It’s been much on my mind as I read the news today. It’s about a young Margaret Mead’s friendship with Howard Scott, the founder of the Technocracy movement, and the ways that technological utopianism manifested in the culture of the 1930s and 1940s United States. For reasons of space, I ended up cutting it from the final draft of the book. Flawed as it was, her effort to construct a path toward human flourishing amid the hatred, nationalism, and violence of the twentieth century is all too relevant today.īelow is an excerpt from Tripping on Utopia.

On the other hand, I can’t help but admire her idealism - or appreciate her timeliness.

Her life was a case study of the dangers of longtermism. Throughout her life, she was driven by a burning ambition to create a better world - and, again and again, this ambition led her to overlook the ethical failings of people close to her. Tripping on Utopia ’s title is not just a reference to the psychedelic experience, but an assessment of Mead’s scientific legacy. In the end, I don’t think she was successful. She sought a middle way between the dystopias conjured by Bateson and the naive assumptions of the earliest techno-optimists (more on that below). What makes Margaret Mead such a complex figure in the history of twentieth-century science is also what makes her relevant for understanding AI in the 2020s. Over breakfast with the physicist’s family, the two men discussed whether “the world is moving in the direction of hell.” They both agreed it was. Once, in 1947, Bateson spent the night at J. Bateson, who was deeply troubled by his wartime experiences in the OSS, the predecessor organization to the CIA, was markedly more pessimistic than Mead about our collective odds. In speeches, articles, and radio appearances, they argued that the creation of a world government was the only path which could ensure humanity’s survival. In other words: the same person helped inspire the two supposedly opposed schools of thought that are battling it out in AI research today.Īfter the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Mead and Bateson dedicated themselves to publicizing the existential threat posed by the atomic bomb. It’s that, after World War II, she also became a prominent theorist of existential risk. Part of why Mead is so intriguing is not just that she was saying this kind of thing back in the 1930s. to build a world which shall be as new in the ordered interplay given to man’s myriad gifts as the present world is new in the technological utilization of physical resources.” The alternative, she wrote, was “a frightened retreat to some single standard which will waste nine-tenths of the potentialities of the human race in order that we may have a too dearly purchased security.” If humanity was to survive the twentieth century, Mead wrote in July of 1939, we needed “to envisage a world in which new social inventions will permit us to draw upon human potentialities as never before. She just knew they were coming, and that she wanted to be part of them. Mead thought those changes were impossible to predict with any certainty. She was also, for a time, a leading proponent of what is now often called techno-optimism: the belief that technology will propel our species toward a transcendent new state by expanding human potential. A pioneer not just in anthropology but also in science communication (a teenage Carl Sagan was one of her many fans) Mead was probably the most ambitious and controversial American scientist of her generation. Though Mead was globally famous in her lifetime, I think her historical impact is substantially underrated today. But the book is also about something bigger: the rise and fall of technological utopianism in the twentieth century, as told through the doomed romance between the anthropologist Margaret Mead and her third husband, Gregory Bateson.

That book, Tripping on Utopia, centers on the early history of psychedelic science. Part of why I’ve been so fascinated by the drama at OpenAI is that I’ve spent the past five years researching and writing a book that’s partly about how these two ideologies emerged. Altman’s dismissal by OpenAI’s board on Friday was the culmination of a power struggle between the company’s two ideological extremes-one group born from Silicon Valley techno optimism… the other steeped in fears that AI represents an existential risk to humanity and must be controlled with extreme caution. That’s because OpenAI’s recent fracturing has brought a larger ideological divide into public view.Īs Karen Hao and Charlie Warzel write in a recent Atlantic article : What will change - I suspect - is the role that AI tools and AI researchers play in our culture. I say social history because the underlying technologies likely won’t change much. This week may end up being remembered as an inflection point for the social history of AI.

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