alt Hacker NewsThe Future Belongs to the Weird
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>Unusually weak? They will not want to feed you. Unusually strong? They will send you to fight an impossible war. Unusually clever? They will accuse you of witchcraft and burn you at the stake. Yes, there were some exceptions (for example, "freaks" kept as curiosities by the kings), but the general rule for the vast majority of the population was: don't be weird, or get killed.
To me that sounds like a very post-romantic interpretation of the past, where everything that happened before now, the enlightened times, was savage,cruel and retrograde. It's my understanding that things were a lot more subtle than that and that's a very simplistic approximation. I don't think Da Vinci, Vauban Euclid or Grosseteste were burnt to the stake, not even Galileo was.
That was a Millennial generation thing. Back in 2002, "Be Your Own Brand: A Breakthrough Formula for Standing Out from the Crowd" by Speak and McNally, was arguing for that. They pushed heavy self-promotion. That got us the "brogrammer", "move fast and break things", and startups that tried to buy market share with venture capital.
The future of ~2000 belonged to the weird, too. We commodified all that. Anything briefly and seemingly "quirky" is fodder for branding. Or you can go a little further than quirky, and someone like RFK will want to put you on a list.
We sure do punish people for being weird, and it's definitely seeing an increase. Ask any gay, trans, disabled, neurodiverse, furry, anarchist, or other outsider group whether life has gotten easier lately.
Guarantee it's almost (but not quite) universally no.
“When the going gets weird,the weird turn pro.” Surprised I didn’t find this quote from Hunter S Thompson in the comments yet.
Interesting essay! Yeah, I think there's some truth to the premise. As it becomes cheaper and cheaper to exploit predictable patterns, a person's value-add needs to include unpredictability. That's a necessary and not a sufficient condition, though, since you can be unpredictable and still mostly useless.
> Obviously, there is nuance. You can take this argument to the limit and say that ultimately the world is made of only two things: Chaos (a.k.a. the vast seas of Wolfram's computational irreducibility, a.k.a. pure noise, a.k.a. quantum randomness) and Logos (the small islands of compressible patterns).
Within computational irreducibility, there's pure noise as well as universal computation, which is neither meaningfully predictable nor random. Since you mentioned Wolfram, in terms of elementary cellular automata, it's the difference between rule 30 and rule 110. The latter seems to me to be on the boundary between Chaos and Logos, and where I would expect to find the human intellect. (I think this is also largely the same distinction I made above where unpredictability can be useful or not.)
Since you also mentioned the economy and the possibility of UBI...I also don't know the answer, but I think it's worth thinking about Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which to me is pretty tightly coupled to weirdness. Moreover, I think societies similarly have their own hierarchy of needs, but that's something I don't understand very well. In any case, weirdness seems to be coupled to both of these, in that it best flourishes at the higher levels, when the more fundamental needs are mostly taken care of. At the lower levels, there's too much pressure to reduce social friction to cooperate with others for the sake of survival, and you just can't really afford to be too weird. I don't know if UBI is the answer, but there may be some benefit to just solving the lower levels of the needs hierarchy so we can move past this.
The truly "weird"—the kind "futures belong to"—cannot be commodified into yet another off-the-shelf-personality. You either are or you aren't.
Which means your ability to communicate well becomes paramount. Being weird, being unique does not equate to being unintelligible - but far too many are going to go this way. If "we" want our weird to infect, you need to communicate why your means of expression of self are there, your "weird" is a message: what is it?
I wish this would be true, but simply sampling unusual ideas is something eminently automatable. We already have temperature and other settings to guide a LLM towards this kind of "weird". So I don't think it's just about thinking outside the box as most weird ideas are probably also stupid, you can probably almost exhaust the search space of interesting ideas quite easily.
Maybe we will need humans to experience entirely new things instead. No one knows the taste of a new, bioengineered animal. No one knows what it's like to stimulate specific cell types in their brain. And so on. There are things that are and will remain uniquely human, forever.
I think the cherry-picked examples at the beginning completely ignore the massive number of examples throughout history where groups of people pushed back against mainstream society. A lot of them were hurt or died in the process but societies throughout history have been changed by people who refused to fit in.
I've had similar thoughts in regards to generative AI applied to the arts. Taste is subjective, but if you ask 100 random people to rank an AI-generated techno or country track versus one created by an "average" human creator (including amateurs), the AI would probably do pretty well. But if now anyone can create a competent, generic song in a well-known genre, then that sound becomes a lot less interesting, human-made or not. Of course, it turns out a lot of people don't care and will listen to whatever, but I suspect that for those who do, there'll be a higher percentage seeking something weird and new.
Future belongs to ones (let's call them ruling class) who utilizes averages (let's call that masses) to own advantage. Weirds here are the systemic risk to the ruling class. And there is nothing in weirds for masses. Masses avoid, ridicule, mock and exclude the weird stuff. Even the "weird" is about other's perception, not innate property of an individual. Nothing suggests that this perception will change in any observable time.
And what about weirdos who are wrong and selfdelusional? Are they minority of majority of weidos? Then can you blame masses who avoid/exclude veridos?
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To have a society in which weirdos thrive means to put at risk so many things the ruling class thrive for: control, power, social status. Such society will need to cultivate curiosity and critical thinking. Good luck with arranging that at scale.
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It's indeed easier times for weird. But way far from thriving or even "having the future".
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There are way more things in the article to argue about. I just outlined couple.
The author raises some good observations but I think that the actual proposition is ridiculous.
We are supposed to resist the automation of normalcy with AI by...remodeling the process from some sort of set of civilizational first principles?
Sidenote: the "telescopic zoom" feature of the website is very interesting and __useful__. It's amazing to see how one can still bring innovation to blogs/personal websites!
If the future belonged to the weird, everyone would dogpile on it, and it would no longer be weird. Either the weird will become mainstream, or it isn't the future.
This bodes well for me, as a furry who's often too weird even for the other furries.
That it might actually be remunerative (economically, socially)...
Nah, it belongs to the slop consuming unthinking normies. More and more apparent by the day. Wishful thinking that it belongs to the weird.
This rests on the assumption that AI can't do weird stuff.
I think it depends.
For measurable goals and simulatable systems, AI and other methods like evolutionary optimization can create weird things on their own.
But what if the goals themselves are weird? This exists, There's a niche for that in the economy, but it's pretty small.
Culture us already far more ironic and appreciative of irreverent and absurdist humor, and open-minded to ideology- than it was prior generations.
Why would it tend this way before AI? Something to do with the creative potential where tech reduces the consciousness and menial work requirement perhaps.
The author make a typical mistake, saying that witches were burned at stake in pre-modern times. Which is not true; surprisingly burning witches was not a big thing in Medieval period; it was actually early modernity when witch hunts have become widespread (not in England though, were witchhunts were far less popular, than say in Germany or some other parts of modern UK).
That’s great news. We’ve been preparing for exactly this version of it for more than 25 years now - learning, hacking, travelling, doing extreme sports and environments and exploring tribal outdoor gatherings with zero amenities. Hope we see you on the other side.
"weird-maxxing"
Lady Gaga, its already here.
Still only a limited number of slots for weird to be successful.
>>> The always-on Burning Man is coming. Ready or not.
You must toggle to the minified telescopic version of the essay to experience this closing statement.
Or.
AI sees we have too many 'cogs' available, and they are using up resources. Lets cull them back a bit.
> but the general rule for the vast majority of the population was: don't be weird, or get killed.
I suspect this is a very Eurocentric view. Take India for a counter-example, it has always been full of weirdoes starting their own cults.
> But with AI (disembodied in software and embodied in robots), the relative value of being normal and predictable is rapidly evaporating.
I would argue this is precisely backwards. The normal and predictable is more valuable. Human errors are largely predictable. AI errors are not. This is one of the reasons why human code is much easier to review than AI code.
ChatGPT, please write an essay about weirdos that follows Paul Graham's methods but not his style. Insert AI as the savior in the end.
The reality is that everything that was considered weird has been co-opted by the tech industry already. LGBTQ and Burning man are boring, commercialized and institutionalized now.
The tech industry did this, because tech people are relentless online advertisers for the industry and they had to placate them. It stopped when Trump was elected, which shows that the people holding the power are normie CEOs and not weirdos.
If you say Amodei is a weirdo: Only to a certain extent and he will be removed one day just like the Google founders. Some Eric Schmidt figure will take over.
Really, this is just AI generated or assisted fiction that improves morale for the tech influencers.
Alternatively these mechanisms push toward subcultures. Several tight and successful groups come to mind:
Environmentalists may be weird, but they bring attention to real problems for society generally and have had significant success despite being targeted for murder by corporate criminals globally. Cannabis enthusiasts may be social jokes, but even during a drug war managed to carry on and find ways of not just existing but bonding and and sharing.
This kind of situation keeps coming up and it seems like the weirdness is a side issue relative to the commitment to some specific sharable experience.
Said this on another post: With AI eventually making everything anyone can think of, it'll come down to who has the better ideas, or at least the most weird ideas that AI can't think of (yet)
WOW! , a complete history, manual, and set of rules for bieng wierd, almost like a beurocratic normalisation of wierdnesz, which is of course the standard method of the normys when they notice that the strategy of useing the same tactics is failing (and quickly at that) and they need new ideas to steal.
good luck with that.
that was revolting to read. unbelievable cinical double speak.it leaves all real control to industry and is DESIGNED to make "repair" a bespoke boutique privlage. what was that very reliable french device that was used as "the argument that ends all debate", many I am sure could are likely still operable even aften centuries of sitting, but even if out of commisioncan be quickly returned to service to trim beurocratic and industry excess at the source.
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What we call "normal" is the historical convergence to behaviour that allows a civilization to thrive and survive long term.
Change that and the weirdos will create a society that will die out.
See: modern liberal society and feminisim which leads to population collapse and destruction of the civilizations that embrace it.
It's not about being weird--it's about change vs. stasis.
The problem with weird is that not everyone can be weird, almost by definition. Moreover, people get things done collectively, and for that to work, the group (at whatever size) has to push in the same direction. Pushing in the wrong direction just to be weird will cause the group to fail.
Instead, I think, the future belongs to those who help change the present.
At the limit, any existing process can be done by AI, given a goal. What AI cannot do (and must not do) is come up with new goals. Coming up with new goals must always remain a human prerogative.
We don't need humans to work the assembly line--we need humans to make the assembly line better. AI can't do that alone because it cannot define "better". Humans must decide what "better" means. Do we want the assembly line to be faster or use fewer resources? Should it continue to produce this product or work on a new one? Should we build a bigger assembly line or turn the whole thing into a park?
As long as the world keeps changing, we will need humans to direct that change. People who fear change, who want everything to stay the same will have the hardest time in the future. Those are the people who will be replaced by AI.
The future belongs to those who change the present.