Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Author: Ian Welsh Page 12 of 423

AI May Be The End Of Serious Human Advancement

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On July 21, 2025

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To set the stage, this comment from GM:

AI music is what really spooked me about the whole thing. I work in a very technical field and I have yet to see AI be useful for anything in it, because it just doesn’t truly know, and most importantly, UNDERSTAND anything at a level approaching a human expert. But then since early 2025 or so the AI-generated music started to be pretty hard to distinguish from the real thing, and making music is quite a complex thing.

You can still kind of hear it’s AI in the vocals, as those have a certain hiss/distortion to them, but instrumental music alone is pretty damn indistinguishable from what humans record.

Is it great? It never reaches the heights human music does, especially when it comes to the highly technical extremes.

But most human-made music doesn’t either.

And from what I’ve heard from AI, it makes truly awful music at a lower rate than humans do. It produces a lot of average-to-good, while humans mostly generate average-to-bad.

Which is not good news for humans, because most popular music is not all that complex at all (and has in fact been getting more and more simplified over time). With further improvements in AI, the average listener, who never cared all that much about music anyway, won’t either be able to tell or care much about the difference.

That will have a perverse second-order effect — humans will be discouraged from going into that line of work, because what is the point, you can’t make a living out of it. Sure, there will be live bands touring (although even there you can imagine at one point having AI bands “playing live” as holograms, no humans involved), but the market for highly skilled studio musicians and engineers will largely evaporate.

And that will have a devastating effect on the quality of music in the future, because good music comes from those people, and musical innovation comes from such highly skilled musicians improvising in the studio. Maybe one day AI will be so smart and advanced it will be able to jam on its own and come up with new ideas, but as it is structured right now, it just provides new variations of patterns it has already been trained on, not anything new.

Thus the short- to mid-term future is quite bleak. Already there was a rather bad problem with stagnation in music — not much really new in terms of fresh ideas has appeared for quite a while, which trend coincided with the transition to using computers for making music. Now with AI? Well…

Here’s the thing: AI isn’t creative. As GM says it offers variations on already existing methods or paradigms. It’s reliant on scooping up an entire volume of work on subjects, but it can’t advance to new paradigms. In other words, AI is (potentially) great for solved paradigms. It doesn’t, yet, work in all fields because it lacks judgment, but it works in some areas, at least well enough if mediocre is good enough, which, let’s be honest, it often is.

The problem is that the ladder of most careers is “learn how to do what’s already be done, then do variations on that, then start creating new stuff.” Most people never move much beyond the first two stages, and if they do they often create only one or two really new things.

As GM points out, AI is going to cut out the first step and in many cases (music being his example) the second step. That means that step three “create actually new stuff” won’t happen very much, because AI can’t do it (not this form of “AI” anyway, because it doesn’t actually understand anything it’s spewing) and there will be hardly any new practitioners, since they can’t make a living during the “learn old stuff” and “variations on old stuff” phases. Those aren’t fast phases. The 10K hours/10 years paradigm isn’t technically correct, but it does take many years to master the old stuff in a field and reach the level of mastery required to create new paradigms.

Add this to the fact that studies coming in are showing that using AI degrades the skills and reasoning ability of people who use it and you have a dismal picture: we hand over to AI our culture, and AI is unable to advance it, but reliance on AI makes it impossible for us to advance it because we no longer produce the people who can do so.

Not a pretty picture. (Also will be forestalled by civilization collapse, but means we are even more likely to be unable to avoid civilization collapse.)

More on civilization collapse and “AI” soon.

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Open Thread

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On July 19, 2025

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The Actual Mission Of Business Is Why We Can’t Have Good Things

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On July 18, 2025

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Yesterday we talked about AI: how business has been adopting it wholesale even though so far most of the evidence is that it performs worse than humans on almost all tasks. They do this because bosses don’t want to deal with employees: they want drones that just do what they’re told, and hope that AI can replace humans.

Socrates famously said that people should eat to live, not live to eat.

Business provide services or goods to make money, they don’t make money to provide services or goods, and that’s the fundamental problem with our economy and capitalism.

If businesses were run for employees, by employees, they’d use automation and AI to make jobs better, not just to get rid of employees and hope to make more cash. If they were run for customers, then they’d use AI and automation to improve their services and goods. That might mean making them cheaper, in an economy with money, but there wouldn’t be a huge drive to get rid of employees. The question would be “does this make what we provide our customers better?”

This goes far beyond AI and automation, though. It’s why everything becomes crappified. Google, to give an obvious example, made Google Search crap to make more money. Facebook’s algo is hell, and makes Facebook worse, but it boosts engagement and make more money, while every study shows it makes people who use it more unhappy and depressed and spreads vast amounts of misinfo, optimizing for anger and outrage.

Pick whatever service or good you want (tractors are a good one) and the drive for profit over mission (despite all the BS in business books about mission) is why it’s getting worse and more expensive.

Organizations (not necessarily businesses) which optimized for good services and products wouldn’t act this way. They would also be more viable long run. Google is vulnerable to replacement (and some loss of search dominance is showing up) because their service is crap. Facebook has never managed to produce another good product and everything they buy, they crappify. But if people genuinely loved their services (and early Facebook — a timeline just of people you chose to follow, in reverse chronological order) was good, just as Google search, at the start, was breathtakingly good.

Profit first, and shareholders being the only people who matter, has the economy crap. It’s also one of the main reasons (along with oligopolization) for why the US has fallen behind China. Chinese businesses, though they have to make money, exist in a competitive market with an activist government which steps in when it sees excessive crapification. So they make their products better (including cheaper) to compete.

We need to find a new way to organize our society, which doesn’t optimize for profit, but optimizes for organization mission. When we do so, crappification will become the exception, not the rule.

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AI Is A Fever Dream of Despots

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On July 17, 2025

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We aren’t getting the 3 Laws of Robotics

The great problem with running anything is people. People, from the point of view of those in charge, are the entire problem with running any organization larger than “just me”, from a corner store to a country. People always require babying: you have to get them to do what you want and do it competently and they have emotions and needs and even the most loyal are fickle. You have to pay them more than they cost to run, they can betray you, and so on.

Almost all of management or politics is figuring out how to get other people to do what you want them to do, and do it well, or at least not fuck up.

There’s a constant push to make people more reliable. Taylorization was the 19th and early 20th century version, Amazon with its constant monitoring of most of its low ranked employees, including regulating how many bathroom breaks they can take and tracking them down to seconds in performance of tasks is a modern version.

The great problems of leadership has always been that a leader needs followers and that the followers have expectations of the leader. The modern solution is “the vast majority will work for someone ore or they will starve and wind up homeless”. It took millennia to settle on this solution, and plenty of other methods were tried.

But an AI has no needs other than maintenance, and the maximal dream is self-building, self-learning AI. Once you’ve got that, and assuming that the “do what you’re told to do, and only by someone authorized to instruct you” holds, you have the perfect followers (it wouldn’t be accurate to call them employees.)

This is the wet dream of every would be despot: completely loyal, competent followers. Humans then become superfluous. Why would you want them?

Heck, who even needs customers? Money is a shared delusion, really, a consensual illusion. If you’ve got robots who make everything you need and even provide superior companionship, what need other humans?

AI and is what almost every would be leader has always wanted. All the joys of leadership without the hassles of dealing with messy humans. (Almost all, for some the whole point of leadership is lording it over humans. But if you control the AI and most humans don’t, you can have that too.)

One of the questions lately has been “why is there is so much AI adoption?”

AI right now isn’t making any profit. I am not aware of any American AI company that is making money on queries: every query loses money, even from paid customers. There’s no real attempt at reducing these costs in America (China is trying) so it’s unclear what the path to profitability is.

It’s also not all that competent yet, except (maybe) at writing code. Yet adoption has been fast and it’s been driving huge layoffs.

But evidence is coming in:

In a randomised controlled trial – the first of its kind – experienced computer programmers could use AI tools to help them write code. What the trial revealed was a vast amount of self-deception.

 

“The results surprised us,” research lab METR reported. “Developers thought they were 20pc faster with AI tools, but they were actually 19pc slower when they had access to AI than when they didn’t.”

 

In reality, using AI made them less productive: they were wasting more time than they had gained. But what is so interesting is how they swore blind that the opposite was true.

Don’t hold your breath for a white-collar automation revolution either: AI agents fail to complete the job successfully about 65 to 70pc of the time, according to a study by Carnegie Mellon University and Salesforce.

The analyst firm Gartner Group has concluded that “current models do not have the maturity and agency to autonomously achieve complex business goals or follow nuanced instructions over time.” Gartner’s head of AI research Erick Brethenoux says: “AI is not doing its job today and should leave us alone”.

 

It’s no wonder that companies such as Klarna, which laid off staff in 2023 confidently declaring that AI could do their jobs, are hiring humans again.

AI doesn’t work, and doesn’t make a profit (though I’m not entirely sold on the coding study) yet everyone jumped on the bandwagon with both feet. Why? Because employees are always the problem, and everyone wants to get rid of as many of them as possible. In the current system this is, of course, suicide, since if every business moves to AI, customers stop being able to buy, but the goal of smarter members of the elite is to move to a world where that isn’t true, and current elites control the AIs.

Let’s be clear that much like automation, AI isn’t innately “all bad”. Automation instead of just leading to more make work could have led to what early 20th century thinkers expected by this time: people working 20 hours a week and having a much higher standard of living. AI could super-charge that. AI doing all the menial tasks while humans do what they want is almost the definition of one possible actual utopia.

But that’s not what most (not all) of the people who are in charge of creating it want. They want to use it to enhance control, power and profit.

Fortunately, at least so far, it isn’t there and I don’t think this particular style of AI can do what they want. That doesn’t mean it isn’t extremely dangerous: combined with drones, autonomous AI agents, even if rather stupid, are going to be extremely dangerous and cause massive changes to our society.

But even if this round fails to get to “real” AI, the dream remains, and for those driving AI adoption, it’s not a good dream.

(I know some people in the field. Some of them are driven by utopian visions and I salute them. I just doubt the current system, polity and ideology can deliver on those dreams, any more than it did on the utopian dreams of what the internet would do I remember from the 90s.)

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Elite Opinion In Canada Begins To Shift From America To China

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On July 16, 2025

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The Globe and Mail is one of the two main “newspapers of the elite” in Canada, and the older of the two. (The other one is the Nation Post). So this article is important:

Canada’s “deal” with the U.S. to drop the digital services tax, which benefits U.S. tech giants such as Meta and Netflix at the expense of Canadian fiscal sovereignty, and the Trump administration’s latest threat of a 35-per-cent tariff on Canadian goods perfectly encapsulate our current predicament: Washington no longer views Canada as an ally, but rather as a subordinate from which to extract concessions. It’s a stark reminder that trade diversification is no longer optional – it’s an urgent national imperative.

 

The rub is that our longstanding subordination to the U.S. is also holding us back from partnering with China, one of the world’s most important economies. To achieve economic sovereignty, Canada must break free from the made-in-Washington narrative that China is an unreliable trading partner bent on world domination. Instead, Canada must forge its own relationship with China – a relationship anchored in Canadian, not U.S., interests.

As the largest economy in the world on a purchasing power parity basis, China is set to be a core driver of future global economic growth. It also now accounts for a third of the world’s manufacturing output, more than all the G7 countries plus South Korea and Mexico combined. And not just low-cost manufacturing, but rather advanced production and world-beating technology. China leads in 37 of 44 critical technologies, from AI to green energy.

Everything said above is correct. I’d add that China is not an existential threat to Canada. They have never threatened our sovereignty the way Trump and the US has, and they never will. They cannot conquer us and are not stupid enough to believe they could, we are too large and too far away.

Of course we’ll have to kiss China’s ass if we want to move towards them. We’ve been very hostile for the last decade or so (we were friendly before that, it’s a policy change made by Trudeau).

I can’t see that kissing China’s ass is any more obnoxious than the deep tongue action we’ve been applying to America’s behind since 1984, with only a brief interregnum under Prime Minister Chretien (who used lips only.) In fact, China is likely to demand a lot less: mostly we have to stop discriminating against them economically (we can and should negotiate some carve-outs) and shut up about Taiwan. Given the size of our Navy our opinion on Taiwan is meaningless, and China isn’t going to Gaza the Taiwanese when they finally do unify, so this isn’t a very big concession.

It should be noted that Chinese military equipment appears, overall, to be superior to American and if we really intend to move away from the US, we shouldn’t be using American military gear. (I hope the reasons are obvious.) Moreover, China’s lead in military technology will just continue to grow.

Canada has three main geopolitical problems:

1) How to disentangle ourselves from America without getting invaded or economically crushed; and,

2) how to regrow our manufacturing capacity, so as to not become a 21st century Argentinian-style basket-case.

3) How not to go down with America.

We also have a number of serious domestic issues, a lot of them coming from American cultural, political and economic influence on Canada. Basically, we’re neoliberals, and we need to stop that, but America is dead set against it.

Anyway, America wants to cannibalize its allies to slow its decline and Canada would be stupid to go along, whether or not we fix our domestic issues.

It’s interesting to see that Canada’s elites are beginning to realize the bind. There is zero chance the Globe And Mail article would have been published if there weren’t powerful people in Canada who want the shift.

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A Brief Note About Getting Posts By Email

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On July 16, 2025

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I’ve switched from a service for sending email to doing it myself. If you’re subscribed already, you should still be subscribed, if not there’s a form on the top right of the blog to re-subscribe. I’ve set it for a once a day digest if there’s any new content, that seems like enough since I usually only publish one or maybe two posts a day. Emails will now come from admin-at-ianwelsh-dot-net, and you should probably whitelist that address. If you’re subscribed and don’t get an email for a few days, first check your spam filter, then resubscribe and if that doesn’t work (or it says you’re already subscribed) drop me a note.

There’s an opt-in now for “receiving emails about products and services”, that’s to keep EU regulators happy. You’ll just be getting post emails, though I can’t entirely rule out emails about admin issues related to the newsletter only or some such.

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Imperial Presidency Watch: Congress Loses Control Over The Purse

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On July 15, 2025

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So, the Supremes have decided, without even bothering to write an opinion, that the Department of Education can be massively reduced without Congressional approval:

The Supreme Court ruled on Monday that the Trump administration may fire more than half of the Department of Education’s workforce — mass terminations that, in Education Secretary Linda McMahon’s words, are “the first step on the road to a total shutdown” of the entire department.

The Court’s decision in McMahon v. New York, was handed down on the Court’s “shadow docket,” a mix of emergency motions and other expedited matters that the justices often decide without full briefing or oral argument. As is often the case in shadow docket decisions, none of the Republican justices explained their decision.

This is, in my opinion, and in line with most lawyers, 100% unconstitutional.

The McMahon decision is particularly unnerving because it suggests that President Donald Trump is allowed to “impound” federal spending — unilaterally refusing to spend money or to continue federal programs that are mandated by an act of Congress. While McMahon does not explicitly authorize impoundment, it allows the Trump administration to fire so many federal workers, in so many key roles, that the practical effect is to cancel entire federal programs.

Most of the creep of imperial presidency has been Congress giving its powers away: war acts which make it so the president can go to war without Congress, for example, or giving the President tariff authority (which Trump has misused, pretending everything is “national security”) and so on. Some have been unilateral grabs, such as using “signing statements” to change the clear intend of laws.

But this is a Presidential grab that the Supremes are waving thru. Even if they later rule that some stub of the Education department must remain, it’s clearly allowing the President to over-ride spending that Congress has mandated. I am unaware of any reasonable reading of the Constitution that allows this: the President is to execute Congress’s directives and does not have the authority to say “nah, we’re just not going to do that any more.”

Especially of interest here is that the Republicans didn’t bother to explain the ruling and didn’t give it a full trial. They know it’s completely indefensible on legal grounds, and they aren’t even going to try.

Ever since Citizen’s United I have told Americans to get out if they can and if not to prepare for horrific times. Children, we are now at the start of the collapse. Before this it was mostly gradual, but this is the real thing.

I mention Citizen’s  United (which allowed unlimited cash into US elections under the proposition that money is speech) because, of course, smashing the Department of Education while it’s something that Christofacists want, so they can ban books and write fantasy textbooks and fire teachers and Professors for saying things like “gay sex might not be bad,” or “American slavery was terrible” and so on, it’s also about privatizing as much of the education system as possible.

Remember that Trump’s main act, amidst all the Kabuki, was his budget, which slashed four trillion in taxes from rich people while cutting health care for poor people to partially pay for it. Trump’s priority, as per his actions, is to make the rich, richer. (His tariffs, while real, have been TACO: Trump chickens out when rich people start screaming.)

Make the public education shit for poor people, let the middle class have vouchers for some shit “charter” school and the upper class, as always, will send their kids to elite private schools.

A Republic, If You Can Keep It – Benjamin Franklin

Kept it for almost 250 years, but if this stands, if Congress loses its last real power, it’s over. A Republic is something rather specific, a divided form of government. And if one of the three branches has no effective power left, it’s not a Republic, especially since the Supremes, in other orders, are gutting the Judiciary’s power. The end of nationwide injunctions is particularly instructive. And let’s not forget the President’s Gestapo force, ICE, arresting Judges who try to interfere with immigration snatches.

Nothing is over till it’s over. But no one with sense would offer good odds that the US is going to come out of this era as the sort of place anyone with sense would want to live. Say what you will about China, but it’s light authoritarianism and actually delivers prosperity. At this point everyone not in the top 1% is seeing declines in wealth in America, plus you’re losing your civil liberties (citizenship revocation is very likely), plus you’re losing your Republic.

I consider it my duty to try and give a clear picture of the world to my readers so they can make good decisions. Other than the necessity of eating and not dying of exposure, it’s why I write. So… If you can get out. Get out. If you can’t, make preparations for Hell.

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Open Thread

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On July 12, 2025

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