Our Fundamental Problem, Part 2: Moonshine, Cats, and the Azeotrope of Civilization

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In “Our Fundamental Problem: Adolescence, Mouse Utopia, & Multipolar Traps,” I argued that the primary meta-problem facing humanity is that the psychology and spirit that built modern civilization are in many ways directly opposed to the psychology and spirit that would indefinitely sustain our species across the future. Just like human adolescence, civilizations develop physically before spiritually and in order to reconcile our Paleolithic brains with our god-like technology,¹ we need to build a new way of thinking, forge a new human spirit. Previous generations built us out of physical poverty; our challenge will be to mature out of spiritual poverty.

In part two, I want to further define the landscape and a potential problem that is developing, one that isn’t getting enough attention: that civilization won’t end with a bang, but a whimper.

But first, let’s discuss moonshine and cats.

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Azeotropes

If you venture deep into Appalachia and happen to know the right old timer, you can find the strongest moonshine made, which will be ~90% ethanol. Yet even with legal producers of liquor, with no threat of ATF raids and access to all the industrial equipment they could want, the strongest alcohol that you’ll find for sale is only 190 proof, or 95% ethanol, with Everclear being the most famous brand (below). But this isn't just some arbitrary limit; there is a physical reason for this: the azeotrope.

Once was enough for me.

Imagine that you have a mixture of two liquid substances (e.g. ethanol and water) that you want to separate. Because substances have different boiling points, if you heat the mixture to boiling, collect the vapor, and then condense it back into liquid in another container, the new mixture will have a different proportion of the two substances than the original one. Repeat this process over and over again and eventually you'll get two pure liquid substances. This process of separation by boiling and recondensing is called distillation.

Schematic of a simple moonshine still. Source.

Now, distillation can be a bit more complex than just that (below is a schematic of a crude oil distillation tower) and there are other factors to consider (for example, it's not just about temperature, but also pressure, and it's not always two liquids) but generally, distillation works well if the two substances have boiling points separated by more than 25C.

But the boiling points of ethanol (78.4C) and water (100.0C) are only 21.6C apart. What happens there?

This should give some insight as to why “petroleum engineering” is its own separate field. Source.

Imagine you have a mash of grain, yeast, and water that you've left sitting inside a closed container. After all the oxygen is consumed, the yeast will undergo alcoholic fermentation, breaking down the grain sugars into ethanol and carbon dioxide. Let's say the liquid portion of the mash is 5% ethanol and 95% water. If you place the mixture into a distillation apparatus² and boil it, because ethanol has a lower boiling point than water, the vapor phase will shift toward a greater percentage of ethanol, let's say 20%. Repeat the distillation process on the recondensed 20% ethanol mixture and the vapor phase will again shift toward containing more ethanol. Repeat this process again and again and eventually you will have a liquid that is 95.6% ethanol and 4.4% water.

But what happens if you try to distill this mixture? Nothing happens. Boiling 95.6% ethanol and 4.4% water produces a vapor that is 95.6% ethanol and 4.4% water. You've hit the azeotrope.

A graph showing the differences in composition between the liquid phase and vapor phase of a ethanol and water mixture by boiling temperature. Notice how they are different at every point, except at 95.6% ethanol. That point is the azeotrope. Source.

An azeotrope is a mixture of liquids whose proportions cannot be changed by distillation. When an azeotrope is boiled, the vapor phase has the same proportions of constituents as the original mixture. An iterative chain of boiling, vapor collection, and condensation will continually reproduce the original mixture. A stable equilibrium has been reached.

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Self-Domestication

When people hear the term "domestication" they usually think of dogs: a slow breeding by humans to alter and shape dogs for their own use. Yet the domestication of the other most common household pet, the cat, occurred in a radically different way: self-domestication.

During and after the agricultural revolution, humanity's relationship with food radically changed. Rather than hunting and gathering for immediate consumption, we shifted toward the farming of grains for longer-term storage. But storerooms and granaries full of grain attracted rodents. A subspecies of wildcat, Felis silvestris lybica (below), realized they could get an easy meal by stalking these centralized locations. Since the cats kept the rodents at bay but were small enough to not threaten people, the humans tolerated their presence.

Source.

This set up a feedback loop where humans that tolerated cats had more food (because of fewer rodents) and cats that tolerated humans had more food (because they could hunt more easily). Both humans and cats were able to increase the other's survival, even though they had minimal interaction (e.g. humans didn't breed or control cats like they did dogs or livestock); cats were just around.

But notice that while human settlements have changed in unfathomable ways since the Agricultural Revolution, cats are essentially the same.

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Self-Domestication As the Azeotrope Of Civilization

Think of civilization as a mixture of humanity's physical and spiritual components. Physical components include things such as our technologies, institutions, and physical recourses, while spiritual components are our mental abilities, cultural morality, and individual psychologies. For now, I’ll simply shorthand these are “technology” and “morality.”

The interaction of humanity’s technology and morality not only produces our current society but also creates the “heat” that distills the next iteration of civilization, slowly but surely purifying our cultural evolution along the path of progress.³ For example, the technological development of settled agriculture helped spur the cultural development of organized religions, or more recently, the physical technologies that enabled the horrors of World War II led to the developments in humanity’s overall morality via such things as the Nuremburg Code and nuclear non-proliferation treaties.

Many futurists depict a future where we rapidly ‘distill’ or accelerate along one of these axes. For example, both “AI utopia” and “AI apocalypse” scenarios can be thought of as a civilization with rapidly shifts to ~100% technology (with the utopia or apocalypse depending on the concurrent amount of morality). Likewise, the Butlerian Jihad of Dune can be thought of as a rapid purification toward morality (i.e. an increase of morality accompanied by a decrease in technology).

Now, what I’d like to posit is that what if the most likely outcome of civilization, the endpoint of our path of progress, isn’t “purification” but rather an azeotrope, i.e. we get stuck at a point in development below purification, unable to shift out of the equilibrium that we ourselves established. What if that endpoint is “self-domestication” of humanity w/r/t AI, just as cats self-domesticated w/r/t humanity.

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In “We Have Become Death, Destroyer Of Fences,” I discussed the “Gradual Disempowerment” thesis of AI risk (executive summary here, full paper here). Individual and collective human agency has been and continues to be the foundation of the entirety of civilization. What happens if/when AIs steadily (or rapidly) improve, leading to a multipolar trap, where more and more of the economy, life, and culture is ceded to them, leading to a “gradual disempowerment” of humans?

The last few years have seemingly distorted everyone’s sense of time and there is so much media attention given to the hyper-optimistic predictions, that it really feels like few have given any serious thought to the world over even a moderate timescale.

Penicillin was discovered less than 100 years ago; today we can completely prevent HIV infection. Television was invented less than 100 years ago; today we have Netflix and HBO. Meanwhile, ChatGPT is was released less than three years ago and we’re already seeing mass reliance on it within the education system, both AI-relationships and AI-induced psychosis are occurring, and even it’s involved in suicides (litigation pending). Laying around with your phone “rotting” is already a thing, and right now, they are the least compelling that they will be in the future.

Forget the next one, five, or ten years. Really think about several ‘distillation cycles’ over decades, where the technologies of AI and robotics and algorithmic content are going to “get better and better and better and better” and how that is going to affect our “guts” (below). What if the end state of human civilization isn’t a bang, but a whimper, where we domesticate ourselves to a more intelligent “species,” just as cats did to us.

Source: Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself by David Lipsky

Think about it: cats themselves established an mutually-beneficial equilibrium with a more intelligent species. This both ensured their survival but stunted their evolution. There is no doubt that in some sense domestic cats live a great life; they get all the advantages of human civilization (antibiotics, air conditioning, etc.) without any fear of predation or the natural elements. But in another sense, they live a life of pure undeveloped and sheltered hedonism. They don’t create or build or have long-term goals; they lay around all day, play with toys, and eat the food that is given to them. They have evolutionarily neutered themselves into stasis.

And what if that is exactly what humanity is doing with the development of artificial intelligence and robotics? If even half of the predictions are right over twice the timelines, vast amounts of wealth and leisure will be unlocked for the majority of people over the coming decades, just as cats unlocked vast amounts of wealth and leisure by hitching themselves to humanity.

And in some sense that will be great, but in another sense, I am not sure that the majority of people could handle it.

A now-deleted tweet from Dylan Matthews. But is he wrong?

Now, I am certain that you, dear reader of The Counterpoint, will continue to live a life of agency and pursuit and challenges.

But creating your own meaning and purpose is hard, and I’m not sure that our current social culture, current human spirit, is shaped in a way that is compatible with mass leisure and wealth. Leisure and wealth do not guarantee happiness or satisfaction. It is already a trope that people lose meaning without work. It is already a trope that ultra wealthy people are unhappy. Multiply that across the entire population and add a heavy dose of exponentially better algorithms, personalized content creation, AI-optimized dopamine hits, and the time and freedom to get into trouble. If within decades of cheap and abundant calories becoming available, the majority of the population became overweight and obese, if the option became available, how could we not be concerned that large portions of society will simply become ‘cats’ and live lives of pure undeveloped and sheltered hedonism, laying around all day, playing with toys and gadgets, fueled by nothing but mass consumption of food and media and substances. What happens when we invent the technologies that allow us the freedom to indulge our worst tendencies? To suppress and ignore the drives that compelled our ancestors to explore and build and create? How could we not be concerned that civilization gets stuck in a hedonistic azeotrope of its own creation?

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We need to build a new culture, forge a new human spirit. If the primary meta-problem facing humanity is that the psychology and spirit that built modern civilization are in many ways directly opposed to the psychology and spirit that would indefinitely sustain our species across the future, it is very easy to see how an issue occurs with the sustaining part: we don’t solve the ecological crisis and consume ourselves; we roast ourselves in nuclear war.

But what if everything goes right, and we get to the end and all have lives of unimageable wealth and leisure? Will we be able to resist the avenues of laziness and hedonism and retreat and outsourcing-to-the-AI/robots that that would enable?

Because if not, as David Foster Wallace says in the David Lipsky book shown above, “in a meaningful way, [we’re] going to die.” The spirit of the wildcat became that of the house cat. Likewise, we will live on, but something will have been lost.

1. “The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.” - E. O. Wilson

2. You can see why it's usually shortened to "still."

3. This is where the analogy breaks down a bit, as technology and morality don’t come at the expense of one another, i.e. a 1% improvement in humanity’s morality doesn’t necessarily mean a 1% decline in our technology, unlike a distillation two substances would.