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The Fourth Age

The Fourth Age by Byron Reese

Running thoughts while reading. Philosophical, optimistic, and occasionally ranting. May 2025

Why this book?

I have zero idea why I started this book. It’s very simple in the sense that I already know what the first few parts are going to cover: language, pre-agricultural humanity, the cognitive tradeoff hypothesis, and more. But I had okay hopes for a perspective I hadn’t encountered yet. Hard to bear, but right to hear.

Running Log

09-05-2025

  • Figured I’d finish this one fast. Let’s see where we get.

11-05-2025

  • The author poses three philosophical questions early on, and they’re a surprisingly clean framework:
    • What is the composition of the universe? Either it’s one thing (atoms, strings, whatever) and everything emerges from combinations of that, or there are dual things: the real world form and Plato’s world of forms.
    • What are we? Either just a mechanistic machine (the Ship of Theseus paradox), or clever animals no different from the rest (just here for timepass), or humans with a god-given soul.
    • What is your “self”? Either just neurons firing (no speaker in the room, the room is a party driven by external stimuli), or emergence (wiring the brain up produces something qualitatively new), or the self is a soul, intrinsic and internally ingrained.

12-05-2025

  • The chapter on “Will AI replace us?” blew my mind. Not because of futuristic speculation, but because I was already in the headspace of thinking about AI and jobs, and this chapter just landed. The arguments, the points, damn.
  • He plays with economics and how jobs will shift in a way that feels grounded rather than hand-wavy.

22-05-2025

  • Finished the book. Felt a sense of… grandness. All these points, all the ways we have lived, it interested me how things actually do change over time.
  • This is what reading Bostrom would feel like without all the hype and speculation. Just the pure facts and the author’s rendition of them. Very interesting.

23-05-2025

Core Concepts

Robots in War

I wholeheartedly agree with the author. We will use the hell out of robots in war and destruction. We used to use men in war because they were cheap, and they were a good way of expanding the will of the emperor or conqueror onto physical reality. If you tell me there’s a non-human (expensive) way to do this? Sign me up.

Warfare is going to shift into the cyber domain too. As the world moves online and all critical infra follows, the ability to set up a self-sustaining network to communicate becomes the real strategic asset. Right now we need humans for that. In the future, it’ll all be calculated, and we won’t need to build from scratch.

This is basically the show Pluto, where obviously conscious robots are made to fight each other and the moral dilemmas that follow. I still love that show.

Will Computers Think Like Us?

Hell naw. They’re going to experience the world in a totally different mindset. I got this feeling from the AI 2027 page, and it isn’t going away.

Us augmenting ourselves with computers and being able to think and see in new dimensions is a real, complete possibility. Which is exactly what happens in Blindsight and is really good.

Will AI Replace Jobs?

The author’s framing of this is the best I’ve seen. The warehouse worker doesn’t become the geneticist. What happens is: a college biology professor becomes the geneticist, a high-school teacher takes the college job, a substitute teacher takes the high school job, and the unemployed warehouse worker becomes a substitute teacher. Everyone gets a promotion. The question isn’t “can a warehouse worker become a geneticist” but “can everyone do a job a little harder than the one they currently do?”

Key concepts he references:

Every invention that replaced jobs was always treated with hostility. French textile workers threw their wooden shoes into automated looms. But you don’t read about the Great Air Conditioner Riots of ‘49, because people don’t riot over tech that doesn’t replace human labour.

He also imagines what someone in 2047 would think of our 2017 lives, and it’s a fun thought experiment. The punchline: we won’t work less when we can afford to. We’ll keep working 40+ hours to avoid living what will feel like a primitive 2017 lifestyle. Maybe we aren’t Homo sapiens so much as Homo dissatisfactus.

Final Thoughts

Contrast with Jaron Lanier

His points are good, and the ideas are mostly rebuffs of things I’ve already read or gleaned, but presented in such a neutrally optimistic way that it’s fun. He paints a utopic-optimistic world rather than the bleak techno-dystopian consumerism proposed by Lanier. And I agree with the latter. Life always takes the path of shortcuts. And drugs are an example of that.

Just look at the carnage of drugs and alcohol throughout history. The only reason we’ve come this far is that the ones in power usually didn’t abuse it. Similarly, complacency will lead to an even bigger problem: the loss of meaning. When that hits, everybody goes into hedonism. And hedonism has its sub-demons: opium, heroin, porn, the whole lot.

The chain goes something like: loss of meaning → hedonism → drugs (mentally numbing yourself) → crime/carnage. It’s Maslow’s hierarchy collapsing from the top.

About the Author

Pretty fun book. Felt like reading Yuval Noah Harari again. Good words. A very good introduction to philosophy of the mind. He’s well read, but he quotes the same people I knew in 2023 (probably because they blew up even more after 2018): Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Andrew Ng, and more.

He’s into Keynesian economics, still talks about Steven Pinker and all. I feel like he’s going to be 30-year-old me: read up on all these people, having enough knowledge to write a book.

I think he’s genuinely been left behind by the Generative AI wave though. There’s so much more to unpack, so much more to think about. But for a 2018 book, this is solid.

The Pleasure of Solvable Problems

Just talking about ideas like sentience, AGI, and a post-labor economy is fun because it brings these problems down to the domain of solvable. Sci-fi doesn’t feel out of reach when it’s organised as a problem. I get intellectual pleasure from this. Pretty fun.

Side Thoughts

  • On de-anthropomorphizing aliens: I think to de-anthropomorphize our thinking of aliens, space, and sci-fi, we can feel our way through the problem using the concept of “cosmic horror.” That’s a pretty good deal for understanding how upper-level species would behave when faced with a universal problem.

  • The Yuga Connection: The contrast of the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd ages can be mapped onto the ancient Yuga concept. The oldies framed it in terms of spiritual values; we’re just basing it on technology. Pretty interesting line of thought if you ask me.

  • Anti-fragility of the Global Order: I couldn’t help comparing our global ecosystem to one of Taleb’s fragile systems. We’ve savoured the liquor of a global economic, trade, and mobility system, but it’s all transient and volatile. Our world is “Fragile” in Taleb’s sense, but only on the shortest timescale (a 30-year generational system). History has shown itself again and again: new players, new countries, new people always come up.

  • The Writing-and-Wheel Cascade: One of the best points in the book. Writing and the wheel weren’t just monumental in themselves; the bigger story is all the changes they set in motion. Writing gave us the nation-state, the nation-state gave us codes of law, codes of law gave us courts, courts gave us lawyers. The nation-state also gave us empires, empires built roads, roads increased civilian mobility, mobility brought commingling of cultures, and that brought changes in fashion and diet. One thing cascading endlessly.

To Read