Perfect. I think I might like Ross Douthat even less. 😊 From: Friam <friam-boun...@redfish.com> on behalf of Santafe <desm...@santafe.edu> Date: Friday, June 20, 2025 at 2:23 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam@redfish.com> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] AI
This is an interesting direction. On Jun 21, 2025, at 5:46, Jochen Fromm <j...@cas-group.net> wrote: I believe it will be possible. Will it be a good idea? I don't know. In science fiction movies AIs often start to kill their creators. "Ex machina" for example is the story of such an AI developed by the CEO of a large corporation https://youtu.be/sNExF5WYMaA Then there is the possibility of massive unemployment because AI takes away the good, creative jobs. Claude's capabilities in programming are impressive. Stackoverflow is already in a crisis because developers ask ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude instead. More and more employees will lose their jobs. It doesn't look good. https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/17/business/amazon-ai-human-employees-jobs Following the article Jochen forwarded, there is another in the same channel: AI warnings are the hip new way for CEOs to keep their workers afraid of losing their jobs | CNN Business <https://edition.cnn.com/2025/06/18/business/ai-warnings-ceos?iid=cnn_buildContentRecirc_end_recirc> edition.cnn.com <https://edition.cnn.com/2025/06/18/business/ai-warnings-ceos?iid=cnn_buildContentRecirc_end_recirc> It says what it says. I won’t tie myself to or away from it. I have been thinking for some weeks about the “pro-natalist” crowd, since they came up a few months ago. As in all this, people can come up with a narrative for pretty-much any position, and we are left (if we want to say something meaningful about causation) to figure out which, if any, of these narratives has anything to do with why something becomes “a movement”, to which many of the narrative-spinners are just fabric and hangers-on. So there can be disingenuous (self-disingenuous?) saps and shills like Ross Doubthat of NYT who have all sorts of old-fashion-values arguments about natalism. But to me the structure is: they are pushing somebody to have lots of babies at exactly the time they are engineering a world to eliminate anything like a human life for the babies already had. I don’t think the timing-congruence of those two things is coincidence and unconnected to causation. It’s clear that falling birthrates seem like a godsend if one thinks population must decrease, but doesn’t want that to happen by wars and disease epidemics, with lots of acute suffering. So for whom is it really not a godsend? Well, for people who can’t live without “being supported”. There are real suffering-issues for aging populations who currently depend on getting crumbs from the big economies for their subsistence. But we probably produce enough, and have enough legacy-stuff, that if we really wanted their lives to have manageable suffering, we could achieve that through redistribution for however long it will take the various generations to die off. For whom, then, is redistribution off the table and they need the “economy” (whatever that is turning into) to be big? The ones who take almost-all of it, for whom there is no redistribution left to capture. So the pro-natalist movement, in the current context of the feudalization of everything, seems to me like it drives paleo-feudalism into something that is no longer distinct from arguments for slavery, and maybe even stronger than that, to arguments for something more like livestock. Dunno. Probably I just repeat statements of the obvious, or things that are already in the air all around us. Eric
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