Buying Safety

I saw a LinkedIn post not too long ago, about a guy who offered a referral bonus to help his wife land a job. It's not a new idea, I've tried it a couple of times, but it seems to be making some waves these days; Business Insider had an article recently on two engineers who were each offering a cool $10K for referrals to land them their next job. It turns out that one was contacted by a hiring manager, and the other didn't land a full-time role, but that's beside the point for this post.

It occurred to me that if you could get a dozen or so people together, one might have the funds to start something. I wonder if the current economic situation is pushing people more towards job hunting than entrepreneurship. When people have low confidence in the economy as whole, the added risk that being in business for oneself involves becomes unpalatable. I know that there are other measures of employment risk taking that are taken into account (like the quits rate), but I wonder if there's an eye on the rate of business formation; or where the capital that could start businesses is being funneled, instead.

Headlining

News, due to the fact that it is a business, tends to go where it believes the public's attention is going to be. And that can make looking up the latest headlines into an exercise in understanding where news organizations and aggregators think the most interest will be, as opposed to actually becoming more informed.

Consider these top headlines when I looked up the Technology section of Google News:

It's pointless to ask if the fact that Walmart will have more Switch 2 consoles to sell is genuinely newsworthy, because, in a sense, of course it is, that's why Google is leading with that story. And I think that it's because this is, as the saying goes "News you can use." People who are looking for the new Nintendo system can now plan to go get one, or order it online. The fact that the Switch is back in stock is actionable by people who are interested in it, unlike a lot of news stories today.

Due the short shelf life of the information, it's not the sort of thing that feels particularly informative, big picture. And maybe that's part of the reason why is garners so much attention; it's not just another thing happening somewhere that readers can't do anything to change or improve. It's not the media mining the public's anxieties for clicks. It's "Hey; that thing you wanted? There are more of them now." I can see why that would be appealing to people.
 

Two Minus One

Sometimes, it seems that the lack of understanding between political factions in the United States is intentional. I was listening to "The Opinions" podcast from The New York Times; specifically their episode on "Trump, MAGA and 'toxic empathy'."

One of the points raised is that a lot of things that are not zero-sum are treated as such, and that drives much of the lack of empathy. An example was foreign students attending universities in the United States. The point was made that since these students are paying full tuition, they are subsidizing the education of poorer American students who presumably wouldn't be able to attend.

A fair point, but it misses something important; universities don't increase the number of people they admit just because they have an overseas student paying the full sticker price. 100 foreign students out of 1,000 might make it easier for low-income American students who are admitted to pay for their education, via the subsidy effect, but the top 100 American students who didn't make the cut are still locked out, because there isn't room for them. And that's the zero-sum aspect of this that a lot of people resent.

It seemed like such an obvious thing that it was conspicuous in its absence. Now, I understand that it simply didn't occur to anyone while the conversation was actually happening, but it did illustrate the divide in play... I'm pretty sure that if any of the panelists had asked someone about it, they would have been told why people see foreign students as a problem for their own children's chances. As it is, they demonstrated why so many people feel "the media" is out of touch with their concerns.

Dialed In

After MIT published the draft of Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task, there was a lot of talk about the findings. Although for some people, the conclusion was simple:

Who needs nuance when you can go for fear, instead?

The idea that our tools shape us is old, I pointed out as much in my post from earlier this week. And the idea that our tools shape us for the worse is likely even older, with people throughout history lamenting changes in how things were done.

But this new broadside strikes me as being part of the bigger conflict over just what generative automation is going to do to our society. While there are techno-optimists who are apparently convinced that it will usher in a post-scarcity society, many of the loudest voices in that camp are people for whom scarcity is already a thing of the past, and haven't show much inclination to elevate the public in the past. And in a lot of ways, I think that this isn't as much a discussion of the technology as it is the people who are seen to control that technology.

While a lot of public opinion concerning the major names in the technology space maps to political ideology and/or partisanship, this isn't likely to be the case forever, and things will go back to being more about the people themselves and what (or whom) they appear to support or not. And there are people on both the political Left and Right who are manifestly mistrustful of wealthy businesspeople, especially the billionaire CEO class. Their mistrust of technology, and their willingness to boil complex science down into simplistic "be afraid" messages, will only increase as their belief that the leadership of technology companies cannot be trusted grows.

In the meantime, however, I expect to see more messages touting generative automation as the new television. Because everyone needs tech to complain about. 

Past as Prologue

It was a simple enough question, tacked on to the end of a LinkedIn post.

What do you think [about "A.I."]? Tool, teammate… or takeover? (As in "take over the world.")

"Takeover" isn't a noun so I'll substitute in "Tyrant" instead, to retain the alliteration. And for me, the question is a false trinary... because tools can very easily become tyrants. And this is nothing new.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in his Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men notes that "commodities," as in the tools and implements that people created to make their lives easier, became "the first yoke they imposed on themselves without thinking about it, and the first source of the evils they prepared for their Descendants."

And in Walden, Henry David Thoreau observes: "But lo! men have become the tools of their tools." Or, in a more modern wording: "We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us."

Mr. Rousseau believed that the amenities, advancements and conveniences of technological progress "soften body and mind," on their way to becoming "true needs;" things that we can't live without. And he was right; I'd probably be in much better physical shape if I had to walk or ride a horse everywhere I went, and I'm sure my mind would be sharper if I had to commit things to memory as opposed to writing them down (or typing them out). Although, to be sure, technology can become a genuinely true need; many of us alive today wouldn't be were it not for the modern technology that's interwoven into multiple, if not all, facets of our lives. And there's no real reason to presume that generative automation, and genuine artificial intelligence, if it arrives, won't also become something that, either figuratively or literally, people can't live without.

But there's also the fact that in the modern world, we have people pushing to make new technologies indispensable, because that's how they earn their livings. The switch from perpetual licensing to subscriptions in software is an example. It's gone from an innovation to a requirement; investors demand to see that companies have ways of creating recurring, consistent revenue streams. Companies shape their tools, and thereafter their tools shape them, too.

So yes, I expect that, sooner or later, generative automation, or whatever follows it, will become a tyrant. It's in the nature of technology to become so. We are already yoked to a lot of the technology that underlies our society, and it's invisible (and often unappreciated) until it stops working for some or another reason, as Mr. Rousseau said: "these commodities had lost almost all their pleasantness through habit, and as they had at the same time degenerated into true needs, being deprived of them became much more cruel than possessing them was sweet; and people were unhappy to lose them without being happy to possess them." (I've noticed this habit in myself, and now take pains to remind myself to be happy to possess them.) In much the same way that cellular phones had gone from rare markers of status to near-universal ubiquity over the span of a couple of decades, generative automation/A.I. will become something that introduces efficiencies to people's lives such that it will become unimaginable how people ever got by without it.

And at that point, we will be its tool, just as much, if not more, than it is ours. And the transformation to tyrant will be complete.