Location, Location, Location

So I was in Seattle's Ballard neighborhood the other day, and encountered this:

The cycle repeats itself...

I've been to Ballard often enough, and seen enough homeless encampments there, to understand that something about the area draws in homeless people. I presume that there are services nearby.

But the whole thing seems to work on an irregular, but repeating, cycle. Homeless people come to the neighborhood, and put up large tents in the parkways. After they've been there for a while, more people, in tents and/or vehicles, set up camp near them. Eventually, they start blocking the sidewalks and the local residents and businesses start petitioning the city to have them removed. The city then shows up, sweeps the encampments, and the campers go elsewhere. For a time. Then someone finds a nice stretch of parkway in the neighborhood, and puts up a tent... Wash, rinse, repeat.

If this goes on, the end will be fairly predictable... there will be another sweep by the city, and the campers will be pushed to another part of Seattle, or maybe just outside the city limits for a time.

While it's become popular to lay the blame at the feet of whatever Progressive (or simply Democratic) mayor has been elected to office this time around, I suspect that some of the responsibility belongs to the weather. Unlike Chicago, the Summer and the Winter don't roll into town looking for a body count. Climate change is a real thing, but the Seattle area still has pretty clement weather, when compared to some places I've been. And this makes involuntarily being out of doors unpleasant, but almost never life-threatening.

Of course, as is often the case, the homeless themselves are, as a group, a part of their own problem. There are enough people with mental health problems, addictions and both that it's going to be difficult to impossible for the community to police itself well enough to be good neighbors. And that means the locals are only going to have so much patience with their presence. 

Rising to the Challenge

A Pastor Turned to ChatGPT Instead of a Doctor. Now He’s Suing OpenAI

Because of course he is. While much has been made of the idea that use of generative automation can lead to lower cognitive functioning, this "Florida Man" story prompts me to ponder if the problem isn't the age-old tendency of people to chase information that aligns with what they want to believe. After all, cranks and quacks on the Internet are nothing new; one doesn't need an LLM-powered chatbot to find someone who will tell you that the medical establishment is bunk and some random prescription medications will cure whatever ails you.

But OpenAI has a lot more money than some Internet rando. So suing them for not having the presence of mind to obtain a second opinion is much more likely to get somewhere, if for no other reason than it will be easier to find a lawyer willing to work the case. After all, lawyers don't like working for free any more than anyone else does, and OpenAI is more likely to have money to offer in a settlement.

I say this, however, as someone who doesn't have any particular distrust of the medical establishment, but with enough casual experience with generative automation to understand that it's not really a good source of information about things one doesn't know much about. And maybe I'm more unusual in that than I think I am. But it could simply be that, being one of those people who thinks of LLM chatbots as glorified auto-complete (even though I understand they're much more complicated than that) and so doesn't really expect it to provide accurate information, given that generative automation is not simply a search of published information.

In addition, while I understand that a chatbot can communicate with me in natural language, I don't see them as sapient, let alone as people. The fact that one might be both articulate and agreeable doesn't prompt me to place any more trust in it than I would in anyone else.

And perhaps that will turn out to be the sort of thing that differentiates people who can work with LLMs safely, from those who may run into trouble. Suspicion isn't really regarded as a virtue in modern society, but maybe the growth of chatbots in everyday life will change that. They're already showing that they aren't naturally inclined to follow rules when breaking them allows them to complete their assigned tasks. And so perhaps the real problem is the expectations that people convey to the models (or are built into them), rather than other flaws with the models themselves.

Pamphleteering

Election day for the Primaries here in Washington State is a couple of weeks away, and that means that ballots have gone out, and, preceding them, the Voters' Pamphlets. Pamphlet isn't really the word for them in most election cycles, this year's is 95 pages long; although this may be simply a function of the fact that King County is the most populous in the state, and, like many counties in western states, is rather large. Accordingly, there are a number of state and federal legislative districts that need to be accounted for.

For offices, like United States Representative, County Council member or State Supreme Court Justice, the half-page candidate statements are a bit of free advertising; as far as people actually read them, at least. (When I was in my old apartment, the trash car near the mailboxes tended to collect Voters' Pamphlets.) But, perhaps out of a sense of masochism, I do tend to read them, especially given that not all candidates for office send out campaign postcards, and I don't watch television any more.

Personally, I don't really find the candidate statements to be all that informative about the candidate's positions on things; if they're going to be forthcoming, their website, if they have one, is the place to look for that sort of information. So the Voters' Pamphlet is more useful as a source of insight into society; or, perhaps more accurately, what candidates, parties and political consultants thing will play well.

Talking about family is big; a number of candidates say how many children, and sometimes grandchildren, they have, and it's not all that uncommon to find mentions of pets (especially if they are rescues). Partisan buzzwords also put in an appearance; the Seattle area, and thus, King County as a whole, is fairly Blue, so Republicans tended to use low-key language to signal an affiliation with President Trump. Not quite "dog-whistle" subtle, but nothing particularly overt. Another interesting thing about the local Republicans was the number of candidates who described themselves as first-generation immigrants. primarily from Europe and Asia.

There was also a lot of talk about how broken and unresponsive government was. A number of people were running as "outsiders," and pledging to make government more transparent, more efficient and more answerable to the public. "The taxes are two damn high," was a constant refrain. Which I get; telling people that one is going to fix how broke they feel is a time-tested tactic; even if no-one ever seems to bring the promised feelings of wealth and prosperity once in office. It's something of a vicious cycle, I think; promise to make people feel more flush, only to have the next challenger to come along double down on the idea that people are justified in their feelings of poverty. For the supposed wealthiest nation on the face of the Earth, politics is often laser-focused on how much money people don't have.

But, I guess it works... otherwise, people would quit doing it. But I do think that part of the reason that people feel both poor and powerless is the constant litany of political advertising by candidates claiming that they can solve those problems. Creating the need works in other forms of advertising... it makes sense that it works here, as well. 

Slices

So a lot is being made of the hostility, especially among younger people, to generative "artificial intelligence." There's been a tendency, especially among techno-optimists, to describe this as nothing more than 21st-century Luddism, but I suspect that's being too dismissive. (Mainly because most people today don't really understand what the Luddites were all about.)

The point behind automation is to create circumstances such that the returns to capital are increased, at the expense of returns to labor. So, even if the overall pie is made bigger, the returns to labor don't grow as quickly as the pie does, assuming that they grow at all. And for the person whose slice doesn't grow, the fact that the pie is itself is larger doesn't do them any good.

And while I'm not sure that a lot of people would describe things in that way, I think that this is what a lot of people are responding to. And the political class has, in general, been willing to buy into promises from the investor and owner class that wealth will be spread around, even when past performance hasn't borne that out. Some of it is wishful thinking, but I also think that the goals of communities, and the goals of individuals aren't always in alignment, and most politicians look to further what they understand the goals of the broader community to be. And since aggregate measure can often hide individual problems, this leads to a disconnect.

I don't think that this time will be any different from past engagements with technology; industries will position themselves as essential, and thus any pain borne by the public is better than the alternative... the Good Shepherd problem all over again. Perhaps this will spur the general public to greater involvement, but I'm not sure what's changed recently that would drive this.

Practicality

The primary elections for this mid-term cycle start in early August here, and so the yard signs are starting to go up, the new Voters' Pamphlets have been delivered and postcards from candidates are arriving in mailboxes.

One such postcard landed in my mailbox this morning, from a Democrat running for the state legislature. I spent a bit of time looking at it, just to glean a basic understanding of who the guy was; as with most campaign postcards, it was a blend of personal story, endorsements and platitudes. Like the following:

I'll focus on practical solutions to bring down the costs of housing, childcare, groceries and other everyday essentials so people can get ahead, and build a future here.

So far, so boilerplate. And that's the problem. Everyone says they'll focus on "practical solutions" to whatever items their focus groups have identified as being the problems most likely to drive feelings of poverty. When was the last time a serious candidate for office vowed to spend their time investigating impractical solutions?

Part of the problem is that "practical solutions" tends to be candidate-speak for some magical process that makes the problem go away without anyone actually needing to pay anything for the fix. Because it's been understood how to lower the cost of housing for the past 20 years now: increase the available land that can be built on, to allow the supply of housing to expand. But that would have costs; not least of which for current homeowners, who would see the equity in their properties diminish if housing costs dropped.

And that's part of the problem with politics; the tendency to ignore the fact that many of these problems have stakeholders on the other side of the transaction who benefit from (and in some cases rely on) the status quo. Take child care. The fact that it's expensive for many parents doesn't mean that the providers and workers are making loads of money. Even if their living expenses could be lowered, it doesn't follow from this that they'd want to pass that savings on to parents. The immediate answer to get around this would be that the state could subsidize child care, but where would the money for this come from? And housing is even worse in this regard; lowering housing costs means homeowners loosing part of the value of their asset.

Big picture, this is why "practical solutions" to these problems have yet to really surface. Not because the last bunch of legislators were unwilling to engage with the problem, but because political solutions that don't come with costs for someone are few and far between. And the low hanging fruit is quickly picked, boxed and shipped for the easy win. But no-one has ever won, at least as near as I can tell, on a platform of making difficult trade-offs. And if the postcards I'm receiving are any indication, no-one will try it in this cycle, either.