banteg (@banteg)

Extropia's Children, Chapter 4: What You Owe The Future

Is the increasingly controversial "effective altruism" movement about helping the most people in the most efficient ways, or about saving trillions of future humans from the dread threat of an AI apocalypse? Or, as some adherents argue ... both?

Grow like Trees: An Organic Approach to Societal Regrowth

2026 is the year that system breakdown became impossible to deny.  Democratic norms, societal norms, rule of law, the fabric of the social contract tearing as we watch. Or hide, unwilling or unable to face the unravelling. The hopeful among us see opportunity through the dark.  Tentatively or boldly we

LIMITS 2026 -- Workshop on Computing within Limits

LIMITS concerns the role of computing in human societies situated in a world of planetary boundaries and limits, such as limits of extractive logics, limits to a biosphere’s ability to recover, limits to our knowledge, or limits of technological solutions to societal issues. As an interdisciplinary group of researchers, practitioners, and scholars, we seek to reshape and orient the broader computing research agenda, grounded by an awareness that contemporary computing research is embedded in finite socio-ecological conditions and must reckon with with ecological limits in general, and climate- and climate justice-related limits in particular. LIMITS 2026 solicits submissions that move us closer towards computing that supports ecological and just futures for diverse human and non-human lifeforms and thriving biospheres.

LIMITS 2025 -- Workshop on Computing within Limits

The LIMITS workshop concerns the role of computing in human societies situated in a world of limits, such as limits of extractive logics, limits to a biosphere’s ability to recover, limits to our knowledge, or limits to technological solutions to societal issues. As an interdisciplinary group of researchers, practitioners, and scholars, we seek to reshape the computing research agenda, grounded by an awareness that contemporary computing research is intertwined with ecological limits in general, and climate- and climate justice-related limits in particular. LIMITS 2025 solicits submissions that move us closer towards computing that supports diverse human and non-human lifeforms and thriving biospheres.

Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful

2025 UPDATE: I’m writing again. Please join me at Substack.

What Humanity Needs To Flourish In The Next Decade

We are headed toward a world of productivity without prosperity, execution without verification and capacity without constraint. But this outcome is not inevitable.

What Humanity Needs To Flourish In The Next Decade

We are headed toward a world of productivity without prosperity, execution without verification and capacity without constraint. But this outcome is not inevitable.

All Possible Views About Humanity's Future Are Wild

If humans will eventually spread out across the galaxy, then we are among the earliest living beings, with remarkable opportunities to shape the future

Collective Flourishing

Our tools for navigating the future haven't kept pace with its growing complexity. Creating new systems that integrate a deep understanding of people, profound advances in modelling and foresight, and expressive interfaces could help us see, reason, and choose a better future together.

Because we get asked a lot. by @PalantirTech(Palantir) | Twitter Thread Reader

Because we get asked a lot. The Technological Republic, in brief. 1. Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation. 2. We must rebel against the tyranny of the apps. Is the iPhone our greatest creative if not crowning achievement as a civilization? The object has changed our lives, but it may also now be limiting and constraining our sense of the possible. 3. Free email is not enough. The decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public. 4. The limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone, have been exposed. The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software. 5. The question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose. Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications. They will proceed. 6. National service should be a universal duty. We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost. 7. If a U.S. Marine asks for a better rifle, we should build it; and the same goes for software. We should as a country be capable of continuing a debate about the appropriateness of military action abroad while remaining unflinching in our commitment to those we have asked to step into harm’s way. 8. Public servants need not be our priests. Any business that compensated its employees in the way that the federal government compensates public servants would struggle to survive. 9. We should show far more grace towards those who have subjected themselves to public life. The eradication of any space for forgiveness—a jettisoning of any tolerance for the complexities and contradictions of the human psyche—may leave us with a cast of characters at the helm we will grow to regret. 10. The psychologization of modern politics is leading us astray. Those who look to the political arena to nourish their soul and sense of self, who rely too heavily on their internal life finding expression in people they may never meet, will be left disappointed. 11. Our society has grown too eager to hasten, and is often gleeful at, the demise of its enemies. The vanquishing of an opponent is a moment to pause, not rejoice. 12. The atomic age is ending. One age of deterrence, the atomic age, is ending, and a new era of deterrence built on A.I. is set to begin. 13. No other country in the history of the world has advanced progressive values more than this one. The United States is far from perfect. But it is easy to forget how much more opportunity exists in this country for those who are not hereditary elites than in any other nation on the planet. 14. American power has made possible an extraordinarily long peace. Too many have forgotten or perhaps take for granted that nearly a century of some version of peace has prevailed in the world without a great power military conflict. At least three generations — billions of people and their children and now grandchildren — have never known a world war. 15. The postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone. The defanging of Germany was an overcorrection for which Europe is now paying a heavy price. A similar and highly theatrical commitment to Japanese pacifism will, if maintained, also threaten to shift the balance of power in Asia. 16. We should applaud those who attempt to build where the market has failed to act. The culture almost snickers at Musk’s interest in grand narrative, as if billionaires ought to simply stay in their lane of enriching themselves . . . . Any curiosity or genuine interest in the value of what he has created is essentially dismissed, or perhaps lurks from beneath a thinly veiled scorn. 17. Silicon Valley must play a role in addressing violent crime. Many politicians across the United States have essentially shrugged when it comes to violent crime, abandoning any serious efforts to address the problem or take on any risk with their constituencies or donors in coming up with solutions and experiments in what should be a desperate bid to save lives. 18. The ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures drives far too much talent away from government service. The public arena—and the shallow and petty assaults against those who dare to do something other than enrich themselves—has become so unforgiving that the republic is left with a significant roster of ineffectual, empty vessels whose ambition one would forgive if there were any genuine belief structure lurking within. 19. The caution in public life that we unwittingly encourage is corrosive. Those who say nothing wrong often say nothing much at all. 20. The pervasive intolerance of religious belief in certain circles must be resisted. The elite’s intolerance of religious belief is perhaps one of the most telling signs that its political project constitutes a less open intellectual movement than many within it would claim. 21. Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive. All cultures are now equal. Criticism and value judgments are forbidden. Yet this new dogma glosses over the fact that certain cultures and indeed subcultures . . . have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful. 22. We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism. We, in America and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity. But inclusion into what? Excerpts from the #1 New York Times Bestseller The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, by Alexander C. Karp & Nicholas W. Zamiska https://t.co/8igjazz1On

The Cult of Bayes' Theorem

I'm no longer a skeptic, but still I can't resist the old skeptic urge to do a bit of debunking. After all, there are a lot of crackpots out there. There are people, for example, who believe that a superintelligent computer will arise in the next twenty years and then promptly either destroy humanity or cure death and set us free. There are people who believe that one of the best works of English literature is an unfinished Harry Potter fanfic by someone who can barely write a comprehensible English sentence. There are even people who believe the best thing you can do to help the poor and the starving is become a city stockbroker or Silicon Valley entrepreneur! And more often than not, the same people believe all these crazy things!

Ecocivilization: making a world that works for all

""One of the greatest thinkers of our age" (The Guardian) presents a new way of living-one modeled on nature's design instead of capitalism's-for fans of Guns, Germs, and Steel and Doughnut Economics It has often been said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism-and yet that is what the historical moment urgently calls for. Climate change has reached an emergency state, inequality continues to grow, and, for many, the future has never seemed more bleak. Incremental policy improvements are no longer enough-we need a deep transformation of our current civilization to continue to survive. In Ecocivilization, leading thinker Jeremy Lent reimagines the basis of our civilization, and argues for a new global system of living, one based on life-affirming principles modeled after nature's own design. What enfolds is a robust framework incorporating Lent's own expertise, and the lived experiences of those on the ground already putting ecological civilization's core tenants into practice-justice, mutuality, diversity, and symbiosis. From the global economy to universal housing and income, from infrastructure to agriculture, every major aspect of our society could be redesigned to work together as a coherent whole, setting the conditions for all people to flourish. Ecocivilization shows how this future on a regenerated Earth is not only desirable, but entirely feasible"--

The Irrational Decision

How the computer revolution shaped our conception of rationality—and why human problems require solutions rooted in human intuition, morality, and judgment

Landslide / Holdfast

Notes on what’s happening to our ability to collectively know things, and a look ahead to what this community is especially well positioned to do to support and revitalize our info ecosystems and the humans inside them.

Goliath's curse: the history and future of societal collapse

A vast and unprecedented survey of societal collapse -- stretching from the Bronze Age to the age of silicon -- that digs through the ruins of fallen societies to understand the root causes of their downfall and the most dire consequences for our future. Stepping back to look at our precariously interdependent global society of today -- with the threat of nuclear war ever present and the world heating up faster than it did before the Great Permian Extinction, which wiped away 80-90 percent of life on Earth -- one couldn't be blamed for asking : Will we make it? Addressing this question with the seriousness it demands, Cambridge scholar Luke Kemp conducts a historical autopsy that stretches across five millennia, and more than 440 societal lifespans, from the first Egyptian dynasty to the modern-day United Kingdom, using the latest discoveries from archaeology and anthropology to reveal profound and often counterintuitive insights into why exactly societies fail. While books like Jared Diamond's Collapse zoom in on only a few case studies, Kemp's embrace of a 'deep systems' approach, availing himself of the largest dataset possible, allows him to discover the broader trends, and deeper causes, of collapse that pose future risks -- without abandoning the gripping historical narratives that bring these pages alive. Goliath's Curse is a stark reminder that there are both bright and dark sides to societal collapse -- that it is not necessarily a reversion to chaos or a dark age -- and that making a more resilient world may well mean making a more just one