Eschatological Scatology

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Reader, I recommend you do not search Amazon for "poop emoji". Lot of stuff there you don't want to be tempted to buy. Like our Product du Jour! You're welcome!

Anyway, it's a topical image for this Ars Technica story: AI digests repetitive scatological document into profound “poop” podcast.

Imagine you're a podcaster who regularly does quick 10- to 12-minute summary reviews of written works. Now imagine your producer gives you multiple pages of nothing but the words "poop" and "fart" repeated over and over again and asks you to have an episode about the document on their desk within the hour.

Speaking for myself, I'd have trouble even knowing where to start with such a task. But when Reddit user sorryaboutyourcats gave the same prompt to Google's NotebookLM AI model, the result was a surprisingly cogent and engaging AI-generated podcast that touches on the nature of art, the philosophy of attention, and the human desire to make meaning out of the inherently meaningless.

I can't imagine what an AI fed on Pun Salad content would produce. Like the Giant Rat of Sumatra, 'twould undoubtedly be a story for which the world is not yet prepared.

But in a slightly more serious look at the AI doomsaying, John H. Cochrane advises: AI, Society, and Democracy: Just Relax.

“AI poses a threat to democracy and society. It must be extensively regulated.”

Or words to that effect, are a common sentiment.

They must be kidding.

Have the chattering classes—us—speculating about the impact of new technology on economics, society, and politics, ever correctly envisioned the outcome? Over the centuries of innovation, from moveable type to Twitter (now X), from the steam engine to the airliner, from the farm to the factory to the office tower, from agriculture to manufacturing to services, from leeches and bleeding to cancer cures and birth control, from abacus to calculator to word processor to mainframe to internet to social media, nobody has ever foreseen the outcome, and especially the social and political consequences of new technology? Even with the benefit of long hindsight, do we have any historical consensus on how these and other past technological innovations affected the profound changes in society and government that we have seen in the last few centuries? Did the industrial revolution advance or hinder democracy?

Among Cochrane's numerous spot-on observations: remember when GMO-based "frankenfood" was gonna kill us all? Well, that didn't happen, but a manipulated virus made with the blessing of (and cash from) a US government agency did manage to kill a bunch of us.

His recommendation:

The government must enforce rule of law, not the tyranny of the regulator. Trust democracy, not paternalistic aristocracy—rule by independent, unaccountable, self-styled technocrats, insulated from the democratic political process. Remain a government of rights, not of permissions. Trust and strengthen our institutions, including all of civil society, media, and academia, not just federal regulatory agencies, to detect and remedy problems as they occur. Relax. It’s going to be great.

Cochrane's substack is titled "The Grumpy Economist", and it looks pretty good.

Also of note:

  • On the crack-down watch. Joe Lancaster on yet another triumph for bipartisan agreement: Both Trump and Harris Would Crack Down on Fentanyl.

    Republicans and Democrats alike agree that the U.S. should do something about fentanyl, the synthetic opioid that is significantly more potent than heroin. It is often found mixed into street drugs, but not because addicts are clamoring for it: Rather, fentanyl is cheaper and easier to manufacture and smuggle, making it an attractive alternative when prohibitionist governments crack down on pain pills.

    Unfortunately, neither of the major party seems willing to either admit the government's own role in making the drug so dangerous, or to pursue an alternative to classic war on drugs policies.

    Nothing is more likely to put me into a snit than seeing my local pols pontificate that they're gonna "keep drugs off our streets".

  • If it's hard for him, imagine how difficult it is for me. And probably you. George F. Will has a problem: Between Harris and Trump, it’s hard to tell who’s worse on economic matters.

    If cynics are people prematurely disappointed about the future, they might now constitute something recently elusive: an American consensus. With voting well underway a month before Election Day (actually, during election autumn), gaze upon the campaign’s stricken landscape:

    […]

    Harris is parsimonious with interviews, but who cares? They can only reveal today’s batch of her views, which tend to expire in batches. It would, however, be fun to find out if there is any question — e.g., are there enough submarines for the AUKUS partners? — she will not answer by saying, “I was raised a middle-class kid, okay?”

    Former president Donald Trump still resembles the “Bleak House” character about whom Charles Dickens wrote: “When he has nothing else to do, he can always contemplate his own greatness. It is a considerable advantage to a man, to have so inexhaustible a subject.” But Trump’s ongoing choices of colorful companions raise a question: Has a ship’s hull ever become so encrusted with barnacles that the weight of them sank the vessel? The Trump campaign should wonder. He evidently enjoys the company of the dregs of America’s political culture — Holocaust deniers, 9/11 “truthers,” Tucker Carlson, who praises a “historian” who thinks Winston Churchill was beastly to Adolf Hitler.

    I've added that "prematurely disappointed about the future" quip to my blog's subtitle rotation.

  • Wax (still) off. Charles Murray takes to Quillette to comment on The Amy Wax Affair.

    Last week, Amy Wax, the Robert Mundheim Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania (“Penn”) and three-time recipient of awards for excellence in teaching, was stripped her of her chaired professorship, suspended for a year at half pay, and denied summer pay in perpetuity. Why? As far as I can tell, for telling her students the truth in the classroom and exercising her constitutional right to express her private opinions outside the classroom.

    Penn’s administration doesn’t see it that way. In the words of the official letter sent to Wax, these punishments were justified by her “flagrant unprofessional conduct”:

    That conduct included a history of making sweeping and derogatory generalisations about groups by race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and immigration status; breaching the requirement that student grades be kept private by publicly speaking about the grades of law students by race and continuing to do so even after cautioned by the dean that it was a violation of university policy; and, on numerous occasions, in and out of the classroom and in public, making discriminatory and disparaging statements targeting specific racial, ethnic, and other groups with which many students identify.

    The specifics of the allegations against Wax can be found in a twelve-page letter written by the Dean of the law school, Theodore Ruger, in June 2022. I am suspicious of some of them, but most of the things she is alleged to have said sound like the Amy Wax I know. In each of our occasional encounters over the years, I have always had the same reactions. She is brilliant, entertaining, disconcertingly frank, and sometimes abrasive. Her style is not my style, but I have never known Wax to use invective or slurs when she is expressing her opinion. She is just really, really, blunt.

    … and, unfortunately, it's paywalled after that. But the upshot is obvious: it's more likely all but the bravest dissenters from the theology that infests American higher ed will avoid being "really, really, blunt".

    And blunt criticism is exactly what higher ed needs. Otherwise we're in for a few more decades of cluelessness and malpractice.