Line between innovation, absurdity
Despite a background in biology and science fiction writing, I’m increasingly finding it hard to tell whether scientific achievement is geared toward helping society or enabling what I call the Technological Absurd.
Take cryptocurrency.
Because crypto is decentralized and requires verification by computers, participants must prove they have supplied a resource — money, computing power or energy — to the blockchain (essentially a digital ledger). They can do this through “proof of work,” in which an algorithm poses complex problems (puzzles, cryptographic equations) for coin “miners” to solve using high-powered computers. The first miner to solve the problem gains authority to add new blocks to the blockchain and may ultimately be compensated with coins and digital currency.
More than 1% of humanity’s energy budget goes to this coin mining, a process that UC Davis science and technology studies Professor Finn Brunton says results in “nothing but heat and solutions to deliberately meaningless problems.”
Even most cryptocurrency enthusiasts have recognized the Technological Absurd here. Accordingly, big blockchain player Ethereum has pioneered a solution called “proof of stake.” To validate their blocks, miners must put up a stake with coins they already have. Proof of stake does not require energy-slurping equipment, but it does mean those with the most money can have the most control because the algorithm that chooses the validator weighs stake and validation history. In other words, the rich get richer — an absurd result given that crypto is often touted for its supposedly egalitarian playing field.
Many crypto billionaires, meanwhile, have become entranced with “effective altruism,” or “earning to give.” Perhaps the best examples are Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, CEO of Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, and Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of FTX, which until recently was the world’s secondlargest international crypto-exchange.
Zhao has pledged to give away all his money to charity before he dies — just not right now because he still needs it to make more money. Bankman-Fried has been even more aggressive about this “pay me now, I’ll donate later” approach. He now stands accused of bank fraud for running an alleged Ponzi scheme, using FTX customer funds to prop up Alameda Research, his trading firm.
All this is oddly reminiscent of the catchphrase of Popeye’s friend, J. Wellington Wimpy: “I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.”
Crypto-moguls and effective altruists have also pumped a great deal of money and effort into “longtermism,” which occupies a position somewhere between philosophical movement and secular religion.
Longtermism has moved significantly beyond science fiction writer Robert Heinlein’s original assertion that Earth is too small a basket to keep all humanity’s eggs in. Current practitioners believe that trillions of us (or far more) must come to occupy planets throughout the universe, if not the fabric of space-time itself.
Many longtermists have come to believe that only existential risks to the entirety of humanity are worth caring about. Climate change or global poverty don’t fit the bill. Nuclear war, runaway artificial intelligence or really big rocks from space might.
The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, is versed in crypto, effective altruism and longtermism. This becomes a problem in the case of Musk’s StarLink satellite internet system, potentially capable of delivering fast internet to pretty much anywhere on the planet.
Sounds wonderful, but astronomers have recently raised alarms about StarLink’s plans to position tens of thousands of satellites, mostly in low-Earth orbit. These satellites are most visible during morning and evening twilight, which is also when near-Earth asteroids are most readily detectable. Many in the astronomical community believe observations are being made more difficult, given that the sun most brightly illuminates the solar panels of these satellites precisely at these twilight times. The majority of large, near-miss meteors that have snuck up on our warning systems were lost in the crepuscular glare, such as the Chelyabinsk superbolide of 2013, which produced a blast of roughly 500 kilotons.
Beyond the moral and aesthetic question of whether any single human individual should have the right to control what humanity can or cannot see in the sky, we might also wonder whether Musk perceives the increased likelihood of space rocks getting through our warning systems as an acceptable risk — because slip-through space rocks would probably only be smaller local or regional devastators.
However, the flash and shock wave of even a small undetected asteroid could accidentally trigger a nuclear war. Had the small asteroid that slipped past Earth’s satellites and exploded 36 miles above the eastern Mediterranean on June 6, 2002, occurred a few hours earlier — over India and Pakistan, during their full military alert “standoff ” — it “could have been the spark that would have ignited the nuclear horror,” according to U.S. Air Force Gen.l Simon Worden.
Might that possibility fulfill the existential-risk criteria enough to move longtermist billionaires to reconsider the current specifications of their satellite swarm operations?
I do not know. I do know, though, that no lone human being should have to make that decision — or have the authority to make it.