What Do We Want?

There's been a lot of back-and-forth over whether or not the widespread adoption of generative automation is going to usher in a new golden age or simply detonate the employment market. What tends to be left out of these discussions, at least as I encounter them, is any mention of aggregate demand. And that seems like an oversight, because the question at hand can usually be boiled down to "How much demand will new automation technologies create (or destroy) and how much of it will it be able to meet itself?"

Because the problem isn't automation per se... it's the fact that there isn't pent-up demand for human labor waiting to take up all of the slack in the labor market. And while people predict that demand is coming, no one has any idea when it might happen, considering that people are still saying "automation could create new jobs people haven't even thought of yet." I think that part of the problem is that new occupations are seen as purely emergent phenomena that simply come along at random one day, so there's no point in attempting to actively bring them about. Which may be true, but new occupations come along to meet new needs. And while some things will always be a surprise, it's possible to predict certain needs a few years or so in advance. This is, after all, how the Bureau of Labor Statistics puts together its "Fastest Growing Occupations" list. In other words, the fact that people may be unable to design the future they want isn't a reason to not be attempting to get out in front of it.

The problem with both the doom-and-gloom and techno-optimist camps is that their outlooks tend to be passive; either there's nothing to be done, or a solution will magically appear where it's least expected. Even the people who are talking up (or selling) ways for people to future-proof themselves against a more automated future are dealing in individual preparation for an inevitable outcome.

But human history is created by, well, people. As a species, we're the ones driving, rather than simply being along for the ride. There's no need to be resigned to a "wait, and see what develops" mindset. But it's going to take some doing. But the difficult thing about it is that it's going to take working together in a situation where the temptation to do better for oneself by jumping ship is going to be high.

Beyond Valuation

It's been said that people only value things when they are, or have been, uncertain that they could actually attain them. And I think that this explains a lot about the way the modern United States works. For most Americans, the resources to build material affluence are uncertain. Circumstances change and what seemed secure one day can vanish the next. But human resources, and human potential, are so common as to be seen as free for the asking. Human capital, as it were, is overwhelmingly abundant, and that shows no sign of changing.

The United States has a rate of preventable deaths that's been calculated to be about 840 people per 100,000, and while there are initiatives to lower that, as a matter of public health, I've never heard it mentioned as an unaffordable loss of needed manpower. The deaths are a humanitarian tragedy, not an economic one.

I remember the economic boom brought about by the rapid expansion of Internet technologies into modern life, and here in the Seattle area, it caused genuine labor shortages. Restaurants had to work hard, and offer bonuses, in order to attract people to work in them, and a few that I can think of closed because they couldn't manage it. Tech companies came across as being desperate for workers, and demonstrating that one had any sort of aptitude for the work was enough to land one a decently-paying job. Now, those days are past. But even at the time, this was not a phenomenon that was spread equally around the nation as a whole. There were still depressed parts of the United States at the time, where there were more people than there was a need for labor. Technology companies may have been vacuuming up anyone who would stand still within sight of a Human Resources employee, but the unemployment rate was never at risk of dropping to zero.

For all that demographers, economists and, in some quarters, racists look at the current birth trends and foresee a future with too few people entering the labor market, the fact of the matter is that we're not making use of all of the people that who are available to work in the present. Leaving aside those who are simply unemployed, there are significant numbers of people who are underemployed, or simply not able to contribute to their full potential.

And that's unlikely to change until people really need it to. The United States, as a matter of cultural tradition, preaches a message that it up to the individual to gain the knowledge, and put in the effort, to make their best contribution to the society as a whole. When a society genuinely needs its people to get out there and make things better, it doesn't leave it up to chance like that.

You Say

Recently, large-scale layoffs at Microsoft have been the talk of the town, mainly because they've done quite a bit to erode people's confidence in the direction of the economy. The Trump Administration's haphazard tariff proclamations are unlikely to restore the high-wage jobs that are being shed, because they're not going overseas; they're simply being swept aside to make room for new technology.

When I was laid off from Microsoft just over six years ago, that's how I described it; I had been laid off from Microsoft. But now, a different way of talking about these things has emerged, with people referring to themselves as having been impacted by the layoffs.

I find it an interesting wording, because it makes the layoffs come across as a separate thing from what's actually happening to people. The layoff moves from an effect to a cause. And the loss of jobs is merely one of the effects of that cause. Whether it softens the blow, or this is simply people mirroring the way the company itself describes the events in question, I don't know. But I suspect that if this trend continues, it's going to lead to a change in the way people see both themselves and their jobs/careers.

And perhaps that's the point. While a lot of corporation-speak tends to strike me as essentially emergent, perhaps this particular turn of phrase is a matter of design. Language does, after all, shape the way people look at the world around them.

Time Travel

Spent the day at a local Renaissance Faire. This is the sort of thing that I did a lot of when I was young, but ad sort of drifted away from. I'm an old man now, so it's more tiring that it used to be, but it was an enjoyable time.
 

Rolling the Line

In early August of 2013, Seattle taxi drivers slow-rolled their way through downtown in an act of protest, hoping to pressure the Seattle City Council to, basically, enforce the law on Uber and Lyft, which they saw as a threat to their livelihoods. We all understand how it turned out. The taxi drivers could hold up downtown traffic, but no-one could hold back the tide.

But the problem that the taxi drivers had wasn't really the technology. By the time this protest happened, Uber's practice of evading, or simply ignoring, local laws and regulations was pretty well known, although the proof, in the form of a batch of leaked company documents, wouldn't come to light for years. The simple fact of the matter was that many people didn't care; they liked the lower prices and ease of use that ride sharing applications offered, and that was more important to them than whether or not the rules were being followed.

The fundamental disunity of the United States results in a lot of situations like this, where people are protesting what they think they have the most (or any) control over, even when that's different than the actual problem at hand.

Exhausted

Sunday was one of the first sunny days in a while, and so I can understand this homeless man taking advantage of the Spring weather to get some rest. Being homeless is not easy, even in the Puget Sound area's relatively mild climate, so I can imagine that a relatively safe place to simply doze was welcome.

Signs of Spring

Spring Rhododendrons

Because the rainy season in the Puget Sound area lasts until the beginning of Summer, there are May showers to go along with the April ones. Still nature does not wait for sunshine, so flowers are blooming around the area. Rhododendrons are common around here and this sort of bright purple variety especially so. I never really noticed how common they were before I received my first camera, but now I tend to find them somewhat photogenic, perhaps because of the unruly nature of their petals.

Nowheresville

More experimentation with generative automation: This time, a question: Does Aurora, Illinois, exist in the real world, or only in Wayne's World?

On Tuesday, I was talking with friends about movies. Specifically the fact that very few movies are filmed in the places they are set, and how sometimes, this is obvious. The example that came to my mind was Wayne's World, but that came out more than 30 years ago, so I checked Google to verify that it was, as I remembered, set in Aurora, Illinois. In the "AI Overview" Gemini informed me that the city of Aurora (where I went to high school), was fictional. This prompted me to do a bit of digging. The prompt was the same in each case, and simple: "Where was Wayne's World set?"

Perplexity AI also claimed that Aurora was a fictional town.

Copilot hedged its bet on this one, opening with the claim that Aurora was fictional, but closing with the statement that Wayne's World was set in a fictionalized version of Aurora.

ChatGPT takes the honors on this one, stating that "the story is firmly rooted in the fictionalized version of Aurora," and never claiming that Aurora itself was fictional.

Part of what seems to be in play here is the distinction (which is fairly important in American English), between a "fictional" place and a "fictionalized" place. For instance, Cyberpunk's "Night City" is a fictional place, located within a fictionalized version of Northern California. While that statement is clear to most people, generative automation (as illustrated here by Copilot) can be uncertain of the difference.

The other big piece of this is generative automation attempting to accurately convey the difference between the location in which a movie is set, and the location in which it is filmed. Wayne's World was filmed mostly in California; anyone, like myself, who has spent time in Aurora (or anywhere else in Northern Illinois) can tell you there are no palm trees lining the streets.

The fact that apparently no filming was actually done in Aurora (Chicago is a close as they came, apparently), seems to have prompted the automated systems to conclude that Aurora wasn't a real place. Again, however, ChatGPT was able to be pretty clear about this.

Big picture, this is fairly trivial, but it illustrates one of the problems with injecting generative automation into Search results. I knew that Aurora wasn't fictional, because I'm from the area. But Chicagoland is a big, and dense, place. I couldn't name all of the suburbs if my life depended on it. And for people completely unfamiliar with the area, there's nothing out of the ordinary about writers and filmmakers setting stories in fictional places, such as Twin Peaks, Washington. So there's no immediate reason to doubt the statement that Aurora, Illinois is also a made-up place. Sure, there are disclaimers that "AI" makes mistakes. So why include a system that can introduce errors into results in the first place?

I Don't Know, Somebody

Guess who isn't named in this headline or blurb?

The fact that Billy Evans, the person who is actually running this new startup, called Haemanthus, isn't actually named in the article until the third paragraph demonstrates what I suspect most people already know about this story: It's not about Mr. Evans, or his company. It's about hoping that a front-page story about Elizabeth Holmes is still enough to drive clicks. Theranos is called out in the URL, and the story's only tags are "elizabeth holmes" and "theranos," even though the story is allegedly not about them.

Except for the fact that it is about them. Only a few paragraphs at the end of the piece directly deal with Haemanthus, and the technology it's working on, information gleaned from a January patent filing and anonymous supposed "sources," who are the stereotypical "people who allegedly know something but shouldn't be talking to the media about it and whose motives are completely opaque to the reader." But the bulk of the story is little more than a rehashing of earlier stories. In other words, it could have been a link.

National Public Radio, like any other outlet, pushes stories like these because, in the end, they work. I'm willing to bet that most of the clicks on this story came from people looking to see what new dirt had been unearthed on Ms. Holmes, or to make sure they stayed far away from whatever the "new biotech testing startup" turned out to be.

And this is the fundamental problem with the media in general. For all of the high-minded rhetoric and lofty ambitions, in the end, news is a business, and when subscriptions aren't mandatory (as they can't be when the "news" is more about entertainment than usable information) it pays for itself by gathering attention by any means necessary.

Retread

Assuming he ever gets his act together with them, one of President Trump's stated goals with imposing unilateral worldwide tariffs is to incentivize a renewal of manufacturing in the United States, something with most people who aren't hyped on manufacturing jobs think is a fool's errand. Accordingly, there has been a decent amount of questioning in the media over just why so many Americans come across as nostalgic for "Made in America."

I would expect it's for the same reason why so many left-leaning journalists and pundits seemed to pin their hopes on the idea that Trump voters would come to their senses and withdraw their support in favor of more old-school establishment Republicans: People understand what the past looks like, and they believe that all that needs to happen to get back there is winding back some number of changes that occurred after a given point in time.

A past, even a misremembered one, is therefore a known quantity, and so seems to carry less uncertainty and risk than charting a new path. And since everyone I've encountered who wants to wind back the clock appears to have forgotten just why things changed in the first place, there's a sense that back in the day, things just worked, and so there's no reason to not go back to doing things that way.

In my experience, the more people seem to feel that they need something to work, the more confident they are that it will work, regardless of evidence to the contrary. Such is the nature of faith.

Epiphany

Over about the past decade or so, the American media "establishment," as it were, has taken to the word "unprecedented" like a kindergartner who's just found a new stuffed animal. Donald Trump and his cronies, with their willingness to reinterpret, sidestep or simply ignore inconvenient laws, regulations ans social mores, have given the Left-leaning press ample opportunity to describe situations as being absolutely unique in the annals of American history.

And to be sure, a lot of the things that President Trump, his Administration and his political supporters do does come across as unusual. To, I've come to realize, a certain segment of the population, of which I happen to be a member, even if I lack a strong partisan identity or attachments.

I've understood, for some time now, as an intellectual matter, that the American Left and the American Right understood the world differently, and I understood that my own worldview is closer to that of the Left than the Right. Being Black, I grew up in a home where it was taken for granted that the Democrats were on "our side," and the Republicans were not, and as I've gone through life, most (if not all) of the people in my social circles at any given time were, to some or another degree, left of center. When it comes to staunch Conservatives/Republicans (with the understanding that, especially now, there is some daylight between those two labels), I could generally count the ones that I knew reasonably well on the fingers of one hand... and thumbs, just be technical about it, are not fingers.

I'm not sure what, precisely, triggered the realization, but it came to me that for many of the people who support Trump, the Biden, Obama and (possibly) Clinton Administrations likely felt like the way the Trump Administration feels to a lot of people now: hyper-partisan, unconcerned with the fortunes of the nation as a whole, corrupt and willing to bend the rules in pursuit of its aims to be point of seeming capricious if not openly lawless. Likewise, I think that many Republicans see Democratic constituencies in much the same way; disinterested in what happens to other people and willing to co-sign clearly corrupt practices, as long as they get what they want, at someone else's expense.

As I noted a bit ago, I'd understood this as an intellectual matter. After all, I understand how partisanship works: "our side" good, "their side" bad, and any deviation from that party line is punishable. But because most of my social circle leans left, I understand how they feel threatened what reads to them as Republicans wanting to blend Christianity into the State, or why they feel that President Trump has found ways to unjustly (or even corruptly) enrich himself through his real-estate holdings and cryptocurrency token offerings and why they worry that his moves against pro-Palestine protestors and foreign nationals critical of him are simply preludes to an organized attack on free speech rights. But for the other side, I understood that they viewed the expansion of gender, the ideology of race, "cancel culture" et cetera as bad things, but I lacked any real link that would give me any insight into how they saw, and felt about the world.

Until it dawned on me that for a lot of them, all of the things that the "Mainstream Media" breathlessly rushed to report as "unprecedented" were for them, simply par for the course. To be sure, I still can't really give examples other than I understand how one could look at the entire Hunter Biden affair and conclude that then-President Biden was acting out of something other than the love of a father for his son.

So I will admit that I'm left mostly with "flipping the script," and simply taking it as true that a fundamental characteristic of partisanship is faith in people who share the same partisan label as oneself. And so Republicans honestly believe that, if the nation had a genuinely honest media, that from the early 1990s until this past January, there would have been a steady stream of outrages coming out of the White House and Capitol Hill, with some number of elected Democrats, and/or their appointees, behind each of them. (In much the same way that I know people who believe that Donald Trump and Congressional Republicans are keeping unethical and/or illegal actions out of the public eye, with assistance from media "élites.")

But what also struck me was the understanding of how at least some of the Republicans/Conservatives I know think of me, and other Black people. I'd heard a number of the standard complaints against the fact that Black people, when they vote, are overwhelmingly likely to vote Democratic; things like Democrats took the Black vote for granted and gave nothing in return, or that Democratic policies were designed to foster dependence on government. But Right-leaning Populism in the United States is tripartite; it sees the public as divided into three groups: the People, the Élites and the Undeserving Others, who accept benefits (that rightfully belong to the People) from the Élites in return for votes. But there are multiple possible reasons why the Undeserving Others to play that part. While it's commonly presumed that they're either ignorant or gullible, which is how it was commonly conveyed to me, I think that for a large, and growing, segment of the American Right, the Others, whether they are poor urban minorities, non-white immigrants or people who reject traditional Christian mores and lifestyles, are at best indifferent to concerns of what's good for the nation as a whole, and at worst, actively seeking to enrich themselves by taking what rightfully belongs to others.

Which would explain why, despite the fact that the last vestiges of officially-sanctioned racial discrimination lasted into my lifetime, for many White Americans, Black people are seen as not only equal, but advantaged and powerful. And why should people on the Right be any less likely to see the advantaged and powerful as any less ethically suspect than people on the Left do?

Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.

Thomas Jefferson, 1785

Thomas Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers were, I think, more clear-eyed about the future of the Republic they were attempting to build than we give them credit for. And that credit is withheld because it doesn't cast the United States as some magical place where the basic problems of humanity somehow simply cease to exist. Whether Mr. Jefferson was right in the idea that the United States simply isn't big enough for multiple racial groups to live together in harmony, his understanding of the divisive nature of the basic human instincts of anger and resentment still reads as spot-on.

In a little more than a year will be the 250th anniversary of the ratification and signing of "The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America." The Declaration of Independence, as it's more commonly known, was an aspirational document, and like most of the type, doesn't spell out how to actually attain its aspirations. And this leaves open the potential to simply declare them attained.

The factors that Mr. Jefferson noted may not be indelible, but combating them requires work. Work which I don't think there was ever a serious effort to undertake. And the continued fragmentation of the United States into mutually-hostile groups is evidence of this.

Dissension

There was a protest in downtown Bothell on Saturday, complete with drums (because, for some reason I have yet to fathom, no lefty protest is complete without them). I happened by as things were winding down, but still managed to get a few shots of people before they dispersed.

And disperse they did; an hour later, you wouldn't have realized that anything had happened. Which I guess is the best outcome, in a way. It's better than the lingering smell of tear gas and the police still being engaged in removing barricades and transporting the arrested.

I'm not a big one for protests; I don't consider them to be effective. There are, I think, better ways to change people's minds. But I suspect that they both require more effort and bring less camaraderie than being in a large group of like-minded people. Which may be the real reason why I don't see myself attending them; I don't see the world enough like the people who do to feel that I'm among "my people."

Untold

One Joseph Czuba was sentenced to 53 years (with credit for time served) in prison for attacking a Moslem woman who was renting from him with a knife and stabbing her 6 year old son to death. I'd heard about the case, which has made international headlines, but hadn't really followed it. According to the coverage I'd seen, Mr. Czuba had pled Not Guilty to the charges, and I was curious what his defense had been. People plead Not Guilty in a lot of cases where it appears that they were caught red-handed, and I've started wondering if they're entering mental disease or defect pleas (claiming mitigating circumstances that separate legal guilt from factual guilt), or simply claiming that, despite what it looked like and/or whatever witnesses their may have been, they didn't do it.

In any event, I'm learning that standard search engines are a terrible tool for finding this sort of information. Mainly, I suspect, because I'm one of those weird people who takes an interest in these things when no-one else does. The results I was able to find were stories about the sentencing from various news outlets, from the local to the international, although the local Fox affiliate did have what I was looking for, noting that Mr. Czuba's defense team "focused [...] on trying to question the clarity of the evidence."

Conspicuously absent from the search result, however, was a story from Fox News. Although the Times of Israel covered the story (while also being at pains to add that "antisemitism and anti-Israel incidents" also happened in the United States), and even the famously conservative New York Post ran a story, when I searched Fox News, nothing about the sentencing came up. Which struck me as odd. They could have simply run (albeit with some much-needed editing) the WFLD story and called it a day. And it's entirely possible that they're simply taking their time, and that by the time anyone reads this, a story specifically on the sentencing will have been posted, even if there isn't one there now.

But on the face if it, it seems to point to the idea that news outlets cater their audiences in their story selection as well as framing, posting items that affirm their worldviews and sometimes leaving out stories that don't. And while people tend to insist that news organizations they understand as ideologically opposed should be running the stories that they want people to see, it's much less likely that pressure will be brought to bear to force their favored news sources to cover the "other side's" preferred narratives.

Feeding the Fire

I'm going to say right now, I'm resentful as a parent that my kids have to do more than other kids to get into certain colleges.
Asian American voters backed Trump in Nevada. Here's how they feel about him now

The central tragedy of the United States is the fact that despite often being considered the single wealthiest nation on Earth in terms of national net wealth, it has not found a way to grow the proverbial pie large enough that it's various constituencies don't feel the need to resent what others are getting. Even for something like education, which can easily be seen as as asset to the nation as a whole, scarcity pits groups of citizens against one another, not to mention immigrants. And our political system tends to cater to people's resentments, rather than find a way to obviate the need for them.