#94 | President Lizz Frog, a parable
"When we are headed the wrong way, the last thing we need is progress." -- Nick Bostrom
"Remember that sometimes not getting what you want is a wonderful stroke of luck." - Dalai Lama
Down the end of the garden of my childhood home was a pond. And in that pond lived a society of frogs.
President Lizz Frog was a fierce amphibian determined to 'get things done'. She was an optimist to the point of ignorance.
The pond, compared to others, was a wealthy one with soft banks and adequate shade, and Lizz Frog, along with her government, promised to do what she could to enhance the happiness and wellbeing of the frogs in it. Public policy questions arose and fell, but whatever she did, Lizz faced ribbiting. She found it impossible to hear the 'legitimate' ribbiting from the press-frenzy croaking that followed even the most minor political mishap.
In the early years, the frogs thrived and became more numerous.
Scientist frogs, Boozman and Eckhart, made a series of breakthroughs concerning tadpoles. Thanks to these scientists, more tadpoles survived their delicate childhoods and became frogs. These frogs themselves had plenty of tadpoles. With this success, Boozman and Eckhart became famous.
Seasons passed, and there were more frogs than ever before. The sheer number of frogs began to drive away the other animals from the pond (who feared for their safety). The insects that didn't escape get eaten with a lick. The frogs became innumerable, their appetites unquenchable. Noticeably fewer flies flew over the green lilies in the centre of the pond.
And with the hungry croaking, Lizz Frog became concerned.
One summer afternoon, on the presidential lilypad beneath the hanging willow tree at the pond's south end, Lizz hosted an emergency meeting with her scientists, Boozman and Eckhart.
The scientists were worried. "Our population is growing," said Eckhart, "and we'll run out of insects if we're not careful."
"We're at the limit of the pond carrying capacity," Boozman interjected, "without insects, we'll starve. We need leadership now. It will be too late as soon as people start to get really hungry."
Lizz hardly responded but blinked as only a frog can do.
Eckhart continued: "without flies, there will be frogs; no frogs means no electorate. No electorate means no presidency."
After a couple of seconds of deliberation, but no more, Lizz exploded: "I've endured and overcome every obstacle of my life, and this is nothing but mean-spirited scientific woohoo. You're trying to scare me and create jobs for yourselves. There are flies everywhere!"
At that moment, Lizz Frog thrust her tongue across the lilypad and snared a passing bluebottle. She chewed slowly and callously, faced by her concerned scientists, who blinked their wide eyes, but said nothing.
The meeting was adjourned, and the seasons passed unrelentingly. The ribbiting of discontent became deafening; the papers said her presidency would topple if Lizz didn't get her frogs the insects they needed. With each season, there were fewer insects and more frogs. And the frogs began to get very hungry indeed.
After hopping past Boozman's endless requests for a meeting, the political climate becomes unbearable. Lizz Frog agreed to meet with her advisors on her presidential pad.
Sitting on her lonely pad, Lizz Frog presented her concerns:
"Great scientists, the problems we face are the ones of your making; without your breakthroughs with tadpoles, we'd never be faced with a shortage of insects. Today, we're facing an insect crisis, and we may even have to ration insects next season. The electorate will hate me if we do. I need a solution."
Boozman nervously and hastily began. "President Frog, we've been waiting to meet with you for some time. We've been running some numbers, and we're afraid you're right. We have only a couple of seasons remaining before all of the insects will be gone, and with them, so will our chances of survival. Eckhart and I have discovered two potential solutions: if you act now, we'll be able to continue to live on this pond. Neither is comfortable, but we can make it through if we choose one."
Eckhart coughed and continued. "Madam President, the first option is to wean the frogs from the insect food they enjoy so much. The frogs will have to eat some of the green foliage from around the pond; little leaves and some moss. We could sustain a community ten times our size on this foliage, and we could find foliage elsewhere, too, if the population grew ever larger."
"The frogs will never stand for it; they will hate me!" said Liz. "It sounds so unbearably cruel to deprive the frogs of the insects they have evolved so naturally to enjoy."
"The second option," said Boozman, "is to limit the tadpoles each frog can spawn, thereby limiting the number of frogs who live in our pond. In just a few seasons, we'd have a sustainable number of frogs, perhaps a third of our current number, and the insects would return and be bountiful — hungry frogs would be a relic of history."
"Oh, that can never work!" Said Lizz in a fit of rage. "The frogs couldn't be deprived of their natural tendency to spawn when they want, how they want! Nature's most incredible achievement is the spawning of frogs, and the frogs wouldn't stand for it. The frogs will hate me if I impose a policy like that. We are not a dictatorship!"
Boozman replied: "But the alternative is prolonging the insect crisis and starvation!"
But Lizz Frog would have none of it. And the seasons swept on; the trees dropped their leaves into the black water of the pond, and the frogs’ croaks called out for insects. But the insects never came. Lizz remained in power, though she never made the hard decision. The frogs starved, even though they would have rathered either of the options the President was so fast to dismiss.
With the Conservative leadership election ongoing, I fear the decisions our next generation of politicians will make will be the same as the last. That is, refusing to make difficult decisions, which we — as voters — would happily make (if inspired), avoiding the catastrophes marching towards us.
My week in books
Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom. If machines get to a point where they are a little bit smarter than us, they will, by improving themselves, become enormously smarter than we can imagine. This would be bad news. Fascinating and scary. I suspect, in our lifetime, we'll find out whether Bostrom is right. Both he and I hope he is wrong. A quote:
“Before the prospect of an intelligence explosion, we humans are like small children playing with a bomb. Such is the mismatch between the power of our plaything and the immaturity of our conduct. Superintelligence is a challenge for which we are not ready now and will not be ready for a long time. We have little idea when the detonation will occur, though if we hold the device to our ear we can hear a faint ticking sound. For a child with an undetonated bomb in its hands, a sensible thing to do would be to put it down gently, quickly back out of the room, and contact the nearest adult. Yet what we have here is not one child but many, each with access to an independent trigger mechanism. The chances that we will all find the sense to put down the dangerous stuff seem almost negligible. Some little idiot is bound to press the ignite button just to see what happens.”
Live well,
Hector