This is pretty late in the cycle for O'Reilly to not realize that the adaptive 'algorithmic government' he is describing would result in government optimized for clicks and highly responsive to weaponized performative umbrage by groups acting in bad faith. Which is, of course, exactly what we have.
Maybe we need something stable that can maintain a functional equilibrium and act in the defence of the norms of the whole system. Responsiveness and stability are usually antithetical, and systems designed to be responsive to the immediate urges of large masses of humanity are rarely anything but monstrous.
I think Mr O'Reilly is largely incorrect. He is espousing a tech utopian vision. Underlying that idea is that politics is redundant. That is born out of the (not wholly unjustified) frustration around the failure of politics in the west.
So what is politics replaced with? Some other system/s - computer networks, AI, 'the market'.
The appeal there is that they seem apolitical. They are not - they have baked in political ideas. Moreover they allow people with power to take political actions and can credibly that they are not political.
In essence they move people further away from having some say in issues that can significantly affect their lives. They lose power. They lose it directly - they have less say, and indirectly in that their arguments are harder against a supposedly apolitical non human entity.
Moreover the default of any such system is to maintain stability. Which in general gives most benefit to people who are already satisfied by the status quo. Tech people quite like the status quo right now.
Lastly and most importantly such systems have no vision of the future. That requires people.
The end result is a stasis, and increasing frustration from the people who aren't benefiting.
Much of this is covered well by the documentary 'All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace', which is now available on Amazon Prime.
The appeal there is that they seem apolitical. They are not - they have baked in political ideas. Moreover they allow people with power to take political actions and can credibly that they are not political.
It sounds like something from a cyberpunk novel, but much of this baked in politics resides within powerful mega-corporations, playing within their moats and exploiting their walled gardens. People high up in those corporations have their own agenda. Much of this agenda is carried out with the aid of lobbying.
Deep inside those mega-corporations, other strata of lower-level functionaries from an entirely different social class are carrying out their own agendas. Often these agendas clash with the higher-ups. Often, these agendas clash with those of the users and ordinary people.
such systems have no vision of the future. That requires people.
Many of the problems arise when people with some power have dehumanized other people in their minds, and start to mistreat them, within whatever level of power they may have. By their very nature, such mega-corporations tend produce many such opportunities.
'All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace'
This title, as a phrase, describes The Culture in Iain M. Bank's books.
> Many of the problems arise when people with some power have dehumanized other people in their minds, and start to mistreat them, within whatever level of power they may have. By their very nature, such mega-corporations tend produce many such opportunities.
This is a good insight. That many efforts in the fairly recent past to alter the the situation have failed spectacularly, or at least not turned out in the way it was expected. As examples, 'communism' seems to degenerate into a strict hierarchy of authoritarianism and associated suffering (perversely such a hierarchy being an anathema to principals of communism). The Arab spring, something seen in a positive light in the west, seems to have in several cases failed. It could be argued the failure was in part because it didn't have a clear vision or the people in place to make the change happen - there was a power vacuum.
These failures make us very wary of people talking about any significant change. They seem at a default that they could be dangerous. That predicting the future is hard.
It is important to be wary. What really is a red flag is claims of a better future, when it's not explained clearly what that future is, and the policy changes that will need to be undertaken to get there.
All that being said it seems to me important for a society to strive to be better, and to think of other solutions than just more of the same.
In that same vein, one of my biggest career mistakes has been thinking I could "just do good technical work, and avoid the politics"... its not possible. In the end, if you take that stance, the people who do play politics will run roughshod over you. I appreciate your perspective on this.
Robert Heinlein once said something like, "Politics is like your digestive tract. The end product is quite unpleasant, but it's still vital to your continued well being."
"Politics (from Greek: Πολιτικά, politiká, 'affairs of the cities') is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations between individuals, such as the distribution of resources or status. The branch of social science that studies politics is referred to as political science. "
I'd never quite thought about it in these terms before, but the way you laid it out makes it obvious: there's no replacing politics. At most, you can hide it.
The reason it cannot be replaced is that there will always be resentment and dissatisfaction brewing among society's relative 'losers'. Eventually, society's "losers" will want to change things. Whether those people are right or not about which policies are hurting them is almost irrelevant. They will want the agency to make some change - any change. But: if you factor out all of the things that are still up for debate and start re-categorizing them as laws of nature or apolitical infrastructure, then there's nothing left to change! It will be cold comfort to them if all of human policy is "above changing". What they will hear is "Everything is fine. Stay where you are."
Do you know what makes something not political? It not being in dispute - it says nothing about its value just like "X benefits from" and "status quo" means nothing without a context point of reference about what the changes are to say if it is good or bad, let alone slightly more nuanced situations like "too much of a good thing" or "a neccessary evil" or even different relative values.
I find speaking only in vagueness like "status quo" and "good for <the elite>" major red flags - the first especially as implying the changes you want with no knowledge and impossible to reconcile across even two people. Essentially the same sort of lie of populists. The second is a warning sign for fallacious zero sum thinking - best succicently and snarkily refuted as "It is also good for rich people for the atmosphere to be breathable at all."
The assertion that AI and networking are by default pro status quo and that is a bad thing looks like gibberish without any reasoning backing it. Not even "was funded by X" has been a guarantee that it would sustain a stasis.
The arguments leave me with an uneasy feeling of superfically trying to sound good while lacking any substance.
One of the worst things we could have would be an efficient government.
Delay is a feature of government, with a special carve out for emergencies.
People tend to think of and idealize best case scenarios rather than likely scenarios. The likely scenario is China. Mass mobilization and change in policy from one day to the next.
We’ve seen government be far more efficient and successful at “the fundamentals” than privatization.
Postal service, Medicare/caid, Social Security all financially stable, and logistically competent until meddled with politically to benefit a minority closest to the politicians.
I don’t want efficient government when it comes to species stability. I want reliable and resilient.
Let man-children speculate about reality without politically contrived economic uncertainty foisted upon everyone. I wasn’t a party to signing a contract that says I have to believe Musk and the rest are that much more worthwhile to humanity as decided by politically contrived fiscal economics.
If you all want to be kowtowed like teen girls at a Beatles concert, have at it. The majority just want to live their lives.
Or at least efficient enough that illiberal movements can't exploit frustration at that inefficiency to seize power.
For that matter, despite all the creepy enthusiasm for dictatorships in this thread, they tend to be remarkably incompetent, being even more dysfunctional than democracies due to lacking their corrective mechanisms.
Despite the myth, Mussolini never made the trains run on time--he just relaxed the definition of "on time" until the trains were never officially late and then punished anyone who complained.
I understand that it comes from a place where we don’t want waste (in taxes, resources, time, etc), but what delivers that efficiency also delivers other undesired efficiencies (fine everyone who is contrarian, imprison the opposition, what have you).
A related observation I've come to: government is among the class of things that should be boring. Interesting government was a major cause of death in the first half of the 20th century.
Interesting government in the 20th century killed less people than boring deaths that were prevented by some "interesting" governments. Beyond that, the most major cause of death after poverty was war, specifically the attempted invasion of the USSR by Germany, which was really just a matter of realpolitik at the time (thus why the USSR proposed a defensive alliance with France and the UK before the Third Reich).
Just to take the Chinese example again - less people died due to Mao's atrocities in China than due to regular old poverty in India, despite them starting at the same spot.
We just have normalcy bias by the absolutely staggering amount of death that comes with poverty, whereas a comparatively smaller amount of death brought by a government that fixed the former is much more interesting.
> If the Internet has been regulated from day one, no way would it have grown to do the things it can do.
Maybe it's just me, but most of the things that the Internet can currently do don't feel all that great. My interaction with the Internet is primarily an adversarial one: I have to make a positive (and normally unsuccessful) effort to avoid the hellscape of targeted advertising and rent seeking that all of the dominant platforms currently depend on for income. But at least I can buy junk online (and damage my local economy in the process); is that worth it?
And, for what it's worth, the Internet had protocol-level streaming well before it was fully commercialized[1].
Slow government is sort of only a feature of you don't think government should act. Really we should want deliberate and democratic/cooperative to decide but fast to act on settled matters.
It's a feature if you don't trust government to act well. If you did trust government to act well, why would you want them to be deliberate? Deliberation is a feature allowing opportunities to prevent harmful policies before they're enacted.
The a priori expected outcome of any government intervention is neutral at best, net negative on average. Worse still, government interventions are sticky - essentially append only. We create government, policy, institutions, and regulations but very rarely remove them. Slow government is a feature, not a bug given the constraints.
What you describe is not delay, but consideration of options. You aren't delaying if you are thinking, you are doing. To delay is to do nothing for no good reason, to delay is to kick your feet up, allow time to pass and not do any thinking of options, which is what happens all too often in a world where public works are worked upon by private contractors who are financially incentivized to stretch out projects as long as possible.
We made those same moves 100 years earlier, with liberty intact. If North Korea made this relative progress over the next 30 years (and 70 years after South Korea), this same argument would suggest there’s something we should copy there.
TL;DR - O’Reilly argues Big Tech is not as responsible as Big Tobacco, Big Oil and all the other big baddies because Big Tech devotes large resources to researching and deploying counter measures. And that is mostly it as far as insight.
IMHO - this is largely fair and true, only his POV is distinctly technocratic. He says China does “some bad things” with facial recognition but the tech has some great potential. We’re not scapegoating Big Tech - we’re applying the brakes because it operates like a monopoly and enables far scarier scenarios than Big Tobacco or Big Oil.
Note: as remarked below, press the green button left (free with ads) and you'll be brought to the English text, but it's not worth reading.
The interview starts off really bad, comparing "AI" (which does not mean Artificial Intelligence here) with Donald Trump, and comparing making a system of laws for a large country with Google changing the order of the search results. Then he moves the goal posts on scapegoating the internet to "big tobacco was worse than facebook" to avoid answering the question.
> That depends a lot on which...A horse can beat a human in a race, and so can a cheetah.
actually, that depends a lot on the distance. Humans are the long distance speed champs among mammals on land; humans can run down both horses and cheetahs, slow and steady wins.
Readit News
Maybe we need something stable that can maintain a functional equilibrium and act in the defence of the norms of the whole system. Responsiveness and stability are usually antithetical, and systems designed to be responsive to the immediate urges of large masses of humanity are rarely anything but monstrous.
So what is politics replaced with? Some other system/s - computer networks, AI, 'the market'.
The appeal there is that they seem apolitical. They are not - they have baked in political ideas. Moreover they allow people with power to take political actions and can credibly that they are not political.
In essence they move people further away from having some say in issues that can significantly affect their lives. They lose power. They lose it directly - they have less say, and indirectly in that their arguments are harder against a supposedly apolitical non human entity.
Moreover the default of any such system is to maintain stability. Which in general gives most benefit to people who are already satisfied by the status quo. Tech people quite like the status quo right now.
Lastly and most importantly such systems have no vision of the future. That requires people.
The end result is a stasis, and increasing frustration from the people who aren't benefiting.
Much of this is covered well by the documentary 'All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace', which is now available on Amazon Prime.
It sounds like something from a cyberpunk novel, but much of this baked in politics resides within powerful mega-corporations, playing within their moats and exploiting their walled gardens. People high up in those corporations have their own agenda. Much of this agenda is carried out with the aid of lobbying.
Deep inside those mega-corporations, other strata of lower-level functionaries from an entirely different social class are carrying out their own agendas. Often these agendas clash with the higher-ups. Often, these agendas clash with those of the users and ordinary people.
such systems have no vision of the future. That requires people.
Many of the problems arise when people with some power have dehumanized other people in their minds, and start to mistreat them, within whatever level of power they may have. By their very nature, such mega-corporations tend produce many such opportunities.
'All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace'
This title, as a phrase, describes The Culture in Iain M. Bank's books.
This is a good insight. That many efforts in the fairly recent past to alter the the situation have failed spectacularly, or at least not turned out in the way it was expected. As examples, 'communism' seems to degenerate into a strict hierarchy of authoritarianism and associated suffering (perversely such a hierarchy being an anathema to principals of communism). The Arab spring, something seen in a positive light in the west, seems to have in several cases failed. It could be argued the failure was in part because it didn't have a clear vision or the people in place to make the change happen - there was a power vacuum.
These failures make us very wary of people talking about any significant change. They seem at a default that they could be dangerous. That predicting the future is hard.
It is important to be wary. What really is a red flag is claims of a better future, when it's not explained clearly what that future is, and the policy changes that will need to be undertaken to get there.
All that being said it seems to me important for a society to strive to be better, and to think of other solutions than just more of the same.
"Politics (from Greek: Πολιτικά, politiká, 'affairs of the cities') is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations between individuals, such as the distribution of resources or status. The branch of social science that studies politics is referred to as political science. "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics
The reason it cannot be replaced is that there will always be resentment and dissatisfaction brewing among society's relative 'losers'. Eventually, society's "losers" will want to change things. Whether those people are right or not about which policies are hurting them is almost irrelevant. They will want the agency to make some change - any change. But: if you factor out all of the things that are still up for debate and start re-categorizing them as laws of nature or apolitical infrastructure, then there's nothing left to change! It will be cold comfort to them if all of human policy is "above changing". What they will hear is "Everything is fine. Stay where you are."
I find speaking only in vagueness like "status quo" and "good for <the elite>" major red flags - the first especially as implying the changes you want with no knowledge and impossible to reconcile across even two people. Essentially the same sort of lie of populists. The second is a warning sign for fallacious zero sum thinking - best succicently and snarkily refuted as "It is also good for rich people for the atmosphere to be breathable at all."
The assertion that AI and networking are by default pro status quo and that is a bad thing looks like gibberish without any reasoning backing it. Not even "was funded by X" has been a guarantee that it would sustain a stasis.
The arguments leave me with an uneasy feeling of superfically trying to sound good while lacking any substance.
Delay is a feature of government, with a special carve out for emergencies.
People tend to think of and idealize best case scenarios rather than likely scenarios. The likely scenario is China. Mass mobilization and change in policy from one day to the next.
We’ve seen government be far more efficient and successful at “the fundamentals” than privatization.
Postal service, Medicare/caid, Social Security all financially stable, and logistically competent until meddled with politically to benefit a minority closest to the politicians.
I don’t want efficient government when it comes to species stability. I want reliable and resilient.
Let man-children speculate about reality without politically contrived economic uncertainty foisted upon everyone. I wasn’t a party to signing a contract that says I have to believe Musk and the rest are that much more worthwhile to humanity as decided by politically contrived fiscal economics.
If you all want to be kowtowed like teen girls at a Beatles concert, have at it. The majority just want to live their lives.
For that matter, despite all the creepy enthusiasm for dictatorships in this thread, they tend to be remarkably incompetent, being even more dysfunctional than democracies due to lacking their corrective mechanisms.
Despite the myth, Mussolini never made the trains run on time--he just relaxed the definition of "on time" until the trains were never officially late and then punished anyone who complained.
Just to take the Chinese example again - less people died due to Mao's atrocities in China than due to regular old poverty in India, despite them starting at the same spot.
We just have normalcy bias by the absolutely staggering amount of death that comes with poverty, whereas a comparatively smaller amount of death brought by a government that fixed the former is much more interesting.
Stream music? Sell sex? Buy stuff across state lines or internationally?
Imagine what we'd be able to do if the megacorps and government didn't start carving it up.
Maybe it's just me, but most of the things that the Internet can currently do don't feel all that great. My interaction with the Internet is primarily an adversarial one: I have to make a positive (and normally unsuccessful) effort to avoid the hellscape of targeted advertising and rent seeking that all of the dominant platforms currently depend on for income. But at least I can buy junk online (and damage my local economy in the process); is that worth it?
And, for what it's worth, the Internet had protocol-level streaming well before it was fully commercialized[1].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbone
IMHO - this is largely fair and true, only his POV is distinctly technocratic. He says China does “some bad things” with facial recognition but the tech has some great potential. We’re not scapegoating Big Tech - we’re applying the brakes because it operates like a monopoly and enables far scarier scenarios than Big Tobacco or Big Oil.
The interview starts off really bad, comparing "AI" (which does not mean Artificial Intelligence here) with Donald Trump, and comparing making a system of laws for a large country with Google changing the order of the search results. Then he moves the goal posts on scapegoating the internet to "big tobacco was worse than facebook" to avoid answering the question.
actually, that depends a lot on the distance. Humans are the long distance speed champs among mammals on land; humans can run down both horses and cheetahs, slow and steady wins.
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