This Side, That Side

"Long term, you tend to remember that kind of negative branding," [University of Alabama Marketing Professor Karen Anne] Wallach said. "And negative language then becomes part of what you associate with the brand."

The tech startups NPR spoke with for this story said they understand the risks of alienating large numbers of people with their cryptic ads. But the upside is too great.
Do you understand this billboard? If not, that's the whole point

While this might seem to be just another story about tech, and how it divides people into groups, the above points to something important about in-group and out-group signalling. Sometimes, alienating the out-group is what the in-group demands. Groups, in general, are defined both by who is a member of the group, and who is not. And for groups that want to maintain some sort of claim to exclusivity, who is kept out can be much more important that who is let in. And hurt feelings on the part of those kept out be damned.

For technology startups who are not attempting to sell themselves to the general public, the idea that the general public is unwelcome can be just the sort of thing that their intended customers want; because it not only sorts, but stratifies. And sometimes, nothing sells a product or service like the idea that being a member of the target audience is proof of one's own superiority.

If an advertiser is willing to accede to an expectation of flattery, even at the expense of others, on the part of the in-the-know, clearly neither the advertiser, nor their audience, expects that any hard feelings on the part of the out-group will be a problem for them. And this is nothing new. I would submit that it's been a facet of human history for as long as there has been history. That said, it doesn't make the practice any less toxic, especially in its more strident forms. But perhaps that's the problem; toxicity has become such a common part of people's everyday lives that it goes unnoticed.

To Be Divine

Superhuman Platform, Incorporated, the company formerly known as Grammarly, is facing a class action lawsuit over a feature it rolled out at the end of the Summer called Expert Review. Expert Review, which was recently removed, was effectively a "this person would make these suggestions about what you're writing," sort of feature, and claimed to offer advice from virtual versions of people like Stephen King, David Abulafia and Julia Angwin (who filed the lawsuit).

When Superhuman Platform CEO Shishir Mehrotra posted an apology for the agentic feature on LinkedIn, he noted "valid critical feedback from experts who are concerned that the agent misrepresented their voices." When Ann Handley, who identified herself as one of those experts weighed in (before commenting on the post was closed), her primary complaint was "building a commercial feature around experts' names and reputations without asking permission, without notification, and without compensation." While Mr. Mehrotra claimed that "the agent was designed to help users discover influential perspectives and scholarship relevant to their work, while also providing meaningful ways for experts to build deeper relationships with their fans," given that it was a subscription feature, and Superhuman Platform wasn't sharing any of the money, it seemed more like they'd simply found another way to have people work "for exposure." And there's a reason why an increasingly common response to that sort of offer is "Fuck you; pay me."

As a random layperson, the whole thing strikes me as openly unethical; but entirely sensible. If generative automation is a race, and losing carries serious, or even existential, consequences, the time to be ethical is later. Ms. Handley calls Mr. Mehrotra out for an ethos of "take first, apologize later." And while I suspect she's correct in that, it's just like any other instance of "ask forgiveness, not permission;" permission wouldn't have been forthcoming, but forgiveness will be. And this is a rational presumption to make; Uber's known flouting of laws hasn't resulted in the general public deciding that the company is too untrustworthy to do business with. And it's unlikely that the Court of Public Opinion will render a different verdict for Superhuman Platform. Investors, on the other hand, are quick to flee a company that's unwilling to do what it takes to make itself more profitable, and they bear none of the risk for the actions the company takes in pursuit of those profits. It's not like anyone is going to spend time in prison over this, and even if someone were, it wouldn't be the investors; so why wouldn't they push for companies to place profitability over ethical considerations, given that it's unlikely that people and businesses with Grammarly subscriptions are going to go elsewhere.

The only way to stop companies (and people for that matter) from preferring to ask for forgiveness rather than permission is to be consistently unforgiving, regardless of outcomes. And that's a hard sell in a culture where many people's primary focus is their own sense of (or concern for) poverty. People may be angry when someone cheats them to pass the savings along to someone else, but they're often ready to look the other way when the savings are being passed along to them. And businesses know this, their executives are members of the public, just like everyone else. They may often speak in the stilted language of finance and investment, but they're not aliens.

Some heads may roll over this; if he's unlucky, Shishir Mehrotra's will be one of them. But Superhuman Platform, Incorporated will survive. People and businesses will still pay to use Grammarly, and investors will still see returns. And that all but guarantees that "take first, apologize later" will remain the standard order of operations.

One of Three

I started listening to the most recent episode of EconTalk, in which Professor Roberts interviews one Hanno Sauer about the latter's new book: The Invention of Good and Evil. I have to admit that I gave up not too long into it, in part because of this statement from Mr. Sauer:

 And, now you get the opposite problem when you move to a naturalistic Darwinian framework. All of a sudden, the default assumption seems to be that it's 'nature, red in tooth and claw.' It's dog-eat-dog, it's elbows out. Everyone is selfish. Everyone is essentially sociopathic. Right?

And, now you get the problem: Okay, evidently there is friendship and heroism and love and altruism and sacrifice. But, where do those come from? It seems to not make any sense.

It irked me, because the basic idea that, under "a naturalistic Darwinian framework" that "everyone is essentially sociopathic," doesn't actually come out of any of Mr. Darwin's work. As I noted in my (unfinished) blogging of my way through On the Origin of Species:

There are three distinct facets to the Struggle for Existence, as Darwin explains it - competition within a species, competition between species, and mitigating the hostile effects of one's environment.

Mr. Sauer's book, rather than seeking to correct the misconception that the "default assumption" should be that competition within species is the norm, leans into it. And I found myself asking why. Or, on the larger scale, why does the misconception persist so? I can't possibly be the only person who has read Charles Darwin, or recalled that person-to-person competition is only part of one of three primary conflicts that Mr. Darwin identifies. So why don't more people push back against it? Why accept the hostile framing that the idea that "the Darwinian view of Evolution requires one to be murderously pseudo-Machiavellian" and then try to argue that unselfishness can grow within it, when it strikes me as much easier to point out that "friendship and heroism and love and altruism and sacrifice" make the other two conflicts much easier, and start from there?

Speculation on other people's motives is often a one-way ticket to creating a strawman argument, so I won't indulge in it, other than to say that there must be incentives at play that I am either unaware of, or not fully crediting. Because while it may seem unreasonable to me, there are assuredly reasons for it that people feel are worthwhile.

Of course, it may simply be that the misconception is widely held enough that people don't always realize that it is, in fact, a misconception. It's like Fyodor Dostoevsky's bit of dialog in The Brothers Karamazov, where Ivan notes: "If God does not exist, anything is permissible." This is commonly taken to be absolutely true in much of the Western world, especially by Christians, despite the fact that there is nothing in the viewpoint of Moral/Ethical Realism that requires some sort of divinity to create the rules, just as there in nothing in Mathematics that demands some sort of divine order for 2 + 2 to equal 4. Perhaps it's just easier to set out to prove the argument incorrect than to point out that it doesn't actually seem to make any sense, given the world as we understand it.

Discollected

While I was thinking about the idea of collective action to change the fate of the job market, I noted that the United States is a very individualistic culture. And considering that a bit more deeply, it occurred to me that they may have been what was behind George Will's observation that here in the United States, we don't prevent catastrophes, we clean up after them. And maybe that's because prevention requires genuine collective, cooperative action, while clean-up can be countless individual and small-group efforts, localized to the specific places that people care about.

I think I need to buy some subscriptions to quality news sources. I'm starting to realize how impoverished my thinking can become when I don't have access to good thinkers, even if I may otherwise disagree with them.

Shifting

I was looking at the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Employment Projections, and the World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report, both of which were updated/released last year. Both of them had software developers on their lists of the fastest-growing jobs. The WEF predicted that Software and Applications Developers would see Global Net Growth of 57% between 2025 and 2030, while the BLS predicted that Software Developers would grow by 15.8% between 2024 and 2034.

It's easy to look at the numbers of layoff notices that have rocked the technology industry in the United States and decide, on that basis, that bureaucrats don't know anything, but of course they couldn't have known what choices people were actually going to make. One can fill out a survey or answer a questionnaire, and then have other factors come into play that result in different decisions being made. And, whether we like those decisions (or their impacts on our lives) or not, people are remunerated quite handsomely to make them.

And that's what came to mind when I saw this chart, in the Future of Jobs Report. It predicts that the share of work done by people, without recourse to automation or some sort of automated enhancement, will drop from 47% in 2025  to 33% in 2030, while the share of work done solely by automation grows from 22% to 34%.

And it's with these numbers in mind, I suspect, that people proclaim dire warning of what will happen to people who don't pivot into the jobs of the future (many of which pay less than the jobs of today). But this decline is no more a given than the increase in software development jobs was. This, too, is something that's going to be driven by the choices that people make. And maybe what's needed is for more people to be involved in those choices.

Now, Dario Amodei may be correct, and what he terms “powerful AI”  may indeed create a “country of geniuses in a datacenter” that's just better at everything we do than we are. But until that comes about (and, given human history, likely even when it does) we have choices as to what we value. There's no reason to presume that it's impossible to direct where the future is going to go by adding some intentional design to the mix. I've said before that a question that bears answering is what new demand for human labor generative automation is going to create. But that buys into the hostile framing that posits that valuable work for humans will be relegated to the leftovers that automation, even if otherwise ubiquitous can't do. Maybe, as people, we'd all be better off if there was an active effort to find/create and then nurture roles that lie outside of the capacity of machines to do, and to start moving towards them now. (Normally, I go out of my way to avoid using the word "we," since it tends to be something of a weasel word, but here, maybe, enough of humanity is in the same boat that "we" makes sense.)

Because if it's undesirable that the World Economic Forum's prediction that out of every 100 workers, some "11 would be unlikely to receive the reskilling or upkskilling needed, leaving their employment prospects increasingly at risk," turns out to be true, perhaps the onus is to come up with something that those 11 can do that makes good use of the skills they already have.

Passively accepting the idea that automation is a bear coming for the job market, and so people's primary goal should be running faster than enough other people that the beast is satiated before it gets to them, is a recipe for disaster. The people the bear seeks to eat are unlikely to go down without a fight, and the conflict could wind up doing much more injury to the collective than the bear ever could. Here in the highly individualistic United States, this may be something of a heresy, but perhaps it's time that people decide to hang together before technology, and the incentive structures behind it, hang everyone separately.