Consolation

 Microsoft's Brad Smith made a blog post today about responding to concerns, especially from young people, about generative automation and the possible impacts on employment.

It's a very cromulent bit of corporation-speak, designed to convey to readers that Microsoft isn't so wealthy, powerful or distant that it doesn't care about people's worries concerning technology. And Mr. Smith is willing to say some things that other corporate executives have been less willing to; he notes that there has been "corporate pressure to reduce headcount to help pay for AI’s enormous capital expenditures," rather than pretending that job cuts were the result of generative automation being able to do the work better. I think I still fault him for making this admission only after that reality had become public knowledge, but honesty is honesty.

But as I read it, I kept being drawn back to the Copilot Super Bowl ad (since removed from YouTube) that aired in 2024. For all that Mr. Smith says that the goal of generative automation is to help people do better work, rather than replace them, the promise of that initial advertisement was that people could be "soloprenuers" by letting Copilot do the things they would hire other people to do. And I said at the time: "If one's fear is that technology will drive isolation, or that AI will render one's skills obsolete, the message of this commercial is not reassuring." I would liked to have seen Mr. Smith acknowledge that there are people who are afraid because Microsoft's messaging gave them reason to be afraid.

Mr. Smith notes that in their book Open to Work: How to Get Ahead in the Age of AI, Ryan Roslansky and Aneesh Raman note five "soft skills that are uniquely human," namely: curiosity, creativity, compassion, communications, and courage. Which is all fine and good. But these are not traits that are in short supply. If the majority of people thought that the demand for these skills were high enough to keep the job market afloat, there wouldn't be so much worry about a jobpocalypse on the horizon.

If widespread adoption of generative automation by businesses is inevitable, and the jobs shed to free up budget for capital expenditures aren't coming back, the technology is going to have to create demand for human labor somewhere else. And "human observation and insight" aren't going to be that demand unless, somehow, the percentage of returns going to labor increases markedly, such that demand for automation-produced goods and services really skyrockets. And that's not a prediction that technology industry analysts seem to be making at this point.

To the degree that progress can be described as a process of creative destruction, I suspect that the public at large is better off when creativity drives destruction, rather than destruction demanding sudden creativity. But the public at large isn't calling the shots. It's the investor class, in search of returns on their investments. And as a high-ranking executive at a publicly-traded company, it's not difficult to tell which of those groups Mr. Smith is more immediately answerable to. And so I wonder about the motivation of this post, from a public relations standpoint. Is this honestly what the leadership of the company is thinking, or is it being conciliatory in an attempt to head off anger that may impact profitability and investor confidence?

Early

I was at Costco this weekend, and noticed that a giant skeleton decoration was already up and on sale. While June seems pretty early for Halloween decorations to be on store shelves, it's something of a necessity if things are both going to be sold, but not in the way of the earlier and earlier start to the Christmas shopping season.

Personally, not being a big Christmas person, I'm not a fan of the longer and longer time that's being devoted to it. But I get it from the point of view of retailers. To the degree that Christmas shopping can be chalked up to impulse buys, it makes sense that stores that have items out first are going to capture sales. And this sets up something of a race to have things out early. And that pushes other seasonal items, like Halloween, earlier in the year.

We'll see if Halloween decorations are on the shelves in May next year, or if the march of the start of the Christmas season takes a year or two to catch its breath.
 

Numbered

I was watching a video by Hank Green, where he was announcing his new podcast, "Humans," and one of the points he was making was that to people who create media for the internet, whether that's YouTube videos, podcasts or what-have-you, they tend to see their audience in terms of numbers, rather than as individuals. Mr. Green said that he spends time in the comments of his videos specifically to interact with people as, well, people.

After that, I watched a short by a guy named "blumineck," in which he related the story of how he was fooled into making an outraged response video to someone appearing to be unsafe with a heavy bow, and had nearly posted it before he realized he'd fallen for a hoax. His takeaway from that was to always verify things, especially those that make one angry, before responding.

Which it pretty common advice about dealing with things on the Internet. I first encountered it well more than a decade ago.

But it occurs to me that between Mr. Green and blumineck, there may be a more general lesson there. And that is: "To many people on the Internet, you're simply a number."

When I posted a "fraudspotting" post on LinkedIn that gained enough traction to top 50,000 "impressions," LinkedIn didn't congratulate me on informing people, or potentially sparing a person whose profile had been copied from reputational damage. Rather they took note of the numbers, and encouraged me to post more in an attempt to keep those numbers rising.

Hank Green had pointed out in his video that for YouTube creators, their interests are somewhat aligned with those to YouTube (Alphabet) itself. YouTube's goal is to increase the number of people who watch videos on the website, and the amount of time that they watch. And to the degree that YouTube rewards more views with more money, a creator can share that goal.

But the goal of making numbers go up can lead to situations in which someone pretends to injure themselves to drive sharing of their video. It can lead to making inflammatory claims for the sake of responses. Or simply a raft of things that all come across as roughly the same as people copy what they have seen others be successful at, in a hope of driving the same numbers.

It's a different mindset than one would have for dealing with a live audience. And keeping that in mind makes the Internet more intelligible. 

Fanrage

I don't know if people understand how much the fandom of something or someone can come to feel valued and respected by the idea that whatever it is exists for them and them specifically. Telling fans to chill out or calm down in the face of changes to the object of their feelings is to tell them that the needs the fandom fulfills are, in fact, trivial.

And, to be sure, to many people, they are. For me, whether or not a character in a movie adaptation is faithful to some original portrayal of them is completely unimportant. But that can also be said for a lot of things that people find important... Importance is, after all, a subjective determination.

So I think that discounting people's emotional attachments may be something done too often in haste. 

Party All the Time

The lower court also “failed to follow our instruction in Callais that the mere fact that voters of different races vote for different parties is not relevant to proving racially polarized voting patterns.”
Supreme Court permits Alabama to use congressional map struck by lower court as racially discriminatory. SCOTUSblog

So then, one wonders, what is?

In the unsigned order, handed down late last month, the 6 conservative justices of the United States Supreme Court basically said that a racial community that consistently votes in a partisan manner are partisans first, and members of their racial community second. Accordingly, gerrymandering districts in such a way as to dilute their voting power is a partisan act, and not a racially discriminatory one.

I understand the logic in play there, even if I highly doubt that this was what Congress had in mind with the various Voting Rights acts. But those were a long time ago, and in the meantime, the Supreme Court has become a hotbed of partisanship. Not because the justices are bad at their jobs, but because the White House and the Senate effectively control access to the court; and with the President now being the effective leader of their political party, anyone who cannot be shown to be loyal to the party line has zero chance of being nominated, let alone confirmed to the bench. In other words, being a loyal partisan is the job of a Justice of the Supreme Court.

And thus, we have a decision widely regarded as nakedly partisan.

Personally, I'm somewhat impressed the ability of partisans to see partisan bias as good for the country. The whole reason why the Louisiana legislature had redrawn its maps was to add another Republican seat to its Congressional delegation, and it had apparently concluded that there was no way they were going to convince enough voters in either of the districts held by Democrats to change their affiliations; so writing one of the districts out of existence was their only option.

One can debate whose fault this is; Black voters in Louisiana for not buying whatever it was Republicans there are selling, or the Republicans for not being willing to make a deal appealing enough to win over those voters. But the end result of the gerrymander is that it no longer matters... Not needing any more actual votes to secure a new seat, Republicans no longer need to offer anything better to Democratic voters, and they have no reason to respond to any shift those voters might make in their direction. Which, in turn, means that Democrats have no reason to consider Republican candidates. One-party systems, even when not enforced by law, tend to be unresponsive to fairly high levels of dissatisfaction for just this reason; unless their base of support completely collapses, they have the ability to tell those who disagree with them to simply lump it. And they don't have to reward anyone outside of their base of support, because those people have no way of inflicting pain on the establishment. And if their base currently benefits at the expense of outsiders, there's an active incentive to keep them outside.

Of course, one of the recurring blind spots of partisans is to see their positions as objectively right and good, and see the public as having a responsibility to them, rather than the other way around. I think that American politics has become more and more partisan since the election of Ronald Reagan, back when I was in junior high school, with Newt Gingrich and company really kicking the process into high gear. (Although this might simply be a factor of my being too young to really follow politics prior to that.) But they were abetted in this by a general fecklessness in government by both parties at a number of levels, which left a lot of people (and i think more join them every day) with the impression that the only way they could protect their interests was single-party dominance.

The very idea that partisan gerrymanders are allowable, but strictly racial gerrymanders are not speaks to this. While gerrymanders rely on the fact that people's votes can be reliably predicted fairly well in advance, their point is to make elections non-competitive. And this lessens the importance of policies that impact the electorate as a whole, in favor of the preferences of primary voters. To use myself as an example, if I only vote in the general elections, and will base my vote on the party affiliation of whomever is on the ballot, why should any care what my opinion on anything is? My vote isn't in play, and so it affords me no power. Given that political parties are simply private political organizations, why hand them, via their most vocal members, this sort of influence?

Coming up on 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the United States is still a disunified (and largely dysfunctional) polity. There's no rational reason why Democratic and Republican voters should be so at odds with one another that so many of them won't even consider voting across party lines. The divide may not be as total as it's often described, but it's present, and deeper than I suspect is healthy.

Elizabeth Willing Powel: “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”
Benjamin Franklin: “A republic, ma’am. If you can keep it.”
Overheard, it is said, at the Constitutional Convention of 1787

Keep it? I'm not convinced that many people even want any part of it.