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We Need To Talk About Our Slavery Fetish
In his 2015 essay, The AI Revolution, Tim Urban introduces the concept of the “Die Progress Unit” (DPU). One DPU being the amount of progress a human being can withstand before it kills them.
For example, imagine transporting a simple farmer from the 1820s to the present day; mains electricity, commercial air travel, the magical, all-knowing rectangles we carry in our pockets, he’d be hit with all these developments at once. And that’s before you even told him about the moon landings and self-driving cars and OnlyFans.
As Tim points out, this experience wouldn’t merely be jarring or astonishing or even mind-boggling. These words aren’t big enough. Our time-travelling friend would be so overwhelmed by what humanity has achieved in the past 200 years that he might literally die.
It would be impossible for him to bridge the gap between a horse-drawn buggy and a Tesla. Or between smoke signals and a Zoom call. Or between a musket and an AR-15 (#justsaying).
But here’s where it gets really interesting.
If our friend wanted to pull the same trick, he couldn’t just grab somebody from 200 years in his past and impress them to death. The world changed exponentially more between 1820 and 2020 than it did between 1620 and 1820.
To reach the next DPU, he’d need to travel to somewhere around 12,000 BC. Back when humans were still hunter-gatherers huddling in caves. Only then would they be sufficiently impressed by things like cities and farming and the concept of “indoors” that they might die.
So, roughly 14,000 years for his DPU, but only 200 years for ours. And with the rise of AI, the next one will likely come even sooner. Not only is progress happening, it’s accelerating. It’s just hard for us to see it in real-time.
There’s one more sign of progress that our friend would notice; there’s no more slave trade. Although, if you fed him a steady enough diet of Twitter, he might not realise.
Last year, Kanye West (you know, the guy who suggested that slavery was a choice), claimed that “the music industry and the NBA are modern-day slave ships." In his new Netflix series, Colin Kaepernick…
