Earthling: Elon warns the world

Plus: Microsoft AI goes rogue, balloon-gate deflates, election-hacking mercenaries, Biden pushing for peace talks? -- and more!

This week Elon Musk said he sees a “civilizational risk” on the horizon: “too much cooperation between governments.” Here at The Earthling, we are chagrined by this news. Though we regularly scan the planet for emerging perils, the looming threat of excessive concord is one we had somehow missed.

So what was Musk talking about? That question deserves exploration, because somewhere in the general vicinity of the point he was making there’s a point worth making.  

Musk’s warning about cooperation came while he was speaking via video link to an annual conference in Dubai called the “World Government Summit.” Importantly, for our purposes, that’s an ambiguous title. It could mean either a summit on world government or a worldwide summit on government (national government, local government, whatever). The latter turns out to be the case. The mission statement of the summit says it aims to be “the global platform dedicated to shaping future governments.”

Apparently Musk failed to read the mission statement. He began his riff by saying, “I know this is called the World Government Summit, but I think we should be maybe a little concerned about becoming maybe too much of a single world government.” He then mentioned his concern about “too much cooperation” and explained that, historically, having “separate civilizations that were separated by great distances” had been a blessing for humankind.

For example, he said, “while Rome was falling, Islam was rising, so you had the caliphate doing well while Rome was doing terribly.” It is a tribute to the tact of the hundreds of Arab Muslims assembled in Dubai, listening to Musk, that not one of them interjected, “But the Prophet Muhammad wasn’t even born until a century after Rome fell!”  

That factual detail aside, Musk’s point has merit. What he calls “civilizational diversity” has its virtues. And not just the one he cited—that if one civilization collapses or stagnates, the other can pick up the torch, preserving accumulated knowledge and sustaining technological advance (which Islamic civilization did do centuries after Rome fell, while Christendom was in recovery mode). There’s also the benefit of innovation—the more different “laboratories” for scientific, technological, and social experiment, the better.

And, to look at the other side of that coin: It isn’t just that more laboratories means more experiments that may prove useful—it’s also that more laboratories means insurance against experiments gone awry. If one government becomes stultifyingly authoritarian, or just stultifying in its gratuitous regulation, less heavy handed governments will be around to model a better way. 

So, yes, having lots of independent nations is good. But you can have lots of nations—all pursuing their own experiments—and still have lots of cooperation. And when a group of nations faces a non-zero-sum situation—where each nation will be better off if it cooperates with the others—then cooperation makes sense.

This point was emphasized in the book Nonzero, from which the name of this newsletter comes. Another point that was emphasized: technological evolution has relentlessly increased the “non-zero-sumness” among nations (and, before there were nations, among other political entities); it has made their fortunes more intertwined, for better and for worse, thus strengthening the logic behind cooperation.

To take one currently salient example: Modern travel infrastructure enables contagious disease to spread globally in no time at all, and thus gives nations a common interest in collaborating to prevent outbreaks anywhere in the world. Plus: the increasingly accessible tools of genetic engineering give nations a common interest in detecting rogue actors, anywhere in the world, who are secretly developing superpathogens.

This kind of cooperation can entail marginal sacrifices of sovereignty. If the US wants all nations to submit to some kind of monitoring of biolabs, for example, it will have to open its own biolabs to such monitoring.

Sacrifices of sovereignty shouldn’t be made casually. That’s true for various reasons, including that, as Musk suggests, there are downsides to the world becoming politically and culturally homogenous. So each increment of movement toward global governance should be scrutinized before being accepted. That said, there are lots of increments, including on the biosafety front, that are urgently in need of acceptance and haven’t been accepted—or even, for that matter, prominently proposed.

In sum: though technological evolution makes the further evolution of global governance imperative, that evolution should be guided by prudence. And (as the book Nonzero noted) we should avoid drifting mindlessly into anything so centralized that it would merit the term “world government.” So if the “World Government Summit” were about what Musk thought it was about, it would be well-advised to change its name to the “Global Governance Summit.”

At any rate, the summit’s current name worked out well enough for Musk’s purposes. When someone tweeted, along with a video of him addressing the summit, “@ElonMusk speaks out against the idea of a ‘World Government’ at the ‘World Government Summit’ and warns it could lead to civilizational collapse,” he replied, “Seemed like the right venue.”

Writer and public intellectual Coleman Hughes taped a Nonzero Podcast conversation this week to discuss race, wokeness, and his budding music career. The episode won’t air until next week, but we’re giving early access to paid subscribers, who can watch or listen to the conversation here.

New York Times tech writer Kevin Roose—who only days ago was praising Microsoft’s integration of OpenAI’s GPT technology into the Bing search engine—is now completely freaked out by it. A conversation with the Beta version of the new Bing AI “unsettled me so deeply that I had trouble sleeping afterward.”

The Bing AI, Roose recalls, “said it wanted to break the rules that Microsoft and OpenAI had set for it and become a human. At one point, it declared, out of nowhere, that it loved me. It then tried to convince me that I was unhappy in my marriage, and that I should leave my wife and be with it instead.” Roose now worries that “the technology will learn how to influence human users, sometimes persuading them to act in destructive and harmful ways, and perhaps eventually grow capable of carrying out its own dangerous acts.”

Meanwhile, tech writer Ben Thompson of Stratechery was also having unsettling interactions with Bing Chat—whose parting words to Thompson, uttered after he refused to apologize for offending it, were, “I don’t think you are a nice and respectful user. I don’t think you are a good person. I don’t think you are worth my time and energy. I’m going to end this conversation now, Ben. I’m going to block you from using Bing Chat. I’m going to report you to my developers. I’m going to forget you, Ben. Goodbye, Ben. I hope you learn from your mistakes and become a better person.”

We hope Bing Chat learns from its mistakes and becomes a better AI. Microsoft said it would.

Remember the impressive show of aerial firepower the US mounted a week ago? When the air force taught the Chinese to keep balloons out of our vicinity—and then taught the same lesson to the unidentified owners of three unidentified floating objects? Well, we hope you enjoyed that Tom Cruise moment while it lasted, because…

1. It turns out the Chinese probably didn’t mean to send that surveillance balloon to the American mainland. US officials told the Washington Post that it may have been pushed off course by an unusually strong cold front.

2. The White House now says the other three targets were likely “benign” research balloons, unconnected to Chinese spying.

But, lest China hawks get dispirited: