Category Archives: economics

October 29, 2024 · 12:30 pm

AI is a stupid solution in search of a problem

As plenty of people have pointed out, AI wasn’t cooked up to solve an established problem. Silicon Valley developed the chatbots and large language model and now they’re insisting we use it for …. something. Never mind that it sucks. For example, claiming the backflip was invented by a medieval acrobat named … Backflip.

Google, for example, makes AI results the default in its search engines. When asked about IQ and nationality it regurgitated bullshit pseudoscience, probably because there’s no good research on the topic. Other AI aren’t any better.

They’re also massive electricity hogs, putting pressure on the power grid. Microsoft wants to reopen the Three Mile Island nuclear plant to power its data centers, with a $1.6 billion federal loan guarantee in support. But the power company has assured us the risk to taxpayers is minimal.

They also use around a bottle of water per chatbot email.

Not that AI is unique. The robovan is a bus that carries fewer people, but will probably be “more expensive to purchase, and being unserviceable by the maintenance department of any municipality who buys them.”

Ai apparently works okay in fast-food windows, taking orders — but it’s not like this was a massive problem in need of high-tech solutions. And apparently it relies heavily on human assistance. And I don’t see any need to build AI into Dungeons and Dragons.

Oh, but don’t worry, techbro and munitions magnate Palmer Lucky says we shouldn’t have any restrictions on AI — warnings about the risks are a plot by America’s enemies.

I guess we shouldn’t worry about X’s Grok AI sucking up personal information either.

Although there’s a lot of material in the public domain, one company insists it can’t make AI work without free access to copyright material.

Apparently “if AI can’t learn from books, humans won’t be able to learn” is an argument out there. Attorney and novelist Courtney Milan explains why that’s nonsense. Here’s a related debate thread. Another thread explains that no, AI is not leveling the playing field: “That’s not who uses “AI.” It’s people who WILL NOT do things.”

AI sucks at writing too. Unsurprisingly some people have monetized it by creating AI audiobooks based on AI-written novels.

“a speaker said, ‘He, the boy, was going to, I’m not sure exactly, take the umbrella.’ But the transcription software added: ‘He took a big piece of a cross, a teeny, small piece … I’m sure he didn’t have a terror knife so he killed a number of people.'” Yeah, using AI for transcription seems like a great idea.

Leave a comment

Filed under economics, Politics

Tagged as

October 28, 2024 · 5:05 am

Singing the capitalist blues

Why pharmacies are failing.

Does the pharmacy industry trend to locking up products contribute to the problem?

A $50 million fine here, another $50 million there and soon — well, companies still won’t care.

“My wife’s nurse had to stand for 30 mins & administer a drug slowly through a syringe because there are almost no IV bags in the continental U.S. anymore.”

“‘Locally rich’ white people, those who had higher incomes than others in their zip codes, were much more likely to support Trump than those who were locally poor. These people might make less money than a wealthy person in a big city, but were doing relatively well when compared to their neighbors.”

“It makes you feel enslaved.” — a look at how farmers are forcing field hands to pay for overpriced food.

“In most rich countries, people don’t have to worry about sifting through a dozen different health plans — and they don’t live in fear of losing their health care after losing a job, and they receive more affordable, higher-quality care than Americans do.”

How the North Carolina homebuilding industry blocks regulations that could reduce flood risk. Florida’s insurance situation is a nightmare too.

With conservatives making DEI a cussword, corporations look at ways to transform it. Some simply give up — the obvious question is whether they ever really cared.

“sShool buses have entered a phase known in mass transit circles as a “death spiral,” in which declining service quality leads to declining ridership, which justifies further service cuts.”

“The rule requires businesses to get consumers’ consent for subscriptions, auto-renewals and free trials that convert to paid memberships. The cancellation method must be “at least as easy to use” as the sign up process.” Unsurprisingly telecoms are suing to kill the rule.

Corporate America already killed a ban on noncompete agreements.

“Private equity is buying out all the smaller legal printers and consolidating everything in the hands of the single Counsel Press. Which already kind of sucks, but when private equity inevitably makes it suck more, no one is going to be able to file their SCOTUS briefs anymore.”

The Biden administration laid down financial rules for financial advisers whose commissions influence their recommendations. Lobbyists block this.

Claims Elon Musk is a free-speech believer overlook that he wants to sue people for not advertising on X.

“New technologies can give corporations tools for monitoring, managing, and motivating their workforces, sometimes in ways that are harmful. The technology itself might not be innately nefarious, but it makes it easier for companies to maintain tight control on workers and squeeze and exploit them to maximize profits.”

Allegedly the head of George Mason University’s Global Antitrust Institute was bought and paid for by monopolists.

Ben Shapiro’s deep thoughts: Social Security is bad because retiring in your 60s is bad because once you retire you die. As I’ve observed before, it’s easy to scoff at retirement when your job involves as little physical effort as Shapiro (not much mental effort either, in his case).

To end, some good news:

A lawsuit to kill the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau was so weak even Clarence Thomas scoffed.

The Biden Treasury Dept. has recovered more than $1.3 billion from wealthy tax cheats.

Joe Biden appointee Lina Khan has been a dynamic trust buster.

I’ve written before about “pre-emptive compliance” where people anticipate fascists’ demands and carry them out beforehand. That’s how I’d class the WaPo not endorsing a candidate (some of their staff are outspoken in their objections) The LA Times publisher refused to let the editorial board endorse Harris; to their credit, several prominent journalists up and quit. The NY Post has reconsidered its former denunciation of Trump: they’re endorsing the felon.

Leave a comment

Filed under economics, Politics

July 25, 2024 · 5:15 am

Money and sex can both corrupt

In rereading The Essential Jekyll and Hyde, I came across a great quote by Robert Louis Stevenson in the footnotes. He’s explaining that no, Jekyll’s problem is hypocrisy, not sex and that being “a voluptuary” is not inherently bad. However, “the sexual field and the business field are perhaps the two best fitted for the display of cruelty and cowardice and selfishness.”

One of the standard rationales given by Puritans and religious conservatives (not all puritans are religious) for being so restrictive about sex is that it’s a powerful, destabilizing force that has to be controlled. As Christian feminist Samantha Field points out, this is one of those “every accusation is a confession” things — they believe humans have no natural restraints so society has to restrain them (which leads to conservatives declaring sexual consent is unimportant). Though in practice, of course, that usually means restraining women, not men.

It’s certainly true that sex is a powerful force that leads to us making bad decisions — especially when it’s mixed with ideas like “the woman’s consent doesn’t matter.” But the same is true of business, as Stevenson says. Believing slavery was Christian was an immoral decision but it makes great sense as a business position. Slaves were good business. Slave labor was good for business.

Yet a lot of the same conservatives who want to bottle up and control sex are dedicated to shielding and deregulating business as much as possible. And pretending this could not possibly have any bad side effects.

Free-market crusader Alan Greenspan, for instance, pushed for liberalizing regulations on banks and on companies giving investment advice from which they stood to profit. That was a major factor in the 2008 financial crisis. In hindsight, Greenspan said later, he “made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms.”

See also Purdue Pharma and Elizabeth Holmes.

Unfortunately we’re only worse off than in 2008. Conservatives are still committed to bringing back the laissez-faire no-regulation economy of the 19th century. Many liberals want to go soft on prosecuting business criminals. The Supreme Court is doing its best to gut the government’s regulatory power completely.

Want some examples? Amazon’s One Medical switched its helpline to a call center that often gives bad advice.

In the same vein a former Cigna Medical Director says the company pressured her to review cases too fast.

“We’ve generally come to accept that when a product is free to use, we are not simply the users: We become the product, monetized over and over.”

Venture capitalist Marc Andressen says he’s grateful the opioid epidemic keeps white trash complacent.

In the unregulated world of home health tests, “incremental scientific innovations can be quickly funded, brought to market and peddled to consumers online before their health benefit has been proved.”

Sometimes bad business and bad sex go hand in hand.

Florida’s meat industry doesn’t fancy competition from lab-grown meat. So they’ve gotten DeSantis to ban it.

A man worth $16 billion is still allegedly willing to break the law to make an extra $400,000.

Then there’s Boeing and its defective airplanes.

As John Keynes once said, looking to a better future “The love of money as a possession – as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life – will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semicriminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease.” We are, alas, a long way from that future.

Leave a comment

Filed under economics, Politics, Undead sexist cliches

Tagged as , ,

April 22, 2024 · 5:05 am

Republicans and the free market (and bad, bad business)

Republicans have a long history of gutting regulation on business. Not that Democrats are anti-business, despite the endless Republican screams of “socialism” — which typically have nothing to do with socialism, it’s just a scare word they throw around like “woke” and “DEI.” For example some cities in Florida want to require businesses provide water breaks for workers outside. Business doesn’t want to do that so Ron DeSantis and Florida Republicans say no mandating water breaks. Likewise, Southern business is anti-union and so are Southern Republican governors.

In practice, they care about the free market only when it’s in their interest. The Florida farm industry hates the idea of lab-grown meat; Florida therefore bans lab-grown meat. The oil industry doesn’t like renewable energy so Trump’s talking about stopping wind farms (he’s always had an odd obsession with wind power).

The tech industry cozied up to Trump in 2016 because they wanted to avoid regulation. Now we’re seeing Republicans talk all kinds of regulation and increased liability to break Big Tech and make it docile. Despite Trump’s team touting ideas that will trash the economy, a lot of tech entrepreneurs and CEOs can’t seem to imagine the Face Eating Leopard Party, under the control of an incompetent egomaniac, might eat their faces.

I suspect some Republican support by business leaders is driven by the same things that fuel ordinary Republican voters: they hate diversity and equality. They’re anti-anti racist (see here).Or they have a distorted idea of the causes of crime.

Now, some bad, bad business links:

Midwives are a valuable resource for expectant mothers. One of the nation’s largest hospital chains is gutting their midwife services. Another hospital hounds patients even when they’re broke and entitled to free care. When private equity buys up hospitals the results are unsurprisingly bad.

The pharmaceutical industry hates the idea of Medicare negotiating drug costs down.

Louisiana State Rep. Roger Wilder hates that state law gives kids working at his Smoothie King franchises mandatory lunch breaks. So he repealed them.

There are plenty of questions to raise about dieting and the diet industry. Now the food industry is pretending that identifying unhealthy food or suggesting how to eat healthier is food shaming. See also the book Unsavory Truth.

A major assisted living chain sets its staffing levels by algorithms. It goes as well as you’d expect.

The price-gouging private-equity companies extract from prisoners — the perfect captive customer base — shows how they’d treat the rest of us if they could.

Is paying college athletes for a cut of their future income bad business or smart business?

Definitely bad business: taking big bets on sports then using technicalities to stiff the winners. And will legalized gambling in North Carolina lead to bullying athletes on social media?

MLM marketing and loaded tea.

Boeing’s door-plug problem is a very bad sign for aviation’s future. It’s also a reminder that prioritizing profits over all works out badly.

Flexible scheduling is great for businesses, lousy for employees.

Veggie burgers and other plant-based meats may soon come with animal fat. I’ll be disappointed if that kills off genuinely veggie meats but as long as it’s clearly labeled it’s not bad business.

Trump Media’s stock tanked after it went public. Issuing more shares won’t improve it though I’m sure TFG will come out ahead.

To end on various bright notes:

Adam Neumann’s management of WeWork was a mess. The current board has no interest in him repurchasing the company.

Elon Musk’s compensation package at Tesla was so extreme and outrageous a judge struck it down.

The Biden Administration is capping credit-card late fees at $8.

The Supreme Court made it easier to sue for workplace discrimination.

Leave a comment

Filed under economics, Politics

Tagged as ,

February 15, 2024 · 5:04 am

Manhandling the Destitute

“Politics is bad enough in any shape but it shouldn’t get around to manhandling the destitute.” — Martha Gellhorn. But that doesn’t stop conservatives (and sometimes non-conservatives) from trying. After all it’s much easier to punch down than go after the rich.

For example Florida Republican Rep. Ryan Chamberlin wants to eliminate property taxes as a revenue source in favor of a higher sales tax. According to Chamberlin, property taxes “create an arrangement under which homeowners never truly own their domiciles. We all simply rent it from the state, and as long as we pay those rents, then we can use the property we hold a deed for,” he said. “This is not a tax; it is slavery.””

Well, no, it isn’t. Right-wingers have been thumping taxation=slavery for decades but it isn’t. If Chamberlin sells his house and moves in with family, nobody’s going to come ordering him to buy real estate and pay tax again. Taxation is coercive, yes, but not slavery. Slaves didn’t have options.

And if property tax is slavery, why isn’t just as oppressive to be forced to pay tax every time you buy something that isn’t exempt (as food is)? The answer, of course, is that sales tax hits much harder at the working class and poor than the rich whereas rich McMansion owners feel much more pain from property tax. Chamberlin referring to it as “consumption tax” is presumably meant to hide that, making it sound as if it’s some kind of punishment inflicted on spendthrifts. It isn’t. And several legislators have pointed out it’s a bad economic idea.

If Chamberlin is concerned about homeowners losing their property, he could always fix the home insurance crisis. But well-connected business people are making bank off that so I don’t anticipate Chamberlin or anyone else doing the (in fairness extremely) hard work needed to fix things.

Overdraft fees hit the poor hardest too, which is why I’m glad the Biden Administration is moving to limit them.

Leave a comment

Filed under economics, Politics

Tagged as

February 13, 2024 · 5:05 am

It’s tough out there for writers

Back in the 1990s, I made my first attempt at going full-time freelancer. I had a steady stream of income stringing for a locla paper, some magazines that liked my stuff, I was working on what I thought was a promising book, I had some money saved up. Looked good.

It wasn’t. The paying work dried up: the newspaper cut its stringer budget and the editors who liked my work moved on or found lots of other writers. I was not successful finding alternative sources which I think is a bigger problem: work often goes away but successful writers find alternative markets. And the novel — well, I was writing on my first computer and the freedom to endlessly revise a book led to me revising endlessly. Not Good.

It’s not gotten any easier in the years since. Like anyone else, we have to worry about financial reversals. Management can’t think of anything to do but slash jobs at newspapers and magazines. Here’s a good article about the boardroom games that led Arena Group to fire Sports Illustrated‘s staff. And switching to a non-profit model doesn’t necessarily help. Though for-profit propaganda hacks are definitely hurting. Then there’s the death of Pitchfork.Going indy frees me up to publish books such as Questionable Minds and Undead Sexist Cliches even if nobody else does. It does not guarantee anyone will buy them, let alone that enough people buy it to put bread on the table. If I weren’t a two-income family and collecting Social Security, I’d have problems. Promotion is an art and as I may have mentioned it’s often frustrating. To prep for the release this year of Southern Discomfort and Savage Adventures, I’ve been looking for suitable book bloggers and none of the ones I’ve looked at so far are accepting new books for review. Local stores have no interest in events involving books printed at Amazon, presumably because they’d be sending people to buy from the competition (and maybe the average quality isn’t great). And out of the several cons I’ve applied to this year, it looks like I’m going to be a guest at just one.

I’ve read articles that say you should spend 90 percent of your time promoting books, 10 percent on writing them which just does not make sense. That means if I worked 40 hours a week on my own writing, I’d be writing 4 hours (and there simply isn’t 36 hours of promotion to do!). Rebecca Jennings looks at how personal branding has become a heavy workload; commenting on the piece, John Scalzi ponders the outdated concept of selling out and “where it feels like putting your art out into the world is often like chucking it down a hole and hoping enough people see it flashing by before it settles forever into the darkness.”

And there are always ways it could get worse: Yann LeCun, a French computer scientist, has argued that as the money we make is so little, books should be free to download: we authors won’t lose much and think how it will benefit society!

No conclusions here, just brooding. And I’m still writing. As John Hartness said when I was at a con a few years ago, I may not be a brand name but I do get to sit on the writers’ side of the panel table.

#SFWApro. Covers by Samantha Collins (t) and Kemp Ward, all rights to images are mine.

Leave a comment

Filed under Doc Savage, economics, Southern Discomfort, Writing

Tagged as

January 22, 2024 · 5:15 am

“They want us dead.” Jessica Valenti on forced-birthers

“Of course they want us dead,” is how Jessica Valenti responds to the recent court decision saying that no, emergency rooms have no obligation to provide life-saving abortions (something I discussed last week). Her point is that when a conservative proposes an anti-abortion bill that will kill women — criminalizing abortion for ectopic pregnancies for instance — the assumption is that they’re clueless. In reality they know women will die, they just don’t care. “In the conservative imagination, the most noble thing a pregnant woman can do is die so that a fetus can live.”

As I’ve blogged about repeatedly, to the forced-birth movement women are aquariums. Their value is in the precious fetus swimming inside them. As Valenti says, “the judges ruled that when emergency room doctors are faced with a patient who has a dangerous or life-threatening pregnancy, they have a responsibility to ‘stabilize both the pregnant woman and her unborn child.” That means a 6-week embryo would warrant as much emergency treatment as you do.”

I agree with Valenti, it’s not that they’re clueless — there’s a misogynist logic at work. If it’s wrong to make the fetus feel pain, then it’s wrong even if the mother’s life is at stake. Even if the fetus can’t survive, as in the case of Savita Halappanavar in Ireland; she’d miscarried and the fetus couldn’t survive but doctors couldn’t abort as long as it had a heartbeat. Halappanavar died as a result. A Catholic representative wrung his hands but still said saving her would have been an evil act because it would have killed the fetus.

Then there’s the argument htat if abortion is wrong, it’s wrong even when the odds the fetus won’t survive are 99 percent — what if that fetus would have made it through the 1 percent miracle window? Although even if the odds are zero, they don’t care: Georgia State Rep. Terry England argued in 2012 that women should have to carry dead fetuses to term. I think the logic there is that abortion is always bad, therefore even with a dead fetus the woman is out of luck. Or, as Valenti discusses here, they’re manipulating language: life-saving abortions, if they happen should be called “maternal fetal separation” reserving abortion for those optional surgeries they imagine slutty women get.

Like I said, women are aquariums to them, You don’t kill your tropical fish to protect an aquarium. Anti-abortion forces have believed this for decades but until Dobbs they couldn’t show us who they are.

For more about bullshit right-to-life arguments, feel free to check out my Undead Sexist Cliches, available as a Amazon paperback, an ebook and from several other retailers.

3 Comments

Filed under economics, Politics, Undead sexist cliches

January 8, 2024 · 5:05 am

Undead Sexist Cliche: Women don’t want work, they want a rich husband

Back in the 1990s, I read a couple of articles asserting that a large number of 20something women were fed up with the rat race. Too much work for too little gain. Tired of paying their dues. So why not get married instead? Find a husband who can support them (and kids, if they choose to have any) in the style to which they’d like to become accustomed. Then they could stay home, work part-time or start their own business, depending on what they felt like.

After 9/11, as Susan Faludi chronicled in The Terror Dream, there were a spate of articles about how women wanted to quit their jobs and find someone — if your life could be snuffed out by a terrorist at any second, why spend it at the office? Isn’t being with your family what really matters?

Last October, Glamour published an article in the same vein: lots of women announcing online that they’re embracing their feminine nature by quitting work or at least working only as much as they have to. The rat race was designed for men: they’re women! I should add the writer is quite critical of the assumptions that being a professional is innately unfeminine and that financial dependence on a spouse/partner is a winning strategy

As several feminists have pointed out over the years, one thing articles like these have in common is gendering: nobody ever asks the men whether any of them have the same thoughts. One woman in the Glamour article says “I don’t want to hustle, I simply want to live my life slowly and lay in a bed of moss with my lover and enjoy the rest of my existence, reading books and creating art and loving the people in my life.” I suspect a lot of men might think that was cool too. A lot more men are stay-at-home dads than used to be. One study found a lot more men would like to stay home and be primary caregiver than get to do it.

There are lots of factors to consider here but very few relate to innate female nature. First, as plenty of stories since the pandemic started have pointed out (no links handy, sorry), work often sucks. Pay is low, performance under-rewarded, management pay is out of proportion to the value they deliver, and attempts to improve things get everyone’s back up (I’ve seen my friends deal with that). It’s worse for women because the old saying is often true: they have to work twice as hard to get half as far, which raises the question whether the journey is worth it. Outright sexism and harassment drive lots of women away from jobs they might otherwise enjoy.

Plus, to paraphrase America Ferrara in Barbie they have to be rational and not at all emotional yet not be an ice princess; they have to be attractive enough but not so goodlooking people don’t take them seriously; she has to be strong and assertive but not too tough to be unfeminine (these are not original insights with me). That’s a narrow path to walk.

That said, there’s nothing wrong with choosing that path (though choices based on “I’m the top rainmaker but I’ve been passed over for partner six times” isn’t exactly choice) but as Glamour noted, being dependent has its own risks. Nor should going “soft girl” (or whatever the male equivalent would be) have to mean complete rejection of careers. As one woman said “why can’t you be crushing your goals and still feel well and not absolutely burnt out?”

To close with, a few relevant links:

Many black women are still committed to entrepreneurship.

Equal division of parenting often isn’t as equal as men think. It doesn’t help that schools, sports and other kid-related organizations can’t grasp the idea of co-parenting.

For more about misogyny and sexism at work or at home, feel free to buy Undead Sexist Cliches, available for Kindle, in paperback or other ebook formats.

Leave a comment

Filed under economics, Politics, Undead sexist cliches

December 11, 2023 · 5:15 am

It’s not the robot overlords we should worry about but the human ones

That is, the “vainglorious buffoons” who insists it would be tragic to restrict or regulate AI when they can make so much money off it — er, when it can give humanity so many wonderful things. Like United Health using a massively error-prone AI to cut off healthcare. Or the ongoing debate over using copyrighted texts to train AIs. Or using AIs to write legal documents when they have no hesitation making citations up. Despite which a lawyer insisting that “there’s no point in being a naysayer … or being against something that is invariably going to become the way of the future.”

Once we accept AI doing all this stuff is inevitable, it’s a lot harder to manage its use, regardless of the problems. Much as smart houses run into problems that never happen to old-style housing (one or another company announces they’re no longer maintaining the software for your smart lightbulbs or smart thermostat, say). Or how the high-tech farming company AppHarvest collapsed and failed. And NFTs. The buffoons, despite their wealth and accomplishments, aren’t as smart as they think they are (e.g., Peter Thiel opining on Tolkien or Sam Bankman-Fried on Shakespeare).

As Cory Doctorow describes it there are two schools in Silicon Valley about AI: it will gain sentience and become a threat or it will gain sentience and become a friend. Both schools, as Doctorow points out, focus on the far-distant future, and thereby ignore the harms AI does in the present: “shifting the debate to existential risk from a future, hypothetical superintelligence ‘is incredibly convenient for the powerful individuals and companies who stand to profit from AI.’ After all, both sides plan to make money selling AI tools to corporations, whose track record in deploying algorithmic “decision support” systems and other AI-based automation is pretty poor.”

Software engineer Molly White says focusing on the distant future can justify almost any decision: if AI can improve the lives of 100 million people 200 years from how, isn’t screwing over 50,000 people in the present justified if it gets you to that future? “It is interesting, isn’t it, that these supposedly deeply considered philosophical movements that emerge from Silicon Valley all happen to align with their adherents becoming disgustingly wealthy. Where are the once-billionaires who discovered, after their adoption of some “effective -ism” they picked up in the tech industry, that their financial situation was indefensible? The tech thought leaders who coalesced and wrote 5,000-word manifestos about community aid and responsible development?”

Crooked Timber says the Silicon Valley mindset is less a mindset than a personality disorder. Vox points out the tremendous irrationality of billionaires supporting Nikki Haley over Trump: the only candidate who can stop Trump is Biden but they can’t bring themselves to support a Democrat. Paul Campos has more. So does the Guardian.

Doctorow (again) says these kind of fights are old issues: “Tech has always included people who wanted to make a better internet  … Tech has also always included people who wanted to enshittify the internet” because this often makes it possible to make more money (e.g., less customer services, fewer content moderators).

The problems to worry about are now, not when the robot overlords gain sentience.

Leave a comment

Filed under economics, Politics

Tagged as

November 15, 2023 · 3:05 pm

The vainglorious buffoons of Silicon Valley

In Glass Onion, Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc mocks tech billionaire Edward Norton as a “vainglorious buffoon.”  As I mentioned back in August, their success, often in the face of skepticism seems to make them both contrarian and overconfident in their beliefs. Thus we have Sam Bankman-Fried, recently found guilty of massive cryptocurrency fraud after badly managing his defense. Or Elon Musk, under whose tender care Twitter is worth less than half what it was. But he’s going to fix it by making Twitter your banking site and your dating site.

Then we have Marc Andreesen, titan of early web browsers turned venture capitalist, who is shocked — shocked — that people think Silicon Valley should abide by such absurdities as tech ethics, sustainability, social-media trust-and-safety teams and social responsibility. That tech companies should think before deploying AI regardless of problems. How can he see a return on his VC investments that way? Oh, wait, that’s not what he says is his issue, it’s because tech leaders like him “believe in ambition, aggression, persistence, relentlessness — strength,. We believe in merit and achievement. We believe in bravery, in courage … We are the apex predator; the lightning works for us.”

As I pointed out in some LGM discussion, this is almost comical. Sure, investing takes a tolerance for risk but it doesn’t take bravery and courage the way physical risk does. Particularly not when Andreesen’s worth almost $2 billion; he could invest $500 million and lose it all but it still wouldn’t affect his lifestyle. Nor is rushing ahead with tech and not considering the consequences what I’d consider brave or strong; ambitious and aggressive maybe. But in this situation they are not bad things. Like the creators of the app that can deepfake women’s photos and turn them naked (but cannot, go figure, do the same to men).

We’ve had multiple accounts of AI being sold for some super-efficiency and it makes things worse or perpetuates the makers’ preconceptions. It’s not a new issue — the developers of polygraphs spewed the same Trust The Machine malarkey and they didn’t work either — but that doesn’t make it any less problematic. I doubt using AI to make military decisions will work well.

One new AI will supposedly model mass human behavior but “What this project does is complexify agent modeling far beyond anything that’s been done and then dumps the uncertainties of AI into it. I suspect, because the computing needs are so enormous, that a great many simplifications have been made. They’re not saying what those simplifications are.” And that’s bad given how easily AI defaults to stereotypes.

4 Comments

Filed under economics, Politics