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…
