Sep
30
2026

I Was Tempted to Find a Pic of Salma Instead

But I've done that before. So I went with Fritz to illustrate Adam D. Thierer's City Journal article: What Hayek Can Teach Us About AI Safety.

Fears about artificial intelligence have gone mainstream, and an intense panic now grips the minds of the press, policymakers, and the public. A familiar cast of technocratic leaders—Barack Obama, Rahm Emanuel, Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and even King Charles—have chimed in with calls for some sort of “AI pause” or other steps to give government major new powers to ensure proper “alignment” of AI models, algorithmic applications, and advanced computation.

It’s a good moment to recall some timeless lessons from social thinker Friedrich Hayek. Today’s AI alignment debate contains echoes of the old economic calculation debate and the planner’s mentality that viewed society as a math problem to be solved. Hayek (1899–1992) spent his life demolishing that reasoning, while warning of the “fatal conceit” of elites who thought they could reorder entire economic systems and remake human nature through freedom-crushing, top-down interventions.

Previously, AI safety discussions were hidden from public view, confined to nerdy tech conferences, obscure internet discussion boards, and the plots of sci-fi stories and movies. That all changed following the splashy resignations of some AI lab employees, worried that developers like Anthropic and OpenAI may have lost control of their creations. Over 1,300 AI lab employees also signed a letter calling for “pacing the frontier” of AI development, and the CEOs of many major labs have called for government assistance in slowing the advancement of recursive self-improvement (RSI) or artificial general intelligence (AGI).

The AI debate increasingly features even more apocalyptic overtones and extreme proposals than did debates during the nuclear era. Regulatory ideas include moratoria on AI development potentially enforced by new global regulatory treaties and bureaucracies; mandated “kill switches” that let government take control of AI systems; nationalization of leading labs or “golden share” socialization schemes to give governments ownership stakes in leading firms; “FDA for AI”-like licensing regimes; and more. At the state level, more than 1,800 AI bills have been floated to regulate virtually every facet of computational innovation and algorithmically enabled speech, creating an unprecedented patchwork of technocratic red tape.

I think Adam-channelling-Friedrich is a pretty good combination.

Also of note:

  • It's not as if we don't have other things to worry about. The WaPo editorialists predict When America’s pot of debt will overflow. (WaPo gifted link)

    The 2030s are crucial because, if present trends continue, the United States will begin running out of fiscal space by the end of the decade.

    What does that mean? Think of debt as water inside a pot made of soft clay. The potter is the American workforce, and the government is pouring the water. The national debt is the total accumulation of water in the pot. The amount of room left in the pot is fiscal space.

    Fiscal space is the difference between the government’s current level of debt and the maximum amount of debt it could take on before undermining confidence in its ability to pay it back. The government needs fiscal space so that it can manage events, such as major wars, recessions, pandemics or natural disasters, that might require an unexpected surge in borrowing.

    The editorial is filled with charts that illuminate the dire problem. And as usual with the WaPo most of the commenters are in denial about needing to get spending under control, with a concentration on entitlements.

  • Among the many things we could stop spending money on… Noah Smith has a suggestion sure to anger your local schoolmarms: Stop spending money on smaller classes. Along the way, he makes a good point about Nikole Hannah-Jones' faulty argument about the lousy NYC school she sent her daughter to:

    What can fix our crappy schools? Hannah-Jones blames a lack of funding for low-income predominantly Black schools:

    [N]ationally, schools in predominantly nonwhite districts receive $23 billion less in annual funding than their heavily white counterparts, according to a 2019 analysis by EdBuild. In everything that we measure, these schools have less, even though the economically struggling student bodies they serve need more. And so the test scores and poor academic performance that typify these schools reflect not just the disadvantage of the students but, more essentially, the disadvantage of the schools.

    This is absolutely ridiculous, and represents a very basic math error. Obviously what should matter here is spending per student, not total spending. We spend more on predominantly white districts than on predominantly nonwhite districts because there are a lot more predominantly white districts in America!

    Well, it wouldn't be the first time Hannah-Jones used a dodgy argument to score ideological points.

    Noah's grand conclusion, after a diligent look at the studies showing little effect of class sizes on learning outcomes:

    We should be spending more money on educating our poorest and most disadvantaged students. But that money should be spent less on flooding those schools with ever more teachers of questionable quality, and more on raising pay to attract highly competent people capable of making a big difference in disadvantaged kids’ lives. If we did that, then stories like Nikole Hannah-Jones’ might be more of a rarity in America.

    I'll disagree in part. If the only thing you do is increase teacher salaries, the first-order effect will be nicer cars in the teachers' parking lot, and nothing on learning outcomes. Higher salaries have to be accompanied concurrently with getting rid of the teachers who don't teach well.

  • When you're out of ideas… At the WSJ "Free Expression" newsletter, Matthew Hennessey observes: Democrats Want You Afraid.

    The midterm elections are five weeks away. Most everybody agrees Democrats will have a big night on Nov. 3. But what are they running on? What are they promising to do come January?

    There are no policies underpinning the Democratic grand strategy, no major proposals on the table for discussion and debate. There are only the Four Fears.

    Fear of artificial intelligence. Every Democrat at every level has gotten the memo. The companies racing to develop AI must be slowed or stopped before they kill us all. From Barack Obama to your local town councilman, the mantra is the same. If you don’t elect us it could be your life. Be terrified. Be very terrified.

    Fear of data centers. This is a related fear, though a much more immediate and digestible one than AI itself. The billionaires and oligarchs want your land. They want to hog your electricity and suck up all your water. Oppose this or watch your beautiful town descend into a humming, throbbing hellscape of warehouses and air pollution. If you aren’t afraid, you aren’t paying attention.

    Fear of Donald Trump. He will deport your remaining immigrant neighbors. He will legitimize discrimination against trans children. He will send your sons and daughters to die in a war. He will try to engineer a third term for himself. He is a threat to all you hold dear. Left unspoken this campaign season has been the likelihood of a third impeachment. Perhaps it isn’t necessary to say such things anymore.

    Fear of MAGA. Tie down the patio furniture all ye who love democracy. Jan. 6, 2021, was only a dress rehearsal for what the fascists have planned this time. “We have never prepared for an election sabotage event like we have now,” Ezra Levin of the left-leaning group Indivisible told the Associated Press. Scared yet?

    Certainly, our local (NH) Democrats have been leaning heavily on the third fear. And not really "fear", more like hatred.

  • An impressive list of synonyms. Via Ann Althouse, who points to a WaPo column from Matthew Gwyther: Trump can’t resist a temptation known since the fall of man. And that temptation is…

    That humans have long been aware of the corrosive danger from kowtowing, toadying, sucking up, piling it on thick, apple-polishing and otherwise bootlicking is shown by the extensive array of synonyms and expressions for sycophancy.

    I recently interviewed that repentant sycophant Anthony Scaramucci, who famously lasted 11 days as White House spokesman in 2017. What was interesting about the Mooch’s musings was that he thinks Trump actually despises those who debase themselves before him, because he finds their weakness contemptible. Yet those who speak plainly to Trump, without fawning, are soon discarded.

    Gwyther makes the interesting observation about that "fall of man", from Milton's Paradise Lost, which featured the serpent's flattery of Eve's "Beautie". Maybe Trump could use a snake?

Recently on the book blog: