Episode #581: When Technique Becomes Autonomous: A Quant's Guide to Civilizational Decay

Stewart Alsop III (0:00)

Welcome to the Crazy Wisdom Podcast. This podcast is for you if you have an insane drive to find the truth of things. It's not the good answers that we seek, but the good questions. I interview a range of different guests from many different fields, all with the intention to uncover the simple truths that are hidden in plain sight. Most people don't want to go there. I go there. My guests go there, and you benefit. Please let me know if you enjoy these episodes and as always, subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to the podcasts. Welcome to the Crazy Wisdom Podcast. Got a very exciting today. We're doing a few things a little bit differently. This will be my first anonymous podcast, so we're gonna change the voice for our guest today. And we're also, in order to get a good video for this to publish on YouTube, we're actually hallucinating a live website as we talk. And my guest today is World Destroyer, and he is doing some quant stuff, he's doing some other stuff. We don't have to talk about that. We might talk about that. Welcome to the show.

So algorithms. It's so interesting, we live in a world where the algorithms are everywhere. I've been reading a lot about Jacques Ellul. You actually helped me out with one of those books.

Jacques Ellul talks about how we're in this autonomous world now, where technique itself has become autonomous and taken over our whole civilization. Maybe even liberalism itself fails now that technique runs everything. There are no ends anymore, there are only means. Means is the only thing most people pay attention to. Now we have algorithms running everything. Jacques Ellul was writing in the 1950s rather than today.

So he didn't see the rise of algorithms, he saw the computers coming, but he didn't see the algorithms coming.

Now the algorithms are everywhere. What is your take? What are you doing with algorithms? How do you see the algorithms shifting the world as we know it? What's going on in your world?

SPEAKER_2 (2:19)

By algorithms, do you mean like social media algorithms or anything that makes a decision?

Stewart Alsop III (2:28)

It's a great question. Anything that makes a decision.

So I didn't really have a meaning of an algorithm because the algorithm is fuzzy in my head of what it exactly is. I like this secondary definition of anything that makes a decision. Autonomously. Is it autonomous? Is an algorithm autonomous when it makes it decisions? Is that the whole point?

SPEAKER_2 (2:53)

No, it's not autonomous. I think on me, organisms are autonomous. Interesting.

Stewart Alsop III (2:59)

So we have organisms that are autonomous, and we biological organisms that move around. One of the big dividing line between something that's alive and something that is dead, is that it moves around. A rock moves around, but a rock needs to be moved, rather than an organism which can autonomously move around its environment and do things. Very quickly, we're getting into the world of free will. I'm not sure if we want to go there, but free will is this sense of that, yeah, autonomous, that there's an autonomous free will.

So yeah, so algorithms are not autonomous. They need to be moved by a prime mover. So they're essentially digital rocks. Is an algorithm a digital rock?

SPEAKER_2 (3:41)

No, I think your definitions are very insufficient.

Like, we are moved to, you know, that doesn't mean we are not autonomous. The autonomy seems to emerge when you have to survive, ooh, and it happens over evolutionary time scales. Otherwise, you are just a pattern in some motion that doesn't necessarily persist. So the reason you need autonomy or you have acquired autonomy over the many millions of years of evolution is that otherwise you would have disappeared, so.

Stewart Alsop III (4:33)

Interesting. So there is this link between autonomy of an organism and survival.

But algorithms are in this world, a digital world. Are algorithms only inside of the digital world? No, they actually exist in the physical world too, inside of industrial automation, right?

SPEAKER_2 (4:57)

I mean, there's no such thing as a non-physical world. There's only one world, and the algorithms are physical.

Stewart Alsop III (5:04)

So, yes, I agree that there is only one world. There is only the world that we interact with. But we spend a lot of time in this world that doesn't have a physical corollary, that it can have a physical corollary. But, like, my imagination, my imagination, yes, it's happening inside my brain.

There is this thing, but it's not connected to the world. Like, it can strongly diverge from the world. Is that right or wrong? What's going on?