Once again I think of Frank Herbert’s Dune, the conceit of which is a distant post AI future where humans are again controlling their thinking. But that results in a homocidal religion sweeping the galaxy in service of a cultic messiah. Complete unreason in other words. Your optimism concerning a turn toward a metaphysics open to transcendence after the dark machine age gives one hope that genuine human reason can outlast the coming devastation. But only if enough of us preserve what we have and strive to teach it to those younger than ourselves who will actually be performing the recovery
The "business case for AI" is much simpler and older. The industrial revolution allowed capital to become physical labor. The digital revolution will allow capital to become intellectual labor.
The former upended the economies of Europe (and America) and depressed wages throughout the 19th century. It decoupled economic success from physical strength and skills. This was beneficial for capital but not so much for labor. (Luddites anyone?)
The latter will do the same, depressing wages for skilled mental labor (lawyers, analysis, programmers, etc...) in the 21st century. Between AI and robotics, the value of labor as an economic input is likely to fall to near-zero. The more interesting question to me is, who will the laptop-class Luddites be and what will they do?
That was a brilliant analysis. I especially liked the glint of hope at the end:
"We may become open, as the West has not been for centuries, to truths made available to us in the tradition that runs from classical antiquity through the Hebrew bible and into the Christian teaching."
Apropos of which, let us consider the possibility of a machine in the garden, of a factory in the countryside that runs on part-time jobs, and of the new way of life that such factories would make possible, anchored firmly in Western tradition: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00U0C9HKW
For within this possibility you will see a hint, not only of what the highest and final stage of capitalist development is going to look like (which turns out to be a form of socialism in all but name only; see chapter 2, note v), but of what can justly be described as the apotheosis of the entire Judeo-Christian project out of which capitalism emerged, the overarching theme of which is the long human struggle from servitude to freedom.
I really liked the connections made in this article; universities as credentialing institutions, the nexus to the managerial class and government, and the idea paradigm may be under threat. I sure hope it is. I also loved the term "civil rights economy." I did some rescue consulting in a $14B public sector organization and the level of dysfunction that was permitted destroyed some of my beliefs.
Do not fail to understand the dangers of owning the means to cognition; one of the reasons that Silicon Valley turned away from the Democrats was the fact that -- on top of the crazy and illiberal censorship complex they built -- the Biden White House disclosed that their plan was to only allow a few large AIs to succeed...and that was precisely because they wished to control the AIs. I still remember the incredible backflips that would occur when you asked ChatGP simple historical questions like, "Were the Democrats the party of slavery in the 19th century?"
I believe the author will be proven more prescient that most people commenting realize. Elon Musk, invested in OpenAI to ensure that AI transformation would be open and not owned. He knew the danger many years ago.
A very interesting essay about a significant threat to the super-sized expert class. I am reminded about the old joke about how "An expert knows more and more about less and less until he or she knows everything about nothing".
LLM based AI could become a very cheap commodity expert creating a large downward pressure on the size of that class. However, it is still doubtful that it can create new technologies or choose directions.
Certainly, when there are contradictions between knowledge and reality, it is hard to not see a role for people. HAL of 2001 space odyssey might be a useful story to consider.
Geez…you were off to such a good start, then missed the point, then devolved into bullshit.
The good start was to point out our dependence on three main cloud providers, although you did fail to point out that only one region of AWS went down, the others continued to function just fine.
The missed point is that AI isn’t in any way about thinking and cannot exercise anything resembling judgement. What it can, and does, do, is tell the user what they want to hear. Nothing sucks up better than ChatGPT.
The bullshit was the comment about Congress transferring decisions about important matters to agencies. That is not what happened. The legislation you refer to (indirectly) sets policies and goals and delegates the technical details. Decisions made by agencies figure out and implement the details. Details change over time, even if the policies and goals do not, so the details need to be easier to change. That’s how technical projects have been managed for, well, forever.
I don't refer to any legislation. Rather, the transfer of sovereignty was creeping and sub-rosa over the course of the 20th century, substituting a de facto Constitution for the written one.
Government agencies are massively intrusive into every aspect of life, yet largely insulated from democratic pressures.
Administrative rulings place people under binding obligations. Per the Constitution, the power to bind in this way (making laws) is reserved to the representative branch. But administrative agencies are part of the executive branch, not delegates of Congress. Sure, Congress is happy to pass off the work of (in effect) legislating to this permanent bureaucracy, where voters have little redress, for the simple reason that incumbents then don't have to cast unpopular votes and thereby give ammunition to challengers in the next election. Nor to they have to explain an unpopular vote to constituents in a hostile "town hall meeting."
What a civics textbook might call "the details" delegated by Congress to government agencies often amounts to those agencies permanently expanding their claim to jurisdiction. Would a person who naively read the Civil Rights Act of 1965 have been able to predict the reach and coercive power exerted by the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department by the end of the century?
The NYU legal scholar Philip Hamburger argues that administrative power revives the "absolute power" of the English crown before the Glorious Revolution. The point of the Revolution was that the Crown (the executive) would now be subject to Parliament. This separation of powers was crucial to the development of Anglophone political culture, but is now largely fictive.
Officially, administrative rulings are subject to review by "administrative judges" when someone complains. In practice, these judges defer to the the agencies they are meant to oversee essentially 100% of the time. (Or so I have read.) Jury rights, dating from the Magna Carta, are out the window in such a setting. As for due process... Try arguing with the DMV, and see how it goes.
That’s one way to look at it, but ignores some serious issues. Many of these regulations are based on technical data that members of Congress are just not competent to address, not because they’re dumb, but because the decisions require expertise from other fields. All regulations go through a long process before becoming final, except for the Trump administration, and there is plenty of time to comment on the actual regulations. Much of the objection to any level of regulation is whining about being regulated at all, not over the specific levels of some measure. The argument for this is that if pollution, or whatever ever problem being addressed, wasn’t happening, regulation wouldn’t be necessary. Regulations exist because some business decided it could pass off costs to the public without penalty. That’s bullshit. Y’all bitch and moan about how regulatory agencies create a permanent bureaucracy but never address why they were created in the first place.
As for the Civil Rights Act, anyone who read it, then imagined ways to get around it, would most certainly land where the DOJ finally did. They got there by plugging one hole at a time because racist bigots kept finding ways to work around it. Address that next time, and be honest about it. The bureaucracy is a response to people doing bad things to other people. Those who complain about it probably want to keep doing those bad things, or they’d come up with an alternative way of preventing them.
That’s easy. CO2 is a green house gas that is naturally regulated. When we dump excess into the atmosphere, by the megaton, it causes warming. That makes it a pollutant.
"The bullshit was the comment about Congress transferring decisions about important matters to agencies."
Do you remember the Kavanaugh hearings? The Democrats were told to go into theatrical hysterics, and they did so. That was when I and lot of my friends realized we were no longer in Kansas. What I found profoundly interesting, is that when it was all over, none of the Democrats I knew sobered up and asked, "WTH was that about? Why did we just do that?"
The Dem leaders that issued the top down directive wanted to stop Kavanaugh because of his specialty in Administrative Law. The Democrats worked hard to capture the agencies and then push power to them; allowing them to implement really shitty policy but evading direct responsibility for it, thereby shielding themselves from accountability from voters. The leaders of the Democratic party and their strategists knew that their abuse of Chevron would be terminated if Kavanaugh was confirmed. And that is exactly what happened. And we are all better off for it, the Democrats Gramscian efforts to exert political power outside of the normal political process is a real rather than imagined threat to the republic.
Nope. Democrats are not responsible for most of the agency delegation. A lot of it started with Nixon. Kavanaugh didn’t “specialize” in administrative law, he was openly opposed to delegation before he developed any expertise. Dems’s objection to Kavanaugh was that he was, and is, a piece of shit who can’t be trusted.
I don’t see any of you proposing a workable alternative to the problem that delegation solved. Come up with one and we’ll talk. Otherwise…
The idea that Occupy and Democratic Socialists of America are simply cases of sour grapes is ridiculous and lazy, avoiding an actual critique based on the merits. And the idea that anti-racism is mere virtue-signaling and status-seeking is not only offensive and stupid, it precludes the possibility that a human being, far from practicing a grasping self-interest, may actually be trying to “participate in something transcendent,” as the author would have him do.
The idea that Occupy and Democratic Socialists of America are simply cases of sour grapes is ridiculous and lazy, avoiding an actual critique based on the merits. And the idea that anti-racism is mere virtue-signaling and status-seeking is not only offensive and stupid, it precludes the possibility that a human being, far from practicing a grasping self-interest, may actually be trying to “participate in something transcendent,” as the author would have him do.
Now Matthew Crawford is back on firm ground, thinking clearly about our species and the logical, but dangerous, path we are taking - or are being taken down by certain members of our species.
Personally I leave him behind when he ventures into a spiritual dimension - however lightly trodden here - as I feel we are all one-offs, and always have been. Still we cannot stop thinking about 'what ifs' and 'whys' so maybe we are in the process of creating a kind of 'god' if we are all allowed to continue thinking about it. Matthew's point is that we might be losing the facility to 'think' about things and that facility is certainly worth fighting for.
I was just accused of being an LLM by the author of an article I criticized at Persuasion substack. The author is a self-styled AI guru and "futurist." Maybe that will become the new form of censorship, ostracism and social control by the gatekeepers.
You become a non-person and therefore anything you say, online that is, doesn't matter and can be mocked and ignored as "racist" or "sexist" and therefore pure evil, but not expressed by a human being with a stake in the game. You become a kind of glitch in the system. Maybe, for instance Nick Fuentes is an AI fake like Tilly Norwood. Or a hologram. After all, with more graphic power AI can turn anyone into a synthetic character and therefore unreal. Online of course.
Excellent. My grandkids and their parents live in Thailand. The schooling they are getting and overall quality of life is significantly better than their US based friends and family. Much freer in day to day life and people are more focused on building community. Almost like 1960s US. Question - is an answer to raising the next generation to value human flourishing living outside the US?
Well, you could also argue that life in the plow is no life at all. You would be right but it does not negate the fact that the plow is a useful technology that could benefit human life. I am afraid that the author is a member of the outdated intellectuals who confuse the means (technology) with ends (meaning) of modern life so profundly that he is unable to make heads and tails of modern life at all. For more details, please reference my critique of another such intellectual (Paul Kingsnorth) featured by The Free Press, https://yansong.substack.com/p/faith-and-meaning-in-the-age-of-artificial?r=o1gg5
Once again I think of Frank Herbert’s Dune, the conceit of which is a distant post AI future where humans are again controlling their thinking. But that results in a homocidal religion sweeping the galaxy in service of a cultic messiah. Complete unreason in other words. Your optimism concerning a turn toward a metaphysics open to transcendence after the dark machine age gives one hope that genuine human reason can outlast the coming devastation. But only if enough of us preserve what we have and strive to teach it to those younger than ourselves who will actually be performing the recovery
The "business case for AI" is much simpler and older. The industrial revolution allowed capital to become physical labor. The digital revolution will allow capital to become intellectual labor.
The former upended the economies of Europe (and America) and depressed wages throughout the 19th century. It decoupled economic success from physical strength and skills. This was beneficial for capital but not so much for labor. (Luddites anyone?)
The latter will do the same, depressing wages for skilled mental labor (lawyers, analysis, programmers, etc...) in the 21st century. Between AI and robotics, the value of labor as an economic input is likely to fall to near-zero. The more interesting question to me is, who will the laptop-class Luddites be and what will they do?
That was a brilliant analysis. I especially liked the glint of hope at the end:
"We may become open, as the West has not been for centuries, to truths made available to us in the tradition that runs from classical antiquity through the Hebrew bible and into the Christian teaching."
Apropos of which, let us consider the possibility of a machine in the garden, of a factory in the countryside that runs on part-time jobs, and of the new way of life that such factories would make possible, anchored firmly in Western tradition: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00U0C9HKW
For within this possibility you will see a hint, not only of what the highest and final stage of capitalist development is going to look like (which turns out to be a form of socialism in all but name only; see chapter 2, note v), but of what can justly be described as the apotheosis of the entire Judeo-Christian project out of which capitalism emerged, the overarching theme of which is the long human struggle from servitude to freedom.
I really liked the connections made in this article; universities as credentialing institutions, the nexus to the managerial class and government, and the idea paradigm may be under threat. I sure hope it is. I also loved the term "civil rights economy." I did some rescue consulting in a $14B public sector organization and the level of dysfunction that was permitted destroyed some of my beliefs.
Do not fail to understand the dangers of owning the means to cognition; one of the reasons that Silicon Valley turned away from the Democrats was the fact that -- on top of the crazy and illiberal censorship complex they built -- the Biden White House disclosed that their plan was to only allow a few large AIs to succeed...and that was precisely because they wished to control the AIs. I still remember the incredible backflips that would occur when you asked ChatGP simple historical questions like, "Were the Democrats the party of slavery in the 19th century?"
I believe the author will be proven more prescient that most people commenting realize. Elon Musk, invested in OpenAI to ensure that AI transformation would be open and not owned. He knew the danger many years ago.
A very interesting essay about a significant threat to the super-sized expert class. I am reminded about the old joke about how "An expert knows more and more about less and less until he or she knows everything about nothing".
LLM based AI could become a very cheap commodity expert creating a large downward pressure on the size of that class. However, it is still doubtful that it can create new technologies or choose directions.
Certainly, when there are contradictions between knowledge and reality, it is hard to not see a role for people. HAL of 2001 space odyssey might be a useful story to consider.
Geez…you were off to such a good start, then missed the point, then devolved into bullshit.
The good start was to point out our dependence on three main cloud providers, although you did fail to point out that only one region of AWS went down, the others continued to function just fine.
The missed point is that AI isn’t in any way about thinking and cannot exercise anything resembling judgement. What it can, and does, do, is tell the user what they want to hear. Nothing sucks up better than ChatGPT.
The bullshit was the comment about Congress transferring decisions about important matters to agencies. That is not what happened. The legislation you refer to (indirectly) sets policies and goals and delegates the technical details. Decisions made by agencies figure out and implement the details. Details change over time, even if the policies and goals do not, so the details need to be easier to change. That’s how technical projects have been managed for, well, forever.
It got worse after that.
I don't refer to any legislation. Rather, the transfer of sovereignty was creeping and sub-rosa over the course of the 20th century, substituting a de facto Constitution for the written one.
Government agencies are massively intrusive into every aspect of life, yet largely insulated from democratic pressures.
Administrative rulings place people under binding obligations. Per the Constitution, the power to bind in this way (making laws) is reserved to the representative branch. But administrative agencies are part of the executive branch, not delegates of Congress. Sure, Congress is happy to pass off the work of (in effect) legislating to this permanent bureaucracy, where voters have little redress, for the simple reason that incumbents then don't have to cast unpopular votes and thereby give ammunition to challengers in the next election. Nor to they have to explain an unpopular vote to constituents in a hostile "town hall meeting."
What a civics textbook might call "the details" delegated by Congress to government agencies often amounts to those agencies permanently expanding their claim to jurisdiction. Would a person who naively read the Civil Rights Act of 1965 have been able to predict the reach and coercive power exerted by the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department by the end of the century?
The NYU legal scholar Philip Hamburger argues that administrative power revives the "absolute power" of the English crown before the Glorious Revolution. The point of the Revolution was that the Crown (the executive) would now be subject to Parliament. This separation of powers was crucial to the development of Anglophone political culture, but is now largely fictive.
Officially, administrative rulings are subject to review by "administrative judges" when someone complains. In practice, these judges defer to the the agencies they are meant to oversee essentially 100% of the time. (Or so I have read.) Jury rights, dating from the Magna Carta, are out the window in such a setting. As for due process... Try arguing with the DMV, and see how it goes.
That’s one way to look at it, but ignores some serious issues. Many of these regulations are based on technical data that members of Congress are just not competent to address, not because they’re dumb, but because the decisions require expertise from other fields. All regulations go through a long process before becoming final, except for the Trump administration, and there is plenty of time to comment on the actual regulations. Much of the objection to any level of regulation is whining about being regulated at all, not over the specific levels of some measure. The argument for this is that if pollution, or whatever ever problem being addressed, wasn’t happening, regulation wouldn’t be necessary. Regulations exist because some business decided it could pass off costs to the public without penalty. That’s bullshit. Y’all bitch and moan about how regulatory agencies create a permanent bureaucracy but never address why they were created in the first place.
As for the Civil Rights Act, anyone who read it, then imagined ways to get around it, would most certainly land where the DOJ finally did. They got there by plugging one hole at a time because racist bigots kept finding ways to work around it. Address that next time, and be honest about it. The bureaucracy is a response to people doing bad things to other people. Those who complain about it probably want to keep doing those bad things, or they’d come up with an alternative way of preventing them.
"The argument for this is that if pollution, or whatever ever problem being addressed, wasn’t happening, regulation wouldn’t be necessary."
But how do you get from there to ruling that CO2 is a pollutant?
That’s easy. CO2 is a green house gas that is naturally regulated. When we dump excess into the atmosphere, by the megaton, it causes warming. That makes it a pollutant.
"The bullshit was the comment about Congress transferring decisions about important matters to agencies."
Do you remember the Kavanaugh hearings? The Democrats were told to go into theatrical hysterics, and they did so. That was when I and lot of my friends realized we were no longer in Kansas. What I found profoundly interesting, is that when it was all over, none of the Democrats I knew sobered up and asked, "WTH was that about? Why did we just do that?"
The Dem leaders that issued the top down directive wanted to stop Kavanaugh because of his specialty in Administrative Law. The Democrats worked hard to capture the agencies and then push power to them; allowing them to implement really shitty policy but evading direct responsibility for it, thereby shielding themselves from accountability from voters. The leaders of the Democratic party and their strategists knew that their abuse of Chevron would be terminated if Kavanaugh was confirmed. And that is exactly what happened. And we are all better off for it, the Democrats Gramscian efforts to exert political power outside of the normal political process is a real rather than imagined threat to the republic.
Nope. Democrats are not responsible for most of the agency delegation. A lot of it started with Nixon. Kavanaugh didn’t “specialize” in administrative law, he was openly opposed to delegation before he developed any expertise. Dems’s objection to Kavanaugh was that he was, and is, a piece of shit who can’t be trusted.
I don’t see any of you proposing a workable alternative to the problem that delegation solved. Come up with one and we’ll talk. Otherwise…
Thought provoking essay, that needs mulling over before commenting...thanks.
Fabulous piece.
The idea that Occupy and Democratic Socialists of America are simply cases of sour grapes is ridiculous and lazy, avoiding an actual critique based on the merits. And the idea that anti-racism is mere virtue-signaling and status-seeking is not only offensive and stupid, it precludes the possibility that a human being, far from practicing a grasping self-interest, may actually be trying to “participate in something transcendent,” as the author would have him do.
The idea that Occupy and Democratic Socialists of America are simply cases of sour grapes is ridiculous and lazy, avoiding an actual critique based on the merits. And the idea that anti-racism is mere virtue-signaling and status-seeking is not only offensive and stupid, it precludes the possibility that a human being, far from practicing a grasping self-interest, may actually be trying to “participate in something transcendent,” as the author would have him do.
Always end on a hopeful note.
Was a great article until the end. Like the author ran out of time, set his pencil down, and ran out of the room.
Now Matthew Crawford is back on firm ground, thinking clearly about our species and the logical, but dangerous, path we are taking - or are being taken down by certain members of our species.
Personally I leave him behind when he ventures into a spiritual dimension - however lightly trodden here - as I feel we are all one-offs, and always have been. Still we cannot stop thinking about 'what ifs' and 'whys' so maybe we are in the process of creating a kind of 'god' if we are all allowed to continue thinking about it. Matthew's point is that we might be losing the facility to 'think' about things and that facility is certainly worth fighting for.
I was just accused of being an LLM by the author of an article I criticized at Persuasion substack. The author is a self-styled AI guru and "futurist." Maybe that will become the new form of censorship, ostracism and social control by the gatekeepers.
You become a non-person and therefore anything you say, online that is, doesn't matter and can be mocked and ignored as "racist" or "sexist" and therefore pure evil, but not expressed by a human being with a stake in the game. You become a kind of glitch in the system. Maybe, for instance Nick Fuentes is an AI fake like Tilly Norwood. Or a hologram. After all, with more graphic power AI can turn anyone into a synthetic character and therefore unreal. Online of course.
Excellent. My grandkids and their parents live in Thailand. The schooling they are getting and overall quality of life is significantly better than their US based friends and family. Much freer in day to day life and people are more focused on building community. Almost like 1960s US. Question - is an answer to raising the next generation to value human flourishing living outside the US?
Well, you could also argue that life in the plow is no life at all. You would be right but it does not negate the fact that the plow is a useful technology that could benefit human life. I am afraid that the author is a member of the outdated intellectuals who confuse the means (technology) with ends (meaning) of modern life so profundly that he is unable to make heads and tails of modern life at all. For more details, please reference my critique of another such intellectual (Paul Kingsnorth) featured by The Free Press, https://yansong.substack.com/p/faith-and-meaning-in-the-age-of-artificial?r=o1gg5