The Probability Broach: White people’s histories

"Scene at the Signing of the Constitution of the United States" by Howard Chandler Christy

The Probability Broach, chapter 7

Win and Ed Bear, twin selves from different parallel realities, are comparing biographies. They’re trying to determine how the two of them can be so similar—”We look alike, have the same name, pursue much the same vocation. In some sense we might be the same person”—when their respective worlds are so radically different.

Win asks Ed if he knows about Chicago:

Ed grinned. “I’ll say I do. It’s the biggest city in the world!”

…He removed an object from the bookcase, fourteen inches long, maybe ten wide, half an inch thick. Sort of an overweight clipboard with a screen and keyboard. At the foot of my bed, the mountain glade disappeared, replaced by a map of North America.

I’ll give L. Neil Smith a point for this one: he pretty accurately predicted iPads and other tablet-style computers. (Then again, so did Star Trek.)

On Ed’s big-screen map, the geography of the continent is the same, but its political organization is entirely different:

All of North America, from the Isthmus to the Arctic, seemed to be one country: the North American Confederacy—no state or provincial boundaries, Chicago was indeed the biggest apple, rivaled closely by Los Angeles and Mexico City. There wasn’t any Washington, D.C., and Manhattan, in tiny, barely visible letters, seemed nothing more than a sleepy Indian village.

Ed and Win determine that they were born in the same place – although in Win’s world (“our” world), it’s the city of Denver, and at the same spot in the NAC, there’s only a tiny rural town.

Win’s parents are deceased, but Ed’s parents are living and retired to the Pacific Northwest. In both realities, both their parents are Ute Indians. Win points out that this is where the name “Utah” comes from:

“I hadn’t made the connection. But you’re right, they’re from Indian stock. Doesn’t mean very much, does it?”

“It never did to me,” I said, “but to some…” I thought about Watts and of the Arab-Vietnamese gang rumbles on my own beat. “Where I come from, people kill each other about it, sometimes.”

“Another difference between our histories?”

“Or between our people.”

This is as close as Smith ever comes to broaching the topic of racism – by implying that it doesn’t exist in the North American Confederacy. Ed Bear doesn’t think ethnic distinctions should matter, and he’s puzzled why anyone else would.

That would be commendably tolerant, except that the next thing Smith writes blows this out of the water:

“Win, why should we… I mean, why should both our worlds, if they diverged so long ago, have produced—”

“A pair of identical gumshoes? I’ve been thinking about that. Maybe because we’re both Indians.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Well, I never set much store in being ‘Native American’—neolithically ignorant while the rest of the world was out inventing the wheel, gunpowder, carbon steel. Hell, if our esteemed ancestors had been able to get along with one another thirty days running, they could have thrown Pizarro and Cortez out on their hairy asses and developed a real civilization.”

This is another running theme with libertarians, going back to at least when Ayn Rand referred to Native Americans as “savages” who deserved to be wiped out because they didn’t have capitalism. Libertarian ideology has to come up with some explanation for why it was morally permissible for white settlers to displace and massacre the original inhabitants of the New World.

Smith carries on this tradition by calling the indigenous Americans “neolithically ignorant” and saying that they lacked “real civilization”. As more recent scholarship has shown, nothing could be further from the truth. Indigenous Americans had civilizations that were at least as large and complex as the Europeans of their era – in some cases, more so.

His implication is that the Native Americans deserved to be conquered because they were too primitive and fractious to unite against European invaders. But wait a minute – I thought Smith was against government!

If the Native Americans didn’t have a unified civilization, doesn’t that mean they were an anarchy? And aren’t anarchies supposed to be naturally superior to invaders operating on behalf of a tyrannical ruler, like a king?

In fact, the conquistadors didn’t take over because of their superior weapons (though that certainly played a part), but mostly because they carried diseases the Indians had no resistance against. Those germs annihilated whole civilizations before Europeans ever set eyes on them. If not for that fluke, history might have turned out very differently.

Be that as it may, Win suggests, the fact that they both have indigenous ancestry explains why they’re the same when so much else is different:

“I don’t know exactly where our histories diverged… But those histories are mostly white people’s histories, right? I mean, George Washington got killed in the Whiskey Rebellion, that’s what Clarissa tells me… [but] whatever the White-Eyes were up to back East, that wouldn’t affect what our ancestors were doing!”

He nodded. “Not until much later, and by that time—”

“By that time our heredity—in each world—would be pretty much unaltered!”

It’s a clever hypothesis – and, to be fair, the book never presents it as anything more than Win’s speculation – but we know it can’t be right, because plenty of white people are essentially the same in both worlds. Richard Nixon makes an appearance later in the book. Also, Ayn Rand, H.L. Mencken, John Wilkes Booth, Robert A. Heinlein, and other familiar historical figures are mentioned in the appendix, which presents an abbreviated timeline of the NAC’s history.

Let’s revisit the topic of race one more time. On one occasion, when responding to what he called a “preposterous charge” of racism, Smith said this:

“The hero of my first novel, The Probability Broach, and my second, The Venus Belt, is a full-blooded Ute Indian whose wife is a freckled strawberry blonde and whose best friend is the 137-year-old Mexican widow of a Russian prince. These are the books that also introduced sapient chimpanzees, gorillas, porpoises and killer whales to science fiction…”

He writes as if having a Native American protagonist automatically disproves accusations of racism, even though said protagonist has no personal or cultural connection to his people and demeans his own ancestral civilization as primitive.

More relevant is this: as far as I know, there are no Black people in TPB. There are no Asian people. It’s said that Mexico has joined the North American Confederacy, but we never meet any Hispanic people. (Lucy, who we met briefly, is described as Mexican, but apparently only in the sense of being white with Spanish ancestry, like Francisco d’Anconia in Atlas Shrugged.)

Smith thinks that having sentient non-human characters displays his open-mindedness. Actually, it emphasizes the point about his bias. Like some other science-fiction writers, he evidently found it easier to conceive of talking chimpanzees, gorillas, dolphins, robots and aliens than human beings whose skin isn’t white. It seems he’s willing to countenance one or two token minorities, but only as long as their ethnicity means nothing and has no role in their characters or the plot.

In fact, Smith also missed an opportunity to argue for his own beliefs. He could have shown how much better everyday life was for people of color in a utopia of freedom where slavery was peacefully abolished. Instead, unnervingly, it seems as if minorities have simply disappeared.

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The Probability Broach: Charity cases

A net of woven rope strands

The Probability Broach, chapter 7

Win Bear has come to terms with the fact that he’s no longer in his own world, but the North American Confederacy, an anarcho-capitalist society where American history took a different track. He hasn’t traveled forward in time like he initially thought, but, as he puts it, sideways:

…either my whole life until now had been some kind of dope dream, or somehow history had shifted sideways. Correction: I had been shifted sideways in time.

…And where, oh, where, was the world I’d been born into, grown up in, loved and hated? Did it still exist?

L. Neil Smith has Win express at least some angst about this possibility. As he says to his counterpart Ed, “Suppose Meiss’s machine just sort of held me in place while my own world was ripped out from under me and yours slipped in to take its place!… How do I know that whatever change in history created your world didn’t destroy mine?”

Under the circumstances, I’d agree that this is a reasonable human reaction—except for the fact that it rings false to the character. Win never misses his own world or regrets leaving it. Nor does he express the slightest desire to return to it. This world is superior in every way to the one he came from.

There’s also no one in his world that he cares about, loves, or misses. He’s conveniently divorced (and actually, the text says his ex-wife died in a car crash after divorcing him). He has no kids, no family, and no friends. If there had been someone in his world he cared about, this might present a greater dilemma, but Smith’s scripting him to have no attachments allows this concern to be summarily dismissed.

(Just as a contrast, I’ll say that this is a major concern of Rae Robinson, the protagonist in my novel Commonwealth. Even if you’ve escaped the world of suffering and made it to utopia, what happens to the people you’ve left behind?)

Win’s story sounds crazy, as even he admits. But Ed says there are some points in his favor, besides the otherwise-inexplicable fact of their identical appearances.

One piece of evidence is the gun Win had on him, a Browning, which he took from a government thug who accosted him in Meiss’ lab. Ed says that manufacturing firearms requires heavy industry—and while his world has a Browning gun company, they didn’t make this one:

“Well, look at mine. It’s a Browning, too.” He hauled a .45-sized pistol from under his poncho, popped the magazine, and shuffled the chamber round onto the bed. It was beautiful, a soft dull gray with slimmer, cleaner lines than an Army Colt.

… “Your Browning,” Ed said, “is made of steel, smaller, but heavier than mine, which is almost entirely titanium. The last steel firearms were made in this country over sixty years ago—I looked it up. Mine was manufactured by molecular deposition, electron discharge—processes that don’t leave toolmarks. Yours, though they’ve done a first-class job, was obviously cut from a solid slab, another method obsolete for generations. No offense.”

Between Win’s overnight healing of near-fatal injuries and now objects made by “molecular deposition” without tools, the NAC’s technology is superior in every way. This is in keeping with Smith’s belief that government funding somehow holds innovation back, rather than supporting it—so in his view, a world without any government would be radically more advanced.

But if this is the case, why doesn’t it play out the same way in our world?

Why are the nations with the most advanced science and technology also the ones with the strongest and most stable governments? Shouldn’t developing nations with weak, uninvolved, or nonexistent governments be hotbeds of innovation? Why is Silicon Valley in California, rather than Oklahoma? Why is Europe more advanced than Somalia or South Sudan?

Ed nodded. “I see. Well this morning while you were sleeping, I ‘commed Browning and took the liberty of showing them this thing. Made by antiquated methods, yet no antique. It caused quite a sensation. I suspect they’d offer you a pretty tenth-piece for it.”

I laughed. “Might need a grubstake at that. I can’t go on being a charity case forever.”

…He smiled reassuringly. “Don’t worry about charity. Just take it easy so your bones will knit straight.”

This is a very noteworthy passage, if only because it touches on something that this book otherwise never addresses. Namely, in an ancap society with no public safety nets, what happens to people who are unable to work?

Up to this point, as I noted earlier, Win is subsisting on the charity of these people he’s just met. Ed drove off his attackers, Clarissa treated his wounds, and he’s staying at Ed’s house while he recuperates. So far, they’ve asked for nothing from him in repayment. It’s no spoiler to say that they never do.

That’s extremely convenient for Win, who’d otherwise be in a dire predicament. He’s a stranger in a strange land—no house, no possessions, no money except pocket change, no transferable skills (there are no police departments here!), no family or friends he could turn to.

But while he was fortunate to find people willing to support him indefinitely for free, that can’t be the case for everyone. What happens to you in this world if you’re orphaned as a child, or contract a serious chronic illness, or become disabled in an accident, or lose your job and burn through your savings, or pledge all your assets to a business that goes bust?

If you run out of money, do you have to beg in the gutter? Are there debtors’ prisons? Dickensian workhouses where the destitute are put to slave labor? Or are you just expected to die?

As I said, the issue never comes up in TPB. There are no homeless people pushing shopping carts, no hobos riding the rails, no beggars or panhandlers on street corners, no mentally ill or drug-addicted people living on the streets. There are no ghettos, no tent cities, no shantytowns, no Hoovervilles. It’s a subject that Smith steers well clear of. He doesn’t explain why none of these unfortunates exist, so much as he just sweeps the whole issue under the carpet.

If you asked L. Neil Smith, I suspect he’d fall back on his (economically implausible) insistence that everything is cheap and no one is poor in the NAC. Even if you’re starting over from scratch, you can walk into any business, get a job on the spot, and start rebuilding your life within days.

But even if that were true, it beggars belief that no one falls through the cracks, in a society where there’s no one whose job is to prevent that. There must be misfits, outcasts and pariahs. There must be people who suffer the burden of discrimination, or who get cheated, defrauded or scammed out of their life savings.

No society yet has completely solved the problem of helping and protecting everyone equally. But in a state with public safety nets, progressive taxation and anti-discrimination laws, there are at least some options open to the least fortunate. By design, Smith’s supposed utopia has none of these. The only thing it offers is “sink or swim”.

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New on OnlySky: The future of antisemitism

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about how the definition of antisemitism is being stretched and muddied, and in an irony of ironies, it’s Jewish Zionists who are responsible for it.

Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza has spurred sharp criticism from around the world, as well as calls for arms embargos, boycotts and sanctions. In an attempt to forestall these criticisms, defenders of Israel have been arguing that denying the nation the right to do as it wishes is inherently antisemitic and prejudiced against Jews. In other words, they’re saying that Jewish people and Israel are one and the same. This is an old antisemitic trope called “dual loyalty”, but ironically, now being used by the people it was once wielded against.

This tactic isn’t new, but it’s sharply increased in volume since the October 2023 Hamas terrorist attacks. In this column, I argue that this isn’t only cynical, isn’t only false, but profoundly dangerous to Jewish people everywhere. It cheapens a rightfully serious accusation and robs it of its moral gravity. What’s worse, it plays into the hands of real antisemites, allowing them to camouflage themselves in the crowd.

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but paid members of OnlySky get some extra perks, like a subscriber-only newsletter:

Incidents like these are why it’s so important to recognize antisemitism for what it is—so that it can be effectively resisted, so people who repeat antisemitic tropes out of ignorance can be enlightened, and so the electorate won’t be swayed by it. We can and should call it out wherever it rears its head.

That’s why we have to face a painful paradox: when it comes to the continuing agony of Gaza, Israel’s most fervent defenders are the ones muddying the water. They seek to define criticism of the actions of Israel as anti-Jewish prejudice.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: The man who killed Washington

Engraving of the Whiskey Rebellion

The Probability Broach, chapter 6

Lying in his hospital bed as he recuperates, Win tries to figure out exactly when and where he is and what’s happened to him.

His initial belief was that he was somehow thrown forward in time. However, some questions for Clarissa, the doctor who treated him, quickly rules that out:

But according to my shapely physician, today was Thursday, July 9, 211 A.L. After reflecting, she added that A.L. stands for Anno Liberatis.

“That’s something, anyway. Mind if I asked what happened two hundred and eleven years ago?”

Clarissa shook her head in bewilderment. “But how can you not know? That’s when the thirteen North American colonies declared their independence from the Kingdom of Britain.”

Doing the math, Win works out that 211 years ago corresponds to 1776 in the timeline he’s used to (since this book is set in 1987). That disproves his time-travel hypothesis, since the year in this place is the same as where he came from, even if they use a different calendar.

However, Clarissa refers to this society as the North American Confederacy, which catches his attention:

“Hold it! Confederacy? Let me think—who won the Civil War?”

“Civil War?” she blinked—at least it was a change from headshaking. “You can’t mean this country, unless you count the Whiskey—”

“I mean the War Between the States—tariffs and slavery, Lee and Grant, Lincoln and Jefferson Davis? 1861 to 1865. Lincoln gets killed at the end—very sad.”

Clarissa looked very sad, systematic delusions written all over her face. “Win, I don’t know what you’re talking about. In the first place, slavery was abolished in 44 A.L., very peaceably, thanks to Thomas Jefferson… And in the second place, I didn’t recognize those names you rattled off. Except Jefferson Davis. He was President—no, it would have been the Old United States, back then—in, oh, I just can’t remember! He wasn’t very important.”

I’ll give L. Neil Smith this much credit: at least he acknowledges that slavery existed.

This is in contrast to Ayn Rand, who tried to erase slavery from American history because it was ideologically inconvenient. She treated history as a morality tale, like a capitalist version of Pilgrim’s Progress, culminating with America, the freest and therefore best nation that ever existed. Slavery doesn’t fit with that story, so she ignored it.

Smith can’t be faulted for that. However, the way he deals with the problem is only a little better. The idea of peacefully abolishing slavery without a civil war is certainly appealing. But the idea of Thomas Jefferson being the one to do it has some massive and glaring implausibilities, which we’ll discuss later.

Clarissa mentions the Whiskey Rebellion, which plays a crucial role in Smith’s alternate history. Here’s how the book introduces the topic:

“Wait a minute, Clarissa, I didn’t catch that last bit.”

She sighed, giving in to the headshaking impulse again. “I said, Albert Gallatin was also the man who killed George Washington.”

If you’re not familiar with the historical backstory, the Whiskey Rebellion was spurred by the first tax America imposed.

After the revolution, the United States was in debt. The states had borrowed huge sums of money to pay for the war, and the federal government agreed to assume that debt. Either way, the nation needed cash to pay back its bondholders. Congress passed a tax on distilled spirits to raise revenue.

This tax was enormously unpopular on the frontier, especially in western Pennsylvania, where whiskey was the lifeblood of the agricultural economy. Federal tax collectors were intimidated and threatened by hostile locals. Some were tarred and feathered, or held at gunpoint and forced to resign. One was besieged at home by an armed mob and only narrowly escaped.

After months of escalating hostilities, some of the more radical frontier dwellers began to talk openly about a second revolution. A ragtag army of several thousand rebels gathered outside Pittsburgh, threatening to attack and loot the city. Eventually, George Washington raised an army and marched into Pennsylvania, and the rebellion melted away without a fight. Only two men were charged and convicted, both of whom Washington pardoned.

In real history, Albert Gallatin was an American founder who tried to negotiate with the whiskey rebels and urged a peaceful resolution to the conflict. In Smith’s alternate history, he joined them instead, and led a rebellion that overthrew the federal government, scrapped the Constitution, and recreated the United States as a utopian anarchy.

(Side note: if the whiskey tax failed in Smith’s universe, what happened to the people who loaned America money to fight for independence? Were they out of luck? Should’ve known better than to pledge your fortunes in support of freedom, suckers!)

The interesting thing about this, although Smith doesn’t dwell on it, is that his political philosophy is fundamentally anti-American. He believes that the ratification of the Constitution was a grave error and that George Washington was a tyrant who deserved to be shot. (He reserves even greater scorn for Alexander Hamilton, as we’ll see.)

Unlike many libertarians and conservatives who wave the flag and proclaim that the U.S. is a glorious beacon of freedom, Smith takes the opposite stance. He believes that all governments everywhere are oppressive tyrannies, our own not excluded.

I’m tempted to wonder if this is part of the reason The Probability Broach never achieved the same popularity as more uncritically patriotic libertarian fictions, like Atlas. The likely readers of such books aren’t looking for a philosophical lecture; they’re only looking for a reason to feel good about themselves and to be told that they’re the superior ones.

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The Probability Broach: Good guys with guns

Logo of the Pinkerton Detective Agency: "We Never Sleep"

The Probability Broach, chapter 6

In the previous chapter of TPB, Win Bear stumbled into a parallel universe, discovered he had a doppelganger there, and sought him out – only to be near-fatally wounded in a drive-by shooting just as he found his other self’s home.

This chapter flashes back, showing these events from the perspective of this universe’s Edwin Bear. The text calls him “Ed”, to differentiate him from Win.

Ed was investigating a robbery at a company called Paratronics, but he’d had his fill of work and was planning a vacation:

One Freeman K. Bertram of Paratronics, Ltd, had a problem: someone had gotten away from a company warehouse, laden with a half-ton of valuable parts and equipment…

Ed might not be the best-known consulting detective in the land, nor the most highly paid, but he was clearly headed in that direction at an age most North Americans considered young. There were more clients than he really had time for, and although he’d worked for Paratronics, Ltd. before, and this sounded interesting, plenty of schedule-juggling had gone into shaking three vacation weeks loose.

This universe’s Ed Bear is a private “consulting detective”, the closest thing that L. Neil Smith’s anarcho-capitalist society has to police. But you have to ask: What, exactly, does this job entail?

Ed has no official legal authority, because there’s no legal system. There are no courts to back him up; he can’t get search warrants or subpoenas. He can’t enter anyone’s property without permission or compel anyone to cooperate with him if they don’t want to. He can’t arrest criminals, even if he catches them red-handed.

Also, there are no public records in this society. There are no IDs he can check, no databases he can consult. As we’ll see later, the North American Confederacy has never even heard of fingerprints. What evidence does he acquire, how does he get it, and what does he do with it? The book never really answers this.

You might point out that the phrase “consulting detective” is meant to echo Sherlock Holmes, who also lacked these powers. But Holmes did have police allies he could call on whenever the situation required it.

Ed is in his garage, getting ready to leave, when he hears a commotion outside:

Beneath the half-open door, a baggily clad form ran toward him then slammed violently into the slowly rising panel. Spots of sunlight pierced the door as a brilliant dotted line raced toward Ed… he dived, flinging back his sportcloak for the .375 on his hip. The shadow, faceless against outdoor light, slumped and fell in a pool of splattered blood.

A huge Frontenac steamer crabslipped up the driveway, bullets streaming. Ed pulled the trigger. Heavy slugs spat toward the steamer—five! six!—and silenced its machine gun… It fishtailed clumsily across the lawn and limped away.

“Death and Taxes! What was that about?” Enter a frail-looking elderly woman, 50 caliber Gabbet Fairfax smoking in her hand. She clutched her bathrobe together, shoving the monstrous weapon into a pocket, where it hung dangerously.

“I haven’t the slightest idea, Lucy.” Ed swapped magazines and holstered his gun, cautiously approaching the inert figure lying in the doorway. “Give me a hand. This fellow’s badly hurt!” He gently rolled the body over and looked down. At himself.

And as we’ve covered, Ed and Lucy drag Win inside and treat his wounds for free, because they’re just that nice – as opposed to, say, rolling his body over the property line into the gutter, hosing his blood off the driveway, and going back inside and pretending they saw nothing.

Back to Win’s perspective. While convalescing, he reminisces about the first time he shot someone, back in his own world:

I’d run out of cigarettes about 2 A.M., pulled pants on over pajama bottoms, and strolled over to one of those little twenty-four-hour groceries with inflated prices and lonely teenage clerks. Only this one wasn’t lonely—not with a 25 automatic pressed against her temple. He stood well away, gun arm fully extended, prancing nervously as he watched her shove small bills into a wrinkled paper bag, preparing herself for death.

You’re a cop around the clock. On my own time, I carried a beat-up .45 S & W sawed off to three inches. The door stood open, ten yards away—I didn’t dare get closer. I knelt, braced my hands on the rear corner of his ’57 Chevy, and pulled the trigger. She screamed for thirty minutes.

…Many a cop sees thirty years without firing a shot in anger, others quit cold after their first. You’d be surprised how often. Some few start enjoying it, but we try to weed them out—too bad the feds don’t follow the same policy.

L. Neil Smith seems to agree that it’s a bad idea to have law enforcement officers who enjoy killing people. The problem, of course, is that his ancap universe has no means to “weed out” these psychopaths. Whoever has a gun and is willing to use it can do whatever their blackened heart pleases.

I’m not for capital punishment, a useless, stupid ritual, degrading to everyone involved—except at the scene and moment of the crime, preferably at the hands of the intended victim.

L. Neil Smith takes pains to portray Win in the most heroic possible manner: an off-duty cop using deadly force to save a humble clerk’s life from an armed robber. It’s the Platonic ideal of the scenario that all gun worshippers want us to imagine.

But those situations – the mythologized “good guy with a gun” – are vanishingly rare in reality. Real-world experience shows that, when everyone is armed, what happens more often is that two people get into an argument which escalates to them drawing and shooting at each other. Both are culpable, but the one who lives gets to frame the situation as self-defense. Or angry, violent people whip out a gun and start blasting away for no good reason, just because someone annoyed them or triggered their racist paranoia.

The real purpose of these “good guy with a gun” scenarios isn’t to win over skeptics with the case for gun ownership. It’s to feed the egos of people who already own guns. It tells them that they’re lone heroes in a dangerous world, self-deputized to defend law and order from the scary outsiders all around. In that sense, this narrative may well make them feel less inhibited, and therefore, makes gun violence more common.

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New on OnlySky: AI deep research

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about the new AI mode called “deep research”, and whether it solves the problems that have plagued AI in the past.

AI chatbots like ChatGPT were introduced with the promise that they’d act as superintelligent robot librarians. Their creators promised that they could rapidly research and synthesize an answer to any question, putting the entirety of human knowledge at everyone’s fingertips.

As we know, the reality was very different. Chatbots are giant association machines, building up statistical models of which words are more or less likely to follow which other words, like a more complex version of the autocomplete on your phone. They don’t know the difference between right and wrong answers, only what a right answer “sounds like”. This means they have a tendency to invent facts, figures and references, which makes their output inherently unreliable.

However, the companies that created them keep working on improving the technology. Now they claim they have a solution to this problem: “deep research” mode, which forces the AI to cite real footnotes and references for each of its assertions.

In this column, I tested ChatGPT’s deep research mode for myself. How does it stack up?

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but paid members of OnlySky get some extra perks, like a subscriber-only newsletter:

OpenAI doesn’t hesitate to claim that this is a step toward an artificial general intelligence, or AGI, which is a hypothetical AI that can do anything a human can do—including original research and the discovery of new knowledge.

These claims present a formidable problem for people, like me, reporting on this technology. I don’t want to be an uncritical booster or a salesman. On the other hand, if this is genuinely a breakthrough, people should know about it.

The case for—or against—AI depends very much on its capabilities. If AI is only good for creating unreliable, low-quality slop, all the energy and resources that went into creating it were a waste.

On the other hand, if AI can accelerate the pace of research and discovery, then there’s a real benefit to weigh against the admittedly large amounts of energy it consumes.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: Affordable care

A medical caduceus laid on top of a stack of dollar bills

The Probability Broach, chapter 6

Following his brief interlude of mid-surgery awareness, Win wakes up for real:

Standing over me was a breathtaking peaches-and-cream blonde, perhaps thirty, hazel eyes—when she smiled, the corners crinkled like she meant it—and an ever so slightly upturned nose. She wore a bright-red coverall with a circled white cross embroidered on the left shoulder.

The wall seemed one huge window opening into a honey-colored meadow and purple columbines. Maybe a mile away an evergreen forest fronted foothills and the ghostly peaks of the Rockies. The illusion was spoiled by a door through the wall and the railed top of a staircase. Television? A beautiful job. I could almost smell the sage.

It’s ironically appropriate that this beautiful landscape turns out to be pixelated artifice.

Given that this anarcho-capitalist world has no environmental preservation laws, it should be a blighted hellscape where forests are clear-cut for timber, mountains are bulldozed for ore, lakes and rivers are used as dumping grounds, and whatever’s left is despoiled with garish advertisements. Pristine natural beauty doesn’t produce a profit for anyone, so in a world where money rules everything, it should all be ruined. The only pastoral scenes ought to be digital fakes like this one.

As we saw previously, L. Neil Smith insists that isn’t the case. The North American Confederacy is a beautiful place with
bucolic parkland and modest, tasteful development. But he doesn’t have an explanation for why that isn’t the case. Who or what prevents these places from being sold off and strip-mined?

The woman at Win’s bedside introduces herself as Clarissa Olson, “Certified Healer”. She’s pleased to see him awake, and Win returns the compliment by engaging in some light banter – or as we’d call it, sexual harassment.

I took a deep breath, found the pain completely gone, and tried sitting up.

“Hold on, Lieutenant! You’re not quite ready for that!” The lady dimpled, pushing me back gently. “How do you feel?”

“I guess I’ll do, at that. Is this a hospital?”

“You want to get really sick? A hospital, indeed! I almost believe you are a time traveler as you claimed last night.”

“What else did I say? Hope I had enough sense to make an improper suggestion or two your way.”

“You’re a ‘Man from the Past,’ from a city that’s never existed. Otherwise you were quite gentlemanly, all things considered.”

But don’t worry – Clarissa doesn’t mind. In anarcho-capitalist utopia, healthcare workers are totally cool with being hit on by their patients. Apparently, it’s only the nanny state that makes women object to being catcalled. Who knew?

Clarissa says she removed a dozen bullets from Win’s body. She shows him the tattered remains of the bulletproof vest he donned the day before, when he left his apartment in the other Earth: “That’s why there was enough of you left for me to work on.”

“When will I be up and around?”

“Well, you’re healing pretty slowly. You were gradually dying of malnutrition: deficiencies in the nitrilosides, lecithin, ascorbic acid; a dozen degenerative diseases I’ve only read about. But as that clears up, your wounds will knit faster. Day after tomorrow—at least for a brief walkaround?”

“Where I come from, bullet holes take a lot longer than that to heal up! This has gotta be the future… or heaven, if you’ll pardon my getting personal.”

There’s no good place to point this out because the book omits it, so I’ll mention it here: Clarissa apparently never charges Win for this life-saving emergency surgery. Despite this being an uber-capitalist society, there’s no mention of him having to pay anything for it, not now or later.

How does it work, in a world with no laws and no public safety net, when a stranger shows up unconscious and bleeding to death? Just as I asked about medical care in Atlas Shrugged, “In a laissez-faire utopia, if someone suffers a critical injury and can’t prove on the spot that they can afford medical help, what happens? Would they be left to bleed to death on the ground?”

Health care is the classic case of a market failure, because critically ill people can’t afford to take their time and shop around for the best deal. They have no choice but to go to the first doctor available and agree to whatever price they demand. In turn, the doctor should charge that patient as much as they can possibly pay – up to and including a lifetime of debt slavery.

That doesn’t happen here, but only because libertarian novelists have their characters play nice and cut each other sweetheart deals, rather than taking their beliefs to their logical, ruthless conclusion.

In a passage a little later in the book, Win gives an aside into the advanced medical technology this world has and how it’s healing him much faster:

The cast on my arm was the devil’s own nuisance, although lighter than a plaster one, and ingeniously rigged for washing and scratching—in essence, merely a rigid plastic mesh. Clarissa maintained that, along with electronics and vitamins, it was helping me knit a hundred times faster than I had any right to expect. I don’t know all the therapeutic details, but I’m sure the FDA would have outlawed it.

This is another of those libertarian fixations that comes up surprisingly often. It’s the fervent belief that government prevents scientific progress.

The filmmakers of the Atlas Shrugged movies claimed that “red tape” holds back Star Trek-style medical scanners. Right-wing crank Michele Bachmann once claimed the free market could easily cure Alzheimer’s disease if only government regulators would get out of the way. And here, L. Neil Smith asserts that the FDA would, for some reason, outlaw a device that heals bullet wounds overnight. (Wouldn’t the military love to get their hands on something like this?)

This belief has an obvious implication. Of course, the government can’t prevent people from inventing things; it can only ban them after they’ve been created. This means there should be advanced medical technologies already in existence that are being held back by government bureaucrats. Where are they?

(Also, why would the government do this? Bureaucrats are people too. They get sick, they have loved ones who get sick. What reason would they have to ban cures they might benefit from?)

If anything, the reverse happens too often. Rather than being too cautious, the government approves drugs that have to be pulled because of dangerous side effects. They’ve approved uber-expensive anti-Alzheimer’s drugs that don’t work, essentially out of desperation for a lack of better options. Worthless quackery like homeopathy is barely regulated at all.

Even if regulators could stand to be more cautious, the government hasn’t stifled all innovation. On the contrary, almost any actual scientist would tell you that public funding is the keystone of their work. And new advances are still coming: During the COVID pandemic, RNA vaccine technology permitted safe, effective vaccines to be created in record time. CRISPR-based genetic engineering therapies to permanently cure previously untreatable diseases are coming online. Government research support nurtured both of these revolutionary technologies.

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New on OnlySky: The future is (still) less religious

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about the trend toward a more secular world – which, despite all the frightening headlines and discouraging developments in American politics, is continuing.

A new survey examines how the global religious landscape shifted between 2010 and 2020. It found that traditional religion continues to wane, such that that “no religion” is now the third most-common religious demographic in the world, behind only Christianity and Islam. While China has the most nonreligious people of any country, the possibly-surprising second-place finisher is the United States. The number of nonreligious Americans doubled in only a decade, and now constitutes about a third of the population.

In this article, I examine the political implications of this change. The rise of the “nonreligious right”, who espouse pseudoscientific justifications for old prejudices, is an unfortunately real phenomenon, but they’re just one small part of a much larger societal shift. The overall thrust of the evidence still signals that a less religious world will, all things considered, be better for everyone.

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but paid members of OnlySky get some extra perks, like a subscriber-only newsletter:

The most eyebrow-raising fact is that the nones have what Pew calls a demographic disadvantage. Compared to the global population as a whole, they’re older on average and have fewer kids. This is especially noticeable in Europe, Japan, and other wealthy, developed societies where religion is fading at the same time as the population is aging and flattening out.

However, the nones are growing in spite of that, because of switching—that is, people walking away from their religious upbringing and becoming nonbelievers. This is in contrast to the way religions typically grow, by mere reproduction and indoctrination of children who are too young to question or doubt what they’re taught. Persuading adults to change their minds is much harder—and yet that’s what’s happening. In that sense, nonreligion is winning the culture war.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: Good samaritans

A painting: The Good Samaritan (1826), by Guillaume Bodinier

The Probability Broach, chapter 6

To recap the previous chapter: After escaping a gun battle with government thugs, Win Bear found himself in an unfamiliar futuristic city where everyone is armed. While trying to get his bearings, he found someone listed in a phone directory with the same name as him. He resolved to go visit his doppelganger and get some answers, but right on the doorstep of his destination, he was gunned down by a black hovercraft.

This chapter begins with him regaining awareness in the middle of surgery, with three vague shapes looming over him:

Ever wake up in a darkened room and a soft bed, with a headache clear down to your knees? My arms wouldn’t move. When I inhaled, sharp pains skewered me from spine to sternum. I was alive, but leaking.

“Hold these,” the first voice, softly feminine, said. “And feed them into the cutter. We’ll have to remove it all, I’m afraid.” Sound of rasping, scraping. Whatever they were chopping off, I hoped I wouldn’t sing falsetto afterward.

The doctors (or whoever they are) remark on how bad his health is, even beyond the bullet holes:

“Such crude dental prosthetics! And he’s in advanced geriosis—see the swollen belly, the sagging tissue around the eyes? What little hair he has is turning gray!

…you should see the scanner—poisonous congestion, ulceration. And the arteries! Even without these bullets in him… he’d be gone in another ten years.”

They notice he’s conscious, and a masculine voice asks him who he is. Win still thinks he’s been flung into the future and that there was a world war in the interim, which accounts for why everything looks so unfamiliar. He tries to explain:

I tried to clear my vision. The guy looked enough like me to get drafted in my place. “Win Bear… Lieutenant, Denver—used to be a city, sixty miles south. Only it’s gone! Blown to—” I stopped, breathing heavily against withering pain. “I’m, well, from the past—a time traveler!”

He frowned perplexedly. Nothing was wrong with my vision. I could make out every hair in his bushy, very familiar eyebrows. “Friend, sixty miles south of here, there’s only Saint Charles Town. Been there, oh, 125 years. Nothing but buffalo before that.”

Win is baffled, and in too much pain to come up with any other explanation. The people treating him are merciful:

“We’re at redline already. The painkillers just aren’t working.”

“What painkillers?” I wheezed past the red-hot pokers in my chest.

… “I give up,” the beautiful voice said. “Lucy, electrosleep—out in a van, a blue case under the regenerator.”

One of the people tending to him comes back with what looks like a tiny gun. She presses it against his neck, and he’s instantly unconscious.

L. Neil Smith did something clever in this section. However, that cleverness is in service of covering up an unsavory political implication, given the realities of human nature. He’s pulled off an authorial sleight of hand to paper over what would otherwise be a glaring, obvious problem with his preferred brand of society.

Here’s the problem: In an anarcho-capitalist world, what would most people do if they heard gunshots outside and found a stranger bleeding to death on their doorstep? Wouldn’t they be more likely to conclude that this is someone else’s feud and they don’t want to get involved?

Would you be eager to take a dying stranger into your house and treat them at your own expense, knowing that some unknown party wants them dead, and knowing there are no police to call if you become the killer’s next target for helping their intended victim? Isn’t it more likely that the average person would say, “This is none of my business, I’m staying out of it”?

The clever part is that Smith concocts one of the very few plausible justifications for involving yourself in a scenario like this. Namely, the owner of this house – the other Win Bear – would naturally be shocked to see his identical twin. He’d want to save the stranger’s life so he can find out what the heck is going on.

Obviously, that’s not going to happen in a realistic world that doesn’t have parallel-universe portals. If not for that only-in-fiction happenstance, the bad guys would have won. Win knows who they are and what they want, but no one else in this world does. If they had killed him, nobody would have stopped them, or even tried to. They would have succeeded with their evil world-domination scheme.

After all, in an anarcho-capitalist society, there’s no government. There are no police. There’s nobody whose job it is to investigate a corpse in the gutter. There could be private detectives (the other Win Bear is one), but obviously, a dead person isn’t going to pay to find out who killed them.

True, if a murder victim has family or close friends, they might hire someone to track down the killer. But that’s just another way of saying that, in this world, access to justice depends on having rich friends. If you have no one who’s willing to avenge you, or no one who can afford to, anyone can kill you without consequences.

In a later chapter, Smith has a handwavy answer to this. He says there are “professionally neutral” civil liberties organizations who investigate unsolved crimes as a pro bono service, “just to make sure no one can murder some friendless wino”.

OK, maybe. But in a society where profit drives everything, how much of a budget do you think they’re going to devote to that, and how high a priority are they going to put on those cases?

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New on OnlySky: The future of drone war

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about Ukraine’s audacious “Operation Spiderweb” – a covert operation to smuggle military drones deep into Russia, from where they launched attacks on airbases across the country. It succeeded beyond what most people would have thought possible, destroying irreplaceable strategic warplanes that Russia was using to bomb Ukrainian cities, all for an investment of a few hundred cheap drones.

Nevertheless, although we should cheer its success in this instance, this tactic opens up a troubling horizon in the future of war. Ukraine isn’t the only nation that can do something like this. Precisely because it was so cheap and effective – and so difficult to guard against – we should expect more drone-based surprise attacks in the future. How will nations adapt when any cargo container passing over their borders could be a Trojan horse sent by an enemy?

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but paid members of OnlySky get some extra perks, like a subscriber-only newsletter:

When this story broke, national leaders and military officials all over the world must have shuddered with fear. There’s no reason this strategy wouldn’t work in other contexts.

A hostile nation could “seed” an adversary with drone-packed cargo containers, smuggling them across the border and concealing them near valuable military assets—or important infrastructure like railroads, pipelines or power plants. These robotic sleeper agents could lie dormant for weeks, months, potentially years. Then, at a signal, they’d all deploy simultaneously, launching a massive wave of surprise attacks with the goal of crippling the rival’s military before they know what hit them.

A well-equipped terrorist group could use the same blueprint to strike at soft civilian targets. It would eliminate the necessity of finding religious fanatics willing to be suicide bombers. Just a few such drone bombings could sow mass panic among the population. It’s also readily conceivable that suicide drone attacks could be used to assassinate public figures.

Continue reading on OnlySky…