Billion-Dollar Baby

So, I've been hearing people talk about the idea of autonomous automation allowing for one-person, billion-dollar valuation companies. It's a topic that comes up on financial and technology podcasts from time to time.

And it's raised a question for me... What would these companies sell? Now, I get that it could be something new and wonderful that no-one has thought of yet, so I'm really asking what characteristics the goods and services they would offer would have.

Because if we're talking about a company that's 1 human being, and X number of automated agents, then anyone who has access to X number of automated agents could make the same thing. There could be other capital needs, but perhaps not, depending on what exactly it is that's being produced. So how does our one-person company protect its market(s) well enough to get to a billion-dollar valuation, rather than simply becoming a proof-of-concept for a number of other market actors? Would it need to be something where the primary market is people who don't have access to the same level of automation?

And, speaking of proof-of-concept, if our one-person company demonstrates that a whole class of goods/services could be produced entirely with automated agents, that could really do a number on the employment market. So does their product or service also need to be more-or-less downturn-proof? And how would that work in practice? Would it create demand for physical human labor in another area? Or would it be something that isn't aimed at the public at large? (Which goes back to the first question... because if other people could make their own version, anyone with the means to copy the product or service might not be a good long-term customer.)

In the end, I understand that talk of one-person, billion-dollar valuation companies is really about a level of techno-"optimism;" the idea that capital could create its own labor, and thus result in fairly big gains for the investor class... But I think that a lot of the speculation makes the implicit assumption that nothing else changes in the overall environment, and I suspect that wouldn't be the case. We'll see, I suppose, sooner or later.

Deduced

There are a couple of rather famous deductive arguments for the existence of God.

Anselm of Canterbury's ontological argument can be considered to be a direct argument... it explicitly references God.

• It is a conceptual truth (or, so to speak, true by definition) that God is a being than which none greater can be imagined.
• God exists as an idea in the mind.
• A being that exists as an idea in the mind and in reality is, other things being equal, greater than a being that exists only as an idea in the mind.
• Thus, if God exists only as an idea in the mind, then we can imagine something that is greater than God (that is, a being-than-which-none-greater-can-be-imagined that does exist).
• But we cannot imagine something that is greater than God (for it is a contradiction to suppose that we can imagine a being greater than the being-than-which-none-greater-can-be-imagined.)
• Therefore, God exists.

The Kalām cosmological argument, on the other hand, might be considered an indirect argument... it claims the Universe has a cause, but doesn't directly say anything about said cause. Other people, however, have added on to it.

• Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
• The universe began to exist.
• Therefore, the universe has a cause.

In each case, the final sentence, the one that begins "therefore" is considered to be true if one accepts the preceding statements, the premises, to be true. And this is part of what makes them popular. An apologist will walk someone through the premises, seeking agreement with each one, and then present the conclusion as granted. Which I get, because it works. The only way to avoid having to either agree with the conclusion or admit to following faulty logic is to deny one or more of the premises, which are generally held out to be common-sense statements that no-one should have a problem with.

But I was reading about these, as part of my amateur interest in philosophy, and it occurred to me: What do these arguments actually mean, anyway? Sure, they have their "common-sense" meanings, but is that actually what they mean?

Take the Ontological Argument. What does "greater" mean in this instance? How should it be understood? The argument doesn't hold up as well if I substitute "taller" for "greater." Because if it's true that "a being that exists as an idea in the mind and in reality is, other things being equal, taller than a being that exists only as an idea in the mind," it does not follow that if I imagine a being a million feet tall, that there must be some real being that's taller than that. It appears, at least to me, to indicate that imaginary height does not matter. Going back to "greatness," this would seem to indicate that I find whomever I consider to be the greatest, and bestow the title of "God" upon them, but that's where it ends.

Likewise with the Cosmological Argument, what does it mean to "begin to exist?" I like to build plastic models as a pastime. And it's true that at some undefined point in the assembly process, a Mobile Suit or an aircraft "begins to exist." Now you don't see it, now you do. But it began to exist because it was assembled from parts that already existed. It's generally presumed that in the Cosmological Argument that the universe began to exist ex nihilo, but there's nothing in the syllogism itself that requires that interpretation. And because the Big Bang is, effectively an Event Horizon, there's no way of knowing whether the Universe simply sprang into existence, or if our current spacetime is simply the current arrangement of matter and energy that already existed in some or another form. So then, even if it's understood that the Universe began to exist, I'm not sure that this tells us anything, especially if energy may be neither created nor destroyed.

Now, to be sure, I don't think that I've put these two long-standing arguments to rest. I'm not that smart. I'm fairly certain that other people have come up with similar objections, and that someone else has come up with counter-arguments. I'm just surprised that I haven't encountered them, and their counters, more often.

On the Rails

One of the interesting things about buzzwords is that they acquire widely-understood, yet completely informal, definitions. My favorite recent example is "guardrails," which has become a shorthand for, effectively, building robust harm-prevention measures into new technologies. Which is interesting, because in the everyday world, that's not what guardrails are designed to do. Consider this post I made about a pickup truck going off the road near where I lived at the time.

The problem wasn't that the guardrails didn't work as designed... it was that an airborne pickup truck was not one of the situations that they'd been designed to contend with. But the guardrails were there; anyone happening by would see them. The point could be made that a new design may have been in order, but it was clear that they had been put in place.

And I think that is somewhat lacking in many of today's discussions of technological guardrails; the difference between inadequate and non-existent guardrails is non-obvious. And so for "guardrails" to be evident, they have to be so obvious as to be intrusive.

I have a set of "kitchen knives" that need to be disposed of. I nearly never used them (in part because they were just that bad), and I've finally gotten around to buying a semi-decent quality knife block with semi-decent quality knives. The "easy" way to dispose of the old knives would be to securely cover their blades in duct tape and throw them away, but I figured it was worth asking about online to find out if there were any better ways. No luck... my question was removed; likely before anyone saw it. The "guardrail" visibly did its job, but did so by presuming that my query was too dangerous for public consumption. Doubtless, there are likely people for whom that's the intended outcome, but it strikes me as overzealous.

And while it's clearer that guardrails are working when they're intrusive, that provides an incentive for people to move to where there are no guardrails. Granted, I'm not going to go searching for a free-speech haven just to ask for a good way to ditch some kitchen utensils, but I doubt that everyone finds their questions as trivial as that one.

A Modest Request

I saw a panhandler today whose sign read: "At least give me the finger." It was both comedic and heartbreaking. The young man appeared to be in the process of giving up for the day, he was walking away from the corner. It's a popular place for panhandlers; there is a Jack-in-the-Box there, which I suppose increases the likelihood that any given car might have someone with cash in it.

It occurs to me that I don't know whether the greater Seattle area has a relatively high number of panhandlers or not. I live in the suburbs, so while there are certain spots where panhandlers and buskers tend to set up, I've never encountered them in numbers. And even the usual spots don't always have someone there. (This doesn't stop the more conservative/fearful among the population from seeing them as symptomatic of apocalyptic levels of social disorder It's somewhat surprising how many people apparently cannot tell the difference between panhandlers and supervillains.)

Now, while there are some panhandlers who don't strike me as being on the up-and-up, for many of them, it seems that what you see is what you get; a down-on-their-luck person who has been reduced to begging funds and/or food from passers-by in order to survive. Often it's just one person. Sometimes, there will be a mother with her child(ren) or a family. Childless couples, however, are vanishingly rare; perhaps they tend to split up to work different places.

Today was sunny and warm, especially considering it's only mid-February, so it wasn't a terrible day to have to be out of doors. But neither Winter nor the rainy season are over yet, so we'll see how things work out.

Of course, the real problem isn't the weather; Seattle's climate is fairly mild, when compared to some of the alternatives. It's the fact that Seattle, like pretty much every other place in the United States, understands itself to be too poor to devote enough resources to the problem to actually solve it. This is, in part, due to a lack of coordination, and a willingness to defect... While Texas and Florida made headlines for putting migrants on busses and sending them to large cities in more liberal-minded states, the practice of shipping homeless people off to become somebody else's problem goes back a lot farther than that. So any city that actual starts to make a dent in their own homeless problem risks becoming a target for elected officials elsewhere looking to find someone else to foot the bill for their own homeless population.

It's also a side effect of the individualistic culture that has grown up in the United States. It's not hard to find someone who will claim that living-wage jobs are freely available for the asking, even when unemployment was significantly higher than it is now. (Of course, asking them just where said jobs were located rarely resulted in answers.) And when the impoverished are viewed as intentional freeloaders, who could get back on their feet whenever they wanted to, people who give are seen as chumps; a perception that many are keen to avoid.

I doubt that I'll ever see the young man again. Panhandlers tend to be a transient population. I'd like to say that as long as he maintains his sense of humor, he'll be okay. But that places the onus back on him, and I know he needs more than that. 

Demonstrated

 

There was another protest today, and it was a good day for it. I'm still of the opinion that deep-Blue Washington state is not the most effective place for it, but it's really not about that.

Bad Read

Representative Ro Khanna (D-California) read out six names that had been redacted, and then unredacted in "the Epstein Files." According to the Department of Justice, four of the names were of random people who had been in a photo lineup. According to Representative Khanna, the fault lies with the DoJ.

While it seems patently evident that the Department of Justice has been sloppy with their handling of the documents, I think that ownership of this particular screw-up belongs to Representative Khanna, simply because it had already been established that simply being named in the set of documents released, or even knowing Jeffry Epstien, is not, in and of itself, evidence of guilt. Representative Khanna blames the DoJ for not explaining why the names were in the documents earlier, but it shouldn't have been up to the DoJ to make clear what everyone already knew.

The idea that there was a smoking gun, being hidden by the Department of Justice, that would blow the lid off of a ring of powerful men who were into sex with teenaged girls, always rested on the ideas that a) Jeffrey Epstein compiled information on people who were committing crimes along with him, and b) that he pretty much exclusively surrounded himself with other people who were into sex with underage girls. That's what it takes to believe that the simple fact that one's name could be found in the documents made one a wealthy and powerful person who was engaged in the rape of minors.

Hoping that Q-Anon's (remember them?) obsession with the idea that there was an Illuminati-like ring of pedophiles running around sleeping with children would become a weapon against President Trump was a bad idea from the jump, based as it was on the conjecture that enough people could be peeled away from the Trumpist coalition on that basis to weaken him politically. Personally, I'd hoped that Democrats would give up on being anti-Trump and pro-fixing things that need fixing in the United States, but it turned out that the Democrats were more than capable of remaining single-minded for longer than I could remain irrational.

It would be nice if this blunder dialed back the strange alliance with conspiracy theorizing that seems to have become popular with the political class (it has zero chance of ending it) but I doubt that it will. Too many people have hitched their wagons to the idea that this will be straw that breaks the camel's back, apparently unaware that thus far, it's been a very resilient camel.

Pass It On

I was reading the most recent posting on Schneier on Security, when I found a weird, rambling conspiracy theory in the comments. The general thrust of it seems to be that "an American Citizen," who is never named, was unjustly imprisoned after the were attacked by "a Muslim" who is named on more than one occasion. It's a pretty clear attempt to slander a person, who was likely the actual victim of whatever crime occurred, by casting them as the perpetrator, and to slander the local law enforcement and judiciary, by claiming that they're in on the scheme. Oh, and there were allegations of antisemitism thrown in as a follow-on. Ho hum, nothing to see here.

But it seemed like the sort of thing that one might find posted, verbatim, in other places. After all, it had exactly zero to do with a proposed law to stop 3D printers in New York from making firearms parts, so it stood to reason that someone had taken their copypasta hatchet job on the road, and dropped the text into the comment sections of other weblogs. This is, after all, a way of spreading the message and getting it in front of more people.

So I found a snippet that came across as likely to be somewhat unique, and dropped it into Google, framing it within double quotes so the search engine would understand that I was looking for the exact string. I was somewhat surprised that it didn't seem to pop up anywhere. I was more surprised to see the generative automation overview synthesize the allegations and present them as "recent reports."

Names redacted, because I don't intend to help spread this inanity...

Also interesting was that it linked to a prior post on Schneier on Security, even though the conspiratorial comment could not be found there... presumably, it had already been deleted, if not for being crazy, for being completely off-topic. But the overview states that the allegations appear on the blog. Which is technically true, I suppose, but there is a difference between a blog and its comments section, especially for public blogs like Schneier on Security, where pretty much anyone can post.

To be sure, this is an edge case and a half... I found the results that I did because I was looking to see where else the wild allegations and conspiracy had been posted, so I'd clipped directly from the text to drop into Google, which would have really narrowed the pool of possible things that the automation would find as matches.

But that doesn't mean that it's not a problem, especially given that names are not unique identifiers of people, and the fact that the automation clearly had access to a cached or archived version of previous posts. The automation simply rolls out a list of names.

And I think that this is what people are getting at when they point out that the generative automation companies are pushing to be first and best to market, and leaving the safety aspects of things until later, or to someone else. Because this isn't a problem of "A.I. slop;" this is a matter of the automation repeating random things it finds on the web. And given that web sites are seeing less traffic, as people simply take the overviews and go, it wouldn't take much for something like this to take on a life of its own, divorced from the comments section(s) in which it was first planted.

Thaw

So there's a local company that uses their street-facing sign mainly for political messaging. In the entire time I've noticed what it's said, it's pretty much never been about business. Usually, the signs have small government or simply anti-Democratic Party messages... whoever runs the place seemed to have really had it in for Governor Gregoire, back in the day. But the last couple of messages have been different, and the most recent one really stood out.

Not that there has ever been any explicitly Trumpist messaging on the sign in the past, but the obviously Republican leaning of the previous signs had given me the impression that this was someone who, if not a staunch supporter of the current administration, could likely always be counted on to direct their fire elsewhere. The fact that even this person, whoever they are, felt the need to take a stand against Immigration and Customs Enforcement speaks to the difficulty that the Republicans may have in the upcoming mid-term elections.

Of course, the chances of a Republican carrying the 1st District of Washington are don't even make it to slim. Zero seems like a much more accurate number, to be honest. But that's never stopped the owner of Chain Saws Plus from railing against the generally Left-of-Center political consensus of the area. And, given that they're still in business, there are people who don't hold that against them. So I'm fairly certain that this isn't a business decision; made as a peace offering to the more Liberal elements of the Eastside.

Instead, this seems like someone who's actually willing to come out and be critical of "their" side in all of this. And while I doubt that would translate into a vote to re-elect Representative DelBene, it does seem like one fewer vote for any GOP challenger(s). (Not that I'd expect any Republican candidates to make it out of the primary, absent a large, and fractured, group of Democratic candidates.)

Reliance on low-propensity voters has shifted from the Democrats to the Republicans, even if President Trump doesn't seem to be aware of the fact. If the Republicans can't count on people who have defined themselves in terms of negative partisanship against the Democrats to turn out, the President's concern that another impeachment is headed his way may turn out to be correct.

Degenerated

A connection of mine made a post on LinkedIn about the use of generative automation in the gaming industry, and how that's become basically cover for bad management.

Someone who saw the post took offense, not at the post itself, or its theme, but at the fact that it struck them as having been artificially generated. (I decided to drop the text into a few "GPT Detector" sites, by the way, and even my favorite false positive generator came back with a "0% GPT" score.)

Pointing out the patterns in writing that one believes that LLMs have been trained (intentionally or not) to favor is a different task than pointing out patterns in writing that are unique to LLMs. I think that there is a tendency to become caught up in the idea of "the flaw of averages," the idea that the "average" of a group of people, even a large group, won't actually match any given individual in that group. Applied to detecting LLMs and GPT-created text, it presumes that some artifacts of the training data that come out in generated text are unique to generated text; observe enough people and you'll see something like a given phrasing or sentence structure come out of the data, but the precise phrasing or structure exist nowhere in the data.

Which is reasonable, but to actually validate that for any given piece of text, one would need an in-depth understanding of the training data. To claim, for instance, that only generative automation uses emojis to mark bulleted lists is to make a pretty sweeping claim about quite a lot of human social media posting; one that's effectively impossible to empirically support. And I have it on pretty good authority that ChatGPT didn't invent the m-dash.

Big picture, I understand the feeling that generative automation is equivalent to "low-effort." I've seen my share of generated artwork, and come away with the impression that the person felt a need to have some sort of illustration, but not anything worth investing significant time, effort or money into, and so it felt perfunctory... the Social Media Gods say that text with pictures gets more Engagement, so here's a picture: please Engage now.

But I'm not sure that angry call-outs do anything productive. (Not that there's anything wrong with simply venting on the Internet, mind you.) People can snipe at one another for a supposed unwillingness to treat online posting with the respect that it deserves, but in the end, that sort of feeds the very Engagement beast that sits at the heart of the problem. And because spending the time to write posts oneself is the norm, there's little drive to step up and comment on that fact. It's not much different from the reasons why rage-bait outperforms more positive postings: the "Must. Denounce. Now." impulse feeds into the incentive structure of social media more broadly. (Which, of course, makes them an attractive mode on online interaction themselves.)

What makes things on social media go away isn't vitriol, it's apathy. (Another sentence structure supposedly coined by LLMs, by the way.)

It's likely overstating things to claim that the use of generative automation in social media is reaching the level of a moral panic, but I suspect that the number of people who feel actively slighted by it is growing. And sensitivity to slights can produce the perverse habit of seeking them out, in order to respond to them. Which, in turn, can lead to one's slight detector is perfectly calibrated.

For my part, I've come to realize that I don't naturally analyze text for signs of automation. I think that I'm okay with lacking the skill to do so; I'm unconvinced that learning to do it well enough to be accurate is time well spent.

Mirror Image

The question that the widespread adoption of generative automation by business will raise is not "What will be the effects on productivity?" Rather, I think it will be, "What will be the effects on demand, especially demand for human labor?" I can imagine a worst-case scenario in which automation, especially autonomous automation, creates a world in which access to raw materials becomes paramount. If doesn't matter, for instance, if people own a robot that can cook for them if they have nothing of value to trade for food.

I suspect, as with so many other things, that these sorts of problems will not crop up unexpectedly so much as it will turn out that people were expecting "someone else" to take care of the problem, preferably in a manner that wouldn't cost them anything. And when it turns out that "someone else" was actually "no one else," emergency measures, none of them really to anyone's liking, will wind up being enacted.

What strikes me as a slowly building panic over the disruptions to the job market in the technology sector, both current and expected in the future, speaks to this. While it's not hard to find techno-optimists who will loudly proclaim that "genuine human interaction" will suddenly become highly valuable in a highly automated society, they tend to be short on explanations as to how a large segment of the current workforce will come to be employed this way. And the people who see not only their jobs going away, but their future prospects for supporting themselves, remain unconvinced.

Cultivating new lines of work that would be expensive to impossible for even genuine "artificial general intelligence" to carry out would seem to be a priority, but such cultivation will, in the short term at least, be unprofitable... which is why no-one's currently turning their resources to it; the expected return on that investment is pretty much non-existent. And while there are people who will look to government to solve the problem, the resources are going to have to come from somewhere, and decades of nurturing a distrust of government efficacy and a dislike of taxation are likely to result in quite a bit of time spent in looking for someone to extract the resources from who have resources to take, yet lack the political voice to block their taking.

In the end, finding a social solution has to be more important to the majority of people than searching for personal ones. But stereotypical American individualism, to say nothing of social division, actively works against that. The saying that "Whenever you say, 'Someone should do something,' remember that Someone stands in front of you whenever you look in the mirror," applies here as much as to anything else, however. And if I don't think that "someone else" will start working on the problem, perhaps I should start educating myself on what that work entails.

Grimelight

Perhaps the real problem with the video, shared by President Trump on his Truth Social account, that portrayed Barack and Michelle Obama as apes, is that it triggered calls for its removal, rather than an examination of why it was posted. I don't believe for a moment that President Trump allowed some anonymous staffer to post the video to his account without anyone knowing what was in the entire video. The President's previous comments about Africa and the African diaspora have made no secret of his disdain. Which is nothing new... I suspect it would be silly of me to say that Donald Trump is the only racist to have occupied the White House during my lifetime.

The idea that there are members of the MAGA movement who are simply unreconstructed racists is simply taken as given by many. But, okay... the United States has had its share, if not more of unreconstructed racists for as long as I've been around, too... but the White House giving an implicit stamp of approval to such messaging seems unique to the Trump Administration, at least in modern times.

Even if we accept (and I don't) the idea that the video was posted to the social media account of the President of the United States without anyone vetting it thoroughly for its message, the fact that it originated with a meme account points to it being a form of "red meat" for the President's base of voters. And that raises the question, at least for me, of why memes? Of all of the things that the President's Truth Social account could be sharing, why bother with random stuff like this; especially if it's going to be hand-waved through? One would think the last thing the White House wants is for some random message to be seen coming from the President. Donald Trump has pretty much zero in the way of "regular guy" credentials, so why engage in the bored teenager act?

When I was in high school, I knew a number of people who had no compunctions against calling me "nigger" to my face. Most of them didn't strike me as racists, and I concluded that it wasn't racist, but personal. They were seeking to get a rise out of me. And I suspect that this is what's at work here. The President is like a class clown who craves the spotlight badly enough to do whatever he can to keep it trained on themselves.

The thimble thunderstorm of the video spread internationally pretty quickly, and generated a lot of heat, even if there was little light. I'm not in the camp that says the President is attempting to distract people from other things... the news cycle can present multiple things to the public at once. Donald Trump simply needs for one of those things to be him.

Democrats were, of course, going to take the bait on this one; their political incentives demand that they constantly decry this or that random bit of inanity that the President's engaged in, even if the smart move would be to simply roll their eyes and find something more constructive to do with their time. But enough people demand constant vigilance, and responsiveness, that they're force to play ball, and keep themselves in the spotlight as well. And this time, even a few Republicans felt the need to get in on the act, despite the fact that it has likely earned them the moniker RINO from the MAGA faithful. But it ensured that reporters would be rushing to get comment from the press secretary and the President himself, both of whom said pretty much the same things they say every other time.

The constituency for this is hard to pin down, because it seems that so many people are on the lookout for, and responsive to, signs that President Trump is doing something; even when that something is not governing. Elements of the political Left and Right alike seem to have little better to do than to boo or cheer the President, who responds with a constant stream of random acts for them to respond to. But what I don't understand is why these groups must never be allowed to go hungry. Why does Congress and the news media dutifully play the same tired role, over and over again. What does the outrage machine offer in return, that the rest of the public cannot match? 

Generation Narrow

I was watching YouTube over dinner, and "the algorithm" suggested "Psychology of Gen X." Being a member of "Generation X" myself, I decided I'd have a watch, and see if I recognized anything of myself. I'm of the opinion that age cohort, as the informal groupings known as "The Baby Boomers," "Generation Z" et cetera are known have become the new Zodiac; clustering broad swaths of the population together and assigning them a pithy list of traits seen as so universal that all members of the group may as well be the same person, just with different haircuts and outfits.

What made "Psychology of Gen X" slightly different than the other profiles that I've come across now and again was that it didn't simply list random traits... it attempted to explain them. It was all very surface-level; the video is, after all, only eight minutes long, and so there wasn't much room for specifics.

But even with that, I quickly realized that the video was really seeking to explain the White, middle-class, urban/suburbanites that I grew up around. Very little of the video seemed relevant to the lives of my cousins who lived in the poorer neighborhoods of Chicago. It was taking the kids from Stranger Things and extrapolating out from them to all of the millions of people born in a 15-year period.

And realizing that gave me a bit of insight into the Trumpist/Make America Great Again movement: of course they see themselves as the legitimate Americans, they see themselves in the broad generalizations that people make about the United States. Sure, Psychology of Gen X did as much to leave out rural Americans from Appalachia as it did Native Americans, but its viewpoint was very much White and male, and there was no indication that it even understood that other people existed, let alone had something worth mentioning to contribute to the experience of being "Generation X." (And that leaves aside the fact that the age cohorts are often taken as worldwide phenomena.)

Part of it seemed to stem from the fact that it was short, and the fact that the channels seems based in the United Kingdom could also play a part, but a lot of just seemed perfunctory. If you've seen one video claiming to explain the psychology of a given age cohort, you've seen them all, and this one was no exception. The stills that played in the background to illustrate the narration were of the bland, generative automation-created style that's come to typify artwork that needs to be done, as opposed to illustration that really adds to the experience.

And a quickly-made, short video about a group of people is going to focus on the mainstream, because that's what there's time to do. And this wasn't a video for Gen X, to lay out the breadth of the cohort... It's a video for today's young people, to offer an easily digestible explanation of their parents, and other older people they encounter at work and in other aspects of their lives. The fact that it only deals with a minority of the overall group would be lost on many of them.

Not that I expect that the target audience would be fooled into thinking they had the complete picture. They likely understand as well as anyone else the difficulties of cramming decades of people's lived experiences into 8 minutes. But it's one thing to understand that one is seeing snippets of the lives of a certain group versus seeing a slice of nearly everyone's lives. That important distinction struck me as missing, and when it did, I realized how many other times it hadn't been made.

While much has been made of the fact that so much of American history is focused on the White middle and upper classes, I'm not convinced that the idea that this means there should be a greater focus on other people has really sunk in. I doubt that the person or people behind this particular Psychology Simplified channel set out to ignore the lived experiences of most of Gen X. When one's making short videos on an every-other-day basis, there likely isn't a lot of time for deep research without a fairly extensive team; and while the video does cite references, there aren't a lot of them, and nothing about any cultural differences in the experience. (Okay, granted, I don't often have a lot of citations here, but Nobody In Particular is intended to be about the United States as I experience it, personally.) So it's understandable that for someone like me, who lived through the time period in question, a lot would seem to be missing. But there are people for whom the narrow focus reinforces an understanding of themselves as the center of the world.

Panic Button

Participant homophobia was found to be the driving force behind their willingness to accept the gay panic defense as legitimate. Higher levels of homophobia and religious fundamentalism were found to predict more leniency in verdict decisions when the gay panic defense was presented. This study furthers the understanding of decision making in cases involving the gay panic defense and highlights the need for more research to be conducted to help understand and combat LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) prejudice in the courtroom.
When Is "Gay Panic" Accepted? Exploring Juror Characteristics and Case Type as Predictors of a Successful Gay Panic Defense

There is, of course, no "straight panic" defense that attorneys generally deploy when seeking to defend people against charges of violence. Because one suspects that it would be open season on stalkers, jackasses and abusers if juries could be counted on to decide that women being targeted, being bothered "over and over and over again" and having unwanted sexual advances made to them justified killing their tormentors.

But given the fact that homophobia and religious fundamentalism are positive predictors of leniency in such cases, it's not surprising... In such circles, the crime is treating a man as one would a woman, rather than a lack of respect for other people as a whole. I would guess that women have to find it extremely frustrating, understanding that there are people who feel that the sort of behavior that many of them put up with on a regular basis justifies violence based on sexual orientation, and that lawyers are willing to play on that in order to help their clients; and that with the right juries, it works. If straight men have a right to expect gay men to take "no" for an answer, why don't women have a right to expect the same from gay men?

The "obvious" answer is that sexually-aggressive straight men are a norm, and sometimes, an expectation. A perhaps less-obvious answer is the overall fragility of many standards of masculinity. If men are so tough, and so able to withstand hardship, why are they given a pass in this way? Simply because having a gay man come on to them risks their self-image as men?

But I guess it's easy for me to say... I'm not staring down the barrel of life in prison because someone threatened my sense of myself as a man, and I responded with lethal violence. Were never setting foot outside of a prison again a real possibility, maybe I'd be all in favor of my lawyers looking to use the jury's deep-seated prejudices in my favor. I like to think that I'd be adult enough to own up to what I'd done, though.

Not that I can see myself doing it. And I guess that's the paradox that rubs at me. I'm not "man enough" to want to kill someone for making an unwanted pass at me, and that's what allows me to be "man enough" to not want to use unjustified prejudices to bail me out. Maybe that's not the correct framing of the issue at hand. Maybe linking those two things, expecting that a masculinity that permits the use of violence over relative trivialities should also demand taking ownership of one's actions (or loss of self-control) is simply playing into a different set of prejudices; one that's just as limiting and unjustified?

Masculinity is a box, one that many segments of American society have decreed that men shall not leave. I don't find it terribly stifling, because I'm not really at all motivated to move any farther from the center of the box than I already am. But I'm also not in a place in that box that compels me to need to defend the actions I take (or don't take) to maintain that place. My tendency towards crankiness prevents me from having much sympathy for those who do, and maybe that makes me part of the problem, as well.

Sloganeering

On a recent episode of "The Opinions" podcast from The New York Times, host Michelle Cottle was discussing whether adopting "Abolish ICE" as a slogan, was, in effect, simply asking for the Republicans to take it and turn it against them. Which, in the wake of "Defund the Police" is a rational way of looking at it, but the idea that a different slogan could be proofed against a conservative-lead backlash, I believe, mistakes the forces in play.

In short, it's never about the actual slogan. It's about the people who identify with it. The problem with "Critical Race Theory" or "Woke" wasn't that there was some built-in negative connotation to either of them. It's that they are associated with Black people and Liberals; two groups that, on the whole, Conservative White Americans feel are unjustly resentful of and hostile towards them. And so it was easy for Conservative activists, like Christopher Rufo, to convince them that these terms were code for all sorts of terrible things.

So declining to chant "Abolish ICE" in favor of the more anodyne "Smarter Immigration Policy," for example, wouldn't prevent Republicans from branding it as code for "open borders," because their target audiences already believe that the American Left wants open borders, and is willing to allow them to be victimized by non-White immigrants in exchange for votes from Black and Hispanic communities. Just was with Critical Race Theory, Conservative activists would be able to attach "Smarter Immigration Policy," or whatever else someone decided the slogan should be, to anxieties around immigration via anxieties around people who understand ideal immigration policy differently that they do.

Accordingly, as long as the anxieties are present, there is no slogan that one can imagine couldn't be linked to them. I think that Ms. Cottle doesn't really grasp this part of the equation. And given the general lack of understanding that the American Left has for the American Right (which, I would submit, is not completely mutual), she's not the only person whose fingers it slips through.

Reminders

The first of the large postcards had a picture on the front; a stock photograph of a man typing into a calculator with bills in his other hand. In the out-of-focus background, a woman played with two small children, a bright pink toy in her lap.

"Politicians in Olympia are proposing new taxes to make our vacations more expensive," it read, bold yellow text with white underlining on a blue background.

The second postcard was more austere, but more strident, "Why Are Legislators In Olympia Raising Taxes On Washington Families Already Struggling To Make Ends Meet?" There was no picture this time; just stark black text on a yellow field. The underlining, again, was in white.

Both had the same message at the bottom:

Paid for by Airbnb Helps Our State Thrive (HOST) PAC, 2350 Kerner Blvd., Ste. 250, San Rafael, CA 94901, Top Five Contributors: Airbnb, Inc.

The back of the first postcard, the one with the picture of the family on the front, lead off with an interesting message on the back. "We're already paying more for housing, groceries and gas. Now, politicians in Olympia are looking to raise the cost of our vacations, too."

But it's understood that some small part of why "we" are paying more for housing is people using homes for short-term rentals, rather than long-term residences. Will a tax on short-term rentals change that? Probably not by much. Are there better solutions? Likely. But Airbnb isn't proposing any. Instead, they're looking to trigger financial anxiety in voters, to enlist them in looking out for Airbnb's interests.

Because it is somewhat likely that a tax on short-term rentals will take some of them off the market, at least for a time, and that cuts into Airbnb's revenues. Airbnb matches the supply of homes available to be rented with people looking to rent homes for short periods, and takes a cut of the asking price... they're a middleman, and as such, they're sensitive to dips on either side of their two-sided marketplace. Accordingly, they're acting to protect the supply of short-term rental properties... the cost of living for people here in Washington isn't really their concern.

And there's nothing wrong that. Corporations are as entitled to look out for number 1 as people are. But I'm not a fan of looking to people's anxieties to enlist them in one's own cause. In part because it's disingenuous. And in part because economic anxiety can last much longer than the debate over a single bill or policy. Whether or not short-term rentals are taxed is unlikely to make a significant difference in most people's broader economic outlook. And if Airbnb gets its way, the company is simply going to go back to minding its other interests, rather than having its Airbnb HOST PAC continue to advocate for the public. Airbnb doesn't need the problems it claims to care about to be solved. And that allows it to claim that solving its problems is the best thing for everyone.

Weather-Wise

While everyone talks about how much it rains in Seattle, being a native of Chicago, I find that is mostly drizzles. I miss the heavy, audible, rain and the rumble of distant thunder that used to be a fairly common occurrence, and so when it happens here, it is something to be savored.

(Unless, of course, I'm on the road. Because for someplace where it allegedly rains 14 months out of the year, a number of people seem to have remarkable difficulty with wet pavement.)

That said, drizzly and dry are not the same, even if they both are something other than genuinely raining. While Winters in the Seattle area don't have the same homicidal instinct that that Midwestern cold can often exhibit, they're still a poor time to not have a home to be inside. I wonder how many people find themselves here in (admittedly short) Summers, and think they've found a clement place to get back on their feet, only to realize that a good nine to ten months of off-and-on precipitation has been awaiting them. Recently two whole weeks passed between rains, and nearly set a new record for January being dry. But the wet is back, and while it doesn't require an umbrella, it's much more pleasant with a roof.

Misread

Print magazines are no less susceptible to a bit of bait-and-switch to lure in readers than online news sources. After all, sometimes, they're the same publication. The cover headline of the February issue of The Atlantic proclaims Donald Trump Wants You To Forget This Happened, under a photograph of January 6th, 2021. Mr. Thompson's actual story is titled: Is this what patriotism looks like? And it's the story of one of the January 6th rioters; one who assaulted police officers, but was pardoned by President Trump.

But let me stick with the cover headline for a bit, because while I think that it will resonate with a lot of people (after all, these things are not chosen casually), I also happen to think that it isn't true. There's a difference between seeking to erase a narrative, and seeking to change one. Historical revisionism is just that... revisionism, and that's closer to what I think that President Trump is after.

For a lot of people, mostly, but not exclusively, Democrats or Democratic-leaning, January 6th 2021 is a story of partisans being sore losers. Deluded, or cynically dishonest, about the nation's opinion of Donald Trump and his performance in his first term in office, they sought to use violence to overturn a free and fair election and act out their grievances against Congress.

Trumpists, unsuprisingly, profess (honestly or otherwise) to see things differently. For them, the President's nationwide popularity is an article of faith; the idea that enough people would vote for the Biden-Harris ticket that Donald Trump would lose the popular vote, let alone the Electoral College, was unthinkable. Malfeasance was the only possible explanation. And so the events of January 6th weren't a crime; they were a principled, even heroic, stand against the forces of corruption and the people who enabled it.

And that's what Donald Trump wants the historical record to reflect. An angelic light on the people who support him. Yes, there are things that the President would prefer to have removed from the annals of history. The Trail of Tears, for instance, is not something that can be readily spun into a narrative of American moral superiority. But revolutions, even failed ones, can be turned into tales of national (and perhaps ethnic) greatness. And so that's the way that Donald Trump, his acolytes and supporters would prefer it to be remembered.

I offer no opinion on whether they will succeed, and, if they do, on what timeline. But that it is the goal, I'm reasonably certain of. 

Line of Fire

"Too many cases do not appear to meet the test of objective reasonableness with regard to the use of deadly force," the report found. "[I]n some cases agents put themselves in harm's way by remaining in close proximity to the rock throwers when moving out of range was a reasonable option."
CBP has a history of excessive force. Critics say they were unprepared for Minnesota

This isn't a new criticism of law enforcement. It was raised in the media in the aftermath of the Amadou Diallo shooting, and that took place in 1999. I suspect that the tendency of court cases pertaining to potentially unlawful uses of deadly force to concentrate solely on the immediate lead up to the point when an officer pulls the trigger is a large part of this. If the timeline is never wound back far enough to get to the point where it's reasonable to ask: "Should the officer have been in so vulnerable a position in the first place?" there will be little incentive for officers to avoid making themselves vulnerable.

The Trump Administration's reflexive defense of every shooting, and the immediate casting of the person killed as dangerous or a terrorist also ramps up the danger level. Not only because officers can come to feel secure in the idea that the Administration will back them, but as I was taught when I spent a summer as a security guard, a dead person can't contradict your version of events. In this sense, fatal shootings become easier to justify than non-fatal ones, where there is a survivor who can demand evidence of the allegations against them.

But perhaps the central problem is the polarization of the general public... or at least between those people who see themselves as ardent supporters or critics of the Administration. For people who see the Trump Administration's crackdown on economic migrants and asylum seekers alike as warranted (or even long overdue), interference with it, or even protest against it, makes one a bad person. And if the actions of law enforcement mean that bad people are hurt or killed, what's the harm?

The one thing that Americans appear to dislike more than fighting with one another is not having anyone to fight with, and the current Administration understands that it will be forgiven a certain amount of overzealousness, so long as it's directed towards perceived enemies of its base of voters. And as long as there's a significant segment of the public that's willing to ignore law enforcement personnel putting themselves in situations that they then feel the need to shoot their way out of, there will be little incentive for change. 

Misbelief

I read Ross Douthat's Believe recently. It's not a long book, about 200 pages, generally devoted to the proposition that there is a generalized obligation for people to believe in some sort of higher power, and for those people who are uncertain which one to believe in, one of the four primary contemporary religions (Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism) are the best bets.

I was only on page 2 when I realized that I likely wasn't in the target demographic for Mr. Douthat's book. I'm not the sort to regard secularism as "an uncomfortable intellectual default." In other words, I wasn't looking for permission to believe. But I also don't believe that it's "just too difficult to be a thoughtful, serious modern person and embrace religious faith." I don't have faith in higher powers, myself, but that's because I don't perceive any real need for them, not because I find them somehow irrational.

Because Believe is a book for people who already want to believe, it doesn't set out to answer the question of "Is this true?" Rather, it's an answer to the question of "Why is this true?" Accordingly, Mr. Douthat starts from the proposition that God is real, and this lends the book the air of begging the question at times. "Nonbelief requires ignoring what out reason has revealed about the world around us," to quote the dust jacket, because Mr. Douthat's faith admits no ambiguity in reason's revelation. This is a bit at odds with the fact that he admits to assuming certain things to be true: I don't come to different conclusions about the world than Mr. Douthat does because I'm cynically engaged in motivated reasoning... I literally have a different starting point than he does, and that differing vantage point means that my view of the landscape is going to differ from his.

I have a number of notes about the book, but I'm sure that many of them come from my tendency to overanalyze things, so I'll cut to the chase. Mr. Douthat seems to want to avoid falling into Pascal's Wager, but the basic gist of his argument is the same: That what the higher Power wants from people is their belief. There's no indication that belief is a means to an end; that once someone chooses to believe, that then, and only then, can they embark on some project, or come into alignment with the story into which they have been placed. This makes it difficult to square the idea that it's not of primary importance to believe in the correct understanding of that Power.

If, as Mr. Douthat says, "It would be a strange God indeed who cared intensely about how we spend our money or what votes we cast or how we feel about ourselves, but somehow didn't give a damn about behaviors that might forge or shatter a marriage, create a life in good circumstances or terrible ones, form a lifelong bond or addictive habit, bind someone to their own offspring or separate their permanently," isn't is also a strange God who is only moderately interested in which faith, and thus which set of instructions one follows? The idea that the various differences in how different religions dictate that people spend their money, cast their votes and live their sex lives are minor details doesn't seem in keeping with the importance of maintaining a conservative outlook on sexuality.

In the end, it was an interesting read, but the limits of the target audience is worth keeping in mind. Believe isn't for people who are fine where they are; it's for those who find themselves standing outside of a religion, hoping to be invited in. 

Only One

It took me longer that it should have to get the joke. I'm impressed that decals this specific can be found for sale.
 

Afterwards

Zanny Minton Beddoes of The Economist interviewed Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis at the World Economic Forum in Davos, on the topic of "The Day After AGI."

A short period of time was spent talking about the disruptions to the labor market that growing adoption of generative automation is bringing and that "artificial general intelligence" could bring if and when it arrives on the scene, and during that section of the conversation Mr. Hassabis expresses a hope that AGI might bring about a post-scarcity society. It's a hope that I find to be completely misplaced. Technology companies may be able to find a way to make computing resources cheap enough to effectively give them away to the public at large, but unless people are reliably able to turn that access into money, things like food, shelter and clothing are going to become problems.

But then, interestingly, Mr. Hassabis says that what keeps him up at night are concerns over how people will find meaning and purpose.

And I've always found this strange. I've known a few people who have been able to retire from the working world relatively young, along with those who stopped working at regular retirement ages, and none of them have suddenly found themselves bereft of meaning and purpose. Given that their material needs are taken care of, they fill their time with things that the want to do. Not to mention people too young to have entered the workforce full-time... there's no indication that people who aren't metaphorically punching a clock every day are succumbing to ennui en masse.

I've never certain if the tech utopianism that many executives in these companies express is a carefully-vetted corporate talking point, created expressly for public consumption, of if they somehow actually believe that some great redistribution of wealth is going to take place to allow people whose labor has been devalued to survive. Talk of how people will find "meaning" in the absence of being able to make a living may sound like concern for those who aren't independently wealthy, but if that's what it actually is, it completely misconstrues the problems that are going to actually need solutions.

To be fair, Mr. Hassabis does note that he doesn't know if society has the right institutions in place to distribute productivity and wealth "more fairly." But I think a better follow-on to that observation would be a plan to create them, and get them into place. But that's not Mr. Hassabis' job. It belongs to society at large, which, so far, has shown no interest in it.

Newspeak

If you parse through those syllables, you may see that [Mr. Nadella]’s not only urging everyone to stop thinking of AI-generated content as slop, but also wants the tech industry to stop talking about AI as a replacement for humans. He hopes the industry will start talking about it as a human-helper productivity tool instead.
Microsoft’s Nadella wants us to stop thinking of AI as ‘slop’

What immediately jumped out about this for me was recalling the ad for Copilot that Microsoft ran during 2024's Super Bowl. I wrote a post about it on LinkedIn at the time. As far as I was concerned, the whole message of that ad was that Copilot was a replacement for people. At the risk of seeming narcissistic, I'm going to quote myself at length here, understanding that not everyone has access to LinkedIn.

For the people who dream of doing big things that are hard to achieve by oneself, Copilot positions itself as something that can help. But it does that, not by making the people in the spot better at what they're already doing, but by allowing them to do things that they'd otherwise ask of others. Commercials operate by showing a need, and offering a solution, and this one is no exception. But the need it appears to be solving is that of human collaboration. At no point in the ad does the viewer see two or more people collaborating on anything. In the world that the commercial shows, there are no teams... only individuals and Copilot. I can see the appeal to people who enjoy working alone, but I suspect it will heighten anxiety for others. 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.

In one scene, a young man asks for sign ideas for his classic truck repair shop. Copilot takes on the role of graphic designer. That scene would have been just as powerful showing Copilot helping a graphic designer to create even more ideas. Or helping "Mike" source specific information on a model of truck that he's repairing. It's A.I. as complement, rather than competitor. By showing Copilot as helping people be productive with the skills they already have, a commercial can avoid the appearance of pitting people against one another, or devaluing the knowledge and talents that they bring to the table.

This is what Mr. Nadella wants the industry to stop doing... the very thing that Microsoft itself was doing in that Super Bowl spot. While other big names in the generative automation business (not to mention journalists) have been predicting that generative automation will destroy jobs, Mr. Nadella understands that "we're making software that will render you unemployed, and perhaps unemployable," is bad PR. But I'm curious where this sentiment was during 2023, when the "Your everyday AI companion" spot was in production. After all, concerns (or hopes, depending on which side of the job market one was on) were already starting to mount. Because reducing the costs of productivity by lowering labor costs was the primary value proposition that generative automation was supposed to bring... not much different than any other sort of automation, really. A technology that leads to greater productivity but doesn't increase aggregate demand will pretty much always lead to lower employment in the absence of some other source of higher demand.

Even the skilled trades or vocations, which are now being touted as "'A.I.' proof" occupations are unlikely to be the safe havens that they're presented as. Sure, we don't have robots that can do home plumbing or electrical work yet, but if people crowd into those professions, were are their customers going to come from? I suspect that former knowledge workers subsisting on low-level service jobs aren't going to be clamoring for skilled tradesmen to come into their homes, and generative automation won't make their low-paying jobs pay any better.

Generative automation both making the pie larger and ensuring that more slices are sufficient for people to thrive needed to have been openly (and honestly) stated as the goal from the outset, because that's the only way that this doesn't cause what could be generations of disruption.

Oh, the Super Bowl advertisement? Here's the link to it... but you likely won't be able to see it... It's been made Private. But, of course, other people have posted it, so maybe this link will work, instead.

A Truth of One's Own

I'm not a fan of discussions concerning "critical thinking." Mainly because I find the point of such discussions are too often little other than a reason to be critical of other people's thinking. In this, "critical thinking" has become something of a buzzword for "coming to the predetermined correct answer."

Which is fine, as far as it goes, I guess, but I'm not really one to think that correct answers are anywhere near as common as they're made out to be. Because it's rarely important if an answer is objectively correct, so long as it works. (One can say this is also the thing about the "marketplace of ideas." It doesn't separate correct from incorrect or wisdom from folly. It separates workable from not workable and popular from unpopular.)

People believe the things that they do because it works for them to believe such things. And while I'm old enough that it should be par for the course by now, I'm still somewhat surprised that people don't seem to realize this. But maybe this is just the way things work in a society of hundreds of millions of people spread over the face of a continent; understanding people well enough to speak to them as people is slow, and seems like a lot of work. Easier to expect that those people will do the work to convince themselves, rather than whatever it is that they'd rather be doing.

To be fair, that was uncharitable of me. The fact that I don't regard the truth, whatever it may be, to have some special right to be first and foremost in people's minds doesn't license me to look down my nose at people who do. (Not that lacking a license has ever stopped me...) And I guess that's the thing about truth; everything looked different once I stopped believing that there was some singular Truth about things that it would benefit everyone to hold.

Whether I'm simply an epistemological relativist, or shade all the way into nihilism, is something that I'm going to have to think about. The two positions are different, even if they have some things in common, and so it may be best not to conflate them.

In any event, learning to become comfortable with the idea that I see the world the way that I do because (and only for as long as) it works for me was freeing. The stress of being right or wrong about the world, and constantly working to understand the difference, gradually went away. Which allowed me to focus on whether or not a given understanding of the world worked for me, rather than trying to reconcile that with some number of other understandings. It's still something of a work in progress, mainly, I think, because it tends to be a solitary pursuit, but I'm winding it a worthwhile one; if for no other reason than it becomes one fewer reason to be critical of others. 

Safe Bet

I was listening to Wired Magazine's interview with LinkedIn founder Reed Hoffman. Mr. Hoffman is an "A.I." optimist, who understands the technology is going to give everyone who uses it "superpowers." But he notes that there's going to be disruption, and there's going to be pain.

What he didn't say is that there's going to be neither disruption nor pain for Reed Hoffman.

Like a lot of technology boosters, not to mention outright utopians, the costs and benefits are always conceived of in the aggregate. Okay, so there are costs, and there are benefits; but as long as the costs outweigh the benefits on, say, the national level, then everyone wins.

But this isn't the way that many people experience costs and benefits of technology in their day-to-day lives. If a factory closes, and the work is sent overseas, to use an easily accessible example, yes, the former factor worker now has access to the goods they once helped make at a discount, perhaps even a substantial one. But their income takes a significant hit, and their other local costs don't decrease. So while the benefits of the change are spread out over many millions of people, the costs tend to be concentrated on the specific people whose careers suddenly ended, and the people who made their livings from their disposable income.

Mr. Hoffman believes that people can use generative automation to create even greater value, and thus head this off, but I'm not sure that he's accurately calibrated for human nature here. He gives the example of a musician he knows, whom he calls "Sarah." Sure, people can now use generative automation to create Sarah-sounding music to listen to, but now Sarah can use automation to make even better music. But the reason why people would use automaton to make Sarah-sounding music in the first place is that even if it falls squarely into the category of "A.I. slop," it's still good enough. And it comes a lot cheaper than paying Sarah.

It's entirely possible to buy legitimately hand-crafted items today. The reason so many of them are so expensive isn't that artisans are greedy; it's that the lower end of the market was disrupted ("collapsed might be a better term) by automation, and if someone can only count on selling two tables a month, each table needs to pay all of their expenses for a two week+ period of time.

And sure, the people who now cater to the lower end of the market could use generative automation to raise their output quality, and look to the higher end of the market, but there are only so many customers in those market segments... and if a lot of people are chasing them, it becomes a matter of who can avoid starving long enough to wait out the other competitors.

Reed Hoffman, being wealthy well past the need to ever work again, is never going to have this problem. Worst case scenario, he starts his comfortable retirement earlier than he expected to. The level of disruption that forces him to wonder how he's going to keep a roof over his head, or put food on the table will have demolished a lot of lives well before it reached him.

Indistinguishable

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Arthur C. Clarke

I've been reading William Gibson's Neuromancer again, after some 30 years. I spend a lot of time staring at screens of one sort or another, and have always found paper to be a good way to unwind. The novel is part of the founding canon of the science-fiction subgenre known as cyberpunk, and I'd originally read it because I'd become interested in a running a campaign for the Cyberpunk tabletop roleplaying game (now in its fourth iteration).

Now that I live in the Dark Future, I find Neuromancer to be interesting in its outlook on technology. The post something-53 ("It's [an AI] got limited Swiss citizenship under their equivalent of the Act of '53.") setting of the novel has a technological base that can only be described as "disjointed." While cellular telephony was present in the early 1980s, it was pretty cutting edge at the time, and so there are no cell phones, as such, in Neuromancer. But at the same time, the mercenary Molly is outfitted with a full broadcast simstim setup that allows protagonist Case to have the sensation of being her, from miles away, and it clearly operates on some sort of radio signal, since the gang fixer Larry can tell not only that it's there, but that it's in use, even though it's strictly a one-way connection. And pay telephones are still a thing. Given where we are in 2025, it seems strangely anachronistic, in the same way that the decidedly analog future of Alien, et al does.

On the other hand, some of the technology seems, quite simply, magical. The character of Peter Riviera can simply project illusions into the visual fields of people around him, out to an undefined distance. "What he imagines, you see," as another character puts it. This due to implanted "silicon," and while it may be rare, it's not unique... the character describing the effect has seen the schematics for the implants. Riviera is basically an expensive entertainer, but the ability to project holograms like this would be a capability with a wide range of applications, licit and otherwise. But strangely, simple communication doesn't appear to be one of them. Likewise, Case is able to surf the net, via a fully virtual reality interface, from a tugboat in space. That's a remarkable amount of bandwidth, and something that seems magical, given the lack of more pedestrian uses for the technology.

All in all, it's shaping up to be an interesting read, as much for assessing the accuracy of Mr. Gibson's portrayal of "the future" as for the actual storyline of the novel. Which, oddly, I'm not very compelled by. (But I am curious as to how a Gibson-esque telling of the main storyline from Cyberpunk 2077 would go.)

But it serves to illustrate that predicting the future is difficult, in the sense that it's often easier to envision new technologies than to spin out where current ones will go.

Bunched Up

To take a pop culture example of the rising material expectations for American families, the TV sitcom The Brady Bunch, which ran from 1969 to 1974, followed the lives of a family with six children—three boys and three girls. The Bradys were prosperous, upper-middle-class Californians who could afford family vacations to Hawaii. Yet the three boys shared a single small bedroom, as did the three girls. What is more, all of the kids shared a single bathroom!
Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years

As the quote points out, The Brady Bunch was a sitcom. It was neither a documentary nor reality television. The fact that the show was set in a relatively small home says nothing about the material expectations for American families at the time. By 1974, my parents had purchased their first home, and it had four bedrooms (which made perfect sense to me at the time... of course everyone would have their own room), and this wasn't understood as cutting-edge... it was the norm for pretty much the entire neighborhood where I grew up.

The Heritage Foundation brings up the example of The Brady Bunch primarily to push back on the idea that "the way to raise successful children is to have fewer of them and invest more in each one," which has generally been the case in developed nations as children have gone from, as I recall one economist phrasing it, economic necessity to expensive luxury good. But was a situation comedy that ended more than 50 years ago, really the best example they could find to make a counterpoint? After all, there were no real Brady children to have outcomes to be tracked.

And that's the thing about the Heritage report in general. It's a deeply ideological document that drifts between feeling deeply. profoundly, cynical and naïvely, childishly, earnest. But it never seems to make what strike me as effective policy suggestions.

This is perhaps due, at least in part, to its stated goal and outlook. The goal being to have people marry earlier in life, then have children younger and have more of them, and the outlook being that a lot of otherwise disparate factors (like people's understanding of "quality versus quantity") play into their choices if how many children to have. But factors all different then the incentives the report notes:

First, many of the past incentives to have large families are gone. For instance, far fewer Americans live and work on farms in 2025 than they did in 1825 or 1925. Few married couples now think of the labor potential of children on a farm or in the local coal mine. Infant mortality has also dropped to near zero, and life expectancy has more than doubled. Far fewer elderly Americans live with and depend directly on their children and grandchildren now than they did in the past—due in part to vast entitlement programs.

There's a bit of grousing about entitlement programs; the Heritage Foundation is, after all, a conservative think tank, but otherwise, there's nothing in the document that suggests the fix is a return to a largely agrarian society, with increased levels of child labor as standard, higher levels of child mortality and people's entire social safety nets being their children. And so it's swimming against the tide with a rallying cry of "Virtue!" But, as if often the case with fundamentally religious outlooks, it refuses to recognize that "virtue" is almost always the celebration of responses to necessity. Sure, the Bible calls on people to have large families. It also calls on them to respect one another's property, and we all know how well that turned out. So 100 or 200 years ago, large families weren't a response to the idea that this is what the universe wanted, or even demanded from people; they were a response to a material situation in which whatever comforts could be squeezed out of life depended on having as many children as was practicable.

The three policy prop0sals that the paper makes are all basically to throw money at it; give married couples who have (their own) children a tax credit, give married couples who care for their own children at home a tax credit and (wait for it...) set aside money for each child born to a citizen and allow for tax-advantaged withdrawals from this fund if the grown child marries between the ages of 18 and 30. (Granted, these are better than some of the suggestions from an earlier draft, like giving parents extra votes, seeking to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges or forcing the owners of "starter homes" to receive bids from families before they could legally sell.) I'm dubious that it would work, partially because I'm not sure they solve the problem the Heritage Foundation thinks it's attempting to solve, but also because I don't think that they're really geared at solving anyone else's problems. Sure, there are some people who think that it's too expensive to raise a child, but I don't see how Heritage plans to force the djinni of greater educational attainment and broader choices for women back into the bottle.

Miscredit

When reading posts from people who understand generative automation, and the skills to use it well, as being the future of work, it starts to sound like financial credit.

The person who has managed their finances well enough that they don’t need to borrow money to fund their lifestyle finds themselves penalized for that. So credit stops being a tool that is employed because it’s the best tool for the job at hand, but simply for its own sake, because one isn’t allowed to employ it for important things unless one has demonstrated that they’ve employed it for trivial things. (And not essential things... if a bank comes to feel that one actually relied on credit cards and other small iterations of revolving credit, then that’s a risk factor.)

Generative automation is moving in the same direction. I saw a post a while back where the poster notes that misusing an LLM to prepare for an interview is a yellow flag for them, but a candidate being proud of the fact that they didn’t need to use one at all is a red flag. And it wasn’t the first time I’ve seen this idea that generative automation should be used, simply for the sake of using it, rather than it’s the best or most effective tool for the job at hand.

If we understand that locking credit behind unnecessary borrowing (with all of its attendant costs) is pointless and wasteful, it shouldn’t be that much of a stretch to see expecting people to use generative automation, just so they can say they’ve used generative automation is the same. Generative automation is a good tool. But it’s not the only tool. Treating it as indispensable, regardless of the task at hand, in the present, on the assumption that it will one day get there, is premature.