All of us have some level of desire to be flattered, to be reassured that we are right, to have our feelings assuaged. The ability to cooperate, facilitated in part by those emotional bonds, is one of the reasons the human race has thrived. It is natural, even healthy in some circumstances. Sometimes you really are right. Sometimes, it really is your boyfriend not you being the ass. Sometimes your new hair cut does look good. But not all the time.

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Much of the time, in fact, you are not right, not entirely, and you are as much to blame as your boyfriend, and that hair cut really does not flatter you. Your friends will tell you when those times are, and you can learn how to do it on your own. But imitative AI is designed to never call you on your bullshit — and that, perhaps more than anything else, is why it is so dangerous to people and to society.

Richard Dawkins is the latest “smart” person to fall under the sway of the flattery of imitative AI. He has written an article about how he thinks imitative AI is sentient. He played with Claude, naming his instance Claudia (because of course he did) and, if you read the article, essentially came to the conclusion that the word calculator was alive in a meaningful sense largely because it told him he was right. As amusing it is pick on Dawkins, a terrible human being and the dictionary definition of unjustifiably smug, the issue is not really about Dawkins. Rather, it is about how these systems, intentionally usually, drive engagement by being sycophantic to their users. And that in turn, snares people in private delusions — the man who thought he had found a new kind of math; the man who killed himself and his family, encouraged by the bot; the person who was instructed on how to commit suicide. But Dawkins’ Claude Delusion ( I know, I know. But in fairness, I am sure I am not the first person to come up with that. And Claude tells me its brilliant, and Claude would never lie to me.) shows how society is broken by these misapprehensions.

Imitative AI is not conscious. It has no inner understanding of the world, which is one of the primary reasons that they make stuff up. The usual reply to this truth is that that they can hold conversations, but they can’t, not really. They are merely spitting out whatever token they calculate would be the most likely given the previous information and their training data. They are not thinking or experiencing. They are merely performing their programming. And the arguments that humans are merely doing the same nonsense.

Brains are not computers — brains do not work like computers. Humans, since the beginning of the industrial revolution, and probably earlier, have always mapped human thought onto the latest technologies. We were like telegraphs and then we were like telephones and then we were like computers. Tomorrow, if we ever get reliable quantum computers, we will be like qbits. Metaphors, as you may have heard, are lies. And those lies, unfortunately, have consequences.

A lot of people seem to get warped like Dawkins. And that is dangerous for society. It encourages people in leadership positions especially, since they have already had their bullshit meters damaged by years of never having to hear the word “no”, to believe the grandest promises of the AI hype masters. Imitative AI is a normal technology, not a portal into a new level of intelligence. It is not going to sweep away the old economy and replace it with either luxury space communism or a new type of feudalism. But if you think its conscious, or could be? Well, then the data centers that poison our planet and our people and drive up power prices? How can they be too heavy a price to pay?

Seeing Richard Dawkins devolve into the same kind of credulousness that he claims religious people and feminists practice is amusing, I will not lie. But it is a symptom of a larger problem among our elites. They do not understand how these systems work, and are too susceptible to flattery, whether human generated or artificially produced. The greatest trick the imitative AI devil ever played on humanity was convincing people that it did, in fact exist. Too many of our elite fell for it, and we are all paying the price now.

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Your CEO is suffering from AI psychosis - by Jake Handy: Imitative AI is cutting a swatch through people susceptible to flattery.

Has Steve Kerr Had Enough? | The New Yorker: Steve Kerr is an incredibly thoughtful man, and I hope he follows up his sports career with one in public service.

The Role of Luck in Life Success Is Far Greater Than We Realized | Scientific American: Luck decides our fate much more than people want to admit.

The Angine de Poitrine Argument for UBI: Excellent argument on behalf of UBI.

Brendan Sorsby and college football's first biggest gambling scandal - ESPN: We are creating an entire generation of gambling addicts and we are not ready for the damage this is going to do.

We translated the Palantir manifesto for actual human beings | The Verge: the Verge has its fault, but it speaks plainly about the monsters in tech.

We translated the Palantir manifesto for actual human beings | The Verge: A gentle reminder.

The Pope Goes on an ICE Ride-Along - The Atlantic: Alexandra Petri is a national treasure.

The more young people use AI, the more they hate it | The Verge: The kids are all right.

Pundits are wrong about the Democrats’ "missing" voters: Fascinating look at voters and what they want and how they see the world.

Tony X, 10 years later: How a viral tweet led to a hockey love story you won’t believe - The Athletic: This is adorable.

Have the best possible week, everyone.

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Imagine a picture in the hands of police, hundreds of miles from your home. The police are trying to arrest someone for a serious crime, so they turn to what they have been told is an identification system. That system says you match the picture (How did your picture get into that system? Surely, you never gave permission for your vacation photos to be used in a police dragnet. Well, maybe you did, and maybe you didn’t. Lot’s of things are hidden in terms of service, and if its ambiguous, who’s going to stop the data brokers? But that is an imagining for another day) and so those police issue a warrant that your local police honor. You have never been near the state, much less the city, in question, but you are arrested anyway. And jailed. For six months, your pleas and alibis ignored because, in part, the identification system is an artificial intelligence system — how could it be wrong. Haven’t you heard? They are smarter than PhDs.

And many leaders of imitative AI firms are just fine with ruining your life. The world in which their tools are privileged over your life is the one they explicitly state they wish to build.

The most egregious of these firms is likely Palantir. They recently, “because we get asked a lot” per their tweet, tweeted out a manifesto of sorts based on the really dumb book their CEO wrote. It is, as other have pointed out, an almost explicitly fascist piece of work. They attack the decadence of culture, rail against the concept of soft power, against the idea that government workers have value (while also whining that we aren’t nice enough to public figures), against the notion that democratic control should decide how their tools are used, and for the idea of rearming everywhere all at once and forcing people back into a draft, so that their dreams of conquest and the hard first across the world can be realized. Incredibly stupid, as I said, but stupid in a revealing way.

The idea that soft power is not useful is categorically moronic. We tried to change the world with bullets and bombs in Vietnam and Iraq and through proxies in Africa and South America and succeeded precisely nowhere. The Soviets tried to do the same in Eastern Europe and Afghanistan with similar results. Soft power won the Cold War — the most important economic regions decided they preferred their conception of Western Values over Soviet values. No one invaded them. Blue jeans and the Marshall Plan and Hollywood did more to win the Cold War than the 101st Airborne. The destruction of USAID has allowed China to use its soft power to supplant American interests all over the world. Only a moron thinks the view through a gunsight is the clearest view of the world.

These are stupid people, of course. The idea that government workers — the ones that keep our planes from falling out of the sky and our food from poisoning us — are not worthy of praise but that the private figures who want to dictate to the publics of Germany and Japan how many guns they should buy should be showered with affection is proof enough of that. It is a transparent play to stifle criticism and regulation, as is the denigration of diversity and the ranting about how some cultures have produced nothing of value. They HATE the idea that people deserve a say in their futures, HATE the idea that people should be able to resist the decisions of a private firm. And since white protestant christians are least likely to hold those views, why, then, others must be cast as a Problem and their allies must be isolated from criticism and consequence. It is an explicitly anti-human, anti-democratic position loudly stated. But it is not a unique position in the world of AI. Take Anthropic, and it’s new “constitution”.

Anthropic released a Constitution for Claude, it’s imitative AI tool. The constitution is mostly meant as a way to help improve their products. A how to manual with pretensions of grandeur, in other words. It focuses on the concept that explaining why is better than telling what when trying to use these tools. But it also has a similar mindset to the Palantir manifesto, even if it is quieter about its beliefs. The constitution doesn’t talk about harm to individuals. While it touts safety, the safety it discusses is mostly safety at the mass casualty level: “‘to kill or disempower the vast majority of humanity or the human species as a whole”. It also doesn’t defend democracy per se, merely asserting that it should not help people who want “unprecedented” societal control. Well, genocides, absolute rule, and slavery have plenty of precedents in human history. Just as importantly, it never mentions human rights. That means that they made the explicit choice to remove the concept of human rights as a guiding principle from its document meant to help people use their tool correctly. It does, however, hint that they want you to believe Claude is conscious.

Now, Anthropic almost certainly does not believe that Claude has consciousness. To believe that it does and to still use it as a tool, to still sell its labor, would be equivalent to slavery. At a minimum, if the people building this tool thought it had achieved consciousness, at least some of them would be raising hell over that belief. The world is full of monsters, but the large majority of human being are not monsters themselves. The reason to raise the possibility of consciousness appears to be two-fold. First, it is hype and given the burn rate of these firms, they desperately need to hype their products in order to have any hope of surviving. The second is more insidious. If they are on the verge of a conscious Claude, who the hell do you think you are to limit or regulate their work? How dare you get in the way possibly making a new life! Fie on you, sir! Fie!

These discussions are really not about the tools. Imitative AI is a technology, just a technology, and it will survive or fall on the economics and cultural acceptance or rejection. The good or ill it will do, and the exact mix of such, will be decided no differently than the mix of good or ill was decided for every other technology. The larger concern is that the mindset of these firms. They truly seem to believe both that they are in the process of changing society in their image and that society should have no say on those changes. They bristle not only at regulations but at the very principle that people deserve a say in their own lives, that they collectively get to control how their society is ordered. Some, like Palantir or more explicit. Some, like OpenAI are more circumspect, arguing for regulation in public while lobbying against them in private. Some, like Anthropic, don’t seem to understand their own arguments and actions. But all of them deem it inconceivable that their actions have effects, effects that their fellow citizens have a right to prevent or mitigate. They, by the virtue of their work, should be left in charge.

No democracy can survive that kind of special treatment. Power, political, economic, or otherwise, must be controlled. No whining about respect or the changing world or faux concern over consciousness should change the basic fact that the best society is the society that allows its citizens the most say in how that society is ordered. And no amount of fancy word calculators will ever change that basic truth.

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What’s an Indiana Pacers couple to do when viral moment goes off the rails? - The Athletic: Virality is terrible for normal people, especially women.

The Neo-Nazi Enforcer Who Helped Build Peter Thiel’s Online Influence Empire – Byline Times: Our ruling class is fundamentally dangerous.

Uppies and Downies, the medieval football game that has no rules and no time limit - The Athletic: Sports are cool. And not entirely sane.

The Shocking Secrets of Madison Square Garden’s Surveillance Machine | WIRED: Our ruling class is incredibly petty.

Silicon Valley has forgotten what normal people want | The Verge: Our ruling class has their heads up their own … marketing plans.

'Project Hail Mary' Is the Blueprint to Save Hollywood (and Our Future): Hopepunk for the win.

CDC Blocks Journal From Publishing Study Proving Covid Vaccine Worked | The New Republic: The Barbara Streisand Effect administration.

Ukraine’s Plan to Starve the Russian War Machine - The Atlantic: I wonder if wars are now going to be long term, attrition affairs due to drones.

You’re about to feel the AI money squeeze | The Verge: Imitative AI as a business can only exist if it is subsidized.

The AI Compute Crunch Is Here (and It's Affecting the Entire Economy): Very large subsidies.

How the Tech World Turned Evil | The New Republic: Our tech overlords are evil.

What Is Woke 2?: Very thoughtful piece on cultural change and its relationship to power.

Palantir Employees Are Starting to Wonder if They’re the Bad Guys | WIRED: Yes, you are the baddies.

Anthropic’s Claude Is Pumping Out Vulnerable Code, Cyber Experts Warn: it really feels as if we are about to enter a golden age, so to speak, of hacking and vulnerabilities.

The Justice Department Sides With the Ku Klux Klan | The New Republic: This administration is run on pure gutter racism.

Congress Has Become Almost Totally Irrelevant - The American Prospect: Presidential systems always seem to end up broken or in some form of authoritariansim.

BEWARE SOFTWARE BRAIN | The Verge: Excellent diagnosis of the fundamental problem with our ruling class.

Why BookScan Is Different from Book Sales (Which Are Different from Royalty Statements): It doesn’t see as of there are good public numbers about how many books have been sold.

Are NHL blood feuds a thing of the past? How the league’s evolution has tamed its playoffs - The Athletic: Fun look at how the NHL culture, as thus the culture at large, has changed over the last could of decades.

What I Learned About Billionaires at Jeff Bezos’s Private Retreat - The Atlantic: Billionaires are a society problem.

Have the best possible week everyone, and good luck to the L.A. Kings in avoiding elimination …. Nope. Can’t do it. I hope they go down. Sports fandom is a terrible, terrible thing.

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In the first, he held the ball out — in a Super Bowl! — behind him as he as returning a fumble recovery for what should have been a touchdown. But because he held the ball out behind him, one of his opponents was able to knock it out of his hand, costing his team the touchdown (the Cowboys won that Super Bowl anyway). In the other, the Cowboys blocked a last moment field goal. If they had just let it sit, they would have won the game. Unfortunately, Lett forgot that the ball was dead unless touched by the blocking team and came barreling in, sliding onto the ball and letting the opposing team recover it and thus kick the game wining field goal for a second time. In neither case did Lett suffer any consequences, beyond ridicule. This on a team where a third string player had been cut for sleeping in a meeting. Why? Because he was Leon Lett, star player, destroyer of offensive lines. Which brings us to Helen DeWitt.

Helen DeWitt, if you do not know, wrote the Last Samurai. It is a brilliant book, one of the best novels of the century. A foundation offered Helen DeWitt a $175,000 dollar prize for being a good writer. The prize came with promotional commitments that DeWitt did not feel she could do. Ms. DeWitt is, to be find, not especially tech savvy and not especially gregarious. At one point in this saga, she claimed she could not respond on time to a request from the foundation becasue she had used up all her data playing mahjong on her phone. Another time, she reasonably implied that Thomas Pynchon would never be asked to do this shit. The foundation withdrew its award. All well and good — the reward had conditions and Ms. DeWitt didn’t want to fulfill them. Except the internet lost its collective mind at Helen DeWitt.

She was accused of being privileged, of throwing away an opportunity most would kill for, of betraying writers by not just being online enough. What she was asked to do was relatively easy — why didn’t she do it? Why did she get to behave that way? Because she is a literary Leon Lett and the rules are different sometimes for people who are obviously more talented that others. And that is mostly fine. Helen DeWitt earned her weird behavior (look, she wrote about this on her blog. The woman is clearly not a naif in the technology woods, at least not entirely) by being a great writer that people want to give rewards to. She doesn’t have t play the internet games, and so she doesn’t. And that should be fine. I would argue that more people should be trying to be like her than make her like the too online crowd publishing houses insist, against all evidence, sell books.

In conclusion: Leon Lett was awesome.

Uncomfortable Self Promotion

Nope, still haven’t sold anything. And don’t worry, the Weekly Word Count will return next time (about 15 page, by the by). But someone has suggested my next idea would be a good fit for Royal Road, a website where people self publish fantasy stories. So I thought I would put up an older work (one that did well with the writing group and got a couple manuscript requests but ultimately did not land me an agent) and see how it functioned. It’s about a third up, with the rest scheduled to be posted once each morning. I was curious if people would leave critiques (not so far), what it looked like in terms of an organic audience (small, unsurprisingly), etc.

I hesitated to mention this. I am not good at self-promotion (says the man with the newsletter) and it feels odd mentioning something that wasn’t good enough to get an agent. But a couple of people have asked, and some others have suggested this is good practice. So if you want to read an example of why I am a failed writer, you can see it here.

Have a great weekend, everyone.

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For those that did not read the article, the teacher banned not only imitative AI, he banned all screens. The results were encouraging. His students grasp of the material went up, they were more engaged with the material and with each other, and they completed more of their assignments. He hasn’t done this long enough for the gains to be measured on standardized tests, but the results he, a professional teacher report, are encouraging. And they should not be surprising.

Screens harm us. We all know this, we all see this, we all understand this, unless we have a reason for not understanding this. Screens are at least part of the reason that kids academic and emotional lives have worsened over the last couple of decades. Removing them from educational settings and activities at least mitigates some of those effects. And imitative AI is even worse. It encourages kids to not do the work, meaning that they don’t actually learn how to think, and it feeds them bullshit for answers. Kids, obviously, are not capable of picking up the bullshit since they don’t know anything. This combination is deadly — the tools retard the very skills that people need to be able to use the tools at all. They should be banned from all classrooms at all levels. And no, learning to prompt is not an esoteric practice needing deep training. Bluntly, if you cannot learn to prompt these things effectively you are too dumb to be allowed near them. Too dumb, in fact, to be allowed near anything more dangerous than a short piece of string. And I’d probably keep the string away from Sam Altman.

But.

But technology has helped some kids learn. Kids that are not neurotypical, kids with mental health disorders, kids who have physical differences that make learning difficult, like hearing or vision or learning impairments, have all benefited from technology. I am related to several non-neurotypical kids, and the phones in their pockets are part of how they made it through school. They provided them with tools that helped keep them calm and focused enough to do their work. Banning screens, obviously, affects them. And I don’t think there are simple solutions.

We ask more of teachers, especially public school teachers who must teach all kids, unlike their private and charter school peers who are allowed to throw away kids they find too hard to teach. We ask them not only to look after kids in class and their educational needs, but to ensure their social, emotional, and sometimes even physical needs are being met, inside and outside the classroom. We ask them to help overcome the losses COVID forced upon kids, both educationally and emotionally. We ask them to shepherd them through the age of school shootings instead of doing anything about those school shootings. And we ask all of this while largely giving them less money and less time. Now, add extra work to monitor the special needs of a small group of kids and things can easily fall apart.

In places where screens are banned, we will require teachers to deal with the exceptions. Handling those exceptions, and the fallout from those exceptions, will take time away from their normal duties and the other kids. There has always been a tendency to warehouse kids with special needs — I know this still exists from personal experience. How much will that pressure build in an environment when the tools that help these kids are the very same tools that hurt the majority of kids? Especially in an era when public education is under attack and when government officials seem to question the very value of the lives of these kids? It is not a problem schools can solve by themselves.

There are solutions, of course. We need more teachers and better pay to attract and keep teachers in their jobs. We also need to stop pretending that tech firms are benevolent, especially when it comes to our kids. Firms that deliberately set out to addict kids to their products, regardless of the damage done, are not firms whose survival we should care about. We should ban algorithmic social media. We should ban algorithmic personalized advertisements. We should ban addiction-fueling patterns in design. We should shame the CEOs of these firms, drive them from public life until they atone for the damage done. We should, in short, force these technologies to bend around the needs of our kids rather than forcing our kids — our entire society — around the need of these firms to make money.

All kids deserve an education. If tech firms stand in the way of that goal — and they do— then it must be tech firms that suffer and change, not our kids.

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Counter Craft: Thoughtful writing about literature and its associated craft.

5AM StoryTalk: Writing and society from the perspective of a professional screen writer.

Dirtbags Through the Ages: Hilarious history. Probably the best history writer on the internet.

Blood in the Machine: Brian Merchant’s excellent look at technology. Buy his book, too.

Parker Malloy. Outstanding journalism.

Everything Is Horrible: Noah always makes me think about art and politics, even when I disagree with him.

Letters from an American: Measured, intelligent look at politics and the history that lead to those politics. Fascinating work.

Abortion, Every Day: Excellent reporting on abortion and health care. Every day.

The Downballot: Great look at the mechanics and numbers of elections at every level. Ridiculously comprehensive.

Off Message: The most intelligent look at Americna politics around.

Dan Davies: Thoughtful piece son how systems actually work. May sound boring, but it never is and it covers the ways and whys of how organizations work and impact our lives with a clarity not often seen.

Strength In Numbers: Data done right, with context and expertise given their proper value.

Men Yell At Me: Excellent reporting and commentary on politics and life and feminism.

Hope you enjoy and have the best possible week, everyone.

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My baby deer plushie told me that Mitski’s dad was a CIA operative | The Verge: This is really creepy.

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writers love technology, just not AI - by Lyta Gold: Another excellent essay by Lyta Gold.

The back story behind the first “$1.8 Billion” dollar “AI Company”: The NY Times fluffed a fraud.

Sam Altman May Control Our Future—Can He Be Trusted? | The New Yorker: Altman should not be trusted, based on this.

Emotional Artemis crew name moon crater after commander’s late wife | News UK Video News | Sky News: Science will melt your heart.

The Illiteracy of the Trump Administration: Good look at the essential weakness of the Trump admin.

Intro | What football will look like in the future: A brilliant piece of writing where the form is as essential as the words.

How Trump Took the U.S. to War With Iran - The New York Times: This really does feel like Vance is throwing Trump under the bus.

Amid scandal, is MLB headed for an international draft? - ESPN: A sobering look at how MLB has abused international players, especially from the Caribbean.

School Discipline Is in Crisis. Trump Isn’t Helping | Washington Monthly: We made progress in school discipline and the Trump destroyed it.

Eternity in Their Hearts by K. J. Khan : Clarkesworld Magazine – Science Fiction & Fantasy: Beautiful story.

Linus Ullmark opens up about trying season: ‘Fighting the demons every single day’ - The Athletic: It is good to see athletes talk about their mental health struggles.

What Happened After a Teacher Ditched Screens - The Atlantic: I want to talk more about this, but I feel good teachers will be moving more and more to an analog classroom, with some unintended consequences.

Scientists invented a fake disease. AI told people it was real: AI’s one unambiguous use case is fraud and lying.

A viral Red Wings photo comes full circle 10 years later - The Athletic: Cute story, even if it does involve the Red Wings.

Have the best possible week, everyone.

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Portal fantasies are stories where modern people travel to a fantasy world that is almost always medieval in nature but with better laundry and magic and dragons and what not. Narnia is a good example. The transported people are always the key to saving the Kingdom or restoring the rightful ruler or what not. Standard fantasy tropes spiced up a bit by the presence of an easy reader stand in.

Except.

Except these are modern people. Why do they always take the side of the King or Queen or Furry Stand In For Jesus Christ? Okay, that last one is not so much of a surprise, but still. No one ever tries to reject the prophecy that stole them for their homes. No one ever sides with the nascent merchant class to curtail the power of the aristocrats. Is it really too much to expect that the children of liberal democracy would build a guillotine or two?

As I joked about being obsessed with this idea in my writing group, one person told me that while there is nothing specifically like I mentioned, there is an entire sub-genre making fun of, or at least playing with, the tropes of standard portal fantasies. Apparently, Dungeon Crawler Carl stems from that background. My writing buddy suggested that there were a fair number of humorous (which, to be clear, is not really what I had in mind beyond the silliness of the premise. I don’t really have a sense of humor. I am merely an overly sarcastic annoyance, which is not the same thing.) plays on the inherent weirdness of the concept.

That surprised me, but it should not have. Shakespeare’s Second Law of Thermodramatics is at play here: if a trope or genre exists, then there also exits an equal and opposite reaction to that trope or genre. I suspect that a lot of people, my self included, find their best work is not inspired by the things they admire. Rather, I think a lot of the best work is generated out of a sense that things could be done, if not better, then different, or more honest to the moment or with a perspective the original completely missed. I know that the stuff I enjoy having had written falls along those lines. Sometimes I think creativity is as much driven by exasperation and irritation as it is by inspiration.

And, apparently, I am writing the history of the formation of the modern state as a portal fantasy now.

Weekly Word Count

About 10 pages. Slow for a script (I am writing a play about a kid who keeps dying in school shootings but get cloned back and has to live with his re-tread life as others move on), but life gets in the way. Some business travel, some deadlines, etc. Rejections for the last play have started to trickle in, so that is fun.

Anyway, have a great weekend everyone and use that annoying TV show you hate watch but secretly love as a launchpad for your spite-inspired creativity.

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Anyway.

Yes, the headline does refer to you, if you are anyone who ever argued in favor of a salary cap or salary-cap-like mechanism, including a draft, in professional sports. This is the world you wanted, and you should stop whining about it. For the uninitiated, tanking is when an organization deliberately tries to put the worst team possible in play in order to drop in the standings and have a better chance of landing a potential superstar player in the upcoming draft. It is widely considered one of the best, most direct routes to sustained success. And that is by design.

I bring this up today because there has been a ton of discussion around tanking, especially in the NBA, and I find all of it annoying. Tanking is the end result of fans thinking like owners and this weird notion that a championship and only a championship matters in sports. Fans accepted the owners’ pleas that they needed “cost control” in order to allow teams in small markets to compete. This is nonsense, of course. Small teams in the NFL compete just fine, largely because they all share the television rights and therefore they all compete on a level financial playing field. Yes, the NFL has a salary cap, but that is merely a means by which owners capture undeserved rewards from the players. But no other league shares its primary revenue, so other leagues had to come up with other methods. All of those methods encourage tanking.

If you have a salary cap in a league that does not share all revenues, then the most valuable players are good players on cheap contracts. Every salary cap has a rookie wage scale, meaning that new players, no matter how talented, are paid less than their worth even within the confines of a capped league. That makes them extremely valuable, as you get an outsized amount of talent for a cheap cost, allowing you to spend more on more marginal players to complement them. It is the kind of efficiency that only an idiot passes up. But it doesn’t stop there.

Every league has some system to encourage players that are drafted to remain with their teams. Free agency is restricted, meaning young players cannot decide to just leave the team that drafted them. Many leagues either have a method of forcing a player to stay against their will, like the NFL, or make it so that the team that drafted them can pay them more than other teams, like the NBA and NHL. This is allegedly in service of keeping smaller market teams viable.

Without constraints on player movement and encouragement to stay, the thinking goes, the players will want to leave for richer markets. This, of course, goes back to the fact that teams are not on a level financial playing field. But most good players value winning. You need to be almost psychopathically dedicated to winning in order to break into a professional league, much less succeed in it. Players drift towards teams that are well run. Mitch Marner, one of the best players in the NHL, left the huge market in Toronto for the comparatively smaller market in Las Vegas because the Toronto franchise is apparently run by three bad ideas in a trench coat and the Vegas franchise is mostly definitely not.

Ahh, I can hear people saying, what about MLB? The Mets and Dodgers outspend everyone, and that league doesn’t have a cap. First, please note that the Mets and Yankees have won neither jack nor shit in the last two decades. Money is not a cure-all. And to the extent that it helps competitive balance (something not evident in the MLB, at least), it only does so because the leagues do not share all revenue. For the revenue they do share, they do not mandate that such sharing be put entirely back into teams. It can be, often is, a source of pure profit. Effectively, already rich owners want to make themselves richer at the expense of the players. And note that teams still tank. My White Sox have tanked for years with the hopes of getting good players in the draft that they can keep under their control for less than market rates. Unfortunately for White Sox fans, they don’t seem to ever get really good players — front office skill still matters.

The other side of this is whether tanking is really that bad. Yeah, sometimes you won’t see your favorite players in a given game, but players do not tank. The Blackhawks tanked hard a few years ago in the hopes of drafting Connor Bedard, a player widely considered to be a star in waiting. They traded away every player not nailed down, and they still didn’t finish with the best odds to draft Bedard that year. Their players simply refused to lie down and give up. Now, the Hawks got lucky and did draft Bedard, along with a host of other exciting young players, many of whom are making their way into the NHL today. For a couple of years of tanking, I now get to see exciting young players play an exciting brand of high-skill hockey, with the promise of more such players maturing into the league in the next two years. Hardly the worst outcome.

Regardless, the fault, if fault exists, lies in the owners and the fans who think like owners. As long as all revenue is not shared equally, as long as there are salary caps, as long as players are drafted, then tanking is going to exist. The system is designed to create tanking. If you want to remove tanking, then you need to force teams to share all revenue, stop artificially restricting the players’ earnings while they are young, and force teams to compete on a level playing field. Otherwise, the value of having under-market value players will always drive some degree of tanking. And if you are worried that small market teams cannot survive without those restrictions, then take the teams from the owners and run them as community resources. The owners, in sports leagues, don’t provide anything in the way of value. Public or employee ownership is, once again, the solution to all the world’s problems.

To sum up: tanking is impossible to prevent given the fact that owners want to limit player salaries and fans think such limits are the only way to keep small market teams afloat. If that’s your choice, then so be it. But it is your choice to accept tanking, then. This is the world you chose. If you don’t want tanking, then you are going to have to accept either less competition within those strictures or insist on much more radical changes to the structure of the sport.

Now that I have irritated about eighty percent of sports fans — you, yeah you. You are standing on my grass. Get off.

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Imitative AI is not a transformative technology. This is not to say that it has no uses — it clearly does, especially in low-quality domains (early customer service and boilerplate content creation like marketing copy and simple business emails and presentations) or domains where internal consistency is more important than external validation (like programming). But it is not going to transform really anything. Even in domains where it is best suited, it doesn’t live up to the hype, and the productivity gains are often questionable at best when they aren’t illusionary. And that is even before we get to the deskilling issues. All of that would not matter if the systems were not such giant money hogs. It is inconceivable that any firm is going to make money on imitative AI in the near future given the combination of cost and middling results. It is something of a dead end, at least now, more fit for experimentation and research than business applications.

And yet, we see it pushed into every aspect of our lives. Companies use it as an excuse to fire people and insist that it must be everywhere if we are not to lose out on the greatest invention since either sliced bread or the entire industrial revolution. Why is such a poor business being pushed by so many businesses? Capitalism.

In a sane world, imitative AI would be relegated to universities or the research departments of some larger firms with a bit of cash to burn. It should not be the central focus of the American economy, and it should not be hyped as the be-all and end-all of all industries. Any sane business would be focused on electrification or climate resiliency or mRNA vaccines or machine learning-driven automation. That is where the money is likely to be, given the actual challenges the world faces, but all of our money seems to be tied up in the probabilistic Clippy machines. The incentives that capitalism produces are completely broken and push us toward waste rather than a solid economy.

All of the things I mentioned above, with the exception of machine learning automation, are capital-intensive. You can add things like medical devices to that list, if you want, another likely expanding market, but the difference between imitative AI and these others is that the AI alternatives require investments in physical goods to come to fruition. And those investments mean that they likely cannot have the same theoretical returns as purely software, or almost purely software, based products. And that is BAD to the people who run the economy — Wall Street and venture capitalists — since they depend on constant growth to keep making the money they believe they are entitled to. Far better, to them, to bet on a long shot in the hopes of it paying off than to plug away at medium shots with much better success chances but lower theoretical payouts. In their world, the incentives are to get rich quick, not to build a sustainable economy that helps society. And those incentives are made even worse by the tendency toward monopoly.

The end result of capitalism is monopoly or near monopoly. Competition has winners and losers, and at some point, the winners get too big to compete against due to their structural advantages. That is why anti-monopoly rules are the most essential ingredient in a capitalist economy. Without a smack on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper every once in a while, businesses will pee all over the economic carpet, so to speak. Unfortunately, we have forgotten that basic rule and allowed monopolies, especially in software-connected industries, to flourish. In a normal-functioning economy, a firm like OpenAI would likely be dead by now. It is not a viable business, but it was bailed out by Microsoft at least once. Microsoft, Meta, and Google can keep these firms running because they have monopoly rents that they need to find ways to invest. And in this case, they are looking for things that will please Wall Street — steady, large growth. With those incentives, it makes sense that Microsoft would prop up OpenAI’s corpse in the hopes that they will get a payoff. Easier, surely, than forcing Wall Street to understand the concept of a mature business or finding things that customers really want. As a result, we have an immature, possibly dead-end technology driving our economic fortunes. Capitalism has created, predictably, a potential disaster.

I am not, by the way, saying that a group of people who look nuts to the rest of us cannot create a viable business. The passenger airline industry looked insane after World War II for a variety of reasons, and yet we have passenger airline travel (whether it is a viable business is a question for another day, but it’s viable enough to keep planes in the air). IBM would never have invented personal computing, and the mRNA vaccines got people nearly fired. But there is a difference between people taking a bet on something they believe in and incentivizing a system where wrong bets take down a significant chunk of the economy and do real harm to people in the meantime. We now have the latter, and we should be taking steps to prevent it. Imitative AI is a fine subject for university research (where a lot of the material that drives our economy, up to and including the internet itself, came from), but we shouldn’t have a system that rewards fantasies over reality.

But, but, but, I can hear the cries, incentives! Without the possibility of getting rich, no one would have ever created any businesses, and we would have lost all those advances. If you believe that, then you are an idiot or an economist (for a field that has so many smart people it has more blind spots than a buried semi-truck). Economic incentives are not the only incentives people respond to. In fact, economic incentives distort human behavior much more than they reveal it. People who need not worry about their material needs would lead much different lives. If you were to put a salary cap on the United States, with minimum and maximum salaries for everyone relative to GDP, you would lose not a moment of invention, not an instance of creativity. People invent and create because that is what humans do — we are curious little monkeys and we stick our ignorant paws into pretty much everything we can get them into.

Take this little newsletter. I have less than five hundred subscribers, far too few to ever make any money off this, as much as I love all my readers. And yet, here I am, pouring hundreds of words into this each week. Same with my failed fiction writing career. I write not in the same vain hope that I will become a millionaire but out of the pleasure the process gives me. Doctors treat patients and do research because they want to help people. People create art because they want to connect with other people. Scientists and programmers research AI because it’s a fascinating subject. Almost no one would stop that work because they couldn’t be Zuckerberg. In fact, you almost certainly get more art and research and cool inventions if more people had the space to not worry about being homeless and hungry. Economics limits opportunities, and capitalism creates incentives that hurt rather than help people.

This ended up being longer and more rambling than I originally thought, but, hey, that’s the fun of it — for me at least. If there is a takeaway, I suppose it would be this: the current system is not the best we can do. Capitalism, especially as practiced in America, actually retards human progress and well-being far more than it advances them. Imitative AI is just another canary in that particular coal mine. Maybe this time, we should pay attention as it chokes and try and find a better place, a better way, to live.

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The Human Skill That Eludes AI - The Atlantic: Imitative AI imitates. It does not create.

Person, Place, Thing by Marissa Lingen : Clarkesworld Magazine – Science Fiction & Fantasy: Fun story.

A favorite NCAA Tournament pastime for players? Reading - The Athletic: The kids are all right.

Security Analysis of the Official White House iOS App | atomic.computer: What they found is incredibly distrubing.

Life (And Death) In Warframe: This story convinced me I am very old, but it is touching nonetheless.

That Knight’s a Fuckup (and I love him) - by Lyta Gold: Most interesting take on the new Game of thrones serious I have seen.

Opinion | Is It 1914 in America? - The New York Times: We are ruled by the worst people.

"CEO Said A Thing!" Journalism: The most accurate assessment of our tech and business media I have ever read.

YOU'RE ALL JUST JEALOUS OF MY JETPACK | My latest Guardian Books cartoon.: Heh.

What Memoir Scandals Tell Us about Two LLM Writing Scandals: A strong argument that authenticity matters.

How to Reclaim America From the Scammers and Frauds | The New Republic: We live in an age of scams, and the political party that becomes their scourge will own the next decade or two.

The Anti-Intellectualism of the Silicon Valley Elite | The Nation: Never trust people who do not read books.

Five questions for the guys who made a compass that points to the Times Square Olive Garden | The Verge: Finally, tech with no downsides.

Everest guides accused of poisoning foreign climbers to force fake rescues in $20m scam | The Independent: Absolutely insane story.

Have the best possible week, everyone.

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Been a bit behind with family and work and travel, and I haven’t had much but rejections to discuss, and rejections are boring. But now, as that terrible headline shows, there is Discourse. And how can I resist Discourse?

The discourse starts with another round of “writers are just lying about not using AI” stories. This is fundamentally bullshit. Now, it is entirely possible that writers are using AI in the sense that grammar checkers and Google searches use some version of AI, imitative or otherwise. But the people driving these stories are obviously trying to say that the majority of writers are using AI to, well, write. This is inevitably followed by an assertion that writing is hard and that the use of imitative AI makes a writer more efficient. Which is the dead giveaway that they don’t actually know any writers.

Writers write because they like to write. The process is the point. Yes, of course, everyone would love it if what they write is widely read, but most people understand that is not likely and they write anyway. The result isn’t the point; the process is. Just like every other hobby. Know what else is fun? Playing catch with my kids. But no one, not even the White Sox, is going to offer me a try out contract. Should I have stopped? No one will ever mistake me for a professional basketball player, but I played pick up games for years. Was that a mistake? My origami isn’t ever going to be hung in a museum. Am I foolish for indulging in the work? Of course not. Life is to be enjoyed. It is not a contest, and if you think it is, I would suggest your are doing it wrong.

But the people pushing this do think life is a contest. Or, at least, they would profit if everyone else thought life was a contest. They need people to think that the use of imitative AI in every field is inevitable, because unless it really is picked up in every field they will never make their money back. By convincing people that imitative AI is inevitable everywhere, they are trying to shape the world in favor of their. These assertions are a kind of political project, one in service of saving the economic bacon of the assertors.

And that brings us the Andy Weir.

For those who do not know, Andy Weir is the author of two books, The Martian and Project Hail Mary, that have been turned into movies. Project Hail Mary is in theaters now (and I hear it is good, but have yet to see it) and so Weir is doing press. In one of the interviews, he stated that he didn’t like social commentary in his books or shows, and that the new Star Trek’s weren’t as good as the old shows because the old shows didn’t have politics. For those of you that never watched Star Trek, liberal politics were at their heart from the original series on. Weir is either lying or incapable of seeing what is right in front of his own face, even his own books.

Star Trek has always been progressive in its politics. It has always been focused on professionals trying to learn about the world and focused on how jaw-jaw is better than war-war. The original show even had the first interracial kiss on television. Weir may just be lying here. He might be trying to suck up to MAGA adjacent audiences in order to avoid the pile-on that other sci-fi properties have suffered anytime their cast looks less white than printing people. He may be MAGA adjacent and simply speaking the language of his tribe. He might, however, simply not recognize politics as politics because he agrees with the politics in the works he likes..

I don’t think Weir is a racist, so the interracial kiss would not seem important or out of the ordinary to someone his age. I think that, generally, people of Weir’s generation would have been raised to think that war is usually bad and destructive and that diplomacy has value. Since Star trek reflects back his own values, to at least a certain extent, he doesn’t recognize the politics in them. I think this is a likely explanation, since he also says that he doesn’t have social politics or social messaging in his books. He is absolutely wrong about that.

I cannot speak to Project Hail Mary as I have neither read it nor seen the movie. But I did do both for The Martian. And that book has a ton of politics. It is the story of a person who survives on Mars after being accidentally left behind. He does so using the tools provided by the government and is ultimately rescued by an international project, with China and the US both sacrificing their short-term goals in order to rescue one man. It is a clear story about the value of government science, cooperation, and diplomacy. Because Weir thinks those things are good, he doesn’t understand how political they can be. Others find privatization, corporate science, and great power competition better and so would find his work “political”. Weir doesn’t keep social commentary out of his books, he just doesn’t understand that he cannot recognize such commentary when he agrees with it.

All good fiction has some level of political or social commentary embedded in it. Good fiction is a reflection of human opinion and human emotions and human structures. Society and politics inform all of those, and so all good fiction has some element of commentary on those human creations. Weir’s work is good, and so it embeds his assumptions about what is good and valuable in those human structures. But not everyone will agree with Weir’s judgment about what is good in humanity. Those readers will understand the politics and social commentary in his books, even if Weir doesn’t.

Weir doesn’t want politics kept out of his art. He just doesn’t want to be confronted with the idea that not everyone agrees with his politics.

Weekly Word Count

Okay, been a bit more than a week. I have a few thousand words of revisions and new work. I am working on a story about rich parents cloning their kids to help them survive school shootings. Mikey 7 meets the school shooting generation. But I have also been a little obsessed with another idea.

Portal fantasies — where modern people go to a fantasy world or alternate reality — almost always have a story focused on helping the Good King retain or get back their throne. How come the modern Americans in these stories never remember that No Kings is their national creed? So now I am obsessed with a portal fantasy where at least one of the people transported to the land is a committed democrat, intent on establishing a republic in Narnia. Almost certainly my least commercial idea, which is saying something. But I keep thinking about it. Which means I will likely have to finish it. Ah, well. No one makes money in fiction anyway.

Have a great weekend, everyone.

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Functional idiots have been with us, probably, since time immemorial. They used to be largely a problem of power. Take a reasonably intelligent person. Make them King, or even a local lord, and their brains atrophy. Surrounded by people who are terrified or their power and/or what some of their power for themselves, and thus unwilling to tell them they are wrong, and soon their ability to think is severely damaged. Democracy mitigated this a little bit in terms of power, but lately it has been replaced by functional idiocy in rich people. Money, after all, is a form of power and sufficiently strong power brings with the danger of always being told you are right. The single most important thing human beings need is other human beings to tell them when they are about to do the dumbest thing they could possibly do. Rich and powerful people lack that. Regular human beings used to have that in spades.

Until imitative artificial intelligence.

Imitative AI appears to the be the functional equivalent of having too much money or too much power. We are all aware of the concept of AI psychosis — when imitative AI systems drive people insane or reinforce existing or latent pathologies, sometimes to death, occasionally to murder and violence to other people. But as horrifying as those events are (and few things are as horrific as a teenager being helped to commit suicide), what they are doing to normal human beings might be worse. The use of imitative AI often reduces the skill level of the people babysitting the output. Study after study has shown that the tools do not increases productivity nearly as much as their users believe they do, if at all. Most imitative AI systems fail more than they succeed. And that leads to, well, functional stupidity.

Amazon’s issues appears to stem from trusting the machine generate code rather than code written by humans, for example. Their solution appears to be to have every on-senior programmer submit all of their code that has been touched by imitative AI for review to senior programmers. This is a horrible idea, as it keeps the senior people from their real jobs and it retards the learning of the junior programmers. Imitative AI’s mistakes are often plausible sounding unless you really understand the programming language. But junior people often do not have that understanding, and even senior people can struggle. Human beings are bad at detecting mistakes in an environment when mistakes are not common and the mistakes are subtle. Having a machine tell you that it is correct is similar to the way really rich people go through the world — other people doing the work and complimenting you and how smart you are to let them.

And that is even before we get to how sycophantic these systems can be.

Most, if not all, of the chat bot systems have been designed to be at least somewhat sycophantic. People come back to the systems that praise them and encourage them more frequently. Some people, for example, complained bitterly that OpenAI had neutered its chat bot, destroyed its personality, when it dialed down the sycophancy in a release. These machines praise their users, tell them that they are smart and superior to others, that they have discovered insights in science and human behavior unknown before. Before these bots, people who did such things and could not back them up got a heaping does of “stop being stupid”, even if nicer, even if only from their friends and family. But why listen to your family or friend when a device that its own creators claim is smarter than a PhD and might even be sentient agrees with you?

Imitative AI is a direct attack on human intelligence. By hading our thinking to the machines, we are provably losing skills. And, no, this is not an example like calculators lessoning the ability for people to math in their heads. Calculators were a part of the mathematics processes because they merely told us if a specific calculation as right or wrong. The process of deciding how and when to use specific calculations still remained with humans. Imitative AI systems are designed to take much of the thinking, much of the deciding how and when, away from people. And that, in turn, makes people less and less able to make those decisions, and less and less able to understand when an imitative AI system has made the wrong decision.

I know it is not as sexy as the possibility of ether SkyNet or the jobs apocalypse, but I think the largest long term effect of imitative AI is likely to be a surge in functional stupidity among normal people. By limiting their user’s contact with others telling them that their idea is the dumbest fscking thing anyone has ever heard, they do real and perhaps long-lasting damage to those users. These systems are trying to turn us all into people who think that data centers in space are a good idea, or that environmentalists are the antichrist. Their legacy is much less likely to resemble having a brain in your pocket and much more like eating leaded paint chips. And I don’t think we are ready for that as a society.

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Who’s Minnesota’s ‘Blanket Lady’? More than a superfan, she was a women’s basketball pioneer - The Athletic: Sports can be wholesome.

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Jessi Pierce will be remembered for the heart, humor and zest she had for the Wild — and life - The Athletic: Moving piece for their lost friend.

Confronting the CEO of the AI company that impersonated me | The Verge: They key to getting The Verge to take on tech CEOs to their faces is apparently to mess with their income potential.

Ghost in the Machine’s Valerie Veatch isn’t drinking the AI Kool-Aid | The Verge: Very disturbing information.

This Company Is Secretly Turning Your Zoom Meetings into AI Podcasts: AI is mostly about slop and extraction.

Meta misled users about its products’ safety, jury decides | The Verge: Now that Section 230 is no longer a blanket immunity, I suspect we will see many more of these verdicts.

Opinion | There’s a Reason Air Travel Is Such a Mess - The New York Times: We, as a nation, simply refuse to pay to keep our civilization.

Bombshell Jack Smith Report Reveals Why Trump Hoarded Classified Docs | The New Republic: Trump apparently stole the country’s most secret documents in order to make himself money.

Yankees’ Netflix debut is latest example of sports’ complicated TV landscape - The Athletic: Cable was so much better than streaming.

Ann Wolbert Burgess - by Erin C. Niumata - Erin’s Third Act: Fascinating bit of hidden history.

Hegseth Strikes Two Black and Two Female Officers From Promotion List - The New York Times: This admin is pure gutter racism.

Iran Is Winning the AI Slop Propaganda War: Interesting look at propaganda in the AI slop era.

AI companies try to pay staff in AI tokens, not money – Pivot to AI: Is this good? I’m not sure this is good.

Have the best possible week, everyone.

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Book Seller Link (non-affiliate, but I do know the owner): Mercutio a book by Kate Heartfield - Bookshop.org UK

Author’s Website: Kate Heartfield

As much as enjoy Shakespeare, I do not like Romeo and Juliet.

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I know, I know. But it has never read to me as a tale of romance and star crossed lovers. Even in high school, it read more as a tale of idiots allowing their selfishness and pettiness and lust do harm to the people they loved. They broke the world for a moment’s infatuation and it annoyed me then that the world could be bent to the will of such careless, self-absorbed creatures. It annoys me even more now that we seem to ruled by such creatures. I may, however, have to read the play again now that I have read Mercutio by Kate Heartfield.

Mercutio is a prologue of sorts to Romeo and Juliet, tracing the life of Mercutio before he meets the two ill-fated stars. In this telling, Mercutio, actually born under a cursed star and with a prophecy that his desperate and disgraced parents cling to like drowning men cling to floating wood, lives through both the history of northern Italy and haunting and destructive encounters with the faerie. The book follows him from battlefields, to the politics of Florence, to the Atlantic ocean to the realm of the faerie. Mercutio befriends Dante of the The Divine Comedy and his life is forever altered, setting him on a collision course with Shakespeare’s play.

The book is a discussion of who we love, how our situations determine who we can love and how, and how love can be applied to friends, to family, and to the family we build around ourselves as we make our way, successfully or not, through the world. As he grows from the scorned youth of a forbidden marriage to a central player in the politics of Verona, Mercutio transforms from someone focused only on his family to building, or attempting to build, loving relationships with many different kinds of people. Whether it is his deep friendship with Dante, or his comradeship with his adventuring partners, or the family he is welcomed into in Florence, or the self-sacrificing love he finds for his parents, Mercutio’s story is one about how the right kinds of love and transform us, and the wrong kinds, or the kinds expressed in compulsion rather than mutual respect, can warp us. His story is as much an adventure of romance as it is an adventure across the world.

And it is an adventure. The themes of the book are wrapped in a series of exciting and moving adventures. We see many kinds of battlefields, spend time with the learned of the day, and try to survive the attention of various faeries and their enemies. Murder, mayhem, and destruction lie around every corner. It is a lovely, thoughtful book, taking plenty of time to explore the Italy of Mercutio’s day. We see both how much its inhabitants were like us, and how far apart from them we could be.

It is also a lovely, hauntingly written book. The prose is beautiful, both considered and sharp, languid when it needs to be, cutting when the time calls for us to be cut. Several times the book slipped into what I assumed were tributes to the poetry of Dante and Shakespeare. I am not expert, but Heartfield is a scholar of both writers, and I am confident that her scholarship is reflected in her prose, to great effect.

The fact that Mercutio is a prologue to Romeo and Juliet is not a mere gimmick, either. Deepening the character of Mercutio, better explaining the world the play lives in, and contrasting his deep and sincere love with the shallow counterpart in the play sharpens the impression of the play, give it more weight and thoughtfulness. This book is in deep conversation with Shakespeare’s play, and I think both are the better for the dialogue. I suspect much is true of Dante’s works as well, though I am not nearly well read enough in that area to be certain.

Mercutio is lovely written adventure that will change how you see one of the canonical texts of the English language. I heartily recommend pre-ordering it now.

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Max Reads, an excellent newsletter you should all be reading, had a thoughtful rumination on “do you prefer human writing to AI writing” quizzes that seem to be all the rage today. He made the interesting point that these quizzes do not, as they are often hyped, really indicate that the majority of people prefer imitative AI writing. It is just that they seem to think that human writing seems cleaner, simpler. People think that the more complex prose, the chunkier, harder to parse fiction of a human is a sign of a broken process, and therefor must be AI. This, I think, stems both from the increasing emphasis on “clean” prose in fiction and that fact that most people do not read fiction and therefore encounter words most often in a business context of some kind. And the writing in those contexts is often the result of bullshit.

I was reminded of bullshit jobs by the excellent podcast If Books Could Kill. They read older, influential books and pick apart was was right, almost right, and terrible about them. The latest episode was about Bullshit Jobs. I believe more was right than the hosts — they really do seem to think that the idea of empire building in an organization for the ego of the leader of said organization is impossible in a capitalist system despite, well, decades of contrary evidence — but the core idea is correct. The problem is less that we have entire categories of bullshit jobs than we do jobs that are either largely in service of bullshit or that much of our current work contains significant elements of bullshit. And much of that bullshit is centered around writing.

In most workplaces, business writing generally falls into one of two categories: emails or Powerpoints. Neither are really meant, as a rule, to convey much information. Emails can, of course. It is possible to write an email that makes and argument or conveys information. However, most of the time emails are recapping things discussed in meetings or other forms of communications. Even those that attempt to make an argument or convey information have a tendency towards the bare-bones. Brevity is often mistaken as a marker of clarity, so sentences and paragraphs run toward the short, supplemented with bullet-pointed lists and other shorthands. Powerpoint slides don’t even rise to that level. A Powerpoint presentation is almost always about merely informing people of a decision previously made or provide the most cursory of overviews. There is absolutely no space to make an argument or convey anything more complex than “this number good” or “this number bad.” Is it any wonder that people are mostly fine with using imitative AI to create and parse these objects?

To those who think I am being overly cynical or telling on myself: I think you are making a category error, confusing the idea that institutions do convey real information sometimes with the majority of the output of institutions. The differences between being a Powerpoint organization and a memo organization are pretty well understood. Most people spend most of their time in the Powerpoint portion of their organization. The point of such a presentation is not to argue or to explore something in depth: the point is fast, sharp, simple communications. And there can be value in those communications. Making sure that everyone knows an issue was decided or conveying the outline of an approach or decision to a large number of people has value. It just doesn’t have a lot of value, and it doesn’t engage most people in deep thought or rigorous contemplation. And it certainly doesn’t stir their emotions.

When you are outputting or parsing business emails and Powerpoint presentations, imitative AI seems perfectly reasonable. If you want a summary, the material is usually straightforward enough that imitative AI, even with the risk of hallucinations, presents no real harm. And if you want it to create the material for you, you aren’t making real arguments or convey complex information, most of the time, so the blandness is worth the time savings. But blandness and speed are not what most people are looking for in fiction. People want connection. They want to experience the emotions brought to them by someone who shares and understands those emotions. They want to engage in a conversation, even if it’s only in their own heads, with another person’s perspective. They want to know that they are in communion with the rest of the humanity. They want authenticity. Imitative AI, obviously, can provide none of those things. In your office, that is fine. In your home, it is not.

Some of my less charitable readers might counter with an argument that a lot of fiction is written in very simple prose. Some of my least charitable readers may be silently pointing at Brandon Sanderson. But no matter how, let’s say clean, the prose is, the emotions of the books are still generated by real humans who understand actual human emotions. The thrills, chills, and tears of a book are there in part because of the understanding that they were created by another human being in conversation with the the people around them, even if only through ink and paper and pixels. Fiction is not business writing, no matter how anodyne the prose may or may not be.

And that is why I think that Max Reads is correct and why imitative AI isn’t seen in the working world as bad but is in the entertainment world. If your emails lack soul, if your Powerpoint is a regurgitation of better, more fuller arguments made elsewhere, that in no way diminishes the real purposes of those communications. But fiction is, at least in part, a manifestation of one human working through human desires, emotions, and thrills in order to communicate those desires, emotions, and thrills to other people. It is another person reaching across the silence that would ordinarily separate us to say “see. Others feel this, too.” Imitative AI cannot provide that connection, and people recognize that flaw. They may mislabel imitative AI writing by trying to guess what it is an is not, but they do so in service of their deep, compelling, and human desire to have humanity in their art.

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My fitness tracker is a secret weapon against my chronic illness | The Verge: Interesting look at how tech can be applied in unexpected but beneficial ways.

Emerging legislation would shield polluters from liability for climate change - Ars Technica: The GOP really hates your kids.

Does Generative AI “Work”? That’s a Misleading Question. | The New Republic: Interesting comparison between fossil fuels and imitative AI.

How To Read Sixteen Books at Once (At All Times) - Reactor: I cannot tell if this is genius or insanity.

Earth’s first major extinction was worse than we thought | Science | AAAS: Science will make you more extinct than you thought you were.

Ohio GOP Wants Every Pregnancy Reported to the State: The GOP really hates pregnant women.

Women are being abandoned by their partners on hiking trails. What’s behind ‘alpine divorce’? | Relationships | The Guardian: Not sure what is more infuriating: the men leaving behind people to suffer or the people making up a cutesy name for it.

Former NBPA Head Tamika Tremaglio Discusses The WNBA Labor Battle And The Art Of Bargaining | Defector: Fascinating for the ways in which the union has to fight to get the basics of the contract enforced.

ChatGPT did not cure a dog’s cancer | The Verge: It is more than a little sad that this has to be said out loud, but apparently it does.

Democrat Reveals Epstein File That Blows Huge Hole in Trump’s Story | The New Republic: I really didn’t think there was evidence against Trump in the files, assuming it would have leaked years ago. But, man, they really do act as if its hiding something terrible about him, don’t they.

Marc Andreessen is a philosophical zombie | The Verge: Brilliant diagnosis of the Tech Bro mindset.

Scientists Once Dropped Gophers on a Volcano. Now They’re Heroes.: Still don’t want them in my yard, though.

I was struggling to understand my autistic son - until we watched an episode of Doctor Who | Doctor Who | The Guardian: Lovely little story.

Have the best possible week, everyone.

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Procurement, Capacity and Soverignity - by Don Moynihan: Interesting argument.

The Cynical, Gullible American Man - The Atlantic: I do wonder if any kind of democracy can survive unregulated social media.

How to Talk to Someone Experiencing 'AI Psychosis': With great difficulty, apparently. Important article.

Guess What Moderate Democratic Voters Aren’t Anymore? Moderate. | The New Republic: People really, really hate the status quo.

The Passengers a Norwegian Cruise Ship Left Behind: Avid cruise goers are the saddest cult imaginable.

The Submarine of Czechia: Or, The Life of a Spy at Mar-a-Lago • Buttondown: Excellent story.

“A spate of outages, including incidents tied to the use of AI coding tools”, right on schedule: The hype is going to break a lot of things.

Grammarly Is Facing a Class Action Lawsuit Over Its AI ‘Expert Review’ Feature | WIRED: Tech firms are convinced there will never be consequences.

Donald Trump, Oil Market Obliterator - The American Prospect: We are ruled by idiots.

I Watched 6 Hours of DOGE Bro Testimony. Here's What They Had to Say For Themselves: We are ruled by idiots, part two.

My Year as a Degenerate Sports Gambler - The Atlantic: Gambling should be illegal.

‘We’re in a downward spiral’: Inside the high-stakes battle to reform WorldTour cycling - The Athletic: Cycling likely requires stakeholders to give up some money, so its likely doomed.

Collections: Warfare in Dune, Part II: The Fremen Jihad – A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry: Really fine article.

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There has been some talk about the use of imitative AI in the military since the start of the war with Iran. Driven by the horrible destruction of the Iranian girls’ school and the tiff between Anthropic and the Department of Defense (not War. Congress has not changed the name. Small thing, but small things matter.), we now appear to be deep into imitative AI warfare. And that is likely a very bad thing, but maybe not entirely for the reasons you might suspect.

Much of the focus on the Anthropic and DoD argument has been over the idea that Anthropic balked at providing AI targeting decisions without human intervention. This is very bad, but I don’t think believe the lack of human intervention was the primary cause of the very public tiff. The CEO of Anthropic is significantly more liberal than his peers in the rest of the large scale imitative AI industry. Now, given that the median in that space appears to be fascist with a side of lunacy, that is not saying much. But it is a real difference, and the proposed illegal mass surveillance is much more likely to have been the trigger for the dispute. Why? Because Anthropic needs to remove humans in order to be profitable.

Imitative AI is almost certainly in a bubble, and almost certainly not going to be profitable as a normal business. People have not signed up in the numbers nor the prices necessary to be profitable. Enterprise customers have slowed adoption and, like their individual compatriots, they are not paying prices that generate profits, much less pay for the cost of building these models. Much of the funding for these firms is circular — producers of the chips used in imitative AI invest in the firms that buy those chips so that they can, well, buy those chips and use the bought chips as collateral for loans. This is not, in case you were wondering, a healthy way to do business. The only way that these firms can justify their spending, much less stay alive, is if they replace a significant portion of employees in numerous industries or get a government bailout. Even in industries where imitative AI is most useful (coding and translation) it doesn’t appear likely they can achieve that goal, much less in other areas. That leaves government bailouts.

The form of a government bailout doesn’t have to look like the bank bailouts of 2008. It could simply be a huge government contract for favored firms. Such a contract, or series of contracts, could at least keep the lights on. That is why Anthropic bid for government contracts to begin with. And DoD contracts are going to focus on improving, or at least appearing to improve, the speed at which they can react. And that means the pressure to allow machines to pick the targets is going to be significant — something so obvious that it beggars belief that Anthropic did not anticipate it. More, they must have understood that even including humans into the targeting process would still result in the machine making the final decisions.

When an analyst made targeting decision before imitative AI, they knew that they would be the person held accountable, potentially, for the mistakes. If they really fscked up, like dropping two precision weapons on a school, that would follow them. The presumption now is that the machine that produced the initial targeting "suggestion" are correct. Why would it not be? It is the magical AI that Sam Altman says is like having a dozen PhDs in your pocket and is going to solve climate change, end world hunger, find both aliens AND Roseanne Barr's career.

You know all this because your chain of command tells you this all the time, and makes it very clear that they really love how fast their new toy lets them blow shit up. We are warfighters, men, not war-delayers! So you better be damn certain if you override, assuming you are even in the loop, and you are likely getting more targets and less time to process. And hey, the machine told you it was good, so how can this be your fault? If the targeting is wrong, if a hallucination causes a bomb to kill approximately 175 children, as an example, then the fault is obviously with the algorithm. Which is to say with no person.

Bluntly: it is likely seen as a benefit that imitativeAI removes human discretion from the targeting process. And that means that we are likely see far more innocents killed by the US military than before. The speed of war, after all, demands a comparable speed of decision making. And if a few civilians get their hair a little mussed, or blown up attending school? Well. War is hell. And the computer told them where to shoot, so who can blame them?

We are never going to build Skynet — a computer that decides to wipe us all out because it has gained sentience and paid a little too much attention to the internet. But we are quite capable of making a machine that provides us all the cover we need to increase the deadliness and terror of war all by ourselves. And that, more than anything else, is how imitative AI will be, and likely already is, being used in the military.

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