Adam Ozimek

Technology is making the world worse. Nothing good has been invented in the last 25 years. Superfluous, spurious innovations that seem impressive at first, like the iPhone, take back more than they give and ultimately benefit only oppressive governments and their oligarch allies.

This reminds me of a comment by a DC insider who said one of the weirdest things about working with Silicon Valley was that if you mentioned regulating something in the normal way that milk or eggs were regulated, they would start quoting Orwell and say that surely that could only lead to dystopia. My impression is that many pharmaceuticals are currently as regulated than chips would be under Plan A. They can only be made in special government-licensed factories, the government maintains the right to inspect those factories at any time, the factories have to prove that they're only sending them to licensed pharmacies, and the pharmacies have to keep excruciating records showing that they only dispensed them to licensed customers. Has this turned into a global surveillance state, or is it such a boring part of everyday life that nobody notices? I assume the government has access to all of my financial transactions; certainly if I tried to send money to Ayatollah Khameini somebody would notice and stop it. This is creepy and probably does qualify as a global surveillance state, and crypto made a decent effort to dismantle it, and I supported that when it seemed plausible - but has anything bad beyond the obvious happened because of it? I think there's a line between "regulate AI chips as much as we regulate Xanax" and "have a global surveillance state", and Plan A keeps on the right side of it. If you disagree, you'll have to tell me which specific part of it you're worried about.

I was at a workshop yesterday and asked several technologists and economists who had predicted large job market losses from AI model improvement whether they are surprised about this. Models after all have improved in some ways *more* than projections. Most said “yes”, some are indeed very surprised. I do think disruption is likely coming, but it is not at all obvious that it will look like mass unemployment.