Two Substack Must Reads for the weekend. Both are open and do not require subscription. Grab the cuppa and take a walk in the park after to consider them.
The “Messy Middle” by Molly Kinder in “Kinder Futures”
Why the years between today and post-AGI abundance will be the hardest political and economic problem of our generation, and why we can’t skip past them
This is the longer of the two essays that presents two realities: Reality 1 of today where AI is increasingly everywhere, but the societal effects have yet to be felt, and Reality 3 where it has been absorbed and we are in the bright sunlit uplands of abundance. The mess is in Reality 2, which she posits as year, perhaps decades, of societal upheaval and what we are already seeing–the near-destruction of the professional ‘cognitive classes’. Yes, people like you and me as creative thought, ability, and specifically cognitive ability, become commodities. This cognitive displacement will affect governments, as the vast middle that pays most taxes suddenly finds income cut in half or more, forced into early retirement, and dependent on government for support. The essential jobs as determined during the Covid pandemic will be the least affected, but still affected because their income trajectory despite need has been declining and that won’t change. The trades survive because their practitioners are scarce for now. The effects on the middle and upper middle classes internationally will be brutal in her scenarios. Ms. Kinder does arrive at conclusions re the political backlash rearranging the current state (we are in it now) and a managed transition that you may not necessarily agree with. See the comments at the end.
The Tech Bros Want to Build God by George Shay in “Common Sense”
Why Pope Leo XIV May Be Right to Worry About Artificial Intelligence—But Not for the Reason You Think
Pope Leo’s first encyclical tackled AI and began, in the introduction, “Humanity, created by God in all its grandeur, is today facing a pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together.” Further, “We must, then, avoid the “Babel syndrome,” namely the idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak, a uniformity that neutralizes differences, and the pretense that a single language — even a digital one — can translate everything, including the mystery of the person, into data and performance. The risk of dehumanization — of building a future that excludes God and reduces the other to a means — is an ancient and ever-new temptation that today takes on a technical guise.” Like most encyclicals, it is written in exceedingly dense, very Catholic language (disclosure, your Editor is Roman Catholic).
Mr. Shay’s take is considerably less dense and moves from a different philosophical ground. All too many of the ‘tech bros’, especially at a high level, speak of technology in almost religious terms. AI has become their highest expression of faith. They rejected traditional faith while young and redirected that impulse, that exists in nearly every human save the sociopaths, into technology. To the observant, that is nothing new–witness the well-known lives of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Instead, in the search for meaning, their salvation is technology.
FTA: “Instead of God creating man in His image, we now hear man preparing to create a machine in his own image.
Some of the rhetoric coming out of Silicon Valley is astonishingly explicit. Researchers and entrepreneurs casually discuss creating “machine gods” or engineering a “new species” superior to humanity. And importantly, they are not speaking metaphorically. They mean it quite literally.”
The ultimate question is ‘why’–and there is no AI that can answer that, despite how the visionaries position AI “in terms that resemble divinity”.
Your Editor expressed two comments that are solely her observations. The first: “Perhaps those most enthusiastic about AI are those most frightened of the existence of God behind life, faith in that God, ethics beyond their own wants and needs, consideration of their fellow man, and their own mortality. Is it no mistake that most of those leaders in technology resemble flawed and strange little boys, even when they are 70? That is an unsettling thought.” The second is lengthy and saved for your reading of the article.
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