The Rise of Glory Tech

The Rise of Glory Tech

Google has this to say in defense of the incredibly costly churches in every major European city and even some minor:

Cathedrals often took centuries to build (e.g., Cologne Cathedral took 632 years). Work proceeded in phases as funding became available, which prevented a single, continuous drain on resources that might cause mass starvation

However digging into the details AI says this:

many medieval cities have magnificent, world-class cathedrals standing next to streets that remained muddy, unpaved tracks for centuries. The city could “afford” the cathedral only because the population collectively chose to invest their surplus wealth into a single, massive monument

Then there are knock on effects. A project that long term employed 5 specialized masons and 5 master carpenters might instead have had a small college of professors.

These same trade offs are alive today with skyscrapers for banks, universities competing on impressive buildings, and airports that are much more glamorous than required.

Some of this building gets justified by its bringing in tourists the same as cathedrals brought in pilgrims. However there are also monuments in the making that don’t serve any public function unless they are one day turned into attractions.

As we hurtle towards a glorious childless destination, we need to at least consider what we believe. Puritans were against glory buildings:

Puritan iconoclasm found its most violent expression in attacks on cathedral churches. This is not surprising — as centre-pieces of the Laudian ideal of the beauty of holiness and as the seats of the bishops they were potent symbols of a religious regime which had alienated many, both Puritans and non-Puritans. The war on cathedrals represented a war on Laudian values and on prelacy in general, now seen by the zealous as irredeemably corrupt.

More on Laudian values:

The political theology of Laudianism was the Divine right of kings and that power flows from God down to the King, not from the people up to the King. Those who followed it were called Cavaliers and it later became the Tory movement.

America was not founded on Laudian / Tory / Conservative values and yet at some point became a glory based society:

New single family home sizes have fallen since 2015, but only because people couldn’t afford them.

Same idea for cars:

American post WWII car based suburbs are effectively the new cathedrals. Literally so according to Stephen M. Koeth.

Glory and consumerism are not the same; what giant cathedrals, houses, and cars have in common is that you can’t really consume them by yourself. One can go on a very expensive vacation and consume the value without anyone else watching — this is not true of glory products.

Glory can even be seen as opposed to consumerism because having a glory product might require great sacrifice of other material goods. So giant houses with just a little very cheap furniture are common.

It makes sense that Laudianism was tied with divine right of kings, because royalty is itself a glory product. A king’s court would tour his realm displaying this glory.

In the same way the United States and China compete on billionaire glory.

Glory Tech

Glory tech has the same feature of being distinguished from normal consumerism by having to be seen. Suppose you get into a taxi where the driver side is hidden from you. Is it a human driver or a glorious machine learning driven Waymo? The same goes for AI generated art — you have to be told it’s not created by a human to feel anything.

Another feature of glory tech is the reversal of normal return on investment. At some point during the building of the Cologne Cathedral, Christian faith became in service of the structure instead of the structure serving Christian faith.

When the cathedral was finished in 1880 the people of Cologne bragged that they had the world’s tallest building — not anything about religion. So to the race for AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) seems removed from any claim of AGI helping humanity.

Now it is possible that AI finds some killer application just as smart phones found posting pictures onto social media. However posting pictures onto social media is again glory tech. If no one praises your pictures then it doesn’t work.

It’s also possible that glory tech can find real purpose beyond glory. Running water in bathrooms started as a status symbol for the very rich, but eventually tremendously reduced disease in cities.

However the reverse happened with bitcoin- a pretty neat invention, instantly transportable mined currency, became mostly about glory.

The transition from useful to glory also happened for fast cross ocean shipping which became about the glory of domination- first with slavery and then with “free” trade.

Still this much money invested in long term AI with such poorly defined goals is astounding, especially considering that capitalism was supposed to be more pragmatic than religion.

Here the Cologne Cathedral glory project again gives us a clue:

The Cologne Cathedral (1248–1880) had a 300-year construction halt caused by a lack of funds, loss of interest in Gothic architecture, and the Reformation. Construction resumed in 1842 driven by Prussian, Protestant, and Catholic desires for a symbol of German national unity.

Germans wanted to compete with France for architecture and Americans want to compete with China for tech.

As usual with glory tech, there are infrastructure and opportunity costs:

Electricity prices rose 6.3% in the last 12 months — more than double the overall rate of inflation. That’s partly due to the high cost of natural gas, which is a major fuel for power plants. It’s also due to increased demand, some of which comes from power-hungry data centers.

Enter David Oliver Sacks the White House AI and crypto czar which can be thought of as head of glory.

Sacks is opposed to AI regulation like California’s AB 2013 that require transparency on the data sets with which LLM are trained. Cause, funny thing, for the purposes of glory it doesn’t matter whether AI can create art or is just violating copy right law to steal human art.

Sacks thinks of AI in terms of growth the same way that Cologne Cathedral proponents wanted height. The cathedral had a very similar backer in Sulpiz Boisserée

Boisserée described finishing the cathedral as a “monument of German art” and a symbol of the “national spirit”.

The difference is that Boisserée admitted the completion of the cathedral was about art. For Sacks

If the U.S. were to lose the AI race, it would alter the balance of power in the world in a very unfavorable way. This is something we have to take very seriously.

Sacks says “balance of power”, but does he mean balance of glory?