Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts. Nothing on the new Iran war, I’ll have a post up on that soon.
Author: Ian Welsh Page 10 of 441
We have a very odd spectacle right now: Anthropic’s CEO has said the US government cannot use Anthropic products if they will not guarantee that they won’t be used for autonomous military robots (firing without human intervention) or mass surveillance. The Pentagon has responded by threatening to eminent domain Claude, and make their own version. The Secretary of “War” has summoned Anthropic’s CEO to a meeting today. We’ll see if he cracks. I’m sure they won’t just threaten his business.
A core problem faced by elites who want to rule is that they must rule thru other people. Enforcers: cops, military, judges, prosecutors and various bureaucrats. They can’t rule alone, and the enforcer class isn’t always reliable. Many joined the Russian revolution; the French; the American. Praetorian guards tend to be corrupt, incompetent and untrustworthy.
The solution to this is AI. Autonomous robots which fire when ordered to and have no conscience. But, if those robots are controlled by a mass of technicians and engineers, well, that’s no good: you’ve just got a different enforcer class.
But what if AI gets to the point where it can write its own updates and can run entire factories with no human intervention?
No soldier who won’t shoot. No technicians or bureaucrats who get in the way of what the rulers want. The elite is served by robots who always obey orders and will do anything. They no longer need to rely on retainers who might be a threat to them.
That leaves the masses. Of course autonomous military and police bots go a long way to making sure the hoi polloi know their place and stay in it but there are two more tools to deploy.
The first is mass surveillance. As Anthropic’s CEO points out in the current/old days even if you had mass surveillance it didn’t do you much good, because no one could be aware of all of it. But AIs can map out an entire opposition. They can read it all, pick the important nodes and tell the autonomous robots who to deal with.
The second is electronic cash. We’ve seen this repeatedly. Germany has been particularly forward about this, de-banking critics of genocide and making it a crime for anyone to give them money, food or aid.
In the old days you could get around de-banking with cash. Most places accepted it, you could pay your rent with it, go on holidary with it, you didn’t even need a credit card till the 80s or so.
But with everything pretty much electronic now, plus mass surveillance, anyone our masters want to completely destroy they can just cut off. No money. No home. No food. No medicine. If anyone tries to help, mass surveillance will catch it and they can be de-banked too.
AI plus autonomous robots gets rid of the need for retainers. AI, mass surveillance and electronic cash means that any attempt by the masses to organize can be crushed by rendering anyone homeless, starving and ulitimately dead. And in most countries all it takes is an administrative order. No need for a messy trial or anything.
This is the plan. The oligarchs time, under normal circumstances, would be coming to an end. The support they need from the 90-99% is going, mass support is dying, their societies are crumbling.
But get the autonomous robots, e-cash, mass surveillance and self-writing self-manufacturing robots going and they can stay in charge forever.
Or that’s their bet, anyway.
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There’s an idea going around that virtues are anti-competitive. That being loyal, honorable, honest, generous, kind, etc… puts you at a disadvantage.
It’s one of those half true statements. It’s true if your society is shit, but in a decent society it can be disadvantage, and if a society has predominantly virtueless people in charge, or as the majority of the population, then the society as a whole is at a disadvantage against virtuous societies.
In a society where everyone is out for themselves or a small group, and where any behaviour is acceptable as long as it “wins”, like the US (notice that even child rape is acceptable to US elites, if it wasn’t, they’d punish it) having morals will hold you back, no question. If you won’t make decisions which impoverish mass numbers of people, or kill them, if it’s in your self interest or the interest of your small group (bank, political party, corporation, family, whatever) then you’re at a disadvantage.
The problem is that such societies self-cannibalize. Instead of growing the pie they fight over who gets how much of a slice, and what they do makes the pie smaller than it otherwise would be. (Ignore every dipshit who tells you how rich the US is. It’s less rich in real terms than it was 60 years ago compared to its competitors and in many cases even to itself. A CT scan in China costs about $50, and you get it the same day.)
Whatever one thinks of China, the fact is that its elites concentrate on making the population more prosperous and the country stronger in real terms. They aren’t offshoring their steel production. They can build ships. They lift people out of poverty, they don’t shove people into it. There aren’t massive homeless encampments everywhere. They arrest senior party members and billionaires for corruption and even execute them for crimes.
They are better people than Americans. Doubtless that will outrage many, but if you think otherwise you’re engaged in special pleading. How many countries have they invaded and destroyed? How many people have they killed or impoverished, including their own people? They’re expanding education and healthcare, working hard to make housing cheaper, etc, etc…
This is an old observation. Societies which work for more people out-compete those that don’t. Lee Kuan Yee, the founder of Singapore was massively impressed with the Britain of the 30s and 40s because he saw, for example, that newspapers were simply left in a pile, people would take one and leave money and no one cheated. They dynamism of 50s thru 90s America (all a result of post-war government spending, by the way, the internet is a government creation all the way up and down) massively impressed him as well.
Good is stronger than evil. It always has been, because cooperative societies defeat societies which are competitive in the wrong ways. It’s alright to have some competition, but when it becomes existential and unbounded by ethics, it damages the host society. America can’t even ramp up weapons production any more because the firms in the business want to charge 10x what weapons cost. Russia and China, no problem increasing production if they choose.
None of this is to say that being evil doesn’t have advantages. Of course it does. But evil, as Tolkien observed, consumes itself over time: it is a war of all against all, with any alliances temporary and untrustworthy.
This is true even when dealing with “evil” societies. It isn’t the evil which makes them effective, it’s the parts they have that are good. Mongol loyalty and discipline and bravery, for example. Genghis Khan never had a single senior general or administrator turn on him. Not one. At the very least a nation needs to be good to more of its own members than than its opponents, but even this has problems, because what you do to external enemies eventually seems reasonable to do internally.
Good isn’t weak. Instead it’s hard. It’s easy to be evil, to betray, to hurt and to take advantage. But if you run your group or your society that way you will weaken it and in time that weakness will lead to destruction.
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So, I’m now fifty-eight years old. My body feels it, though that’s more residual damage from various health problems than age, but my soul doesn’t: I feel like I’m still who I was when I was five years old, staring at multicolored fish in tide pools, making sand castles and telling myself stories about the freighters I saw steaming past my grandmother’s beach home.
When it comes to my life work, to understand the forces of history and civilization, it’s mostly given me a sense of the pace of change, and a feeling for momentum in human affairs. A human life, even a long one, isn’t very long. Human history operates on generations, with three and seven seeming to be the numbers which matter most.
A normal sub-ideological cycle (New Deal and post-war liberalism, neoliberalism) is about 3 generations. Sometimes they can go longer, but making a bet of about fifty to sixty years for a run will usually work. The changes FDR made stayed substantially in place till 1980 with Reagan. Neoliberalism is dying as we speak. There’s always an overlap period, where the old order is dismantled, but substantial spars remain in place. It takes till the late 90s to repeal the major market reforms of New Deal liberalism, for example.
I was born in 1968. I was twelve when Reagan was elected. I lived the very end of the post-war order, and my entire teenage and adult life has been under neoliberalism. I watched as social services were cut, as every building went from “just walk in” to having security guards. I saw Universities go from being open to the public to closed. I remember the old “middle class” economy and I lived thru the transition to one where the top 10% does over 50% of all spending.
I predicted the ways that the neoliberal order would end, and was right about almost all of it: the rise of China, the end of dollar hegemony, elite capture, the effects of surveillance and electronic money, but in terms of a human life it has all felt like very a long time.
It isn’t, really, in historical terms. Fifty years isn’t very long, unless you’re living thru it.
Young adults today have the same relationship to the 80s and 90s that I do to to the 50s and 60s. They don’t remember them, but they grew up with adults who lived thru them. Heck, I knew adults who remembered the Great Depression, the 20s, World War I and II. My span—what I either experienced myself or what I heard about from people who were there goes from about 1910 to the current year. My teachers included Old Edwardians, Lost Generation types, Hippies and square jawed GI and Silent Generation types.
My parents had me late, so I was really raised mostly not by Boomers, but by the Silent Generation. My father was in training as a pilot when the war ended. Had it gone on another six months he’d have been deployed.
They were very foreign people, not at all like those who are adults today. There was an acceptance of personal violence that has faded, but also a sense of honor which no longer exists. The male adults who were most important in my life were all men whose word you could trust. They might be assholes, many of them were, but if they said they’d do something, they did it. They rarely lied, and they believed in duty and honor.
That’s all gone now in the West. I hardly meet anyone who has principles I trust them to stick to under duress. There isn’t even a pretense any more. Hypocrisy as the tribute vice pays to virtue is gone in America. Trump and the people around him don’t even pretend to be honest, good or honorable. They’re all cruel bastards looking out for number one and willing to hurt or kill anyone, and they don’t even pretend otherwise.
One can see that as preferable to the hypocrisies of Clinton, Bush and Obama, and in some ways it is, but it’s also an indication of how far we’ve fallen, that our lords and masters (and they are our masters, and we are their slaves) don’t even pretend to have any virtues. The only virtue left is being rich or powerful, if you’re neither, you’re nobody and if you’re nobody, in the eternal words of George Bush Jr, “who cares what you think?”
They have, of course, in becoming virtueless scum, destroyed their host nations. Both Europe and America are going down, and hard and it is precisely because of the loss of virtue in the ruling class and the inability and unwillingness of the ruled to do anything about it.
It’s not that you have to be “good”, precisely. It’s that if your culture is lead by people who are cowards, faithless and concerned only with personal wealth and power, well, they can’t run a society effectively. They will always run it into the ground. The punishment for neoliberalism is China’s rise and the end of hundreds of years of European superiority.
And I (and most of my readers) have had to watch this. The destruction of our societies and the aggrandizement of the worst among us. I assume these days that if someone is very successful, either in politics or private enterprise, that they are untrustworthy and effectively a psychopath, and the vast majority of the time, I’m right.
It’s felt very long. I knew it could not last. I knew how it would end. I fought to change it, and failed (no surprise).
This is nothing new, of course. Confucius felt this way, and died convinced he was a failure. “Stop doing all these evil things,” he screamed, and no one listened. The Chinese are good at this. They recognize there are times when public affairs are so evil that good men and women can do nothing but withdraw and try and live good lives, because any success in public affairs can only come at the cost of one’s character. To succeed, to become a billionaire, in America today, is to scream to the heavens “I am evil. I make money hurting people. I care only about myself and perhaps a few friends or family.”
But the torch passes on. China has its problems, but the Chinese leadership has, in fact, mostly made their people far better off. When they say they’ll do something, it isn’t a lie, they track what they do and publish the results against their promises. If they say they’ll build a thousand parks, be sure a thousand parks will be built.
And so it is this I have seen over the span of my life: the civilizational torch passed from the West to the East, from Europe (America is European, sorry) to China. I’ve seen the West lose its virtues, get rid of the civil liberties which were our greatest glory, and in losing its virtues lose its place.
Now we come to the rise of the Chinese century. I wonder how much I’ll see, and how weird it will be to no longer be a member of the important, ruling civilization, but only a barbarian, watching my civilization collapse and the glory and the future move elsewhere.
May the Chinese do more good than evil with their time in the Sun, and may they remember too, that the sun always sets.
And I’ll keep watching, because while most of this has sucked, the one virtue of interesting times is that they are interesting, and age’s great advantage is perspective.
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We’ve all seen the titles of articles “Big Company decides to do something BAD” or “This famous actor’ adorable dog saved his life!”.
Click bait. The information you want is “what the big company is what big company did what, or who the actor is.
Back when we had newspapers the titles would have been “X AI is making degrading nudes of people without their consent”. It would name the actor.
The rules of pre-internet Journalism were as follows: the most important information goes into the headline. The first paragraph summarizes the article and each paragraph after includes information in order of importance, with the least important information in the second last paragraph. The last paragraph sums up the article again.”
The rule of thumb I was taught is that half the readers only read the title and that you should expect to lose half the remaining readers per paragraph. I don’t think it was always that bad, and it varied by type of article, more people will read an entire book or movie review, for example, but the thrust of it was correct.
Newspapers knew that people wouldn’t read the whole article so tried to get the most important information to them first, the second next and so on.
Modern internet journalism optimized for clicks and for time on site. The title leaves out the important information to get a click. The article is often written so that the most important information is near or at the end, so you have to read all the way thru, with paragraphs before that being teases, meant to keep you reading.
One reason people are more likely to be ignorant today is simply this change from “get them the information they need as fast as possible” to “get them to click and stay on site as long as possible.” Bonus points if you can get them to click on more links inside your site. While strictly speaking internet news isn’t optimized for inefficiency, it might as well be: that’s the effect.
Overall I think that the internet has been bad for humanity. I don’t make this judgment call lightly, I make my living here, after all, and there’s a lot I love about the internet, especially the ease of looking up information.
Inefficient information transfer is just one part of why the internet has been bad for humans, I’m going to return to this issue over and over during the next few weeks.
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