Category: “AI”

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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Fixing Education In The Age of “AI” Is Simple, But Hard

By Ian Welsh

On May 8, 2025

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As has been noted, AI is being used to cheat. A lot:

Lee said he doesn’t know a single student at the school who isn’t using AI to cheat. To be clear, Lee doesn’t think this is a bad thing. “I think we are years — or months, probably — away from a world where nobody thinks using AI for homework is considered cheating,” he said.

Clio, the Muse of History

He’s stupid. But that’s OK, because he’s young. What studies are showing is that people who use AI too much get stupider.

The study surveyed 666 participants across various demographics to assess the impact of AI tools on critical thinking skills. Key findings included:

Cognitive Offloading: Frequent AI users were more likely to offload mental tasks, relying on the technology for problem-solving and decision-making rather than engaging in independent critical thinking.

Skill Erosion: Over time, participants who relied heavily on AI tools demonstrated reduced ability to critically evaluate information or develop nuanced conclusions.

Generational Gaps: Younger participants exhibited greater dependence on AI tools compared to older groups, raising concerns about the long-term implications for professional expertise and judgment.

The researchers warned that while AI can streamline workflows and enhance productivity, excessive dependence risks creating “knowledge gaps” where users lose the capacity to verify or challenge the outputs generated by these tools.

Meanwhile, AI is hallucinating more and more:

Reasoning models, considered the “newest and most powerful technologies” from the likes of OpenAI, Google and the Chinese start-up DeepSeek, are “generating more errors, not fewer.” The models’ math skills have “notably improved,” but their “handle on facts has gotten shakier.” It is “not entirely clear why.”

If you can’t do the work without AI, you can’t check the AI. You don’t know when it’s hallucinating, and you don’t know when what it’s doing isn’t the best or most appropriate way to do the work. And if you’re totally reliant on AI, well, what do you bring to the table?

Students using AI to cheat are, well, cheating themselves:

It isn’t as if cheating is new. But now, as one student put it, “the ceiling has been blown off.” Who could resist a tool that makes every assignment easier with seemingly no consequences? After spending the better part of the past two years grading AI-generated papers, Troy Jollimore, a poet, philosopher, and Cal State Chico ethics professor, has concerns. “Massive numbers of students are going to emerge from university with degrees, and into the workforce, who are essentially illiterate,” he said. “Both in the literal sense and in the sense of being historically illiterate and having no knowledge of their own culture, much less anyone else’s.” That future may arrive sooner than expected when you consider what a short window college really is. Already, roughly half of all undergrads have never experienced college without easy access to generative AI. “We’re talking about an entire generation of learning perhaps significantly undermined here,” said Green, the Santa Clara tech ethicist. “It’s short-circuiting the learning process, and it’s happening fast.”

This isn’t complicated to fix. Instead of having essays and unsupervised out of class assignments, instructors are going to have to evaluate knowledge and skills by:

Oral tests. Ask them questions, one on one, and see if they can answer and how good their answers are.
In class, supervised exams and assignments. No AI aid, proctors there to make sure of it, and can you do it without help.

The idea that essays and take-home assignments are the way to evaluate students wasn’t handed down from on high, and hasn’t always been the way students’ knowledge was judged.

Now, of course, this is extra work for instructors and the students will whine, but who cares? Those who graduate from such programs (which will also teach how to use AI, not everything has to be done without it), will be more skilled and capable.

Students are always willing to cheat themselves by cheating and not actually learning the material. This is a new way of cheating, but there are old methods which will stop it cold, IF instructors will do the work, and if they can give up the idea, in particular, that essays and at-home assignments are a good way to evaluate work. (They never were, entirely, there was an entire industry for writing other people’s essays, which I assume AI has pretty much killed.)

AI is here, it requires changes to adapt. That’s all. And unless things change, it isn’t going to replace all workers or any such nonsense: the hallucination problem is serious, and researchers have no idea how to fix it and right now there is no US company which is making money on AI, every single query, even from paying clients, is costing more to run than it returns.

IF AI delivered reliable results and thus really could replace all workers. If it could fully automate knowledge work, well, companies might be willing to pay a lot more for it. But as it stands right now, I don’t see the maximalist position happening. And my sense is that this particular model of AI, a blend of statistical compression and reasoning cannot be made to be reliable, period. A new model is needed.

So, make the students actually do the work, and actually learn, whether they want to or not.

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Postliberalism, Liberal Apogee, Routine Elite Failure and Then?

By Nate Wilcox

On October 23, 2024

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I was alerted to Nathan Pinkoski’s “Actually Existing Postliberalism,” by N.S. Lyons’ response “The Post-Cold War Apotheosis of Liberal Managerialism,” and enjoyed both tremendously.

Pinkosi’s piece is an excellent short history of the public-private partnership currently aiming for absolute global cultural control via the weaponization of finance that he calls postliberalism.

I thought it would be fun to excerpt all the times Antony Blinken’s name appears in the piece.

First mention:

When Bill Clinton took office, he continued the pursuit of openness. In 1993, he ratified NAFTA and relaxed the ban on homosexuals in the military. However, he made it clear that the old liberalism was not enough. Eager to extend the reach of democracy and confront foreign enemies who stood in its way, his administration developed new tools to advance America’s global power. In September, National Security Advisor Anthony Lake outlined a new paradigm. His speech, “From Containment to Enlargement,” bespeaks a political revolution. It provided the blueprint not only for the foreign policy agenda of nearly every U.S. president since then, but for the convictions of every right-thinking person. Lake’s speechwriter was Anthony (sic) Blinken.

Second mention:

After Biden was sworn in as president, his administration shelved a plan to overhaul sanctions policy. A consensus held that if the kinks of the past could be worked out, then the Americans and Europeans had all the weapons in place to launch a devastating financial first strike against their preferred targets. Planning began in the first year of the new administration, with Secretary Blinken’s State Department taking the lead. So by February 2022, just as the Russian invasion of Ukraine faltered, the arrangements were already in place. The strategic possibilities seemed limitless. Russia could be brought to its knees; Putin would follow in the ignominious footsteps of Milosevic and Gaddafi.

The execution of the strike was dazzling. The scale, especially the involvement of SWIFT and the targeting of Russia’s central bank, caught the Kremlin by surprise. It was Barbarossa for the twenty-first century. Yet the first strike did not yield the promised results. Nor did the second, third, or fourth. Putin’s approval ratings soared, Russia’s industrial output increased, and its military continues to grind away at the Ukrainian army. Despite implementing nearly 6,000 sanctions in two-plus years, the euphoria of spring 2022 (let alone that of the holiday parties of 2011) is long gone. Although American policymakers have said again and again that they have mobilized a global coalition against Russia that has left the country isolated, that is not the case. The map of the countries that have imposed sanctions on Russia closely resembles the map of the countries that have legalized same-sex marriage. Economic warfare against Russia has exposed the limits of the global American empire.

Lyons applauds Pinkoski’s essay but rejects the notion that this is a revolution against liberalism — instead, it is its apogee.

Sadly, he doesn’t mention Blinken, but he does elaborate on the frightening ambition of this movement:

The managerial ideal is the perfect frictionless mass of totally liberated (that is, totally deracinated and atomized) individuals, totally contained within the loving arms of the singular unity of the managerial state. To achieve its utopia of perfect liberty and equality, liberalism requires perfect control.

This ideal is, of course, the very essence of totalitarianism. Yet if we wonder why the distinction between public and private has everywhere collapsed into “the fusion of state and society, politics and economics,” this is the most fundamental reason why. Perhaps, for that matter, this is also why the U.S. and EU now habitually sponsor LGBT groups in Hungary or India, and finance human-trafficking “human rights” NGOs in Central America and the Mediterranean: because managerialism’s blind crusade to crush any competing spheres of social power has gone global.

In response, a comforting tonic from The Archdruid, John Michael Greer at Ecosophia, whose reader “Dave” asks him:

I’ve noticed a growing and extremely worrying trend of the “elites” of politics and entertainment pursuing reckless and (to me) clearly wrong courses of actions that blow up in their faces, and then instead of honestly looking at the situation they’ve had a large hand in creating and doing a mea culpa, either doubling down and getting mad at regular people when they’re less keen to do what the elites tell them, or trying something else without ever really honestly accounting for their mistakes. The actions remind me of signs of elite collapse that this blog has talked about for years now and it’s very surreal and worrying to see happening in real time. What is going on and why can’t the “elites”, the people with access to more data and resources and advisers than anyone else, seem to realize what’s going wrong? Do they not care or are their actions part of a larger plan, not to sound conspiratorial?

Greer’s response was just what I needed to hear:

Dave, I don’t think that it’s any kind of plan. Quite the contrary, this is normal elite failure, the thing that comes right before an elite replacement crisis. Just as the capitalist elite of the 1920s crashed and burned, and was replaced by a managerial elite in the 1930s and 1940s, the managerial elite of the 2010s is crashing and burning, and will be replaced by an entrepreneurial elite in the 2020s and 2030s. The entitled cluelessness of a class that has remained in power too long is a familiar thing; comparisons to French aristocrats just before the French Revolution also come to mind.

Although, honestly if this means that Elon Musk and company are going to win what Chris Hedges calls “The Choice Between Corporate and Oligarchic Power”…eek!

Kamala Harris, anointed by the richest Democratic Party donors without receiving a single primary vote, is the face of corporate power. Donald Trump is the buffoonish mascot for the oligarchs. This is the split within the ruling class. It is a civil war within capitalism played out on the political stage. The public is little more than a prop in an election where neither party will advance their interests or protect their rights.

And what do the oligarchs want?

Warlord capitalism seeks the total eradication of all impediments to the accumulation of profits including regulations, laws and taxes. It makes its money by charging rent, by erecting toll booths to every service we need to survive and collecting exorbitant fees.

Trump’s cohort of Silicon Valley backers, led by Elon Musk, were what The New York Times writes, “finished with Democrats, regulators, stability, all of it. They were opting instead for the freewheeling, fortune-generating chaos that they knew from the startup world.” They planned to “plant devices in people’s brains, replace national currencies with unregulated digital tokens, [and] replace generals with artificial intelligence systems.”

As much as I eagerly anticipate the long-overdue fall of our current elite, I truly dread what’s coming up in their wake.

AI Dynamic Pricing

By Sean Paul Kelley

On August 11, 2024

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Allow me to venture a prediction. If AI dynamic pricing is adopted by corporations, especially grocery store chains, it will cause just-in-time supply-chain chaos and profits to be unpredictable by two or three standard deviations outside the bell curve. All of which will then result in stock and bond market carnage worse than 2008. Moreover, this kind of short-sighted innovation, just the kind Silicon Valley adores, is untested and untrustworthy and will cause a societal meltdown that will make the results of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans look like Sunday school, possibly ending in a near-famine if adopted. Finally, it’s the kind of intellectual irresponsibility that will propel already Burj Khalifa levels of stupidity out into the cosmos, ultimately ushering in chaos and revolution.

Why Technocratic Elites Aren’t Trusted (Sam Altman Edition)

By Ian Welsh

On May 6, 2024

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So, Sam Altman recently said something which seems reasonable, but isn’t:

using technology to create abundance–intelligence, energy, longevity, whatever–will not solve all problems and will not magically make everyone happy. but it is an unequivocally great thing to do, and expands our option space. to me, it feels like a moral imperative...

most surprising takeaway from recent college visits: this is a surprisingly controversial opinion with certain demographics.

(lack of capitalization from original.)

Back in the original Greek writings on rhetoric and argument, one of the three steps was Ethos: this is the rhetorician’s qualifications, including his ethical qualifications. The “why should we listen to you?” part. If you’re talking about courage, are you brave? If charity, are you charitable?

If technology, do you use it for the good of others?

What most people can’t explicate about their objection to Altman’s thesis that using technology to create abundance is a good thing is that they don’t trust Altman. OpenAI was originally a non-profit, meant to create AI in a way which would benefit everyone. Altman turned it into a for profit, and no one except billionaires and sycophants think that companies are out to be beneficial to the majority of people: we work in them, we know it’s bullshit.

And how did Altman create his AIs? By training them on other people’s work, without permission or payment. Further, the AIs compete with the people whose data they trained on: you can ask for a picture in the style of a particular artist, for example, and they compete with artists, writers and other professionals in general.

So, the people whose actual work made AIs (they aren’t really AIs but I use the term for convenience) possible, are the ones harmed by them AND they didn’t give their permission or get paid.

Why they hell would anyone other than a shareholder or a well paid employee “trust” Sam Altman?

Now let’s move on to the Altman’s actual argument (his logos and pathos)

using technology to create abundance–intelligence, energy, longevity, whatever–will not solve all problems and will not magically make everyone happy. but it is an unequivocally great thing to do, and expands our option space. to me, it feels like a moral imperative...

Now, this is a case where the logos is almost entirely true.

But what’s the actual track record of using technology to create abundance?

We’re losing our topsoil. Nutrition in food is less than it used to be. We’ve created climate change, which appears to now be past key tipping points and will kill and impoverish billions. Most of the American population is fat, they weren’t fifty years ago, so it’s not “individual choices.” We have widespread ecological collapse, including the loss of most large mammals and so few insects compared to even fifty years ago that there is no longer “bug splat” on windshields. The oceans are full of plastic, and the coral reefs are dying, while fish stocks collapse.

None of this is to say that technology hasn’t had vast benefits, but we’re using it also to reduce our option space: to damage the carrying capacity of the Earth in ways which will take tens of thousand of years to recover from, as a best case estimate (millions for some of the issues.) The last 40 years, when people like Altman have had the most influence, have seen a vast rise in inequality, and a huge number of homeless. Altman and co. blame left wingers, but who are the billionaires? Who actually has the power?

Altman’s making an argument which is true on its face, but he belong to a class of people whose actions do a great deal of harm. Most people can’t clearly articulate this, but they know he and his class can’t be trusted, so they instinctively disagree with him, but since they can’t quite say why, they sound incoherent.

But they’re right to distrust Altman. Technology could be used to benefit everyone, even in the long term, but Altman isn’t trying to do that: he’s trying to get rich, and if that hurts a lot of people along the way, he’s OK with it.

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

Category: “AI”

AI Is A Fever Dream of Despots

Fixing Education In The Age of “AI” Is Simple, But Hard

This blog has always been free to read, but it isn’t free to produce. If you’d like to support my writing, I’d appreciate it. You can donate or subscribe by clicking on this link.

Postliberalism, Liberal Apogee, Routine Elite Failure and Then?

AI Dynamic Pricing

Why Technocratic Elites Aren’t Trusted (Sam Altman Edition)