Libertarians
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AI and the Current Zeitgeist
Apologies if I'm throwing more AI stuff at you than you care to read, but things in the world of AI are happening fast, and the argument I've been making here for the last couple of years is that what's happening there is more important to understand and to resist than whatever is happening in
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Mountainhead: Some Quick Thoughts after Watching It
I'm glad it’s a movie rather than a full, multi-season series. I gave up on Succession half way through the first season, and I would have given up on this, too, if I had to watch much more of it. That doesn't mean it fails–the writing is clever, and the humor burns–but that there's just
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And Meanwhile in the AI Bubble . . .
I suspect that the most important thing happening right now has little or nothing to do with politics. Although AI executives commonly speak of the coming AGI revolution—referring to artificial “general” intelligence that rivals or exceeds human capability—they notably have all at this moment coalesced around real, albeit loose, deadlines. Many of their prophecies also
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Worshipping in the Temple of the Invisible Hand
“I tend to think that most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism,” Chiang told me. “And I think that this is actually true of most fears of technology, too. Most of our fears or anxieties about technology are best understood as fears or anxiety about how capitalism will use technology against
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Reaganism Finds Its Fulfillment in Trumpism
“We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” —Ronald Reagan quoting Thomas Paine in his speech accepting the GOP nomination in July 1980. The increasing divergence—and antagonism—between the red nation and the blue nation is a defining characteristic of 21st-century America. That’s a reversal from the middle decades of the 20th
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Ukraine and the Politics of Inevitability
Because the politics of inevitability assures you that whatever the good things are, they’re being brought about automatically by some invisible hand, right? The market is like Mom. You know, it’s going to take care of you with that invisible hand. And you don’t have to think about what the values might be, what you
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The Crisis of the Liberal Order, Part II
And that is not all: even if man really were nothing but a piano-key, even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then he would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point. And if he does not find means
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Christian Nationalism
If you're not aware of this bizarre exercise in religious delusion, this article in the NY Times does a good job of laying it out, and of identifying who benefits. It's pretty much what I've been writing about over the last month–how billionaires use culture war issues and credulous Christians to insure the entrenchment of
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Milton Friedman: Proto-Sociopath
But while economists still argue over Friedman’s theories, his hot take 50 years ago for nonspecialists — the Friedman doctrine — turned a capitalist truism (profits are essential) into a simple-minded, unhinged, socially destructive monomania (only profits matter). In “A Christmas Carol,” Scrooge is redeemed when he abandons his nasty profit-mad view of life —