Chief Investment Strategist, The Freeport Society
Editor’s Note: Money for nothing! Universal basic income! Cradle to grave welfare! One might think I was repeating talking points from the Democratic National Convention (DNC) this week. And, I suppose I am! But I’m also talking about something else that has nothing to do with politics… yet could just as easily lead to the death of the human spirit.
As InvestorPlace Digest editor Jeff Remsburg details in a recent piece, renowned behavioral researcher John B. Calhoun conducted a series of experiments that, by creating a “utopia” for mice, replicated how Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) could help the human race.
AGI has the potential to create cures for virtually any disease… craft on-demand movies for endless hours of entertainment… perhaps even do everyone’s day jobs for them. But what happens when you take away all hardship? What if all of life’s challenges suddenly melted away?
As Jeff puts it, Calhoun’s experiments always ended in “a hellscape of violence, death, and, eventually, mass extinction.” We must face that potential for disaster as we head down the Road to AGI. And so, with Eric Fry’s The Road to AGI Summit rapidly approaching – in less than 24 hours, tomorrow at 1 p.m. Eastern (go here to instantly save your seat) – we asked Jeff if we could reprint his essay. He kindly agreed. Thanks, Jeff… I think…
Charles Sizemore, Chief Investment Strategist, The Freeport Society
The biologist had created a perfectly engineered “utopia.”
The focus of the experiment was: “What would happen now that the subjects had everything they could ever want? Would it lead to unbridled flourishing?”
It was the opposite.
The experiments, run for decades, always ended the same way…
This idyllic “utopia” devolved into a hellscape of violence, death, and eventually, mass extinction.
Yes, this is a strange way to begin, but stick with me…
In 1968, renowned behavioral researcher John B. Calhoun created what you might think of as a “Garden of Eden” for mice.
It was a pen that held the perfect conditions for rodents – more than enough food and water… a temperate climate… reams of paper and stuffing for the mice to build perfect nests… 256 separated “apartments” for mothers and young… plenty of space to prevent overcrowding due to population growth… and each mouse was pre-screened to eliminate the risk of disease.
It was an environment perfectly engineered for a burgeoning, healthy population… and yet, time and again, it collapsed into a nightmare.
What an increasing number of people are asking today is: “Are we on a path toward our own ‘mouse utopia’ thanks to Artificial General Intelligence?”
AGI will exceed human intelligence in every aspect. It’s predicted to be an autonomous agent that can learn without human supervision. It will have some version of consciousness, subjective experience, emotional understanding, and self-reliant decision-making capability.
The central fear in creating such an AGI, then, is: “How do we control a conscious agent that is substantially more intelligent than us?”
Yes, as the more alarmist portions of the media are happy to crow about, there is the potential for “our AI overlords” to wage war against humans. But as Calhoun’s decades-old experiment shows, there also is the risk that AI will have unintended consequences from a sociological perspective.
I’ve read several visions of the future in which AGI is so powerful and efficient that we’ll all eventually stop working and live on a universal basic income (UBI). This will free us to follow our hearts, becoming poets, musicians, sculptors – whatever your dream may be.
In other words, we’ll live in a utopia.
But as Elon Musk has said, “With artificial intelligence, we’re summoning the demon.”
Is it possible that the demon we’re summoning is… us?
The Hellscape of “Mouse Utopia”
Calhoun’s most famous “mouse utopia” experiment centered on Universe #25, which began in July 1968.
At first, things seemed wonderful. The eight initial mice bred, and the population doubled every 55 days afterward. It eventually peaked at about 2,200 mice roughly 1.5 years into the experiment.
To be clear, this peak population growth wasn’t limited by the size of Calhoun’s physical universe. The pen he created had additional room to support further population growth.
Some studies of mouse utopia argue that overpopulation was the problem, but that’s not the case. From VictorPest.com:
Despite the abundance of space throughout the enclosure — each compartment could house up to 15 individuals, and the overall enclosure was built for a capacity of 3,000 — most mice were crowding select areas and eating from the same food sources.
No, it wasn’t overpopulation that killed mouse utopia. What led to the decline was something far more sinister.
In mouse utopia, mice pups rarely died, grown mice had to do nothing to survive and flourish, and all mice wanted for nothing. This introduced unexpected problems.
Mice have social hierarchies. Dominant alphas control harems of females and regularly must fight off challengers. In the wild, the losing mouse scurries off and starts over elsewhere. But in mouse utopia, the losing mouse couldn’t escape. And because so many mice were surviving in these idyllic conditions, hordes of these losers – what Calhoun called “dropouts” – would gather in the center of the pens.
Injured, scarred, and angry, these dropouts would occasionally begin brawling for no apparent reason. They would even roam the pen attacking innocent mice. It was just senseless violence. Some of these dropouts even turned to cannibalism.
Life wasn’t better for the alphas. With so many mice surviving childhood, the alphas grew tired of defending their harems. So, rogue mice invaded many of the mouse apartments.
The female mice fought back, but this changed their relationship with their existing young. Many of these tired, stressed mothers booted their pups from the nest before they were ready. Other mothers abandoned their young. Some even attacked their own offspring.
Then, with all basic needs provided through the experiment, the mice didn’t have to spend their days foraging, creating shelters, or avoiding predators. This lack of purpose led to new deviant behaviors. Here’s Science History to explain:
Maladjusted females began isolating themselves like hermits in empty apartments — unusual behavior among mice.
Maladjusted males, meanwhile, took to grooming all day — preening and licking themselves hour after hour. Calhoun called them “the beautiful ones.” And yet, even while obsessing over their appearance, these males had zero interest in courting females, zero interest in sex.
Given the violence, lack of traditional roles, lack of sex, and lack of parental support when pups were actually born, the population began to plummet.
Back to Science History:
By the 21st month, newborn pups rarely survived more than a few days. Soon, new births stopped altogether.
Older mice lingered for a while — hiding like hermits or grooming all day — but eventually they died out as well.
By spring 1973, less than five years after the experiment started, the population had crashed from 2,200 to 0. Mouse heaven had gone extinct.
Humans aren’t mice, but we’d be foolish to ignore these findings.
Instinctively, we know that a “perfect society” that requires nothing of us is not healthy.
Humans are hardwired for striving, not leisure. Consider that the retirees who are happiest in retirement are the ones who transition from “work” into a different type of “work” – usually, volunteering for something that brings fulfillment along with a continued sense of identity, purpose, and meaning.
A lack of said identity, purpose, and meaning often breeds depression. Then there’s the cognitive decline that accelerates when people stop working, due to the sudden reduction in mental processing.
Indeed, Calhoun wrote about the “spiritual death” of the mice in his experiment that preceded their physical death. Here’s Medium:
Calhoun saw the fate of the mouse population as a metaphor for the potential fate of humanity. He called the breakdown of society a “spiritual death,” while physical death was called the “second death” …
Spiritual death, as generally understood, is a disconnection from one’s own essence, values, or beliefs. It can manifest as a loss of purpose, meaning, or sense of belonging.
Are we to believe that an AGI-driven world in which we do nothing but paint, sing, and dance will be meaningful and intellectually stimulating?
I would guess that some of your own times of greatest fulfillment and happiness were found on the other side of a period of intense (and possibly painful) striving, stretching, and battling to accomplish a noble, worthy goal.
Would a lifetime of self-indulgence spent on artistic self-expression really be a utopia? Or might it be fun for a while until the complete absence of responsibility, duty, and self-sacrifice for a goal beyond ourselves turns into a hell of our own making?
The Socioeconomic Risks of AGI
Let’s return to Medium:
With advances in technology, AI-driven advances could replace almost all mental and/or physical work done by humans within a couple of decades. This could cause major problems in society.
- If it is not distributed fairly, it has the potential to cause the existing imbalance of wealth and power to become an order of magnitude or more severe than it already is. That would lead to authoritarian societies and the potential of despotic dictatorships.
- If fairly distributed, it could grant the population much more free time and they could effectively wither and die, so to speak, if they are not imaginative enough to find their own purpose in life or find someone else to give them a purpose in life.
Now, though our focus here is on the sociological challenges of an AI-driven future, I want to make one comment on the idea of distribution of wealth because the excerpt above taps into it, and because it relates to sociological risk.
For our entire world to enjoy a UBI, there must be mass redistribution of wealth on a scale we’ve never seen before.
Where is that wealth to come from?
Ostensibly, it will come from the corporations that benefit from AI, generating all the profits.
Today, these corporations are investing billions of dollars into AI technology. In the coming years, that number will climb into the trillions.
Are we to assume that these companies will just hand over their profits to the government for mass redistribution?
What about the risk capital they put on the line? The years of lower earnings due to huge outlays of capital into AGI R&D? Is that just ignored?
What about the money you, as an investor, have aligned with that company? What happens to the company’s share price – and your portfolio value – when the government takes those AGI profits for redistribution?
A large portion of our citizenry will love this idea of mass wealth distribution and push for it. Meanwhile, a significant portion will fiercely resist, viewing it as stealing.
I’m sure nothing could go wrong there…
Keep your eyes open tomorrow afternoon for a much deeper dive into AGI from InvestorPlace’s global macro expert, Eric Fry.
He’s creating a series of reports for members of his trading service The Speculator. If you’re a subscriber, you’ll get those later this week. For the rest of us, tomorrow at 1 p.m., Eric will be hosting The Road to AGI Summit (join him here), where he’ll share his No. 1 stock idea for investing in AGI. It’s a fast-growing startup with virtually limitless potential on the Road to AGI. Additionally, he’ll be delivering his “futureproof” blueprint to prepare for this rapidly evolving landscape.
Because AGI is reaching a point of no return for developing AI technology, this event is crucial for anyone looking to stay ahead and capitalize on this coming technological revolution.
Eric will provide all the details during his The Road to AGI Summit tomorrow, August 22, at 1 p.m. Eastern time.
Click here to reserve your seat, before time runs out.
And keep your eyes open – Eric and I will both be bringing you more on AGI’s investment implications as well as our specific visions of our AGI-driven future.
Have a good evening,
Jeff Remsburg
Editor, InvestorPlace Digest