There is this series on Chinese history. It's ambitious in trying to cover each year in China's history since year 1000. It's more well done than I thought it could be. The host is an excellent showman.

This episode was rather mundane, pretty much nothing took place in year 1003.

On the surface it was about the prime minister of Soong Dynasty at the time. One quality that stood out about him was his policy to never listen to advices.

Say what? Go ahead watch it yourself, I'm not going into it.

But turn out that was just a device to dive into the notion behind what conservatism really means.

It's a new finding for me, so I'll spoil it here. Conservatism has this reputation of out-of-touch stick in the mud, people who want no change and therefore no progress.

Not defending them, but that's not true. They do desire progress, they are just less risk tolerant. Secondly, even if that's true, there's an unspoken spirit that motivates their conservative tendencies: a complete distrust in human's sense of rationality.

Against a conservative, the rationality you take pride having developed ends up sounding like hubris. Not that he think he is more rational than you, but that he thinks it's cringe to even try to outsmart the flow of nature.

In an era of profound change (which was what this prime minister lived through in early Soong), all unsolicited advice and consultations are worth nothing, even if they mean well and were true.

According to this episode, the only people who can be counted on were the forefathers. It's been a few generations down in Soong line, whoever is the emperor is destined to be a lesser man than the founders. It's just a simple principle of reversion to the mean.

Given that the people who knew best were the founders of dynasties, conservatives prefer to refer to the tried and true.

So that was the episode. One can argue that conservatives leaning on history made sense in year 1003 of Soong. Things had largely stabilized for two decades by now. Looking back 30 years for guidelines wasn't outrageous.

Let's look at us now. Some people say everything is changing rapidly, let's assume that's true for the purpose of this writing.

That makes learning from recent history less and less valuable.

What can history teach us about living with digital stochastic parrots?

They say "the more things change the more they stay the same." But in a post-AI world, what in history gets to rhyme to with it?

Side track: maybe this is a reason I've been slightly fascinated with hunter/gatherer lately. Perhaps post-Singularity, mankind finally get to go back hunting & gathering. For leisure.

The Singularity as a concept does not necessary mean mind-uploading. It simply refers to a time in history where it's pointless to speculate what's ahead. Just like the conservatives, it declares way ahead that you can "save it, your supreme intellect is inadequate to predict what's coming so don't even start."

As usual, the only thing there is to do is to fall back on things that do not change. Even if they don't serve as guide posts (or worse, are completely misguided), they still make for comforting prophecies.

However, looking for things that do not change (and still valuable) is getting harder. That's something professional historians have to contend with.

The more things have changed, the further we have to looks back to find helpful patterns. Two-thousand years of history may not be enough anymore; twenty-thousand years may barely cut it.