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?
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
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.
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.
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
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?
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
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.
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.
Thought provoking essay, that needs mulling over before commenting...thanks.
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