 Infinite wisdom Michael Lewis’ Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon is a strange book. It tells the story of Sam Bankman-Fried, the crypto billionaire (and former Semafor backer) who, as Lewis was profiling him for the book, turned out to have been defrauding customers and is now facing decades in prison. Lewis seems to have started out by painting a sympathetic picture before being forced to veer into redrawing SBF as a villain when the fraud became known. But the quantum-computer scientist Scott Aaronson loved the book: “It was great partly because of, rather than in spite of, Lewis not knowing how the story would turn out when he entered it.” Aaronson thinks that, had a few details in his life history been different, SBF’s story could have gone in a completely different direction. Single conversations — one with an effective altruist that made him an effective altruist, one with a vegan that made him a vegan — seem to have swayed him. “I find it plausible that a single conversation might’ve set him on the path to a less brittle, more fault-tolerant utilitarianism,” says Aaronson. With relatively little having changed, Aaronson believes, “SBF could still be running a multibillion-dollar cryptocurrency empire to this day, without lying, stealing, or fraud, and without the whole thing being especially vulnerable to collapse.” Sing when you’re winning Nick Cave, lead singer of the rock band Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, keeps a blog in which he answers fans’ questions. A 17-year-old named Eugenio had one: What should he do? Eugenio is in a band which has a chance to record an EP, but he’s concerned: “I know that my singing could be better and that I could wait a little bit more to create something I’m 100% proud of.” Should he wait and get better, or take the chance and sing now? Cave’s answer: “If your intention is to become a singer, Eugenio, then you need to sing and sing and sing some more. Whether or not you go into the studio when you have the chance is not really up for debate. It is your duty to yourself to do so. If you do not take these opportunities to sing, you may forever be that melancholy boy peering through the window of a dream you never had the self-assurance to embody, and there is little more sorrowful in this world than one who forgoes his dreams.” A note of caution Prometheus stole fire from the gods and was condemned to eternal torture. The story is repeated in many forms — most notably and explicitly in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. Marc Andreessen, the tech investor and self-described techno-optimist, calls the story an expression of “the fear that technology of our own creation will rise up and destroy us,” and compares it to modern fears about technology, technē, in general and artificial intelligence in particular. But it’s a complete misreading of the original myth, says Virginia Postrel. “Prometheus is not a cautionary tale,” she says. “Prometheus is punished for loving humankind. He stole fire to thwart Zeus’ plans to eliminate humanity and create a new subordinate species … His punishment is an indicator not of the dangers of fire but of the tyranny of Zeus.” The Greeks, far from fearing fire and technē, celebrated it; the story is one of gratitude, praising Prometheus for sacrificing himself so that humanity could rise. |