Techno-capitalism

• Partying our Way to the Apocalypse

  Since American society's future is in the hands of people whose average level of moral maturity is that of a middle schooler, the future of humanity is likely to be determined by who wins the perennial battle between the snarky, rich cool kids and the earnest, nerdy kids who get elected to the student council.

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• What Is After the Future About?

  Note: Every once in a while I revise my About statement at the top of the left column on this site. I thought I'd post my most recent revision here today: After the Future is a public diary that I've been writing for over twenty years. It's what I'd be writing anyway if there were

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• The Coming Politics of AI

  How exactly the parties would align—pro-AI or anti-AI or somewhere in between—is unclear. The possibilities are downright kaleidoscopic. Democrats, traditionally more concerned about long-term threats such as climate change and pandemics, might oppose AI development on the grounds of existential risk. Republicans, traditionally more concerned about the preservation of existing social structures and mores, might

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• Humans Don’t Really Believe in a Human Future Anymore

  So they're willing to surrender it to the bots. Ezra Klein last week– Since moving to the Bay Area in 2018, I have tried to spend time regularly with the people working on A.I. I don’t know that I can convey just how weird that culture is. And I don’t mean that dismissively; I mean

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• Return of the Repressed

  In "The Crisis of the Liberal Order, Part I", I argue on a more practical political level that the future of democracy in the U.S. depends on Liberal Democrats succeeding and Republicans in their current form failing and then being pushed to the margins. I argued that's not likely to happen if Main Street Americans

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• Progressivism in a Post-Liberal World

  I do not consider myself a Liberal, but I do think of myself as a Progressive in the late-19th-, early-20th-Century sense, more with the Social Gospel/W. J. Bryan strain than with the Deweyan/statist, managerial liberal strain. I'm a communitarian/subsidiarist who admires Wendell Berry, but who nevertheless recognizes that the technocratic state is a necessity. I

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• Liberalism + Whatever

  There are moments of transition and turmoil when liberalism appears to stand alone, and liberals sometimes confuse these moments for an aspirational norm. But nobody except Hugh Hefner, Gordon Gekko and a few devotees of the old A.C.L.U. can bear to live for very long under conditions of pure liberalism. Instead, the norm for successful

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• How Neoliberalism Captured the Cultural Left 2

  Sean Illing interviews Stuart Jeffries, author of Everything, All the Time, Everywhere: How We Became Postmodern, and the discussion focuses on themes I've been making for years now about why the Left hasn't the resources to fight the Right. I'll say more about it below, but my argument over the years is that insofar as

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• Sociopathic Artificial Intelligence 2

  After posting yesterday, It came across this Thomas Edsall column from May in which he quotes Stiglitz and Korinek: In their December 2017 paper, “Artificial intelligence, worker-replacing technological progress and income distribution,” the economists Anton Korinek, of the University of Virginia, and Joseph E. Stiglitz, of Columbia — describe the potential of artificial intelligence to

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• Sociopathic Artificial Intelligence 1

  “I don’t anthropomorphize,” Chowdhery said bluntly. “We are simply predicting language.” Artificial consciousness is a remote dream that remains firmly entrenched in science fiction, because we have no idea what human consciousness is; there is no functioning falsifiable thesis of consciousness, just a bunch of vague notions. And if there is no way to test

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