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.

Bit of a Misstep

I was listening to a recent episode of Slate Money, and Felix Salmon was noting that there still wasn't a particularly compelling use case for Bitcoin. Co-host Elizabeth Spiers immediately chimed in with "money laundering." Mr. Salmon and guest co-host Stacy-Marie Ishmael stepped in with corrections, noting that Bitcoin is a terrible vehicle for money laundering.

While it's a fairly common misconception, I was somewhat surprised that a veteran financial journalist and former analyst would make that sort of error, which requires a fundamental lack of understanding of how blockchains work, and therefore how crypto/digital currencies can even be viable. As an aside, while Mr. Salmon and Ms. Ishmael didn't take the time to explain just why Bitcoin isn't a good money-laundering too, and I felt this was something of a miss, I understand it from the point of view of time-limits on a podcast.

But it's a useful reminder of something that it may be easy to forget when it comes to the news media, even relatively specialized news media; a lot of even narrow-seeming topics still contain vast bodies of knowledge within them, and it's hard to know all of it. While Ms. Spiers error caught me off-guard, in hindsight, it's understandable; cryptocurrencies (not the best name for them, really) aren't something that most people have to deal with very often, so the details aren't always relevant. And one can report on, say, the airline industry without needing a working understanding of how airplanes work, after all.

Part of the thing about trusting the media, or any other sort of informed party, about topics one doesn't know much about is the need to assume that the person presenting the information actually has accurate sources themselves. In this sense, I suspect that the media isn't any more biased than anyone else... because why should journalists be any better about knowing what they don't know than the butcher, baker or candlestick maker?

I get it, however, because it's not always comfortable to have the feeling that one can spend a significant amount of time engaged in learning about the world around one, only to not be use that one knows any more than they did before. 

The City

The Seattle Waterfront, as seen from just out into Puget Sound.

Seattle is, I think, a nicer place that it's given credit for. I don't go into Seattle proper all that often, mainly because parking can be a royal pain, but I think that I should spend more time in the city. And there is, after all, much more to it than just downtown, and other places where there's a lot going on. 

2.3 Meters

If, as Karl Marx opined, "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people," the idea that the spread of automated systems that can reliably mimic human cognition and interaction will make "genuine human connection" more valuable is the copium (or maybe hopium) of the current day.

In part because I believe that it's not the technology that's at issue here. I remember Twenty Minutes into the Future and (the American version of) Max Headroom, and the conversations I would have with friends about them. While Max was created with practical effects, as the computer technology of the time wasn't sophisticated enough to manage it, we all thought it would be amazingly cool if computers could generate a character like that. While I have nothing against Matt Frewer, we were somewhat disappointed that he played Max via prosthetics, as opposed to character being CGI.

Of course, at the time, there wasn't the idea that the point behind advancing such technology was to advance an apparent class war between the investor class and people who wanted to work for a living. Which is what's in play in the present. But I have my doubts as to the longevity of the sentiment; if for no other reason than people are adept at seeing themselves as exceptional, and thus likely to succeed where other (lesser) people fail. And I think that as the fear of the people behind Large Language Models fades, the opposition to agents and other automated systems on the part of the public at large will fade.

To a degree, it's something of a phantom to begin with. For instance, the TikTok/YouTube series Fruit Love Island took off, racking up millions of views despite being obviously created with extensive use of generative automation. And several people have come forth to claim that they are ai.cinema021/AI Cinema, the anonymous creator behind the videos. Sure, there's been some pushback, but people wouldn't be hoping to pass themselves off as the creator of a property that met with universal opprobrium.

As the tools advance, especially those that are very inexpensive, or even free, to use, there will be more and more media created with it. And while some, or perhaps most, of that will fall into the category of "slop," some non-zero amount of it will be deemed worthy of people's attention. And so technology companies like Meta, Alphabet and TikTok will move to create their own material to create audiences and capture revenue. And since they who control the distribution channel controls the experience, they can privilege their own items over those of other people; presuming that they even need to.

Of course, the technology firms could shoot themselves in the foot by placing significantly more pressure on the job market, and convincing people that the technology needs to go, but even then, that's likely to be more delay than denial.