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…

The Probability Broach: Coffin nails

A smoldering cigarette in an ashtray

The Probability Broach, chapter 5

Win has almost reached his doppelganger’s address in the parallel world he’s stumbled into. He’s walking through a residential neighborhood, “elaborate in architectural extremes”:

Victorian and Edwardian gingerbread sat grandly between the baroque and a sort of Swiss-chalet style—ornate, almost rococo, but taken all together, neither garish nor intimidating. Just different. The homes were set back deeply from the road, on enormous lots with gracefully curving rubber driveways winding through gardens and wrought-iron fencery. If Edward W. Bear lived like this, being a P.I. must pay better here than it did in my jurisdiction.

One thing we’ll see more of is Smith’s insistence that everything is cheap in this society, including land. A person who works an ordinary job can live in a mansion and own a fleet of cars.

We’ll discuss the plausibility of this in more detail later. For now, I’ll simply point out that capitalism is premised on scarcity: either naturally occurring, or created artificially by rent-seeking and monopolies.

It can’t be the case both that all goods are cheap and also that everyone is affluent, because in a capitalist economy, my spending is your income and vice versa. If everything is low-priced (as we’ll see below with the cigarettes), then the people who sell those goods are making very little money, by definition. Someone here must have to be poor.

However, Smith breezes past this and writes as if there are no tradeoffs at all. In an economic Lake Wobegon fantasy, he believes you can have a society where everyone is richer than average.

Here, the underground crossings ran to neighborhood groceries, stationery, and candy stores—the kind of mom-and-pop operations nearly killed off by city zoning back home. I took another fling, stopping for some cigarettes, my first decent ones in almost five years. Two copper pennies for the most expensive in the place.

I haven’t emphasized it until now, but one of the reasons we’re supposed to believe Win’s United States is a dystopian, oppressive regime is that it bans tobacco.

As we saw last week, when Win saw signs advertising cigarettes, he exulted, “Prohibition was over!” In a previous chapter, he mentioned a “Confiscation Act” to Jenny Noble – although practically everyone smokes illegal cigarettes, including Win himself, and he says he refuses to enforce anti-drug laws unless he absolutely has to.

It’s no coincidence that Smith considers tobacco bans a mark of evil. Much like living in Colorado or worshipping gold bars, smoking is one of those arbitrary fetishes that an unusual number of libertarians share.

As I covered in my review of Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand absurdly argued that smoking was rationally proper. She claimed it was symbolic of human supremacy over nature, representing the power of a tamed fire held in the hand. Obviously, the real explanation is that she was addicted to nicotine. She concocted a superficially “rational” justification for something she wanted to do for less-than-rational reasons.

Ayn Rand never acknowledged the health risks of smoking (even though she had lung cancer later in life) or the responsibility of the tobacco companies that profit from sickening their customers. L. Neil Smith carries on that tradition of silence. In TPB, cigars and cigarettes are a symbol of individual freedom, nothing more. He never breathes a word about how they’re bad for you.

Even at the time Atlas Shrugged was published, the tobacco-cancer link was understood. TPB has even less excuse. It was published in 1980, well after the evidence had mounted to the point where it was completely unreasonable to deny it.

Of course, this is an ideologically motivated omission. If some products were both addictive and inherently harmful, there’d be a legitimate argument to restrict them. Smoking bans couldn’t just be waved off as yet another overreach by a tyrannical, power-hungry government. At the very least, you’d have to admit that there were real tradeoffs involved in regulating tobacco – something that Smith is never willing to do.

His saving throw is that his ancap utopia has super-advanced medical technology, and can doubtless cure any disease caused by smoking without difficulty. However, that’s not the case in the real world. We shouldn’t take political lessons from a fictional society that doesn’t suffer from problems we still have.

Now, to be fair, I don’t support tobacco bans either. I’m not a smoker, but I’m a fan of individual autonomy. Absent a compelling reason, people should have the right to choose what to do with their own bodies. Also, as America found out with alcohol and then again with cannabis, laws that ban recreational drugs often do more harm than the problem they’re trying to solve.

Of course, people who smoke can be charged higher insurance premiums and other sin taxes to account for the increased risk they’re assuming, and we can and should limit tobacco advertising, especially the kind targeted at children. Also, the right to put nicotine into your own body doesn’t imply a right to make others breathe your secondhand smoke, so no-smoking laws in public places are perfectly fine.

The chapter ends on a cliffhanger, just as Win finds what he’s looking for:

At long last a fancy scrollwork signpost announced PLACE d’EDMOND GENÊT. My stomach tightened, my mouth went dry. Who was this other Edward Bear?

All of a sudden a 747 was trying to land on my back! I whirled; a long black hovercraft tore down the street, coming my way fast. It bellowed, riding a tornado as other drivers bumped up over the sidewalk, swerved and slid to avoid being hit. Six feet above the ground, the monster covered blocks in seconds, sending a hideous roar ahead and a shower of sparks. Bullets sang around my head.

…I wrestled the automatic free from my coat and thumbed the hammer back, jerking the trigger again and again as the machine slid crazily around the corner. It was like a dream where nothing you do has any effect.

Win runs up the driveway, toward the house. The garage door starts opening, as if someone is expecting him, but too late:

My face slammed into the rising door as the bullets slammed into my body. Blood splashed the panel in front of me! The bottom edge rose past me… the pavement rose and smacked me in the face.

It’s no spoiler to say that Win doesn’t die here. But it does give us an opportunity, in the next chapter, to explore what an anarcho-capitalist philosophy has to say about medical care.

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The Probability Broach: Vegas on steroids

The Probability Broach, chapter 5

In a phone booth in a strange futuristic city, Win Bear has found a number for his doppelganger. Driven by curiosity, he dials it.

To his frustration, he gets a busy signal. However, the phone booth is able to draw him a map to the address he was trying to call. It turns out the other Win Bear’s house is only a few blocks away.

When I emerged, traffic was still heavy, and fast. Looking for a break, I glanced back the way I’d come only minutes ago. A flashing arrow at the curb spelled out PEDESTRIANS and pointed to an escalator that flowed down into a broad, well-lit area lined with shops, then became a moving walkway. Halfway through the trip, I passed a tunnel labeled, paradoxically, OVERLAND TRAIL. Here and there cheerful three-dimensional posters advertised food, entertainment—and tobacco. Prohibition was over! There seemed to be a lot of ads for various intimidating firearms, and something calling itself SECURITECH—WHILE YOU SLEEP. Was that a burglar alarm or a sleeping pill?

Nope, sorry. Not excessive enough.

L. Neil Smith at least acknowledges that there should be ads in his ultra-capitalist confederacy. However, they ought to be a lot more common than “here and there”. Every street corner should look like this:

A bustling city intersection at night, blanketed with neon signs and billboards

In a laissez-faire society without zoning laws or regulations, every vertical surface should be covered with neon signs and digital billboards jostling each other for space. Everything else should be plastered with strata of posters, fliers and handbills. Every business would have an incentive to make their ads bigger, brighter, gaudier and more obnoxious than all the rest, to stand out from their competitors.

Every beautiful landscape and natural wonder should be despoiled with hideous advertisements (which did indeed happen in a less civilized era).

This world shouldn’t be as Smith describes it: a calm, laid-back place with verdant parkland, peaceful residential areas, and charmingly understated commercial districts. This world should look like Las Vegas on steroids.

Forcibly reminded of certain biological facts, I stopped off at a door with appropriate markings, a model of understatement as it turned out. More than the usual monument to the ceramic arts, the rest room was an updated Roman bath: swimming pool, snack bar, even sleep cubicles for rent. I thought of Colfax Avenue hookers who’d love the setup, then noticed that such services—your choice, organic or mechanical—were available at a modest fee.

Sexbots in ancap utopia! Are you even a little surprised?

Perhaps out of some residual sense of propriety, this is the only thing Smith says in this book about sex work, so I won’t dwell on it. I’m not against sex work in principle – as I’ve said before, I believe we own our own bodies, and we should be able to decide what to do with them.

However, it’s essential to acknowledge how exploitative the industry often is, and how much potential for abuse exists. More than almost any other profession, if it’s going to exist, there has to be rigorous oversight and strong worker protections. A world where sex work exists with no legal protections is going to resemble the worst caricatures put about by those who’d like to ban it altogether.

Definitely feeling more like myself, whoever that was (another twinge of curiosity about this “Edward W. Bear”), I ambled along in the afternoon sun, absently aware that the almost-silent vehicles swooshing along beside me in the street produced no noticeable exhaust. Down in the curbing there wasn’t a scrap of garbage.

Now that isn’t even slightly believable.

In an anarcho-capitalist world, by definition, any trash pickup would be a private service you’d have to pay for. On the other hand, there’d be no laws against littering or dumping, because there are no laws against anything. So why not just throw your garbage out the window into the street? Why not dump your business’ trash in the nearest park, or discharge your factory’s effluent into the river? If your car breaks down, why not abandon it on the roadside? Once it leaves your hands, it’s not your problem anymore!

To quote an excerpt from my novel Commonwealth, here’s what would actually happen in a world like the one Smith wants:

MuniSan Incorporated, the private company that had been the city Department of Sanitation, had raised its rates because of shareholder pressure for higher profits. In response, many New Yorkers had canceled their garbage pickup. Instead, they dumped their trash on the street, where it was no one’s responsibility.

It had been a brutally hot summer, and black garbage bags piled up in sweltering heaps. They swelled and split in the sun like overripe fruit, disgorging decaying refuse. Flies and cockroaches swarmed over the stinking mounds; mosquitoes bred in the dirty water that pooled beneath them.

…As the garbage piled up, it clogged storm drains and treatment plants—plastic bags, soggy cardboard, chunks of styrofoam, dirty diapers, congealed lumps of grease and fat, sanitary pads, used condoms, dead animals, tangles of hair. Sewage backed up into the municipal water system, infiltrating the pipes that ran to apartments where people swiped their credit cards to fill glasses and pitchers from the tap.

Cholera and dysentery crept back into New York City. They appeared in the reclamation zones first, but spread slowly into wealthy neighborhoods. Following them came other waterborne diseases: typhoid fever, rotavirus, leptospirosis, norovirus, giardiasis.

…Meanwhile, other diseases reappeared, spread by rats, flies and mosquitoes: first bubonic plague, then malaria, yellow fever, dengue fever, chikungunya, West Nile virus, Zika fever, St. Louis encephalitis. In the feverish heat of the summer, a thousand pathogens found fertile soil, grew and swelled. An old darkness, once banished by public hygiene laws, woke from its long sleep and stretched subtle fingers into the crevices of the city.

…TV opinion segments and letters to the editor cried for someone to do something, but it was unclear who or what. Cleaning up one’s own street would be useless when the problem was citywide, and no individual could afford to pay for the whole city to be cleaned up. So everyone reasoned, and therefore no one solved the problem.

As I emphasized in this passage, public hygiene is a Prisoner’s Dilemma problem. It can’t be solved unless everyone cooperates (after all, a single person can litter and vandalize an otherwise-beautiful landscape that’s seen by thousands). However, there’s always a selfish incentive to skip doing your part and leave a mess behind for other people to clean up. And in an anarcho-libertarian society, there are only selfish incentives.

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New on OnlySky: Is it better not to exist?

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about the strange philosophy of antinatalism, and how it led to terrorist violence in at least one case.

Antinatalism is a philosophical idea which claims it’s better not to exist, because existence inevitably involves pain and suffering, which should be avoided at all costs. Most antinatalists stop at urging others not to have children, which is a valid choice in line with the principle of individual autonomy.

However, a few disturbed people go further, concluding that life is so intolerable that it’s a positive good to end it – whenever and wherever possible. This is the nihilist mindset that appears to have inspired the bombing of an IVF clinic in California last month. This act of terrorism fortunately killed no one except the perpetrator, but it could easily have resulted in the deaths of innocent people, as well as the destruction of frozen embryos.

Before we pass judgment on the bomber, we need to examine the ideas that motivated him. Does the antinatalist philosophy hold up to criticism? Is it bad to be alive and unethical to reproduce?

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:

In the name of fairness, we should try to steelman the antinatalist argument. Here’s what they’d likely say for themselves.

When scientists run studies on human beings, they have an ethical obligation to do no harm, or at least, not leave the participants worse off than they were before. There’s a dark history of experiments carried out on unwilling or unaware participants that did grievous harm, which is why scientific studies today have to be approved by institutional review boards or other ethical watchdogs.

In the antinatalist view, having children is like an unethical human experiment.

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The Probability Broach: Mo’ money, mo’ problems

Money of various denominations and countries

The Probability Broach, chapter 5

Dizzy and baffled, stumbling through an unfamiliar world with no clue where he is or what’s happened to him, Win spots something he recognizes:

…lower and wider than I was used to, with tinted panes in a wrought-iron latticework, and a fancy Kremlinesque spire pointing skyward:

TELECOM

Whatever that meant. Nothing orients you faster in strange territory than browsing through the phone book. There wasn’t any door. I took two steps down into the booth and the street noises went away.

…No phone book. Just like back home. No telephone, either: just a simple matte-finished panel like sandblasted Corningware. Underneath was a keyboard. I plunked myself down on the broad upholstered bench and abruptly the screen had letters on it:

—NEED ASSISTANCE?—
The Grand Combined Director of Greater Paporte!
Gray, Bell, & Acme Communications Systems

As we tour this anarcho-capitalist fantasy world, one way to spot the authorial sleight of hand is to keep an eye out for what’s missing. This is a good example. This phone booth is far too neat and clean. Where’s the graffiti?

The impulse to make your mark is as close to universal as it gets. People from every era find it an irresistible temptation: whether it’s rude remarks directed at your rivals, boasts about your sexual prowess, fond memories of the dead, or the simple desire to leave something of yourself for the future.

Humans have put carvings and paintings on the walls of caves, on the stones of temples and cathedrals, and on the trunks of old trees. There’s graffiti on the walls of Pompeii and Herculaneum, inside Egyptian pyramids, and in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, left by Christian crusaders.

Graffiti persists despite efforts to stamp it out. In an anarchy where there are no police and private property is only a convention, it should be omnipresent. Every surface should be covered with it.

Win pecks at the keyboard, and an animated avatar appears on the screen (“a pleasantly stereotypical old-timey operator, crisply pretty in a high-collared blouse and headset”). He’s a little startled to be talking to a cartoon, but he takes it in stride:

“Could you give me Long Distance? The Denver Police… This is Lieutenant Win Bear.”

“One moment, please Lieutenant Bear.” The screen blanked, then she reappeared. “I’m sorry, we have no records for a Denver Police in either local or trunkline memories. Are you sure you’re using the correct name?”

That stopped me. “What do you mean? Try ‘Denver, City, and County of.'”

Her face registered good-natured exasperation. “I’m very sorry, sir. I’ve accessed 36,904 listings: but no ‘Denver, City and County of.'”

Win is sure there must be an error in the phone system. He asks the animated operator what her directory covers:

“Sir, we list over seven billion individuals and organizations currently contracting with some twelve thousand telecommunications companies on this planet, the Moon, Mars, and Ceres Central. I am confident to sixteen decimals that there is no ‘Denver, City and County of’ in the known solar system. May I be of further assistance, or would you prefer a live operator?”

These interplanetary colonies are alluded to several times in this book, but L. Neil Smith never tries to justify how they can exist. Who on earth footed the bill for them?

A government, which marshals and directs the productive capacity of millions of people, can build something huge, complicated and costly – like a pyramid, an interstate highway system, or a space program, or a lunar colony. But there’s no realistic way a private individual could finance this, unless there are plutocrats so gigantically wealthy they might as well be kings.

In a libertarian world where money reigns supreme, everything has to be done for the sake of profit. There might be philosophical reasons for establishing a colony on the Moon or Mars – scientific curiosity, a belief that our destiny lies in the stars, a desire to spread out so humanity won’t go extinct in case of planetary catastrophe – but there sure as hell isn’t an economic reason for it. There’s nothing on another planet that we can’t get more easily on Earth.

Win is starting to form a hypothesis about what’s happened to him. Given the high-tech look of everything (“some artist’s conception of Tomorrowland”), plus the mention of space colonies, he concludes that this is the future. He wonders if the explosion he survived was the first nuke of World War III, and the force of the blast flung him through time. Or was the unfamiliar gadgetry in Vaughn Meiss’ lab a prototype time machine?

He looks up Otis Bealls, wondering if the man or any of his descendants might be alive. There’s no one by that exact name in the directory, but:

The cursor dot slide-whistled up and down the page uncertainly.

Then, in the right-hand column across from the Beallses, it caught me, right between the eyes:

BEAR, EDWARD W., Consulting Detective
626 E. Genêt Pl.		ACMe 9-4223

Win is dumbfounded to see his own name and his own (“more-or-less correct”) profession in the phone book of a strange futuristic city. Driven by irresistible curiosity, he punches in the number.

The machine displays a prompt: “PLEASE INSERT ONE TENTH COPPER OUNCE”. Win doesn’t know what kind of money that is, but he rummages through his pockets and finds the silver coin he took from Meiss’ lab. He puts it in the slot, and the machine accepts it.

There’s something that’s missing in this scene. It’s subtle, but look again at this seemingly innocent transaction. How is it possible that the phone booth only accepts one kind of coin – which, conveniently, just so happens to be a coin of the kind Win has on his person?

As we’ve discussed, this sort of thing should be a massive problem in an ancap society. There’s no central bank, no treasury, no government with a money-printing monopoly. Anyone who wants to coin their own money, can – and there’s a powerful incentive to do so, namely seigniorage, the power to profit by creating money on demand.

There should be dozens, if not hundreds, of currencies in circulation. There should be competing coins in different sizes and combinations of precious metals, as well as paper notes, gemstones, IOUs, electronic cash, carved stones, wampum beads, and more esoteric valuables. (In a later chapter, Smith does indeed say that there are competing private currencies, but we never see this.)

Trying to do business in this place would be a logistical nightmare. Imagine trying to buy something at a store, but being unable to, because the Venn diagram of currencies the merchant accepts and currencies you use has no overlap. Imagine having to check a hundred wildly fluctuating exchange rates every time you want to buy groceries.

Imagine how hard it would be to tell if an unfamiliar coin or bill is counterfeit – or, even if it’s not, whether its issuer has the reserves it claims to back the currency with. Imagine your life savings suddenly wiped out because the issuing bank went bust and your money is now worthless. Even coins of precious metal can be debased with less-valuable alloys.

Not least of all, imagine workers trapped in a cycle of exploitation and debt slavery because their employer pays them in company scrip that’s only accepted at its own overpriced stores. Again, under anarcho-capitalism, there’s every incentive to do this and no regulator that can prevent it.

L. Neil Smith never considers these problems because, like most libertarians, he doesn’t grasp that the economy is a construct of society. He thinks all the rules and norms he’s used to just arise naturally – like rivers and rainclouds. He can’t fathom that they come from the government he despises.

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The Probability Broach: Kindergarteners packing heat

A small child holding a large assault rifle

The Probability Broach, chapter 5

Win sits up, dizzy and bloodied, his head throbbing from the explosion that hurled him into the air. He remembers fleeing from a hail of gunfire and escaping through what he thought was an emergency exit. But his surroundings bear no resemblance to that violent scene:

Through my personal haze, the scene was tranquil, bearing no relationship to the meat grinder I’d just been through: a broad emerald lawn and a five-foot hedge stretched endlessly in the distance. On the other side, a corrugated metal shack showed robin’s-egg blue. The air was warm, heavy with the scent of dark earth and growing things, dappled with sunshine and shade amid small groves of enormous trees; benches and sidewalks somehow tinted tones of red, orange, or yellow.

…Here and there, other people were dancing, talking in small groups, lying in pairs under leafy canopies, moving gently with the music. They wore a bewildering variety of costumes: bright swirly cloaks, skirts or kilts, trousers and tunics—riots of color strewn like shining flowers across the forested lawn.

…A hand on my shoulder—I started. A dark, pretty girl in orange bellbottoms stood behind me. “Are you all right?” she asked, almost apologetically… A sheathed dagger, needle slim, hung from a jewelled chain around her tanned and slender waist.

Unable to comprehend what’s happened, Win can only assume he was somehow thrown clear by the blast (“the Enquirer’s headline would read, POLICEMAN THROWN HUNDREDS OF FEET BY EXPLOSION, LIVES!”).

He croaks that he’s all right and staggers off, hurting and bewildered. People stare at him as he stumbles through the park, and as his head clears, he looks back at them. The first thing he notices, after the unfamiliar clothing styles, is that everyone is armed:

Whatever the local ordinances were, I saw more low-slung handguns, more dirks and daggers, than in a dozen B-westerns and swashbucklers spliced together reel to reel. I found myself grabbing convulsively at my left armpit more than once. Fort Collins sure had changed!

…There hadn’t been a hardware collection like this since the Crusades were catered. Women and children sporting arms right along with the men.

In case it isn’t obvious, Win has entered a parallel universe. It’s L. Neil Smith’s anarcho-capitalist utopia, the North American Confederacy. The NAC is a society with no government, no laws and no police. Everyone is responsible for their own safety, hence why everyone is carrying weapons. At any moment, you might have to defend yourself against someone trying to rob or kill you, and no one’s coming to help you if you can’t.

You might think that a lawless, heavily armed society would be like the Wild West. It should be a place where the threat of violence is always hanging in the air like thunderclouds, where every stranger is regarded with suspicion and hostility, and every encounter takes place through narrowed eyes and hands hovering above pistol grips. Smith insists that isn’t the case:

Something was missing—the barely concealed hostility and fear that haunted my city streets. These people never seemed to push or jostle, never avoided looking at one another. They’d nod politely—even speak!—and they carried their heads high, unafraid of the world around them. It sent shivers down my spine.

This is the “an armed society is a polite society” thinking that’s ubiquitous among gun-worshippers. It’s also completely false.

As ultra-violent America proves by its own bad example, putting more guns in more hands makes society more violent, not less. There will always be angry, unstable people who erupt at the slightest provocation. There will always be abusers and psychopaths who have no qualms about lashing out at others to get their way. In a world where nobody is armed, these confrontations might end in yelling, curses, or at worst, a brawl. In a world where everyone is armed, they’ll end with bullets.

And that’s what happens in the real world, where people know that calling the police is an option when you’re in danger, and where the threat of legal consequences deters people from choosing violence. In Smith’s world, going for your gun is the first and last resort. There’s every reason for lethal violence to be more common, and no reasons for it to be less. His North American Confederacy shouldn’t be a peaceful, well-mannered utopia; it should be a war zone.

But wait – among that panoply of armed strangers, did he mention children? Yes, children:

Even more jarring were the weapons—men and women alike, little people, children. I passed one obvious kindergartener carrying a pistol almost as big as he was! Was there some danger here I wasn’t seeing?

…Yet these people seemed so full of cordiality. Could the source of their pride and dignity be nothing more than the mechanical means of dealing death they carried?

Okay, look.

There’s a reason we don’t let children do things like drink alcohol or drive, and it’s not because we live in an overbearing nanny state. It’s because their brains are still developing and maturing. Kids exhibit a combo of intense emotions, lack of common sense, and impulsive behavior that can be hard for parents to manage at the best of times.

As the father of an 8-year-old boy, I can attest that kids are capable of being intelligent, sweet, compassionate, and insightful. They’re also prone to being stubborn and contrary for no good reason, ignoring directions they’ve been given a hundred times, doing dangerous things out of sheer carelessness, and throwing huge tantrums over inconsequential problems. They stick things in electric outlets, walk into traffic, try to pet strange animals, run up and down the stairs. My son once touched a cactus to see what would happen.

And he’s old enough now to occasionally reason out the consequences of his actions. Smith is proposing that even younger children should be trusted with deadly weapons. I wouldn’t even trust a kindergartener with a permanent marker!

Then there are the teenagers. Again, it’s not just the government passing arbitrary laws because they hate freedom. The frontal cortex of the brain, which is involved in foresight and self-control, isn’t fully developed in teens. That’s why they’re prone to impulsive, risky behavior like dangerous driving, drugs and unsafe sex. (The free market also recognizes this; that’s why they pay higher car insurance rates.)

You can imagine how disastrous it could be to add easily accessible, unregulated firearms to the mix. What happens in anarcho-capitalist world if you’re the parent of a teenager and you ground them for bad behavior? Can they threaten to shoot you?

Libertarians reflexively assume that humans are perfectly rational beings who carefully weigh the benefits and drawbacks of every decision, even in cases where it’s obvious that assumption is false. This is the most shocking example. Owning a firearm, much less carrying it around, demands a level of care, discipline and vigilance that most adults don’t possess.

Kids die, all the time, from finding and playing with their parents’ guns. In the past few years, guns have become the #1 cause of death for U.S. children and teenagers. It takes a willfully perverse mind to look at this carnage and conclude the only problem is that there aren’t enough kids packing heat.

Image credit: Public domain, via NARA/DVIDS

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