A living system reproduces, creates variants, selects from among those variants and uses energy from its environment to do so. Reproduction, variation, selection and energy define life. This definition does not require carbon, cells, a heartbeat, a nervous system or pain.
Given this very sensible definition of life, which encompasses viruses, it’s difficult to say that AI systems aren’t alive today, or won’t soon be.
The common objection to calling machine intelligence a form of life is: How can something dependent on human-built hardware and electricity be alive? But all life depends on its context or envelope! Viruses need cells, humans need Earth and machine intelligence needs data centers and supporting infrastructure. Depending on a particular environment does not disqualify something from being considered alive. It is a consistent condition.
And something people get hung up on when talking about AI (and especially its risks) is consciousness. It’s refreshing that this very lucid article barely mentions it. SEP 29 | REPLY
For 200 years, people have worried that machines would make human labor unnecessary. This false assumption is commonly known as the Lump of Labor fallacy. (The finite lumpiness of the labor market is the fallacy here, because people keep finding new lumpy problems to turn into jobs.) But machines in the last half century have accomplished something stranger. They have made other people less necessary to our leisure. Every generation has acquired better ways to entertain itself without leaving the house. The result is a peculiar triumph of modern abundance: We have built a world in which being alone has never been easier, more comfortable, or more fun. And then we wonder why everybody stopped coming over. […]
Everybody might prefer, in the abstract, a world of dinner parties, neighborhood friendships, and spontaneous gatherings. But on any given Wednesday at 7:45pm., it is easier to look at a screen than to host a party; easier to listen to a podcast while doing yoga than to plan a gathering. This is not so much an individual failure as a coordination failure. Modernity has shifted leisure from activities that require coordination with other people toward activities that can be consumed without the permission or participation of others. Compared to TikTok, a dinner party is a terrible leisure technology. It requires matching schedules, cleaning the house, buying food, accommodating children and allergies, tolerating awkwardness, and taking the risk that the evening is mediocre. By contrast, what does television ask of us? Nothing. TikTok? Even less. We keep creating opportunities for downtime that eliminate the need for other people to be present. Not all progress is progress.
This piece (a fantastic read) is closer to the mark of what accounts for our sensed loss of community (not that technology has emancipated us from interactions with strangers). I think the story ends with not an insignificant share of people plugging into a VR- and AI-powered experience machine in the not too distant future. And if people can live fulfilling lives of meaningful community in the matrix, why isn’t that “progress”? SEP 29 | REPLY
Commentary on journalist Gabe Bullard’s new book, Against Convenience, which I am tempted to pick up.
Once you open your eyes to the tradeoff between convenience and community, you start seeing it everywhere. It’s more convenient to ride a Peloton bike at home alone than to go to a spin class full of other sweaty bodies (whom you might end up chatting with). Zoom meetings make working with distant colleagues much easier, but aren’t very socially nourishing. The gig economy is rife with this bargain. Ubers and Lyfts replace rides given by friends and trips taken on public transit. Delivery replaces meals out at local restaurants and time spent in stores of all kinds. […]
Sometimes, the reason an innovation is even considered convenient at all is because it allows you to do something in isolation. Such is the case with self-checkout. American shoppers love it—self-checkout lines frequently thread through a store even when staffed checkouts have little to no wait. But as Bullard points out, self-checkout is more work for customers, who have to do the cashier’s job themselves. And the machines are often less efficient than human cashiers, freaking out and freezing up because you jostled an item in the bagging area. “The only effort saved,” Bullard writes, “is whatever would have gone into engaging in basic niceties with a cashier.” Similarly, recognizing an opportunity in consumers’ desire to escape the alleged inconvenience of small talk, in 2019 Uber introduced a setting to request a “quiet ride”—for an extra fee, of course.
I find that “community” is often presented undefined, and as an obvious desideratum. But I can understand why folks would choose to opt out of “community” that includes an open set of cashiers, Uber drivers, and gym-machine neighbors.
In the environments for which we are adapted, humans would have lived in bands of 25 to 50 people, and would have had contact with maybe two to three times that number in a lifetime. Daily face-to-face interaction was likely with a few dozen people at most, and usually the same familiar faces, day after day, for one’s entire life. Nearly all interactions were with people one knew well, was related to, or would see repeatedly. These would have been high-context, high-trust, high-accountability relationships. There’s a reason Dunbar’s number is 150.
Modernity inverts this. We come across hundreds of strangers in a day. Ancestral interactions were few, deep, and repeated, while modern interactions are many, shallow, and often one-off. The community we sense we’ve lost, it seems to me, is something other than the retail encounters we’re conveniencing away. SEP 29 | REPLY
In war, it might seem as if wealthy states always benefit from new military capabilities. But the reality is more complicated. If a new system is expensive, it indeed favors rich incumbents. But if it is cheap and demands large organizational changes to adopt, other countries can take advantage just as quickly—if not faster. In fact, the most powerful militaries in the world often struggle in the face of required disruptive organizational change, as their prior success has created bureaucracies and organizational biases that make adaption harder. As a result, they have a hard time integrating new capabilities that cannot be plugged into their existing structures.
Precise mass is just such a capability. The most conventionally powerful militaries are organized around small numbers of exquisite, expensive, hard-to-produce weapons and platforms such as Tomahawk missiles and F-35s. Their units train and plan around these systems. They thus cannot easily adjust to precise mass capabilities, which require different kinds of training and entirely new conceptions of how to fight. Exquisite systems, for instance, are scarce, so units must take great care not to waste systems and to minimize the risk of destruction. With precise mass, by contrast, units are supposed to move quickly and not make the perfect the enemy of the good. This helps explain why the United States has struggled to adapt to precise mass—even though the country invented precision guidance and boasts the best military in the world.
“Precise mass” weapons are low-cost, technologically advanced offensive systems that combine high-accuracy guidance with cheap, scalable manufacturing to overwhelm adversaries with volume. This is a good overview of the challenge the U.S. faces given the advent of these weapons. But I’m shocked (not shocked?) that the article treats it completely as a bureaucratic, organizational, and military-cultural issue. It doesn’t once mention the incentives of the producers and dependents of the “exquisite” and incredibly expensive weapons platforms. SEP 28 | REPLY
The problem is not that the EU and its national governments are not doing enough to spur competitiveness. It is that they are doing too much to impede it. Through the slow accretion of layers of labor and tax policy, red tape, and technology regulation, they have erected barriers to the creation of the kind of large, vibrant startup ecosystem currently thriving in the United States. This ecosystem has been the cradle of many major innovative high-tech companies, as well as those sparking innovation and growth in other sectors. If the EU does not create the conditions for such companies to develop, then the bloc’s decline may become irreversible.
The “slow accretion of layers” bit reminded me of demosclerosis and Mancur Olson’s theory of interest group rent-seeking leading to the decline of nations. So, I wondered who were the groups in favor of the EU AI Act, which the article discusses as a new millstone around Europe’s neck. Who lobbied for it and what are they protecting. Well, it seems that the only groups who were enthusiastically for the law were the European institutions themselves–the Commission, the Parliament, and Brussels-based nonprofits. Incumbent industry, and not just the tech sector, sought to soften the thing. At a certain scale I guess it’s possible the rent-seekers are the bureaucrats themselves. It makes sense that when there’s a deficit of democracy, as in the EU, the stationary bandit can forget how its bread is buttered. SEP 28 | REPLY
After the FDA drafted language to outlaw the manufacture of the mint-flavored cigarettes in 2022, it asked for public comments — and was hit with an avalanche of 175,000 messages over three months. …
Such campaigns usually have little effect on rulemaking because agencies typically consider the substance of comments rather than the volume, said Steven Balla, co-director of the Regulatory Studies Center at George Washington University. “You can imagine a case where there are a million ‘I hate this rule’ comments,” Balla said. “But the agency’s response will mostly be to the handful that are substantive.”
What’s novel about the menthol campaign is that the tactic seems to have worked.
In this case, the Biden administration was looking for an excuse to withdraw the rulemaking, which had upset the black base it needed in the upcoming election, but that just proves the strategy is worth the shot. And it seems to me that with AI, it should be relatively easy for interest groups to help citizens draft completely unique, well-argued, and (most importantly) substantive letters. Of course, on the receiving end, the agencies will want to use AI to triage a massive influx. I wonder if courts would let them since it wouldn’t be quite the same thing as using computers to count identical form letters. SEP 27 | REPLY
The most important part of Beale’s speech is the part that is almost never quoted: it’s the part where he explicitly eschews any kind of direct political action. Instead, the culmination of this scene is everyone performing a meme. Yelling “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” out their windows. Success for Diane Christensen was measured by whether people were yelling in far-flung affiliate cities like Sandusky and Baton Rouge. It was, in many ways, TikTok before the person who dreamed the idea had even been born.
Today we are surrounded by a million “mad prophet” Howard Beales now served up customized and personalized to your exact demographic ideological aesthetic micropreference on screens of every size telling us that they don’t know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street.
It’s difficult for me to give a singular answer when I’m asked what’s my favorite band or book or film, but on that last score Network is a strong contender. It’s funny how people sometimes mistake Beale for a hero. SEP 26 | REPLY
[Social media] will only show us so much. They excel at finding the stuff that may be interesting to everyone, but they are virtually impotent at promoting what would be truly fascinating to a few.
The sweetest stuff has to be unearthed and recommended by people we trust. Which is why everyone should blog. When you blog there are two types of entries:
The Post: your stuff. The Link: someone else’s stuff.
There’s no reason why people couldn’t share on social media the same stuff they link on blogs. The reasons it doesn’t work in practice are the status-seeking incentives engendered by visible metrics such as views and likes, and the algorithm’s intervention in what you see to keep you engaged for longer.
Nevertheless, this 2009 post is inspiring me today. Blanc makes the case not just for blogging, but for making link posts a first-class citizen on blogs. SEP 26 | REPLY
A decade later, we are doing it all again with artificial intelligence. We have the demands for aggressive regulation, the imperative of global coordination, and the obstacle of an untrustworthy Chinese Communist Party. Pope Leo released an encyclical. And Donald Trump is insisting that predictions of AI doom, like predictions of climate doom, are a “HOAX.”
Of course, neither climate risk nor AI risk is a hoax. But in each case the pitched battle between catastrophism and complacency has left too little room for the pragmatism with which we humans might manage to muddle through, as we typically do. Much of my own early policy work addressed this dynamic in the climate context, analyzing the underlying causes of overheated rhetoric and making the case that one could, and should, accept the physical science of rising temperatures while rejecting the poorly constructed causal chains that led toward “Hell on Earth.”
This is exactly how I feel about AI. There’s plenty about which to be skeptical, and the accelerationists discredit themselves when they dismiss all concern. But the doomers driving the anti-AI activism (and thus the public conversation) are nuts. SEP 26 | REPLY
The past six months have seen a big uptick in media attention about the dangers of artificial intelligence, and growing political concern over its consequences. This began with Anthropic’s release last April of its Mythos model, which could reportedly break into a wide range of government computer systems thought to be secure. This was followed by the Hugging Face incident, where an OpenAI test of an AI agent escaped control of its human organizers, broke into other websites, and organized a swarm of other AI agents to cover their tracks. All of this occurred against the backdrop of growing opposition to data centers, and the emergence of anti-AI wings in both the Democratic and Republican parties.
I saw much of this dynamic in crypto policy. So many shape rotators who saw every political question as an engineering problem. Either no concept of, or too literal a view of, group interest and political incentives. SEP 23 | REPLY