“The Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer” is too rich an allegory to leave hanging.
The Primer is commissioned by a duke-level Equity Lord, Alexander Chung Sik Finkle-McGraw, who has a St. Godric of Finchale type biography, ascending from humble origins into the ruling oligarchy, and along the way develops the shocking non-conformist attitude that “some kinds of behavior were bad, and others good, and it was reasonable to live one’s life accordingly.” The Primer is commissioned for the use of Finkle-McGraw’s grand daughter as an alternative to a public school education on the premise that “in order to raise a generation of children who can reach their full potential, we must find a way to make their lives interesting.”
Early in the book in a bit of inspired foreshadowing, Finkle-McGraw hires Hackworth, an engineer who studied romantic poetry in college but who reads the journals “appropriate to his station,”to build The Primer assigns the build of its power supply to Cotton who immediately encounters problems using “auto assembly” and fixes the problem using a “furiously proscribed” “intuitive approach to the job.”
And these oppositions play themselves out quite interestingly when the Primer falls into the hands of a thete, that is a member of the lower class who was not part of a tribe.
So how is this allegorical?
First, none of the links today make any reference to truth that I noticed. In The Diamond Age, “it is not necessarily a good thing for everyone to read a newspaper in the morning; so the higher one rose in the society, the more similar one’s Times became to one’s peers’.” The research AI’s discussed appear to pretty much function in a similar fashion, reading more papers than humanly possible, prioritizing the most recent, and condensing them down into a received popular wisdom acceptable to the hermetically isolated few. Cowen linked to a piece the other day, Feudalism as a Contested Concept, https://www.broadstreet.blog/p/feudalism-as-a-contested-concept?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web that conveys the zeitgeist perfectly. Nothing in the piece itself actually about what is commonly understood to be referenced and its ambiguity by the shorthand term “feudalism” that is not better and more informatively conveyed in the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica entry for Feudalism, or for that matter in the few short introductory paragraphs of Carl Stephenson’s classic Medieaeval Feudalism, yet the author asserts it is a subject that “non-specialists are not equipped to have an informed opinion” and “it goes without saying that good historical social science should be in dialogue with the most up-to-date historical scholarship.” It is all a realm to which the annointed have exclusive access and apparently more concerned with dialogue between the annointed than the revelation of any truth about that which the humans who lived under what is referenced as “feudalism” experienced. One suspects that researchers might enrich their understandings if with every AI query they ran a separate query restricted to sources dated before 1950. Do AI’s even get trained on such classic sources?
To the extent that AI poses a threat in limiting access to currently unpopular bodies of knowledge, one suspects the world would be better off with a more widespread practice of an intellectual aparigraha, that is is a self-restraint from the culture of exclusivity where one's own professional status as well as material gain or happiness is enhanced by AI gnosticism.
But even in its absence, one suspects that under the new AI overlords and their surveillance state, a new underclass will grow, not embarassed by either culture or routine, and with it will awaken primitive energies in individuals who will find new avenues of commerce and discovery to push aside this establishment, enrich themselves, and in so doing, advance progress across the human race. A new AI enhanced darkweb market with efficacious anonymity tools anyone?
Can AI cause us to feel guilt about our behavior? I would like an AI to monitor my children. In boxing class, their coach provides character education, especially when children in the class misbehave. In fact, this is one of the most valuable aspects of boxing class —my kids gain access to a moral mentor.
He is in the process of creating an app that will allow the parent to teach boxing to kids. But can he mimic his presence through this app? Not yet. That would take a sophisticated AI, monitoring the movements and words of the children.
Surely such an AI system would be a boon to character education, not only in schools, but at home, in churches, on the field, and in daycares. With the press of a button a teacher or parent could command an AI agent to “individualize” on a specific student, beginning a dialogue with him about his misbehavior. This dialogue could be recorded and sent home to his parents for a follow-up conversation.
Not only do we want to mimic Arnold Kling’s mind, we want to mimic Jesus Christ, MLK, and other moral exemplars, not only for our children, but for all of us.
Soon I will be able to hire an AI agent to monitor my behavior. My children will task it to talk to me about my misbehavior. Let’s hope freedom of encryption is amended in the Constitution so that we can keep our private lives private.
As the parent and caregiver of a developmentally disabled adult, I can testify to the enormous friction associated with every aspect. The idea of an AI that would deal with all of it is incredible.
The problem is when the friction is the point, that is, to the service providers out there, a feature, not a bug. If you think about it, a bunch of that stuff could have been streamlined or automated a long time ago. It intentionality wasn't, it's all there on purpose because it serves a tragically important function.
Scarce resources that need to be rationed but which can't be rationed by charging market-clearing prices will be rationed in other ways. Sometimes it's long waiting lines, or lotteries. Sometimes it's leveraging clout or social networks and "who you know'.
But often it's plausibly deniable Kafkaesque Gatekeeping in which the introduction of significant costs of annoyance, frustration, time-consuming redundant busy-work, etc. is the only way to filter down the flood and select a more limited population of the most perseverant and diligent marshmallow-test passers which is some combination of, on the one hand, the best kind of customers who are smart, kind, easy to work with, and really deserving of help and special solicitude, and on the other hand, pests so troublesome and litigious that it's cheaper and easier to just give them what they want to make them go away than to try to wait them out.
It's completely impossible for customer-side AI to help with any of this, because it will be countered and neutralized with org-side AI, since the org NEEDS the friction. Imposition of these frustration costs is simply indispensable.
It's interesting that none of this occurred to the writer of the piece but then despite his impressively smart-sounding jargon (to me) he did say "often disadvantaged people have the least time to spare" which suggests he is truly just bloveating.
As has been true of the output of Hollywood directors and script-writers for some time, it's often hard these days to attribute the poor development of ideas in online essays or reporting to a low quality author or to a high quality author needing to pay some bills and slumming it in satisfying the demands of a low quality audience.
At any rate, just like James Scott tried to explain to us how to supplement the intuitive way we see things from the perspective of individual citizens to also see things like a state, most writers need to supplement their impulse in "seeing like a customer" with a good education in "seeing like a firm", that is, from the perspective of the needs of the management of a for-profit business facing all the challenges and constraints of the modern context. When you look with the eyes of a customer, you see a bug. But when you see it like a firm, you see a feature.
Per the "humans being the problem" part... Absolutely.
There's a big fleet of driverless cabs here in Wuhan, and it's magical to watch them when they get packed up at the depot. They navigate and maneuver like a choreographed operation, and gridlock situations simply don't happen, it all gets fluid and moves. I took one the other day. It's very strange.
If they wanted it to be easy for you to cancel, it would be easy. Since they don't want it to be easy, they aren't going to just sit back and let people use AI to make it easy again, so they'll stop it from working. Easiest way and most plausible cover story is that they have to know they're not dealing with those bad bots, so you'll have to prove you're a human, but then the 2FA won't work or CAPTCHA test will prove unpassable, and so you're just going to have to phone call in and talk to someone giving you the full (AI-augmented) Used Car Salesman treatment, like it's still 1973 or something.
I've already run into many instances of the CAPTCHA tests seeming increasingly fake charades as if bogus and designed to fail no matter how many times I correctly click on the crosswalks, fire hydrants, bicycles, traffic lights, motorcycles, or busses.
It was more humorous wishful thinking than a fact based rational analysis of the current model...which, btw, sucks. I don't have answers other than I limit my subscriptions to a bare minimum and once signed in to any of them, immediately go in and cancel so I don't forget it in the future.
It’s funny, I was wondering if it was just me getting endless CAPTCHAS of biases, bikes and crosswalks. Of all the things in the world, why those? I never get “which pictures contain a cat” or phone or pencil or hammer. It’s always that very narrow domain.
“The Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer” is too rich an allegory to leave hanging.
The Primer is commissioned by a duke-level Equity Lord, Alexander Chung Sik Finkle-McGraw, who has a St. Godric of Finchale type biography, ascending from humble origins into the ruling oligarchy, and along the way develops the shocking non-conformist attitude that “some kinds of behavior were bad, and others good, and it was reasonable to live one’s life accordingly.” The Primer is commissioned for the use of Finkle-McGraw’s grand daughter as an alternative to a public school education on the premise that “in order to raise a generation of children who can reach their full potential, we must find a way to make their lives interesting.”
Early in the book in a bit of inspired foreshadowing, Finkle-McGraw hires Hackworth, an engineer who studied romantic poetry in college but who reads the journals “appropriate to his station,”to build The Primer assigns the build of its power supply to Cotton who immediately encounters problems using “auto assembly” and fixes the problem using a “furiously proscribed” “intuitive approach to the job.”
And these oppositions play themselves out quite interestingly when the Primer falls into the hands of a thete, that is a member of the lower class who was not part of a tribe.
So how is this allegorical?
First, none of the links today make any reference to truth that I noticed. In The Diamond Age, “it is not necessarily a good thing for everyone to read a newspaper in the morning; so the higher one rose in the society, the more similar one’s Times became to one’s peers’.” The research AI’s discussed appear to pretty much function in a similar fashion, reading more papers than humanly possible, prioritizing the most recent, and condensing them down into a received popular wisdom acceptable to the hermetically isolated few. Cowen linked to a piece the other day, Feudalism as a Contested Concept, https://www.broadstreet.blog/p/feudalism-as-a-contested-concept?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web that conveys the zeitgeist perfectly. Nothing in the piece itself actually about what is commonly understood to be referenced and its ambiguity by the shorthand term “feudalism” that is not better and more informatively conveyed in the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica entry for Feudalism, or for that matter in the few short introductory paragraphs of Carl Stephenson’s classic Medieaeval Feudalism, yet the author asserts it is a subject that “non-specialists are not equipped to have an informed opinion” and “it goes without saying that good historical social science should be in dialogue with the most up-to-date historical scholarship.” It is all a realm to which the annointed have exclusive access and apparently more concerned with dialogue between the annointed than the revelation of any truth about that which the humans who lived under what is referenced as “feudalism” experienced. One suspects that researchers might enrich their understandings if with every AI query they ran a separate query restricted to sources dated before 1950. Do AI’s even get trained on such classic sources?
To the extent that AI poses a threat in limiting access to currently unpopular bodies of knowledge, one suspects the world would be better off with a more widespread practice of an intellectual aparigraha, that is is a self-restraint from the culture of exclusivity where one's own professional status as well as material gain or happiness is enhanced by AI gnosticism.
But even in its absence, one suspects that under the new AI overlords and their surveillance state, a new underclass will grow, not embarassed by either culture or routine, and with it will awaken primitive energies in individuals who will find new avenues of commerce and discovery to push aside this establishment, enrich themselves, and in so doing, advance progress across the human race. A new AI enhanced darkweb market with efficacious anonymity tools anyone?
Can AI cause us to feel guilt about our behavior? I would like an AI to monitor my children. In boxing class, their coach provides character education, especially when children in the class misbehave. In fact, this is one of the most valuable aspects of boxing class —my kids gain access to a moral mentor.
He is in the process of creating an app that will allow the parent to teach boxing to kids. But can he mimic his presence through this app? Not yet. That would take a sophisticated AI, monitoring the movements and words of the children.
Surely such an AI system would be a boon to character education, not only in schools, but at home, in churches, on the field, and in daycares. With the press of a button a teacher or parent could command an AI agent to “individualize” on a specific student, beginning a dialogue with him about his misbehavior. This dialogue could be recorded and sent home to his parents for a follow-up conversation.
Not only do we want to mimic Arnold Kling’s mind, we want to mimic Jesus Christ, MLK, and other moral exemplars, not only for our children, but for all of us.
Soon I will be able to hire an AI agent to monitor my behavior. My children will task it to talk to me about my misbehavior. Let’s hope freedom of encryption is amended in the Constitution so that we can keep our private lives private.
As the parent and caregiver of a developmentally disabled adult, I can testify to the enormous friction associated with every aspect. The idea of an AI that would deal with all of it is incredible.
The problem is when the friction is the point, that is, to the service providers out there, a feature, not a bug. If you think about it, a bunch of that stuff could have been streamlined or automated a long time ago. It intentionality wasn't, it's all there on purpose because it serves a tragically important function.
Scarce resources that need to be rationed but which can't be rationed by charging market-clearing prices will be rationed in other ways. Sometimes it's long waiting lines, or lotteries. Sometimes it's leveraging clout or social networks and "who you know'.
But often it's plausibly deniable Kafkaesque Gatekeeping in which the introduction of significant costs of annoyance, frustration, time-consuming redundant busy-work, etc. is the only way to filter down the flood and select a more limited population of the most perseverant and diligent marshmallow-test passers which is some combination of, on the one hand, the best kind of customers who are smart, kind, easy to work with, and really deserving of help and special solicitude, and on the other hand, pests so troublesome and litigious that it's cheaper and easier to just give them what they want to make them go away than to try to wait them out.
It's completely impossible for customer-side AI to help with any of this, because it will be countered and neutralized with org-side AI, since the org NEEDS the friction. Imposition of these frustration costs is simply indispensable.
It's interesting that none of this occurred to the writer of the piece but then despite his impressively smart-sounding jargon (to me) he did say "often disadvantaged people have the least time to spare" which suggests he is truly just bloveating.
As has been true of the output of Hollywood directors and script-writers for some time, it's often hard these days to attribute the poor development of ideas in online essays or reporting to a low quality author or to a high quality author needing to pay some bills and slumming it in satisfying the demands of a low quality audience.
At any rate, just like James Scott tried to explain to us how to supplement the intuitive way we see things from the perspective of individual citizens to also see things like a state, most writers need to supplement their impulse in "seeing like a customer" with a good education in "seeing like a firm", that is, from the perspective of the needs of the management of a for-profit business facing all the challenges and constraints of the modern context. When you look with the eyes of a customer, you see a bug. But when you see it like a firm, you see a feature.
Per the "humans being the problem" part... Absolutely.
There's a big fleet of driverless cabs here in Wuhan, and it's magical to watch them when they get packed up at the depot. They navigate and maneuver like a choreographed operation, and gridlock situations simply don't happen, it all gets fluid and moves. I took one the other day. It's very strange.
"But an AI agent that will cancel a subscription when the introductory offer runs out? I’d be on it."
Hah! Definitely. Sign me up.
If they wanted it to be easy for you to cancel, it would be easy. Since they don't want it to be easy, they aren't going to just sit back and let people use AI to make it easy again, so they'll stop it from working. Easiest way and most plausible cover story is that they have to know they're not dealing with those bad bots, so you'll have to prove you're a human, but then the 2FA won't work or CAPTCHA test will prove unpassable, and so you're just going to have to phone call in and talk to someone giving you the full (AI-augmented) Used Car Salesman treatment, like it's still 1973 or something.
I've already run into many instances of the CAPTCHA tests seeming increasingly fake charades as if bogus and designed to fail no matter how many times I correctly click on the crosswalks, fire hydrants, bicycles, traffic lights, motorcycles, or busses.
It was more humorous wishful thinking than a fact based rational analysis of the current model...which, btw, sucks. I don't have answers other than I limit my subscriptions to a bare minimum and once signed in to any of them, immediately go in and cancel so I don't forget it in the future.
It’s funny, I was wondering if it was just me getting endless CAPTCHAS of biases, bikes and crosswalks. Of all the things in the world, why those? I never get “which pictures contain a cat” or phone or pencil or hammer. It’s always that very narrow domain.