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