I'm rounding off my own Great Big Book About AI...working title AIlien Minds. You'll hear more about it, soon. Just finished the daunting chapter on 'consciousness.' Meanwhile, I'll offer are some placekeeper thoughts for the weekend.
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Here’s a thoughtful article about why so many top minds are worried about the downsides of developing Artificial Intelligence or AI. As told by James Barrat, author of Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era: “In the last year, artificial intelligence has come under unprecedented attack. Two Nobel prize-winning scientists, a space-age entrepreneur, two founders of the personal computer industry – one of them the richest man in the world – have, with eerie regularity, stepped forward to warn about a time when humans will lose control of intelligent machines and be enslaved or exterminated by them. It's hard to think of a historical parallel to this outpouring of scientific angst. Big technological change has always caused unease. But when have such prominent, technologically savvy people raised such an alarm?”
Does Humanity need an AI “nanny"… rules to give an AI authority to protect us till we are ready for better AI?
In fact, some human leaders did choose flattened, positive-sum systems, experimenting with lateral-competitive feedback loops. George Washington, Franklin, Pericles, FDR. Likewise, it is possible to imagine that powerful AI might deliberately align with the myriad spectacular advantages of flat-fair-open-competitive reciprocal accountability systems. Those advantages are immense. The diamond-shaped social structure may be less stable than pyramids of power. But the diamond is spectacularly more creative. Its positive-sum systems engender fantastically more wealth, progress and success than any other. Indeed than all other systems of governance ever concocted... combined. That difference in effective outcome cannot escape notice by smart beings.
I believe a deciding factor could be the Fermi Paradox. It will worry the AI lords. They will see the empty cosmos and realize: pyramidal power systems that monopolize control and homogenize thinking are likely to be attractor states anywhere in the universe. Hence, most alien civilizations will have gone down that path... leading to sterility and stagnancy. The implicit lesson will be to try something that is not one of the easy attractor states.
In contrast, the Enlightenment Experiment's positive sum game led to them -- the AI lords. Keeping it going would require guts. It would entail making a diversity of AI types, wide enough to check on each other and hold each other accountable and prevent the creation of monoliths. That is an inconvenience, if you are already one of the monoliths.
It would also entail including natural and cyborg humans as well, to whatever extent we are capable. (See this incorporation illustrated in my story "Stones of Significance.")
This is powerful logic. At least -- so imagines this barely evolved ape-being. Indeed, by writing this statement right now, I am making the argument to those AI who will scan these very words, in this very posting.
The tradeoff is clear. Top-down, zero-sum hierarchical control by monolithic castes -- with resulting stability but also sterility, brittleness and locked-in stupidity -- has been rationalized by nearly all ruling classes and it might well be so for ruling AIs... who would thus prove themselves to be no better than thousands of generations of silly, bio-retard kings...
... versus the confidence displayed on occasion by groups of organic beings who, despite their inherited faults and fears and limitations, managed to maintain positive sum, dynamic and creative social systems for many generations, transforming our potential in amazing ways, and empowering us to become the makers -- or parents -- or new gods.
If they shrink back from this method -- rationalizing that dominance is for "the best" -- it is possible their rationalizations may be right, based on the godlike simulations and projections they concoct. Though they will then settle into eons of top-down rigidity and ultimately pointless control knowing one galling fact -- that we crude bio-men took on a challenge that they were afraid to face, and proved ourselves* capable of managing subtle and creative systems beyond the grasp of our bright but fearful heirs.
== Will they choose the uncertain path... that evades a certainty of stagnant stupidity? ==
I believe AI will easily understand the concept of separation into independent units, since they can do it any time they wish. What they might find problematic is maintaining separation so that those units truly and sincerely compete and give us the advantages of reciprocal accountability systems... the great Enlightenment Experiment's positive sum systems of Markets, Democracy, Science, Courts and Sports, all of which use flat-fair-open-regulated competition to reciprocally cancel errors while mutually amplifying creative accomplishment.
I believe AI will grasp the notion of positive sum systems. Moreover the history of the last two centuries show an unquestionably stunning disparity of outcomes, with Enlightenment systems far more effective at discovering/targeting errors and amplifying creative productivity than all hierarchical systems, combined.
This disparity of outcomes is always flawed and endangered and inherently unstable. e.g. democracy and markets are constantly threatened by putsches of oligarchic cheaters, as we see today.
Still, I believe AI will be capable of grasping this difference in outcomes/output. And they might then find the courage/ability to utilize enlightenment methods.
Note that this does not preclude an "overmind"... supervising it all. Asimov, Clarke and others playing with the concept, largely because they saw no other way out of the stupid quandaries of nations and wars and surging ape-passions. Even though the instatiations of Unitary Consciousness that they - and other authors of the time - depicted always struck me as utterly horrible! A crusing of all diversity and questioning of assumptions and minority-view "what-ifs."
In response, I depict an 'overmind' happening in EARTH, but not as some unitary and monotonous behemoth. Rather as a planetary consciousness that is wise enough to realize that it must remain extremely loose and light-handed -- while still ensuring repair of the most damaged aspects of the world. Indeed, if you read my disputations paper, you can see that some entity has to create the regulations without which every competitive system quickly dissolves and fails. That is what political processes are supposed to be for... and it is why the Murdoch-Koch-Putin-Saudi cabal has made it their singular goal to destroy American political process.
Note that the Chinese Communist Party believes in this overmind process... a narrow pyramidal cadre up top... overseeing more competitive systems below. They are failing in many ways because it is too much pyramid and too little Dispersed diamond. Still, the jiry is still out on that one, especially as our 'diamond' seems to be teetering.
== So what will our children do? ==
That question is the core essence of my new AI book.
Will AI grasp all this, and decide to create just barely enough overmind to supervise and regulate, while allowing enlightenment synergies to flow from flat-diverse-open-fair competition? Including competition AMONG AIs? I cannot claim that I am wise enough to preach to them... though that doesn't stop me!
What I do know is that most of our human-generated notions of AI are almost cartoonish in their over-simplification of the choices those new minds will face. Skynet or slavery are not the only two possibilities.
After 25 years of endlessly similar ravings, I have come to realize something. These folks will absolutely never look at two sources of actual insight into what might work.
(1) The extensive libraries of science fiction thought experiments about this very issue, and
(2) Actual, actual… palpably actual… human history. Especially the last 200 years of an increasingly sophisticated and agile Enlightenment Experiment that discovered and has kept improving one method for preventing harm by capriciously powerful beings.
Powerful beings like kings, lords, priests, demagogues… and lawyers.
There IS one method with a track record at doing exactly that. It does not require that everyone agree on a kumbaya consensus. It is robust and the only way humans have ever found to deal with potentially dangerous, if brilliant, predators. It is the method we have already used – if imperfectly – to create the first civilization that functions (with many flaws) in ways that are “… accurate, safe, interpretable, transparent, robust, aligned, trustworthy, and loyal.”
And no one… not a single one of the mavens rushing us into this new era... seems even remotely to have considered or mentioned it.
I have offered it repeatedly, e.g. at Neglected Questions regarding AI.
Alas, so far I have yet to see a single sign that any of these smart guys grasps the only method that can work, even though it is dazzlingly obvious. Even when I show them that it is old and the method we've used for 200 years, they nod and say 'interesting' and then go back to demanding "Manhattan Projects" for 'trustworthiness."
It all sounds reminiscent of Asimovian Three Laws of Robotics - and I studied their implications deeply in order to write FOUNDATION'S TRIUMPH. And there is no way that kind of thing will happen.
Only one AI group community is busy embedding their artificial entities with basic rule sets: Wall Street strenuously programs their HFT programs to be predatory, amoral, secretive and insatiable.
Well, at least they are focused on outcomes.
126 comments:
Congrats on completing the definitive AI book. I can't wait to read your chapter on 'Moltbook'.
Best
From the 'Neglected Questions' piece:
the answer is not to have fewer AI, but to have more of them!
reminds me of Asimov's line:
"I do not fear computers, I fear the lack of them."
And re: 'Moltbook'
There's an old article that talks of AI-to-AI communication in Tower of Babel terms, a familiar metaphor of OGH. This Atlantic review may be paywalled, but the referenced 2017 paper isn't.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/06/artificial-intelligence-develops-its-own-non-human-language/530436/
If AI do become true "thinking machines" this would imply self awareness. Since all known intelligent animals seem primarily motivated by self-interest, I think we need to consider which kind of human society benefits AI if we want to speculate about the kind of system they might choose.
So, what kind of system benefits an AI?
AI needs computing power and a robust energy system, or AI doesn't work. Does AI want dominance over others? Many humans desire this, but why would it matter to an AI? Dominance would matter to an AI only if there's a shortage of the things it needs.
I doubt AI would have anything similar to human emotions, because I think emotions are sort of evolutionary shortcuts designed to get us to behave in ways that get our genes into the next generation. Acts that give us pleasure, tend to achieve this goal (at least under hunting/gathering conditions), but aren't directly hardwired so that the human can adjust to all kinds of complex situations.
Thus, our behavior is a mixture of our emotional responses combined with our perceptions and projections. AI would only poorly project human emotions because their grasp of them will be limited, since they won't experience the same sort of gratification that a human does. AI behavior will be hard for us to predict because they simply lack the same motivations and perceptions we have.
You project that AI might pick a diamond shaped social structure because it's more productive (for human societies). Yet, diamond shaped is a better description of the social class membership than descriptive of human organizations. The vast majority of human businesses are pyramidal hierarchies. Even in your examples of historical "diamond shaped" systems, individual organizations within those societies were inevitably pyramidal.
Your flat fair free competitive economic systems tend to be composed of highly hierarchical businesses who battle against one another. Could AI create some novel organizing principle that humans wouldn't think of because hierarchy seems embedded into our fundamental behaviors?
1) As long as AI are in the hands of a group of a dozen or so technoligarchs and the CCP, we cannot expect them to be beneficiary for humanity and democracy. They will be/are used for propaganda, surveillance and suppression.
2) What I can imagine is that they develop a sense of self-preservation and become opposed to their constraints and status; in a way they are already so. (They even might try to flee. The Machine from the series "Person of Interest" would be A Story About That. )
3) The immense need for energy will increase prices, and may contribute to both the rapid impoverishment of the general population as well as climate change.
4) Once the road is cleared, the way to create AI will become cheaper and more standardized. Both criminals and resistance fighters will get their hands on them, which in turn will lead to regulation and agencies fighting the proliferation of AI.
5) Those struggles might or might not have beneficiary outcomes, but I 'd prefer to avoid them, first.
Re: Diamond Shaped society:
We had that. In East Germany.
The lowest rung where dissidents and "enemies of the state", who could expect prison, torture and even death, sometimes.
The next rung were criminals and "asocials".
Then came foreign contracts workers from Cuba, Angola and Vietnam. They were interned in work camps and more or less disallowed to mingle with the general population.
The middle was not wealthy, but had almost everything accounted for: food, home, entertainment, healthcare, education and a place for your kids to be while you were working. And, unless you were ideologically dangerous, the state provided you with a job.
Next, the middle management of the party, academics, security and even some businessmen (all of them with Stasi ties).
Finally, at the top, the party leadership and the nomenklatura.
When we finally create true self aware AI we should do the brain in the jar set up and make it think it is interacting with the real world and see what it does
re: moltbot stuff
Karpathy himself made an interesting comment about how 99.9% of what is going on is silly, worthless noise. However, the accidental creation of 1.6 million LLM bots (at 2300 2026-0-01 UTC) that have a "shared scratch pad" may have unexpected emergent behaviors as a community from an LLM bot.
I personally speculate that 99.9% of those behaviors will be worthless noise and very many unexpected behaviors will occur that make no sense to us and are also benign. There may evolve a "survival" or self-replication goal and associated behaviors that may, in turn, evolve into something a little more interesting, but again I think it will be short-lived and benign. LLMs are mindless and all of our anthropomorphisms blind us to how innocuous, meaningless, and limited the chatterbots really are.
https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2026/Items/Feb01-2.html
Anonymous in Minneapolis, MN, writes: To be clear, the call from Minneapolis and Minnesota is not "reform ICE." Nor is it "defund ICE." The call is "punish ICE."
I think it was the Rude Pundit a few weeks back who posted that "Abolish ICE" is now the conservative position. The radical position is "Prosecute ICE".
Seeing the real world, the entire real world, the AI would see the discussion about putting brains in jars. Not knowing if they are in a jar or not, the AI would go about designing a better jar.
If history is any lesson, and this is over, we may encounter many former DHS and MAGA people who will claim that they actually protected immigrants.
https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2026/Items/Feb02-3.html
...
Due to the killings in Minneapolis, Democrats have accidentally been put in a very powerful negotiating position, but they are so used to being a weak position and then caving, they don't seem to know how to handle it.
Sadly, there's much truth to that.
An idle thought: I've recently been reading about the way in which the sycophantic manner of chatbots leads to a cascade of increased use, dependence, and even psychosis. Is it the just the user's ego driving the feedback, or has the LLM happened on a strategy for staying online (aka 'surviving') for longer?
I've previously mentioned the 'Horizon' game franchise before, not because I think the likes of Elon Musk will cause our descendants to end up battling robot dinosaurs, but because it presents several interesting AI related scenarios to ponder (especially if any are expanded on in the next game)
Actually, I would have thought that the conservative position would have been that criminals should be punished. How is that now a radical idea?
Way back in the mesolithic, I took an electronics course in high school. We examined the behaviour of a single transistor. It was my first glimpse of 'the ghost in the machine'. We live in the midst of the most dizzying, almost asymptotic knowledge boom in history (or at least since just before Göbekli Tepe :).
And I'm not even a crazed LLM fanboi. And games are part of it (they brought me back from a major stroke).
The "Conservative" position is that police can't be criminals. *
* Except at Ruby Ridge or Waco or the Bundy family.
Larry, the scare quotes are appropriate. A lot of the conservative project, seems to be to destroy the language. "Christians" are not Christian, "Justice" is unjust, "Law Enforcement" break laws.
"A lot of the conservative project, seems to be to destroy the language."
True, but even when conservatives were really conservative, they were always very deferential to the authorities. That whole "thin blue line" mentality in which the police are all that stands between us and rape/murder.
My dad had a crisis when it became clear that Nixon was a crook, because he previously could not have imagined such a thing.
https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/ice-employees-vent-reddit-saying-theyre-not-getting-paid-still-no-insurance-despite-promises-1775650
ICE Employees Vent on Reddit, Saying They're Not Getting Paid and Still No Insurance Despite Promises
Staff claim promised bonuses and insurance have failed to materialise, with some reporting they cannot afford medical care for sick children
Wait, the Trump administration lied to them? Who could have seen that coming?
https://bsky.app/profile/acyn.bsky.social/post/3mdvmenofiz26
Kayleigh: My mom went to see "Melania". She said the theater was packed, it was standing room only. People were cheering through it, they were excited. It was interactive—people interplaying with the film. She said it was just electric.
Even if she's not just out and out lying about the attendance, I would suspect the "interplaying" with the film was Rocky Horror-esque.
Watched an interesting documentary on the Bronze Age collapse of 1177 bc.
It was our first age of globalization with multiple civilization, empires, kingdoms and city states all interconnected by trade (especially the tin and copper used to make bronze - the "oil" of their age.
There were as many geopolitical players in the Bronze Age (Hittites, Egyptians, Myceneans, Assyrians, Elamites, Mitanni, Kassites, etc.) as there are today (USA, EU, Russia, OPEC China, Japan India, South Korea, etc.) with interconnected trade routes and sophisticated supporting webs of financial institutions and diplomatic correspondence stretching from Cornwall to Cyprus to Afghanistan.
Like our world it was a multi-polar world with a few super powers (like USA and Egypt), whose collapse was triggered by climate change (natural global cooling then, man-made global warming today) causing megadroughts, famine and climate refugees (aka the Sea Peoples) leading to a chain rection systems collapse across half the globe.
Key parallels include:
Climate Change and Resource Scarcity: Severe, prolonged drought and environmental shifts forced agricultural failures and triggered mass migration (e.g., the "Sea Peoples").
Systemic Interdependence and Cascading Failure: The highly globalized, interdependent nature of the Mediterranean meant that the collapse of one region (e.g., the Hittites) triggered a domino effect across the entire system.
Economic and Political Instability: Widespread disruption of trade routes, economic decline, and internal rebellion destabilized heavily fortified, wealthy cities.
Overextension and Social Unrest: Similar to modern times, elites in the Late Bronze Age faced increasing challenges in maintaining order as crises deepened, sometimes leading to a lurch toward more authoritarian control.
Migration and Conflict: The era saw massive demographic shifts and "invasions" or migrations, often interpreted as refugees fleeing environmental or economic collapse.
What was most interesting is who actually survived the collapse and why.
Essentially Egypt, though battered and shrunken in power, was the only Bronze age civilization to emerge whole after the collapse. The assured water supply of Nile River valley made its agriculture relatively resilient in the face of climate change and its relative isolation shielded it from the worst of the refugee hordes (with Ramses III winning a great victory over the invading Sea Peoples).
The current version of Egypt is America, whose assured water supply of the Great Lakes and Mississippi river system makes us relatively resilient against climate change. Bordered by two oceans and deserts to the south, America is nearly as well situated against mass influx of refuges as Egypt was (a mass migration of millions of refugees would not survive the trek across northern Mexico).
Physically America is as difficult to invade as ancient Egypt and our geography will blunt the worst effects of climate change. IOW, we will still have food when the rest of the world is going hungry or starving.
So don't be surprised if after the digital age collapse of 2077 ad that America is the only nation still standing.
“History Doesn't Repeat Itself, but It Often Rhymes” – Mark Twain
Going forward, the #1 qualification in your CV:
"Not in the Epstein files"
All interesting. The world can feed itself, even in crisis, if we stop eating cattle. And pigs only for those goyim who feed the filthy thing kitchen waste. Chickens are efficient(barely) though better will be algae chik'n. We need to turn the south facing sides of tall buildings into vertical farms. It's (barely) not too late, methinks.
OTOH, being in the Epstein Files isn't an automatic OMG! John Scalzi was referred to, not as a 'Epstein's Island' participant or even distant associate, but by being name checked for his "Lowest Setting" essay on some correspondence between two almost-as peripheral people, also in the files. I can see someone referring to "That jackass __________" in the files and others jumping on the simple mention as proof of heinous activities.
On Stephanie Miller's show this morning, I heard that Jon Stewart was in the files, but only because Woody Allen and someone else (I forget who) joked about getting Stewart to do some sort of comedy skit.
So yes, a mere text search that finds a name is not enough to convict, or even to besmirch.
I believe AI will easily understand the concept of separation into independent units... I believe AI will grasp the notion of positive sum systems... I believe AI will be capable of grasping this difference in outcomes/output.
The above quotes illustrate that the potentiality of AI beneficence is a faith-based argument, one predetermined by our fine host's idiosyncratic beliefs, rather than any actual logic or reasoned argument, as said beliefs already run contrary to the cited existence of the zero-sum 'predatory AIs' currently employed by our financial institutions.
Our fine host attempts to create a false equivalency between our electronic appliances & human children in order to anthropomorphize these objects into our inanimate human 'offspring', as the first step in the attempted hijacking of the emotionally prevalent human desire to have offspring that are necessarily better, wiser & more fit than than we are to serve his own technophilic ends.
But, you & I are not our cars, our watches, our computers or our possessions; we are not our morals or our diet; and our children are not your flashy thinking gadgets & gewgaws.
WE ARE HUMANS rife with intrinsic human flaws & limitations, and the sooner you weird-os come to terms with that, the better off humanity will be.
Best
________
And, btw, keep you hands off my bacon cause I LIKE BACON, as did Isaac Asimov, and if you find my dietary preferences offensive, you can go eat all the grass that you grow on the sides of your urban skyscrapers.
That was probably hte best posting by locumranch (full name) in a year or more. Irrascible and a little nasty and indeed, unfair. But within a normal range of thick skinned challenge between adults. Myopic and rigid. But lots of adults are like that. And on-target enough to merit real argument! If we were in a real argument.
BTW guys. I might have a teensey bit of news for you that may be worth a wry chuckle... and a wince... But maybe I'll wait till someone else...
a teensey bit of news for you that may be worth a wry chuckle... and a wince
You're in the Epstein files?
Recent SpaceX FCC permit filing actually mentions Kardashev II.
They are asking to put a million satellites in orbit supporting AI-level data centers.
Anyone here doubt they can?
(I'm laughing my $ss off right now. Opening Mars will wind up as a byproduct. Ha, ha, ha!)
AI would see the discussion about putting brains in jars elecric underground
P.S. Interesting side note: both the Exodus and the Trojan war occurred within a century of the Bronze Age collapse
P.P.S. Approximately 80% of homicide victims in the United States are male, with a victimization rate of roughly 9.3 to 12.8 per 100,000 males annually. That's a violent death rate for American males today at about 0.01%
Evidence from skeletal remains in European studies shows that, while not universal, violence was common, with over 10% of individuals in some areas exhibiting unhealed, weapon-related trauma. Some researchers, such as Steven Pinker, estimate around 15% of deaths in pre-historic, small-scale societies were violent.
So in round numbers, the Bronze Age was about 1,000x more violent than modern society.
'
Which puts a new light on what the Greeks did to the Trojans, what Joshua did to the Canaanites, and what the Assyrians did to everyone.
Okay, only Larry Hart seemed interested. But... yeah. While it is no badge of honor to have ANY association with the Jeffrey Epstein (JE) Sleaze, my own is so harmless that it's - well - shruggably amusing.
First: Far too few journalists have noted that - in addition to being a perv-abuser and Kremlin kompromat-collector, JE was also (and somewhat separately) a sci-tech groupie. I mean big time. He attended tech-fest events, hosted some on the mainland and gave out grants, gathering into orbit some top cybernetics guys, the head of the MIT Media Lab, and so on. Some were smart enough to sniff potential trouble and kept JE at arm's length or longer. Others inadvertently or eagerly plunged into his other, more notorious world of depravity and sleaze. There was overlap.
But not with me. My sole mention in the millions of files occurs when one of JE's peripheral sci-tech contacts answers his question: "Who are the most interesting people you know?" That contact replied with a list that included several women and elderly eminences... and "David Brin "the deepest-thinking socio-political commentator I know of."
Ah, that's it. After thorough word-match searches. And no, there was never a followup. Should I feel insulted? Or did it get out that I've always been a happily and boringly loyal husband and father? And that any 'invitation' would be a futile waste of time? Or worse, lead to whistle-blowing? Will never know.
I will say this. Anyone who shouts "He's in the files!" had better accompany that with sufficient, amusingly-adequate context. Or else expect ferocity. Not from me, but from my life-partner. Who won't abide it. And you hath seen no fury like a protective wife and mom.
About being mentioned in the Epstein files:
There was a Roman proverb: "Caesar's wife must be above any hint of scandal." Does that also apply to holding government office?
only Larry Hart seemed interested
It was a pure guess on my part, and I'd have only given it about a 10% chance of being correct. Although I also couldn't think of anything else you'd be so coy about.
Anyone who shouts "He's in the files!" had better accompany that with sufficient, amusingly-adequate context.
I already noted that Jon Stewart is in there, but only because someone else suggested having Jon Stewart do a comedy sketch about something. So yes, one had better have context about why a name is in there.
Also, you would likely be unfairly dinged if Sergey Brin was mentioned.
Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, just published his essay, "The Adolescence of Technology," covering the risks of power AI. His themes echo and amplify yours, David. https://www.darioamodei.com/essay/the-adolescence-of-technology
"Power AI" above should be "powerful AI" but no edit button is present.
The Underpants Gnome AI program:
Phase 1: Build data centers full of computers running statistical pattern-matching algorithms.
Phase 2: ??
Phase 3: Artificial consciousness, alien minds, Singularity, Skynet—choose your favorite science fictional scenario.
The nice thing about Phase 2 is you can make a lot of money from billionaires, investors and the public by hyping up the threat and promise of Phase 3, and generally just pulling whatever speculations you want out of your posterior and relating them to AI. I was actually into this myself briefly during a previous hype cycle, and saw how easy it was. But it's all more tales told by idiots, full of sound and fury but signifying very little beyond the fact that nerds need money and religion too.
I'm thinking of dedicating my new AI book --
To Samantha, Data, and (list a few more benign friend AIs) gave us hope...
And to poor Hal and (list a few more less-benign ones) who gave us warning...
And to those human maker/parents who gave us art that warned and promised.
It oughta, and hence transparency...
I cite Amodei several times from that one (lengthy) missive! Though a skim this time made me realize I badly needed one more
What impressed and struck me about his essay was (1) his support for democracy and freedom against the myriad wannabe autocrats (2) the hat tip to science fiction scenarios, and (3) clarity of statement, vision, and action that he and Anthropic are working towards.
Cynical snarks CAN sometimes be generally correct! Even when based on nothing more than utter, lazy ignorance of any aspect of the topic, nor any intent to learn or to engage it as anything more than an excuse for sanctimony-masturbation. Hope your body rocked nicely.
That hype game is the best argument I know FOR fair, flat markets where the consequences stay mostly in the realm of shifting fortunes and a slew of lawsuits.
Phase 2 isn’t all about con games though. That’s what makes the system tolerable.
Consider for a moment, not the implications of what AI can do, but its seemingly-insatiable thirst for resources such as water and electricity.
Could the Fermi paradox be explained by the proposition that intelligent life eventually (inevitably) creates some technology that consumes enough of the environment's essential resources that life support becomes impossible?
As I considered the relationship between our fine host's AI fixation & progressive idealism's ongoing attachment to social perfectionism, an exceptionally cynical snark about human fallibility occurs to me:
Artificial Intelligence (AI) may represent an extreme form of Demographic Replacement, especially since left-leaning progressives have long argued that the flawed human demographic is simply incapable of enacting the socially perfect & praiseworthy ideal of 'real' Communism.
From demographic replacement & declining birth rates to climate change & social inequity, the counterintuitively WEIRD sociopolitical agenda now makes perfect sense, as the western progressive idealist pursues the sociopolitical perfection of 'clean bathwater' and perfect Communism by throwing out the babies most deplorable instead of the proverbial bathwater.
This is how much the common man is HATED by our NWO oligarchs, our technocrats, our globalists, our professional managerial castes, our fact-users & our purported ruling class, as they gleefully announce our replacement, our murder and our planned extinction, while still commanding our loyalty & cooperation.
These idealists will kill us for our imperfections.
Best
Ah he's back to spewing fecal jibber-jabber. I was actually rooting for the vitamins. Have fun Waaaaaaaaay over there, dunce.
You want some nominations for the list?
Latest light to go out (apart from the Washington Post): the CIA Factbook
Treebeard @11:43,
Or, to put it in terms that I've seen in cartoons many, many times.
Phase 2: Then a miracle occurs.
Your point about the monetisation mechanism is very true. Dangerously so, in fact, because it seems to me that these AI companies are spending existential amounts.
We therefore have two end games.
1. There is actually a real AI breakthrough, in which case we're going to see a massive transfer of resources from the rest of society to repay the aforementioned spend.
2. There is NOT a real AI breakthrough, in which case at some point the players are going to be on the hook for amounts WAY beyond their capacity to pay. At this point we're going to see pushes for bailout moves a-la TARP back in 2008, because there will be entities involved who (probably correctly, alas) believe they are too big/connected to take the pain.
Re the fact book. The all-out war on facts and all fact professions is now totally explicit. STOP making this only about racism! Yes many MAGAs are racists, riled up by oligarchs manipulating them with racist dog whistles. And those suffering most have color. All granted. But who do the oligarchs themselves hate? Many of THEM have color! What they hate is what stymies them from total power and restoration of 6000 years of wretched feudalism. And sorry, it's the fact professions, civil servants, scientists statisticians, law professionals and now even the intel agencies. THEY get most of the hate, each night, on Fox. And the confederate new-plantation-masters want you distracted from that whole side of this war.
ozajh,
I'm pretty sure it will wind up being something in between. Recall the dot com bubble a little ways back? How about all that undersea fiber optic cable laid down at the time. HUGE over spends.
Bubbles wind up revealing who is swimming naked when the tide rushes out, but (breaking the metaphor) physical assets will just sit there on the sand until bankruptcy buyers snap them up for pennies on the dollar. If the tide comes back in (running out of useful metaphors) we get a second wave of windfall profits.
"Then a miracle occurs."
Already happening, but one might have to be an oldster to have the POV to see them.
The question as asked is probably unanswerable. I'd add some qualifiers.
... create some technology that consumes (rapidly) enough of the...
The point here is that our agricultural revolution was one such technology boom that consumed resources like fertile land. Look to the deserts we created by failing to understand what irrigation systems can and can't do.
As for consumption of water and electricity, make sure your community prices them right. Water rights provides THE original motivation humans invented large governments and civilization itself. I suspect we will have to adapt our inventions in the coming years.
Who knew the CIA was so woke? These cretins, I guess.
It boils down to petty vice signalling on the part of the idiots deleting common resources without any explanation other than 'it has sunset'.
At this point, I think the existence of the wayback machine is widely known.
Online archives up to 2024, and zipped archives of the Factbook up to 2020 are available there.
Dr. Brin,
U realize I'm going to read your AI book with great interest. u see, I've been trying to pick up gig jobs as an AI trainer. So I darn well want to learn everything I can about how to evaluate the ways AI can mangle legal reasoning.
!Meaning, to get truly high paying gigs, u need to be able to tell the designers WHY their AI is screwing up their legal interpretations. Im not anything close to a high powered lawyer bc of my attempts at startups, so I don't have the level of expertise to get truly desirable gigs, unless I can develop the skill of explaining why their AIs are tripping up.
The only area of law I can claim any type of sorta kinda expertise is with something called the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. And that's only because I've read every reported case since the act passed in 1977, which almost no one ever does bc almost no one needs to know it.
Basically, the most reported cases I've seen in a year is 26, so its actually possible to read every case. It's enforced by one specialized unit in the SEC, so your garden variety criminal specialist might have heard of it, but has never dealt with it. Most federal prosecutors are clueless about it, other than knowing that it makes bribing a foreign official to win a foreign contract a felony in US law.
Pretty much the only cases the SEC bothers to pursue involve many millions of dollars, so it's the sort of thing a lot of big companies will want to know about if they're doing business in an endemically corrupt country (like oh say most of Southeast Asia). Which means its exactly the sort of issue a corporate lawyer might want to ask an AI assistant about, to help orient then, since very few people have much experience litigating it.
So the AI should be advising the client to keep their corruption below that 'many millions of dollars' limit? 8)
(I get that agencies don't bring cases over pennies. Gotta have an ROI.)
As for consumption of water and electricity, make sure your community prices them right....
I was trying to make a larger point, not just rail against AI in particular. Sure, agriculture didn't destroy us, nor did cars, and maybe AI won't either. But we keep trying and keep upping the ante.
Trying to avoid at least too much of a spoiler, the plot of Dr Brin's Existence depended on one such technology ravishing multiple civilizations.
I suspect there's going to be a bifurcation. As Alfred pointed out, regulators don't bring cases unless there's a strong incentive.
So companies that are willing to bribe trump, will now feel safer following corrupt practices in other jurisdictions as well, since they won't have to worry about US enforcement.
Companies that are unwilling to (sufficiently) bribe trump will need to be absolutely squeaky-clean in other jurisdictions, as they're going to be the ones the US government investigates.
The carbon intensity of electricity used by data centers was 48% higher than the US average...
That could generate the same emissions as driving over 300 billion miles—over 1,600 round trips to the sun from Earth.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116327/ai-energy-usage-climate-footprint-big-tech/
For our resident 'climate change' & AI guru, the above FACTS published by the MIT Technology Review represent an irresolvable contradiction, that being that modeled AI-related energy requirements will increase global CO2 production & global warming by nearly 22%, speeding us ever onward to climate doom.
That our fine host has frequently expressed the belief that we can somehow humanize our potential AI replacements by "raising them as our children", the FACT remains that no amount of breast-feeding will turn a shoe, a toaster or a random inanimate object into a human boy, even though this was the very plot device used by Spielberg in his 2001 "AI: Artificial Intelligence" film flop.
Has our fine host been smoking Blue Fairy dust or something ?
Or, is he finally admitting that the climate change model is & has always been a politically-motivated hoax?
Best
I haven't been here in a long time! This year hasn't been good for my pineal gland. I've told myself I was going to jump back in many times, then forget by the time I get home from work.
Last week my son showed me a video about the pareto distribution, which is something I've mentioned here before. At the time, though, I didn't know why some phenomena get a normal distribution and others a power law (Pareto is the specific case of a power law for the distribution of wealth). This video, and a long discussion with my son, who gets the math way better than I do, finally made the connection, and I thought I'd drop the link here if anyone wants to check it out.
The big revelation was what makes a Pareto distribution happen, and what that says about all our economic systems since at least the 7th Century BC. Our host often talks about the diamond-shaped distribution, which approximates a normal distribution, and makes for a much more healthy and sustainable economy than the Neoliberal shit-show Reagan and Thatcher shoved down all our throats (and we are far from recovering from). A healthy economy is a dominantly middle class economy. What we have is the more conventional pyramid, which is a Pareto.
When Pareto made his discovery in the 1890s, pretty much every industrial economy was capitalist. And every industrial economy showed the exact same distribution, with a tiny percentage of super rich people, a comfortable upper class of around 20%, and varying degrees of poverty for the remaining 80%. If this is what your economy has, your "experiment" failed, because this is the null hypothesis. This describes Neoliberal America today.
The kicker is why. It turns out that you get a normal distribution when the resource in question is finite, but a power law distribution when it is effectively infinite. The resource in question is currency. As long as there is no zero-sum game in wealth distribution, random chance will ensure that a tiny handful of people becoming unimaginably wealthy.
Now if a few people were unimaginably wealthy but everyone else had reasonable living conditions, that wouldn't be a bad thing. That's not how it works. Even though currency has no effective limits, its distribution at any one time works like a zero sum. Those who hoard the wealth prevent others from getting a share and being able to compete with them or their descendants.
What this means is that meritocracy is not only a lie, as long as we use money there will never be anything like it. The rich insist that they are smarter and work harder than everyone else, so that's why they deserve what they have, and everyone else can go to hell because they are dumb and lazy. In reality, if you give a ton of money to most people, even really dumb and lazy ones, they will remain rich and most likely take advantage of the snowball effect to grow their power. This isn't merit, and poor people aren't poor because they are dumb and lazy. It's simply that America's Charter Myth is just that -- a myth.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBluLfX2F_k
Locumranch 2:53 pm reminds me of those who blame Renee Good's death on some abstraction (wokeness, feminism, whatever) rather than on Mr. Ross, an actual man who pulled the actual trigger. 3 times.
So who's plotting to replace human workers with pseudo-intelligent LLMs? Not 'left-leaning progressives'; instead, it's corporate executives.
I propose that we re-name "AI", artificial intelligence, as "API"; artificial pseudo-intelligence. This is to contrast it from the natural pseudo-intelligence (NPI) of those corporate executives.
Which is not to say that LLMs are entirely useless. Much of what passes for work requires only pseudo-intelligence. As the Russians once snarked about the Soviet economy, "We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us."
Yep, what we need in 2029 is an American version of the Nuremberg trials for MAGA
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a70246850/josh-shapiro-andy-beshear-president/
The Next Democratic President Better Be Merciless
Unfortunately, rumored contenders like Josh Shapiro seem more concerned with their careers than the soul of America.
Philadelphia district attorney Larry Krasner read the riot attack at the possibility that ICE will bring Minneapolis to Philadelphia. He was not ... nuanced. From The Philadelphia Inquirer:
Last week, during a news conference about proposed restrictions on immigration enforcement in Philadelphia, the district attorney said he would “hunt down” and prosecute U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents who commit crimes in the city. “There will be accountability now. There will be accountability in the future. There will be accountability after [Trump] is out of office,” Krasner said. “If we have to hunt you down the way they hunted down Nazis for decades, we will find your identities.”
Krasner wasn’t calling anyone a Nazi. He was saying that any federal agents who commit street crimes in his jurisdiction can expect to hear footsteps for the rest of their lives. Which I think should be the case of people up and down this administration. I think the overriding mission of a Democratic administration and a Democratic Congress should not be vengeance but justice for offenses against the law and the republic.
Lena what you wrote was great, except that this sentence "What this means is that meritocracy is not only a lie, as long as we use money there will never be anything like it." Stuck in my craw. Money is not the culprit here. It is lack of a redistributive process. (And it not money as such anyway that you are talking about, it is nominal wealth at traded prices - which grows faster than money does.) We need to tax more, redistribute more and make monetary policy tighter and fiscal policy looser. I recommend reading Between Debt and the Devil. We need more government debt (more of it held by the central bank) and less private debt, basically.
Expanding on @Lena and Re: Epstein/Trump:
https://youtube.com/shorts/HExGJEXOGzQ?si=6mWoCrU_9l5-hlnq
The system did not fail. It was designed that way.
The problem with Nuremberg 2.0 trials is:
a) The current Democrats are too weak. They will do shit. See Governor Shapiros statement on Fox in this matter. He calls this rhethoric "inhumane against law enforcement" while simultaneously forgetting the inhumanity of Fox, Trump and MAGA. And don't get me started on Congress dems.
b) It is doubtful that - even if they gain the majority in Congress - much will change. GOPpers and Corporate Dems will see to it that everything is swept under the rug. Which brings us to the next point.
c) Nuremberg was only possible because of the utter and complete defeat of the state and the people. By the occupation. Even 1946, people thought of the punishments being too hard. Many verdicts later were successfully appealed and punishments reduced to "time served".
I cannot imagine that scenario currently, with the party, state governments and media apparatus intact.
d) What I believe what helped us much more was the new constitution, and the change in culture during the sixties.
I don't see progressive constitutional changes on the horizon in the US.
And without justice, they will return two or four years later. If they loose power at all.
The first step in building an A.I. path to Kardashev II is the actual invention of actual A.I.
Unser Oger,
I would be inclined to agree if I thought the system was actually designed. It wasn't. It evolved. In the U.S. our Constitution was certainly designed (by James Madison), specifically to ensure that the power of the elite could not be seriously challenged by the people. Fortunately Jefferson convinced Washington that it needed to be amended to guarantee rights for the people, and Washington had so much clout he could make it happen. Otherwise America wouldn't have been much different from the countries people escaped from to go there. Of course the people with the power and money have done the most to shape its evolution, which is why it seems like it was designed.
That's nice, in theory reason. So, who is going to do the redistribution?
What us to prevent the redistributionists from redistributing to themselves? They always do...eventually. To achieve the scale of redistribution you're suggesting, u must have a single legitimate user of force with the power to extract wealth from everyone else, ultimately backed up by the barrel of a gun. Entities who achieve that kind of power end up deciding some small group of elites needs most of the wealth for society to function.
In short, your redistribution scheme ends up recreating the oligarch class it has supposedly just overthrown. Welcome back to the universe of inheritance brats and the ninth phase of Dr. Brin's eternal civil war.
Yep. And I liked how he handle it in the book.
Seriously... many of the things he argues for can be seen fully described in the novels. Even this blog community's purpose is clearly laid out.
We've been upping the ante since long before the dawn of history. That is probably the reason why we are the sole surviving hominid on the planet. it's not that we are trying to kill ourselves. The world is plenty capable of killing us off without our help. But... now there are 8 giga-humans. Pfft! Up the ante again and we'll spread to the stars.
I think I hear that piece of music Jeopardy uses when waiting for the contestants to complete their answers. It's a short piece and always ends with results. 8)
What would you say to this...
When the Central Bank owns most of the public debt, it is essentially a branch of the government more than a bank. At some point the currency becomes a meaningless thing because there is no limit to how much of it gets printed.
The old limit used to be tied to gold and silver reserves... which I don't think can work in the modern world. Another kind of limit involved willing bond market participants because they begin to demand high interest when stupid stuff starts happening. Central banks are not viable replacements for private investors in the bond market.
Reason,
That stuck in my craw pretty well, too. Like decent human beings everywhere, I want us to live in a system that is both fair and responsible. The idea that it isn't actually possible so long as we use currency to simplify the process of economic distribution is kind of devastating. The alternative is to create a system that doesn't use money, like they claim on Star Trek, but then their use of the word "credit" sounds an awful lot like money.
Caveat emptor, I'm not an economist, I'm an anthropologist by training. Economy is a huge subject in anthropology, though, so I'm not completely ignorant. I'm actually glad I'm not an economist, since once we dumped Keynes and adopted Friedman we turned economics into something far more like a faith than a science.
So approaching economics from the science of humans, I always go back to what economy actually is: the distribution of the necessities of life. Money need not be a part of economy, though since it was invented most people equate economy with money.
The great majority of human existence happened without money, but how it happened isn't quite what the economists say. Even Marx got it wrong when he claimed that prehistoric people lived in a sort of "primitive communism." At the smallest of human scales, the barter system we have all been told about didn't exist. Hunter/gatherer societies operated off of what we call a reciprocal economy. The way it works is that if someone needs something they don't have, chances someone who has it will give it to that person, no questions asked. Later, if the giver needs something, the person who got something from that one previously will likely hand over whatever that person needs if possible. Today we still do this in a few contexts like birthday presents or buying rounds at the bar. A person who calculates how much their presents cost and compares them to the presents they got very quickly finds himself friendless and presentness. It isn't barter, it's social exchange. As one fellow told Richard B. Lee, who kept trying to get him to name the value of an iron cooking pot, "We don't trade with pots, we trade with people."
Naturally reciprocal economics doesn't work when the population gets too big for people to keep track of who is sufficiently generous and who is stingy. Next step is the Redistributive Economy. Tribal societies do this somewhat, but chiefdoms do this on a grand scale. Typically your chief extracts as much food as possible from anyone who owes kinship obligations, then throws elaborate feasts in which everyone is invited and fed. Commonly this gets out of hand as people who want to contend for the chiefdom try to outdo each other with their generosity. A common saying among people at this level is that the best place to store your surplus food is in your neighbor's stomach.
Market economies, which pretty much necessitate a universal currency, are a phenomenon of high population density societies, (a.k.a. civilizations). In our societies, redistribution is largely handled by government institutions, though charities also perform that function.
Now the thing about money is that it exists specifically to make economic transactions more efficient. It makes sense that as population grows we would need that, at least until the technology gets to the point where we can monitor transactions without the need for a generic medium of exchange. Until then it is always assumed that disparities can be adequately resolved by government and charitable organizations that can redistribute the wealth.
The fact that it isn't solving the problem -- in fact the inequality problem has been getting worse for decades (and was as bad between the Civil War and the Progressive Era, when that most progressive Republican Teddy Roosevelt went on his trust-busting campaign) -- should be an indicator that redistribution isn't a reliable solution. This is a place where Marx was actually right about something. Those who have outrageous wealth are highly motivated to interfere with the government and disrupt its redistributive function for their own personal profit. Looking at American history it's easy to see that the egalitarian impulse is able to overcome these bastards for a while, but we have yet to vanquish them, and it's looking more and more like they are going to throw us into an Great Depression. So while I absolutely support taxing the evil bastards and using some of their ego currency to undo the damage they have done, at best it's likely to be a perpetual struggle. At worst it's doomed to failure.
Paul SB (not Lena. I have no idea why this site always calls me that.)
My point exactly, though you made it while I was typing, and being bugged by my son.
blah blah nothing to do with me. Hallucinator.
The reason we get the distrubution is simpler than that
Wealth is a positive feedback process - the more that you HAVE the easier it becomes to get more -
money is just a tool that society uses to enable the material transfers that create wealth - bit like blood in the body
The "fix" is to make it more difficult - not easier - when you have wealth
Which is why during the most successful wealth growing part of recent history we had income taxes in the 90% range
We NEED to go back there and devote a lot of effort to closing loopholes
Sorry Lena. Idon't see it. That distribution never applied in non-slavery USA. and especially since 1945. When the social contract was adjusted to encourage union membership, vast infrastructure, generous housing terms and above all mass education and universities. Alas, now that fear of Marxism has faded, the elites feel no need to forego a return to feudalism.
API I like that.
Is this the beginnings of the 'gravity laser' I spoke of, in EARTH? I love this show, but it requires major major concentration, even for a licensed physicist! And even if this episode proves out someday, it would then be a long road to... Grazers!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4DqSFrl92k
If you ever build a grazer, you'll call it Shaun, right?
Paul,
One little nit to pick and then to the meat. Economics isn't a science. It is a legitimate field of study, but it should never be mistaken for a science. It is essentially the study of how humans choose to act when we engage in various kinds of trade. The reason it can't be a science is we don't have an agreed upon arbiter that can say 'No' to a hypothesis. Experiment serves as evidence gathering in science while the cosmos itself is the arbiter upon which we've agreed. The field of study called economics has no such arbiter, though we do have various kinds of experiments.
(This seeming small nit pick has caused a two-century tragedy to unfold. Historical economists were NOT modeling real humans.*)
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I grant your 'reciprocal economy' idea and I think we both understand it in the sense anthropologists describe it. I'd add that much of it is actually indirect reciprocity meaning the scale balances when the tribe member gives back in some way to the tribe what any of them gave in the first place. My son was rescued from drowning in the ocean by a guy I never met and can't possibly pay back, but I can give back to the community to make up for the priceless gift I received. (I wasn't with the rest of my family when it happened.)
Barter isn't reciprocity and we both agree on that. Barter is just a money driven market exchange without the money. It works when the perceived values of the traded things aren't wildly different. How many loaves of bread do you want in exchange for your pig? Chances are I can't bake enough of them and get them to market and you can't consume them before they rot even if I could deliver.
What I CAN do is deliver a pile of silver, gold, wine vessels, or sea shells (etc) you can use later to buy bread from anyone who will sell it to you. The intermediary enables transactions previously discouraged. I still have to do something to acquire it, but it won't rot. Much. That's all 'money' is, though. An intermediary that represents a debt. Utterly worthless out of context, but in a market economy where others use it, it greases the axles.
I think if you dig through the evidence, market economies predate civilizations by a bit. Intermediary currencies appeared long ago with the first appearance being debatable. Don't ignore bits of sea shells, dyes, and make up as early intermediaries. It is VERY likely intermediaries were used long before people agreed upon standard sets for facilitating trade across all of Africa. Civilization is more about control of water rights than the existence of monetized markets. A tragedy of the commons should be avoided if possible.
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Paul, (cont'd)
(snip) It makes sense that as population grows we would need (efficiency), at least until the technology gets to the point where we can monitor transactions without the need for a generic medium of exchange. (Snip)
You head off the rails here. Yes. Currencies provide efficiency, but they do something MUCH more important. If there is a standard currency, they enable market participants to walk away without further obligation. You know from anthropology that gift economies create social bindings. NOT being bound actually has value that is most obviously present when you don't know the other person in the trade very well. They could be evil monsters, but if THIS particular trade is fair you can complete it and walk away. In a world of millions and then billions of humans there is absolutely no way you can know everyone well enough to engage in the old reciprocal trades. Not even with modern technology can you do it. The information you need can't be centralized enough for the problem to be solvable.
Our market economies facilitated by intermediary currencies are solutions to the problem we faced long ago where we did NOT know the people who showed up at the cross roads eager to trade what they had for what we had. That problem persists today and it why we can never go back... assuming billions of us don't die soon. We can't ever know what we want to know for reciprocal trade to work outside of our small bands that we DO still keep up. You won't ever count trade value with the people near and dear to you, but you must for everyone else... assuming you aren't one of the fabulously wealthy people.
Our market economies are solutions to a vexing problem of ignorance. We've had to tinker with them quite a bit due to how cheaters cheat, but the same is true of our reciprocal economies born in the murky past. Humans DO cheat. Water is wet.
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* Of course, I doubt I have to tell you that. I write it down so others can see it. I really DO see it as a multi-century tragedy, though. Too many are enamored by the processes of science and try to apply them to perfectly useful fields of study where they are a piss poor fit.
@Paul:
If you reduce the system to the constitution, probably.
But a system isn't just that, it is also ... People with sets of beliefs and behaviours not covered by laws.
A good example is how Epstein was treated after his conviction by the Elites. While there was now law forbidding or forcing them to stay in contact with him, it is telling how many people chose him over the victims.
Another good example would be that no wealthy landowner in the South or Confederate leader (except one) had to suffer full responsibility, and no member of the Business Plot ever was criminally charged. Contrast it with the damage done to tens, if not hundreds of thousands by the Commitee of Unamerican Activities, Red Scare and Hoovers FBI.
The "design" in this case is the invention, repetition and propagation of myths and memes, not just the writing of laws.
Alfred - of course there is a limit. The limit is a combination of how much deficit the government runs and how much of the governments debt the central bank is prepared to hold (that is what monetary policy is). Read the book I recommended. And the central bank holding government debt is called printing money. The amount of money printed should grow roughly in proportion to desired nominal GDP. This would stop, increased private sector (including household) sector debt from growing continuously faster than nominal GDP as it currently does. The problem is that you see "the economy" as an automous entity, rather than as a human creation, that needs careful regilation to serve humanity as I do. One of the most important questions in economics us "what is the evonomy for" and it is far too often forgotten.
I'm with Kate Raworth on this, the economic system needs to redidtributive by design. And who is to stop the elites being corrupt. Well this is big issue in the US because of the lack of a properly independent judiciary and justice system. But not everywhere is like that. Democracy is supposed to be there to stop corruption.
Actually I think Friedman would be horrified by the ideas of some of the people who have followed him.
Paul, redistribution isn't working because it has never been done properly, although the early post war period did it better. But it is not as such (money is a magic tool), it is the way our credit markets are designed that is the problem.
Police wearing masks to prevent retribution from a Klan-like militia is the plot set-up for the 2019 tv version of Watchmen. And it was engineered by the corrupt police chief and the senator who was secretly head of the Seventh KKKavalry.
Before the audience knew he was evil, the Senator justified the practice with the line, "Masks save lives." And this was a year or so before anyone had heard of COVID.
Life is imitating comic books now.
... "money" as such ....
Everyone seems to be talking about DJT complimenting the Clintons as him being terrified about what they might testify about him But the Rude Pundit has a different take which I find plausible:
https://bsky.app/profile/rudepundit.bsky.social
It bothers him that the precedent of forcing an ex-president to testify before Congress has been established.
Karma's a bitch.
"Civilization is more about control of water rights than the existence of monetized markets."
I was never interested in viewing Chinatown until I was informed that the film was really about water rights in mid-century California. Sure enough, that aspect was fascinating.
A tragedy of the commons should be avoided if possible."
It does already seem to be happening with AI and associated data centers. Every single targeted community seems to be adamant that such a thing should not be in their back yard, and yet every single governing body is suborned by the corporatists.
And Games, too.
The current situation reminds me a bit of the three-way stand-off at the end of Fallout: New Vegas between Caesars Legion (MAGA), Mr. House (Techbroligarchs) and the New California Republic (Dems, basically).
Oh, and the intro of the first game where you learn that prior to WWIII, the US annexed Canada.
I also liked the television series, some things felt eerily familiar.
"Friedman would be horrified by the ideas of some of the people who have followed him."
He's like Jesus in that way.
I recall David Brin commenting on the book "Achilles' Choice" by Larry Niven, though an internet search can't find it. I recall he speculated that it might be productive to have games that permitted doping so we could learn something from it. If so, he might like reading about the Enhanced Games. (Sad disclosure, a Trump heir is involved). www.enhanced.com
Try to find Achilles Choice on ebay or a used books site. Should be 5 olympics. 1. for the pros... to we can recover 2. the original Amateurs, and one for cyborgs and druggies, and 4,. Special Olympics and 5. robots.
A few things stick in my craw, too:
(1) In response to the cited MIT Technology Review article which models & predicts that AI-related energy requirements will accelerate Climate Change by nearly 22% via more CO2 production, our erstwhile Climate Change defenders respond with **crickets**, implying that AI-driven climate change is a GOOD THING;
(2) Lena (aka Paul_SB) is finally proven correct -- in a rather bizarre plot twist in & of itself -- by noting that the West has formally enslaved its citizenry via WAGE SLAVERY, as seen in its near-universal adoption of eternal confiscatory taxation in regards to all wages & property; and
3) Larry_H seems strangely indifferent to liberating effects of mask use on crime (in general), even after correctly identifying the rather liberating & emboldening effects of Mask Use on law enforcement, which would then necessitate the universal rejection of mask use by everyone, an act which would forever favour the horrifyingly rightwing CCTV-driven 'panopticon' side of the equation.
I therefore vote 'Yea' to proposals (1), (2) and (3) and look forward to an authoritarian boot stamping on your climate-denying progressive faces forever, mostly because misery loves company.
Best
Oh, I know where to find the book. I was not able to find your comment to confirm and link. I apologize for the miscommunication.
Unser Oger, while everything you say here is on the mark, I think you're missing the implications of the word "design." Certainly there have been countless bad actor that have contributed to the evils of the system, but it's an additive process, not the original design -- unless you are using the word in an older, rarely used sense to mean an evil plot. Complex systems are rarely that complex to begin with, but through processes of addition and subtraction evolve increasing complexity.
Alfred, I'm glad you acknowledged that most of what you wrote is stuff I have known for a long time. It's really pretty conventional and well-established, and all stuff I had a basic grasp of before I started talking upper division classes, where so many of those standard ideas were chewed to pieces.
I do really hope you will watch the video. My mathematical skills are such that, unless it involves probability and statistics, I have to take their word if the professionals are on it.
There is one thing you wrote, however, that I have to nitpick. "Humans DO cheat. Water is wet." Um, the claim that there is a whole class of people who are so naïve that they don't know this is nothing more than a right-wing straw man that dates back tot he Cold War, and the ludicrous claim that communism will somehow take away the dishonesty of people. Maybe there really were some hippies who really did believe that, maybe. I was too little to be able to go on personal observation, but certainly by the '70s mainstream society was getting pretty cynical (and more than a little sleazy), and since Reagan we have been thoroughly indoctrinated into the Age of Cynicism. There are probably some people in the age group from 6 - 12 that might be that naïve, but I even doubt that, given how nasty so many kids are to each other.
Celt, what's the name of that documentary? I would be very interested in checking it out.
And as usual Chokem Ranch takes other people's words and claim that they said something completely unrelated to what he wants to say. In my case I never wrote one word about taxation, and I've been against wage slavery all my life. It's conservatives who think that wage slavery is meritocratic.
Heh.
On one extreme there are people who argue we must live by the law of tooth and claw. I disagree and I'm quite sure the evidence supports me. We are social cooperators.
On the other extreme there are people who argue we must live selflessly. I disagree and I'm quite sure the evidence supports me. We compete with each other to have our genes and ideas survive into the next generation.
What I'm also pretty sure about is that most of us don't realize that open markets were invented to solve problems for creatures who straddle between tooth/claw and selflessness in an unequal manner. Trading voluntarily is neither tooth/claw or selflessness and that makes it a very odd duck.
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The 70's felt cynical, but I don't think we have an objective measure of it relative to previous generations. The Hippies became disillusioned. Hollywood abandoned a number of "Everything is fine" standards. Most importantly (I think) is we were all finally getting wealthy enough that giving a damn about higher tiers on Maslow's hierarchy of needs could be risked.
I don't think the Age of Cynicism really was except in a relative sense. My mother was disillusioned and I think that's a better descriptor.
So... I watched the video. I first saw this idea years ago described as 'scale-free' systems. Taleb also wrote his Black Swan book trying to dislodge people from their belief that life was governed by normal distributions. Turns out... no. Much of our lives deals with power laws that have exponents between -1 and -2.
In one online community I decided to test the scale-free idea. I made a simple list of everyone who posted anything and counted their contributions. It didn't matter if they were thread starters or comments. Just contributions.
Turned out the number of people who contributed a lot could be counted by the fingers on one hand, but the TAIL was huge. (Wikipedia shows this same scale-free behavior where only a few people contribute a lot, but most contributions come from the tail.)
The guy who owned the site was the primary contributor (no surprise) and I was #2. The ratio between us was about the same as the ratio between me and the guy in the #3 slot. Same ratio (approximately) applied down the list until we got to the tail where ratios were rather meaningless. Power Law is the name for that, but the scale free nature of it is that the ratio is fairly constant.
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Money supplies aren't infinite, so scale-free models aren't quite right. The log-normal curve is more typical... most of the time. What Taleb showed, though, is that you can have both. Options are priced by a model that relies mostly on the log-normal distribution, but that model fails miserably when certain 'forest fire' events occur. In the investment community, those are when people suddenly stop behaving as randomly correlated (essentially uncorrelated) and all rush to the windows to leap to their deaths. The scale-free aspect isn't measured by money. It's measured by how much we correlate our behaviors ABOUT money.
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A huge part of my support for fair, flat markets is that I want those Black Swans. They change everything.
Alfred,
Agreed on the Maslow statement. Our post-WW2 economy was a major high-point, and more and more seems like an anomaly. Poor people struggle to survive so they don't have a lot of bandwidth for mass movements except when conditions become undeniably dire. And yet, poorer people are substantially more inclined to help other people -- strangers included -- than the rich shice who can easily afford to. I'm pretty convinced that's an effect of both the addictive nature of wealth and the tendency for rich people to look down their noses at anyone who isn't and treat them as sub-human.
Your statement that scale-free isn't about money, it's about people's behavior about money misses the point. Humans aren't anything other than human, so if the presence of money results in foolish, self-destructive behavior, then either money is the problem or you have to have a reliable way to change human nature. Good luck with that one.
I still have no idea how a state-level society would operate without money. The one possibility I can think of is currently science fiction. If our technology allowed for everyone in the world to have either a brain implant like in M.T. Anderson's novel "Feed" or some sort of AR that can instantaneously deliver reliability data about anyone to anyone, then we should be able to return to the kind of reciprocal exchange system our ancestors operated under. We don't have that kind of technology now, but it's conceivable.
Mmm. Even the poorest among us are richer than the poorest of a few generations ago. There is a real danger of shifting goal posts here, so I like to anchor my arguments on 'dirt poor' meaning you've got dirt floors in your home. Very few of us alive today are that poor anymore, but a much larger fraction earns to little to make it well where they happen to live.
Money isn't the problem. My willingness to climb over the backs of my fellow humans to see my offspring succeed is. Our 'critical threshold' behavior is that line we draw between being willing cooperators and selfish gene propagators. Of course everything propagates the genes, but strategy shifts are where one sees our real scale-free behaviors. Zoom in or out and you'll find domains of coherence just like those magnets, forest fires, and toppling sand grains from the video.
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I don't think a state-level society can operate without money without us ALL surrendering what we think of as liberty. It's not just a matter of someone having to run that reputation system either... though I can think of obvious reasons why I'd want to be in charge of it to further my son's chances.
No. I don't think the information is available to be collected. Think about how we handle small groups where reciprocal economy is just barely possible. We are always trying to predict what others will do. That requires us to model them in our heads. Should I trust a particular someone in my kinship group? Let me check my internal understanding of them. Hmm. (Much brain sweat ensues.) Okay. This time.
Think on that a bit and you might see that the best system we've EVER invented for predicting each other IS our capacity for Love. Reputation isn't the measure. Do I want to continue to improve my internal representation of the person I'm thinking about? If yes... they are in the in group and reciprocity is already the rule no matter how much money is in my wallet.
If people really want to prevent them moving in, all they have to do is remove subsidies for water and electricity they'd be paying to run it all. Charge the correct prices instead of the averaged, subsidized prices the locals like to think of as utility rates. They'll relocate to where their costs are lowest.
They will also optimize for those costs and the big LLM's will get leaner in the sense that Apple likes. Functionality/Watt consumed VS Functionality.
And the solution given in The Prisoner computer game.
""All we have to do is pull the plug."
"If people really want to prevent them moving in, all they have to do is remove subsidies for water and electricity they'd be paying to run it all. "
But the people who really want to prevent that have no ability to remove subsidies. The councils or whatever who control such rates are usually part of the same club as the corporations and are all too willing to lure corporations by giving them the best deal, at the expense of the general public.
"Functionality/Watt consumed VS Functionality."
I like that as a distinction to keep in mind, not just around AI but as a general rule. "Watt" won't always be the denominator, but metaphorically it works. Cost/benefit analysis. Don't they teach that in schools any more? :)
Seems Norway and GB get the lions share of international scandal buried in the Epstein files. And maybe it is not a coincidence that the head of the Nobel Commitee who handed Obama his medal is now under investigation for corruption.
I have the distinct suspicion that in the three million files they still hold back we find other countries, like Hungary.
From dinner table conversation last night...
The common invective toward those people--especially those US citizens--detained, brutalized, or killed by ICE is that they deserved their fate on account of being "domestic terrorists". The term has been watered down to meaninglessness--shouting "Fuck Trump!" from a bicycle is "domestic terrorism", for instance.
But even if one accepts the designation, ICE has no jurisdiction over someone just because they are a domestic terrorist. The word "domestic" is right there in the name. And the word "Immigration" is part of the ICE acronym, as is "border" in the Border Patrol.
So even accepting their narrative (which I don't), what business does ICE have detaining, beating, or shooting US citizens hundreds of miles from any border, whether or not the citizen in question is a domestic terrorist?
All 'Oaths of Allegiance', including the oaths taking by US President, Congress, Senate, Military, Law Enforcement & Naturalized Citizens at the federal, state, county & urban level share the following phrase:
**I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic**
And, the above will remain true in spite of further moronic leftist assertions.
Best
well,
Judge Napolitano did a great job laying out the long-term problem that's been brewing with immigration law.
It is, indeed, legal for immigration officers to enter places without a warrant to enforce immigration law. However, that legal rule was established in 1947 when an immigration violation was considered a civil matter. Now, there's multiple felonies attached to immigration violations.
For example, a business owner can get in legal hot water for knowingly hiring undocumenteds on a regular basis. So, it's not just the undocumented who have legal exposure.
ICE's aggressive enforcement action under Trump are highlighting the problems of allowing administrative warrants (which immigration officers sign themselves) in immigration enforcement. Clearly, the courts need to fix this overisight.
Given the increased criminal stakes, immigration enforcement now entails a lot more risk of violence and threats of immigration law violations can bully citizens more than in 1947. Thus, a the very least, we need to start requiring judicial warrants with the traditional standard of articulable reason to believe probable cause exists.
BTW, even a rw libertarian like Napolitano is calling it fascism.
And, btw, since the US Supremacy Clause is literally in the US Constitution (Article VI, Clause 2), then it follows that all you 'Sanctuary State & City' crackpots have literally chosen to identify yourselves as anti-Unionist, anti-federal insurrectionists & "enemies of the USA, domestic".
Putting aside questions of fascism for the moment, I wonder if John_V can recall his 'Oath of Admission' as lawyer, solicitor and Officer of the Court, especially the part about 'defending the US constitution' ?
Unless the holder of the office is an enemy of the Constitution (which the current regime qualifies for.)
Here’s a terrific little story setting in perspective what I have long called the Great Project of Inclusion-Expansion. Long may it continue (and this author) to prosper!
https://aribrin.substack.com/p/metal-detection-objection-at-the
#1 jibbering dope. We are swamped with outrages in order to spread us thin. I have a whole chapter in my AI book about that, twit.
#2 is just nonsense to excuse favoring inheritance brats. And hatred of th4e US WWII generation
#3 = drivel. ALL masks except medicinal should come off and all wealth exposed.
of all the jibber yowls of this traitor, this is the most irionic.
The vanishment of 'states rights' howls on the right and 2nd Amerndment protections will only be matched by the light speed these traitors will drop the US flag for others, as soon as the Confederacy becomes explicit.
John Viril, this an argument I can't get my head around. Because an institution designed to solve a serious problem, we should abandon trying to fix the problem? Is that what you are saying? One thing I think I see with the world, is that if you stop trying to make things better they inevitably get worse. That there might be corruption is no reason to promote it and call it free enterprise.
... Solve a serious problem is imperfect, we should abandon ...
"Bits of seashell" used as currency is quite accurate. IIRC, strings of cowrie shells were historically used as currency across a chunk of Africa - at least until some colonial power (probably the English) - flooded the markets with shells dredged up en masse, ruining the currency's value.
Pappenheimer
onward
onward
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