public policy

The Butlerian Jihad is looking better all the time

PNRJ book reviews, cognitive science, computer science, core principles, critique of neoclassical economics, inequality, politics, public policy, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Mar 24 JDN 2460395

A review of The Age of Em by Robin Hanson

In the Dune series, the Butlerian Jihad was a holy war against artificial intelligence that resulted in a millenias-long taboo against all forms of intelligent machines. It was effectively a way to tell a story about the distant future without basically everything being about robots or cyborgs.

After reading Robin Hanson’s book, I’m starting to think that maybe we should actually do it.

Thus it is written: “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.”

Hanson says he’s trying to reserve judgment and present objective predictions without evaluation, but it becomes very clear throughout that this is the future he wants, as well as—or perhaps even instead of—the world he expects.

In many ways, it feels like he has done his very best to imagine a world of true neoclassical rational agents in perfect competition, a sort of sandbox for the toys he’s always wanted to play with. Throughout he very much takes the approach of a neoclassical economist, making heroic assumptions and then following them to their logical conclusions, without ever seriously asking whether those assumptions actually make any sense.

To his credit, Hanson does not buy into the hype that AGI will be successful any day now. He predicts that we will achieve the ability to fully emulate human brains and thus create a sort of black-box AGI that behaves very much like a human within about 100 years. Given how the Blue Brain Project has progressed (much slower than its own hype machine told us it would—and let it be noted that I predicted this from the very beginning), I think this is a fairly plausible time estimate. He refers to a mind emulated in this way as an “em”; I have mixed feelings about the term, but I suppose we did need some word for that, and it certainly has conciseness on its side.

Hanson believes that a true understanding of artificial intelligence will only come later, and the sort of AGI that can be taken apart and reprogrammed for specific goals won’t exist for at least a century after that. Both of these sober, reasonable predictions are deeply refreshing in a field that’s been full of people saying “any day now” for the last fifty years.

But Hanson’s reasonableness just about ends there.

In The Age of Em, government is exactly as strong as Hanson needs it to be. Somehow it simultaneously ensures a low crime rate among a population that doubles every few months while also having no means of preventing that population growth. Somehow ensures that there is no labor collusion and corporations never break the law, but without imposing any regulations that might reduce efficiency in any way.

All of this begins to make more sense when you realize that Hanson’s true goal here is to imagine a world where neoclassical economics is actually true.

He realized it didn’t work on humans, so instead of giving up the theory, he gave up the humans.

Hanson predicts that ems will casually make short-term temporary copies of themselves called “spurs”, designed to perform a particular task and then get erased. I guess maybe he would, but I for one would not so cavalierly create another person and then make their existence dedicated to doing a single job before they die. The fact that I created this person, and they are very much like me, seem like reasons to care more about their well-being, not less! You’re asking me to enslave and murder my own child. (Honestly, the fact that Robin Hanson thinks ems will do this all the time says more about Robin Hanson than anything else.) Any remotely sane society of ems would ban the deletion of another em under any but the most extreme circumstances, and indeed treat it as tantamount to murder.

Hanson predicts that we will only copy the minds of a few hundred people. This is surely true at some point—the technology will take time to develop, and we’ll have to start somewhere. But I don’t see why we’d stop there, when we could continue to copy millions or billions of people; and his choices of who would be emulated, while not wildly implausible, are utterly terrifying.

He predicts that we’d emulate genius scientists and engineers; okay, fair enough, that seems right. I doubt that the benefits of doing so will be as high as many people imagine, because scientific progress actually depends a lot more on the combined efforts of millions of scientists than on rare sparks of brilliance by lone geniuses; but those people are definitely very smart, and having more of them around could be a good thing. I can also see people wanting to do this, and thus investing in making it happen.

He also predicts that we’d emulate billionaires. Now, as a prediction, I have to admit that this is actually fairly plausible; billionaires are precisely the sort of people who are rich enough to pay to be emulated and narcissistic enough to want to. But where Hanson really goes off the deep end here is that he sees this as a good thing. He seems to honestly believe that billionaires are so rich because they are so brilliant and productive. He thinks that a million copies of Elon Musks would produce a million hectobillionaires—when in reality it would produce a million squabbling narcissists, who at best had to split the same $200 billion wealth between them, and might very well end up with less because they squander it.

Hanson has a long section on trying to predict the personalities of ems. Frankly this could just have been dropped entirely; it adds almost nothing to the book, and the book is much too long. But the really striking thing to me about that section is what isn’t there. He goes through a long list of studies that found weak correlations between various personality traits like extroversion or openness and wealth—mostly comparing something like the 20th percentile to the 80th percentile—and then draws sweeping conclusions about what ems will be like, under the assumption that ems are all drawn from people in the 99.99999th percentile. (Yes, upper-middle-class people are, on average, more intelligent and more conscientious than lower-middle-class people. But do we even have any particular reason to think that the personalities of people who make $150,000 are relevant to understanding the behavior of people who make $15 billion?) But he completely glosses over the very strong correlations that specifically apply to people in that very top super-rich class: They’re almost all narcissists and/or psychopaths.

Hanson predicts a world where each em is copied many, many times—millions, billions, even trillions of times, and also in which the very richest ems are capable of buying parallel processing time that lets them accelerate their own thought processes to a million times faster than a normal human. (Is that even possible? Does consciousness work like that? Who knows!?) The world that Hanson is predicting is thus one where all the normal people get outnumbered and overpowered by psychopaths.

Basically this is the most abjectly dystopian cyberpunk hellscape imaginable. And he talks about it the whole time as if it were good.

It’s like he played the game Action Potential and thought, “This sounds great! I’d love to live there!” I mean, why wouldn’t you want to owe a life-debt on your own body and have to work 120-hour weeks for a trillion-dollar corporation just to make the payments on it?

Basically, Hanson doesn’t understand how wealth is actually acquired. He is educated as an economist, yet his understanding of capitalism basically amounts to believing in magic. He thinks that competitive markets just somehow perfectly automatically allocate wealth to whoever is most productive, and thus concludes that whoever is wealthy now must just be that productive.

I can see no other way to explain his wildly implausible predictions that the em economy will double every month or two. A huge swath of the book depends upon this assumption, but he waits until halfway through the book to even try to defend it, and then does an astonishingly bad job of doing so. (Honestly, even if you buy his own arguments—which I don’t—they seem to predict that population would grow with Moore’s Law—doubling every couple of years, not every couple of months.)

Whereas Keynes predicted based on sound economic principles that economic growth would more or less proceed apace and got his answer spot-on, Hanson predicts that for mysterious, unexplained reasons economic growth will suddenly increase by two orders of magnitude—and I’m pretty sure he’s going to be wildly wrong.

Hanson also predicts that ems will be on average poorer than we are, based on some sort of perfect-competition argument that doesn’t actually seem to mesh at all with his predictions of spectacularly rapid economic and technological growth. I think the best way to make sense of this is to assume that it means the trend toward insecure affluence will continue: Ems will have an objectively high standard of living in terms of what they own, what games they play, where they travel, and what they eat and drink (in simulation), but they will constantly be struggling to keep up with the rent on their homes—or even their own bodies. This is a world where (the very finest simulation of) Dom Perignon is $7 a bottle and wages are $980 an hour—but monthly rent is $284,000.

Early in the book Hanson argues that this life of poverty and scarcity will lead to more conservative values, on the grounds that people who are poorer now seem to be more conservative, and this has something to do with farmers versus foragers. Hanson’s explanation of all this is baffling; I will quote it at length, just so it’s clear I’m not misrepresenting it:

The other main (and independent) axis of value variation ranges between poor and rich societies. Poor societies place more value on conformity, security, and traditional values such as marriage, heterosexuality, religion, patriotism, hard work, and trust in authority. In contrast, rich societies place more value on individualism, self-direction, tolerance, pleasure, nature, leisure, and trust. When the values of individuals within a society vary on the same axis, we call this a left/liberal (rich) versus right/conservative (poor) axis.

Foragers tend to have values more like those of rich/liberal people today, while subsistence farmers tend to have values more like those of poor/conservative people today. As industry has made us richer, we have on average moved from conservative/farmer values to liberal/forager values. This value movement can make sense if cultural evolution used the social pressures farmers faced, such as conformity and religion, to induce humans, who evolved to find forager behaviors natural, to instead act like farmers. As we become rich, we don’t as strongly fear the threats behind these social pressures. This connection may result in part from disease; rich people are healthier, and healthier societies fear less.

The alternate theory that we have instead learned that rich forager values are more true predicts that values should have followed a random walk over time, and be mostly common across space. It also predicts the variance of value changes tracking the rate at which relevant information appears. But in fact industrial-era value changes have tracked the wealth of each society in much more steady and consistent fashion. And on this theory, why did foragers ever acquire farmer values?

[…]

In the scenario described in this book, many strange-to-forager behaviors are required, and median per-person (i.e. per-em) incomes return to near-subsistence levels. This suggests that the em era may reverse the recent forager-like trend toward more liberality; ems may have more farmer-like values.

The Age of Em, p. 26-27

There’s a lot to unpack here, but maybe it’s better to burn the whole suitcase.

First of all, it’s not entirely clear that this is really a single axis of variation, that foragers and farmers differ from each other in the same way as liberals and conservatives. There’s some truth to that at least—both foragers and liberals tend to be more generous, both farmers and conservatives tend to enforce stricter gender norms. But there are also clear ways that liberal values radically deviate from forager values: Forager societies are extremely xenophobic, and typically very hostile to innovation, inequality, or any attempts at self-aggrandizement (a phenomenon called “fierce egalitarianism“). San Francisco epitomizes rich, liberal values, but it would be utterly alien and probably regarded as evil by anyone from the Yanomamo.

Second, there is absolutely no reason to predict any kind of random walk. That’s just nonsense. Would you predict that scientific knowledge is a random walk, with each new era’s knowledge just a random deviation from the last’s? Maybe next century we’ll return to geocentrism, or phrenology will be back in vogue? On the theory that liberal values (or at least some liberal values) are objectively correct, we would expect them to advance as knowledge does—improving over time, and improving faster in places that have better institutions for research, education, and free expression. And indeed, this is precisely the pattern we have observed. (Those places are also richer, but that isn’t terribly surprising either!)

Third, while poorer regions are indeed more conservative, poorer people within a region actually tend to be more liberal. Nigeria is poorer and more conservative than Norway, and Mississippi is poorer and more conservative than Massachusetts. But higher-income households in the United States are more likely to vote Republican. I think this is particularly true of people living under insecure affluence: We see the abundance of wealth around us, and don’t understand why we can’t learn to share it better. We’re tired of fighting over scraps while the billionaires claim more and more. Millennials and Zoomers absolutely epitomize insecure affluence, and we also absolutely epitomize liberalism. So, if indeed ems live a life of insecure affluence, we should expect them to be like Zoomers: “Trans liberation now!” and “Eat the rich!” (Or should I say, “Delete the rich!”)

And really, doesn’t that make more sense? Isn’t that the trend our society has been on, for at least the last century? We’ve been moving toward more and more acceptance of women and minorities, more and more deviation from norms, more and more concern for individual rights and autonomy, more and more resistance to authority and inequality.

The funny thing is, that world sounds a lot better than the one Hanson is predicting.

A world of left-wing ems would probably run things a lot better than Hanson imagines: Instead of copying the same hundred psychopaths over and over until we fill the planet, have no room for anything else, and all struggle to make enough money just to stay alive, we could moderate our population to a more sustainable level, preserve diversity and individuality, and work toward living in greater harmony with each other and the natural world. We could take this economic and technological abundance and share it and enjoy it, instead of killing ourselves and each other to make more of it for no apparent reason.

The one good argument Hanson makes here is expressed in a single sentence: “And on this theory, why did foragers ever acquire farmer values?” That actually is a good question; why did we give up on leisure and egalitarianism when we transitioned from foraging to agriculture?

I think scarcity probably is relevant here: As food became scarcer, maybe because of climate change, people were forced into an agricultural lifestyle just to have enough to eat. Early agricultural societies were also typically authoritarian and violent. Under those conditions, people couldn’t be so generous and open-minded; they were surrounded by threats and on the verge of starvation.

I guess if Hanson is right that the em world is also one of poverty and insecurity, we might go back to those sort of values, borne of desperation. But I don’t see any reason to think we’d give up all of our liberal values. I would predict that ems will still be feminist, for instance; in fact, Hanson himself admits that since VR avatars would let us change gender presentation at will, gender would almost certainly become more fluid in a world of ems. Far from valuing heterosexuality more highly (as conservatives do, a “farmer value” according to Hanson), I suspect that ems will have no further use for that construct, because reproduction will be done by manufacturing, not sex, and it’ll be so easy to swap your body into a different one that hardly anyone will even keep the same gender their whole life. They’ll think it’s quaint that we used to identify so strongly with our own animal sexual dimorphism.

But maybe it is true that the scarcity induced by a hyper-competitive em world would make people more selfish, less generous, less trusting, more obsessed with work. Then let’s not do that! We don’t have to build that world! This isn’t a foregone conclusion!

There are many other paths yet available to us.

Indeed, perhaps the simplest would be to just ban artificial intelligence, at least until we can get a better handle on what we’re doing—and perhaps until we can institute the kind of radical economic changes necessary to wrest control of the world away from the handful of psychopaths currently trying their best to run it into the ground.

I admit, it would kind of suck to not get any of the benefits of AI, like self-driving cars, safer airplanes, faster medical research, more efficient industry, and better video games. It would especially suck if we did go full-on Butlerian Jihad and ban anything more complicated than a pocket calculator. (Our lifestyle might have to go back to what it was in—gasp! The 1950s!)

But I don’t think it would suck nearly as much as the world Robin Hanson thinks is in store for us if we continue on our current path.

So I certainly hope he’s wrong about all this.

Fortunately, I think he probably is.

Let’s call it “copytheft”

PNRJ core principles, critique of neoclassical economics, public policy , , , , , , , , ,

Feb 11 JDN 2460353

I have written previously about how ridiculous it is that we refer to the unauthorized copying of media such as music and video games as “piracy” as though it were somehow equivalent to capturing ships on the high seas.

In that post a few years ago I suggested calling it simply “unauthorized copying”, but that clearly isn’t catching on, perhaps because it’s simply too much of a mouthful. So today I offer a compromise:

Let’s call it “copytheft”.

That takes no longer to say than “piracy” (and only slightly longer to write), and far more clearly states what’s actually going on. No ships have been seized on the high seas; there has been no murder, arson, or slavery.

Yes, it’s debatable whether copytheft really constitutes theft—and I would generally argue that it does not—but just from hearing that word, you would probably infer that the following process took place:

  1. I took a thing.
  2. I made a copy of that thing that I wasn’t supposed to.
  3. I put the original thing back where it was, unharmed.

The paradigmatic example of this theft-copy-replace sequence would be a key, of course: You take someone’s key, copy it, then put the key back where it was, so you now can unlock their locks but they are none the wiser.

With unauthorized copying of media, you’re not exactly doing steps 1 and 3; the copier often has the media completely legitimately before they make the copy, and it may not even have a clear physical location to be put back to (it must be physically stored somewhere, but particularly if it’s streamed from the cloud it hardly matters where).

But you’re definitely doing step 2, and that was the only part that had a permanent effect; so I think that the nomenclature still seems to work well enough.

Copytheft also has a similar sound to copyleft, the use of alternative intellectual property mechanisms by the authors to grand broader licensing than is ordinarily afforded by copyright, and also to copyfraud, the crime of claiming exclusive copyright to content that is in fact public domain. Hopefully that common structure will help the term get some purchase.

Of course, I can hardly bring a word into widespread use on my own. Others like you have to not only read it, but like it enough that you’re willing to actually use it—and then we need a certain critical mass of people using it in order to make it actually catch on.

So, I’d like to take a moment to offer you some justification why it’s worth changing to this new word.

First, it is admittedly imperfect; by containing the word “theft”, it already feels like we’re conceding something to the defenders of copyright.

But by including the word “copy” in the term, we can draw attention to the most important aspect that distinguishes copytheft from, well, theft:

The original owner still has the thing.

That’s the part that they want us to forget, that the harsh word “piracy” leads you towards. A ship that is captured by pirates is a ship that may never again sail for your own navy. A song that is “pirated”—copythefted—is one that not only the original owners, but also everyone who bought it, still have in exactly the same state they did before.

Thus it simply cannot be that copytheft takes money out of the hands of artists. At worst, it fails to give money to artists.

That could still be a bad thing: Artists need to pay bills too, and a world where nobody pays for any art is surely a world with a lot fewer artists—and the ones who remain far more miserable. But it’s clearly a different sort of thing than ordinary theft, as nothing has been lost.

Moreover, it’s not clear that in most cases copytheft even does fail to give money that would otherwise have been given. Maybe sometimes it does—a certain proportion of people who copytheft a given song, film, or video game might have been willing to pay the original price if the copythefted version had not been available. But typically I suspect that people who’d be willing to pay full price… do pay full price. Thus, the people who are copythefting the media wouldn’t have bought it at full price anyway.

They might have bought it at some lower price, in which case that is foregone payment; but it’s surely considerably less than the “losses” often reported by the film and music industries, which seem to be based on the assumption that everyone who copythefts would have otherwise paid full price. And in fact many people might have been unwilling to buy at any nonzero price, and were only willing to copytheft the media precisely because it didn’t cost them any money or a great deal of effort to do so.

And in fact if you think about it, what about people who would have been willing to pay more than the original price? Surely there were many of them as well, yet we don’t grant media corporations the right to that money. That is also money that they could have been given but weren’t—and we decided, as a society, that they didn’t deserve to have it. It’s not that it would be impossible to do so: We could give corporations the authority to price-discriminate on all of their media. (They probably couldn’t do it perfectly, but they could surely do it quite well.) But we made the policy choice to live in a world where media is sold by single-price monopolies rather than one where it is sold by price-discriminating monopolies.

The mere fact that someone might have been willing to pay you more money if the market were different does not entitle you to receive that money. It has not been stolen from you. Indeed, typically it’s more that you have not been allowed to exploit them. It’s usually the presence of competition that prevents corporations from receiving the absolute maximum profit they might potentially have received if they had full control over the market. Corporations making less profit than they otherwise would have is generally a sign of good economic policy—a sign that things are reasonably fair.

Why else is “copytheft” a good word to use?

Above all, we do not allow our terms to be defined by our opponents.

We don’t allow them insinuate that our technically violating draconian regulations designed to maximize the profits of Disney and Viacom somehow constitutes a terrible crime against other human beings.

“Piracy is not a victimless crime”, they will say.

Well, actual piracy isn’t. But copytheft? Yeah, uh, it kinda is.

Maybe not quite as victimless as, say, marijuana or psilocybin, which no one even has any rational reason to prefer you not do. But still, you’re not really making anyone else worse off—that sounds pretty victimless.

Of course, it does give us less reason to wear tricorn hats and eyepatches.

But guess what? You can still do that anyway!

Adversarial design

PNRJ core principles, critique of neoclassical economics, current events, futurism, politics, public policy , , , , , , , , , , ,

Feb 4 JDN 2460346

Have you noticed how Amazon feels a lot worse lately? Years ago, it was extremely convenient: You’d just search for what you want, it would give you good search results, you could buy what you want and be done. But now you have to slog through “sponsored results” and a bunch of random crap made by no-name companies in China before you can get to what you actually want.

Temu is even worse, and has been from the start: You can’t buy anything on Temu without first being inundated in ads. It’s honestly such an awful experience, I don’t understand why anyone is willing to buy anything from Temu.

#WelcomeToCyberpunk, I guess.

Even some video games have become like this: The free-to-play or “freemium” business model seems to be taking off, where you don’t pay money for the game itself, but then have to deal with ads inside the game trying to sell you additional content, because that’s where the developers actually make their money. And now AAA firms like EA and Ubisoft are talking about going to a subscription-based model where you don’t even own your games anymore. (Fortunately there’s been a lot of backlash against that; I hope it persists.)

Why is this happening? Isn’t capitalism supposed to make life better for consumers? Isn’t competition supposed to make products and services supposed to improve over time?

Well, first of all, these markets are clearly not as competitive as they should be. Amazon has a disturbingly large market share, and while the video game market is more competitive, it’s still dominated by a few very large firms (like EA and Ubisoft).

But I think there’s a deeper problem here, one which may be specific to media content.

What I mean by “media content” here is fairly broad: I would include art, music, writing, journalism, film, and video games.

What all of these things have in common is that they are not physical products (they’re not like a car or a phone that is a single physical object), but they are also not really services either (they aren’t something you just do as an action and it’s done, like a haircut, a surgery, or a legal defense).

Another way of thinking about this is that media content can be copied with zero marginal cost.

Because it can be copied with zero marginal cost, media content can’t simply be made and sold the way that conventional products and services are. There are a few different ways it can be monetized.


The most innocuous way is commission or patronage, where someone pays someone else to create a work because they want that work. This is totally unproblematic. You want a piece of art, you pay an artist, they make it for you; great. Maybe you share copies with the world, maybe you don’t; whatever. It’s good either way.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to sustain most artists and innovators on that model alone. (In a sense I’m using a patronage model, because I have a Patreon. But I’m not making anywhere near enough to live on that way.)

The second way is intellectual property, which I have written about before, and surely will again. If you can enforce limits on who is allowed to copy a work, then you can make a work and sell it for profit without fear of being undercut by someone else who simply copies it and sells it for cheaper. A detailed discussion of that is beyond the scope of this post, but you can read those previous posts, and I can give you the TLDR version: Some degree of intellectual property is probably necessary, but in our current society, it has clearly been taken much too far. I think artists and authors deserve to be able to copyright (or maybe copyleft) their work—but probably not for 70 years after their death.

And then there is a third way, the most insidious way: advertising. If you embed advertisements for other products and services within your content, you can then sell those ad slots for profit. This is how newspapers stay afloat, mainly; subscriptions have never been the majority of their revenue. It’s how TV was supported before cable and streaming—and cable usually has ads too, and streaming is starting to.

There is something fundamentally different about advertising as a service. Whereas most products and services you encounter in a capitalist society are made for you, designed for you to use, advertising it made at you, designed to manipulate you.

I’ve heard it put well this way:

If you’re not paying, you aren’t the customer; you’re the product.

Monetizing content by advertising effectively makes your readers (or viewers, players, etc.) into the product instead of the customer.

I call this effect adversarial design.

I chose this term because it not only conveys the right sense of being an adversary: it also includes the word ‘ad’ and the same Latin root ‘advertere‘ as ‘advertising’.

When a company designs a car or a phone, they want it to appeal to customers—they want you to like it. Yes, they want to take your money; but it’s a mutually beneficial exchange. They get money, you get a product; you’re both happier.

When a company designs an ad, they want it to affect customers—they want you to do what it says, whether you like it or not. And they wouldn’t be doing it if they thought you would buy it anyway—so they are basically trying to make you do something you wouldn’t otherwise have done.

In other words, when designing a product, corporations want to be your friend.

When designing an ad, they become your enemy.

You would absolutely prefer not to have ads. You don’t want your attention taken in this way. But they way that these corporations make money—disgustingly huge sums of money—is by forcing those ads in your face anyway.

Yes, to be fair, there might be some kinds of ads that aren’t too bad. Simple, informative, unobtrusive ads that inform you that something is available you might not otherwise have known about. Movie trailers are like this; people often enjoy watching movie trailers, and they want to see what movies are going to come out next. That’s fine. I have no objection to that.

But it should be clear to anyone who has, um, used the Internet in the past decade that we have gone far, far beyond that sort of advertising. Ads have become aggressive, manipulative, aggravating, and—above all—utterly ubiquitous. You can’t escape them. They’re everywhere. Even when you use ad-block software (which I highly recommend, particularly Adblock Plus—which is free), you still can’t completely escape them.

That’s another thing that should make it pretty clear that there’s something wrong with ads: People are willing to make efforts or even pay money to make ads go away.

Whenever there is a game I like that’s ad-supported but you can pay to make the ads go away, I always feel like I’m being extorted, even if what I have to pay would have been a totally reasonable price for the game. Come on, just sell me the game. Don’t give me the game for free and then make me pay to make it not unpleasant. Don’t add anti-features.

This is clearly not a problem that market competition alone will solve. Even in highly competitive markets, advertising is still ubiquitous, aggressive and manipulative. In fact, competition may even make it worse—a true monopoly wouldn’t need to advertise very much.

Consider Coke and Pepsi ads; they’re actually relatively pleasant, aren’t they? Because all they’re trying to do is remind you and make you thirsty so you’ll buy more of the product you were already buying. They aren’t really trying to get you to buy something you wouldn’t have otherwise. They know that their duopoly is solid, and only a true Black Swan event would unseat their hegemony.

And have you ever seen an ad for your gas company? I don’t think I have—probably because I didn’t have a choice in who my gas company was; there was only one that covered my area. So why bother advertising to me?

If competition won’t fix this, what will? Is there some regulation we could impose that would make advertising less obtrusive? People have tried, without much success. I think imposing an advertising tax would help, but even that might not do enough.

What I really think we need right now is to recognize the problem and invest in solving it. Right now we have megacorporations which are thoroughly (literally) invested in making advertising more obtrusive and more ubiquitous. We need other institutions—maybe government, maybe civil society more generally—that are similarly invested in counteracting it.


Otherwise, it’s only going to get worse.

Depression and the War on Drugs

PNRJ cognitive science, current events, politics, public policy , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Jan 7 JDN 2460318

There exists, right now, an extremely powerful antidepressant which is extremely cheap and has minimal side effects.

It’s so safe that it has no known lethal dose, and—unlike SSRIs—it is not known to trigger suicide. It is shockingly effective: it works in a matter of hours—not weeks like a typical SSRI—and even a single moderate dose can have benefits lasting months. It isn’t patented, because it comes from a natural source. That natural source is so easy to grow, you can do it by yourself at home for less than $100.

Why in the world aren’t we all using it?

I’ll tell you why: This wonder drug is called psilocybin. It is a Schedule I narcotic, which means that simply possessing it is a federal crime in the United States. Carrying it across the border is a felony.

It is also illegal in most other countries, including the UK, Australia, Belgium, Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway (#ScandinaviaIsNotAlwaysBetter), France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Japan, the list goes on….

Actually, it’s faster to list the places it’s not illegal: Austria, the Bahamas, Brazil, the British Virgin Islands, Jamaica, Nepal, the Netherlands, and Samoa. That’s it for true legalization, though it’s also decriminalized or unenforced in some other countries.

The best known antidepressant lies unused, because we made it illegal.

Similar stories hold for other amazingly beneficial drugs:

LSD also has powerful antidepressant effects with minimal side effects, and is likewise so ludicrously safe that we are not aware of a single fatal overdose ever happening in any human being. And it’s also Schedule I banned.

Ahayuasca is the same story: A great antidepressant, very safe, minimal side effects—and highly illegal.

There is also no evidence that psilocybin, LSD, or ahayuasca are addictive; and far from promoting the sort of violent, anti-social behavior that alcohol does, they actually seem to make people more compassionate.

This is pure speculation, but I think we should try psilocybin as a possible treatment for psychopathy. And if that works, maybe having a psilocybin trip should be a prerequisite for eligibility for any major elected office. (I often find it a bit silly how the biggest fans of psychedelics talk about the drugs radically changing the world, bringing peace and prosperity through a shift in consciousness; but if psilocybin could make all the world’s leaders more compassionate, that might actually have that kind of impact.)

Ketamine and MDMA at least do have some overdose risk and major side effects, and are genuinely addictive—but it’s not really clear that they’re any worse than SSRIs, and they certainly aren’t any worse than alcohol.

Alcohol may actually be the most widely-used antidepressant, and yet is clearly utterly ineffective; in fact, alcoholics consistently show depression increasing over time. Alcohol has a fatal dose so low it’s a common accident; it is also implicated in violent behavior, including half of all rapes—and in the majority of those rape cases, all consumption of alcohol was voluntary.

Yet alcohol can be bought over-the-counter at any grocery store.

The good news is that this is starting to change.

Recent changes in the law have allowed the use of psychedelic drugs in medical research—which is part of how we now know just how shockingly effective they are at treating depression.

Some jurisdictions in the US—notably, the whole state of Colorado—have decriminalized psilocybin, and Oregon has made it outright legal. Yet even this situation is precarious; just as has occurred with cannabis legalization, it’s still difficult to run a business selling psilocybin even in Oregon, because banks don’t want to deal with a business that sells something which is federally illegal.

Fortunately, this, too, is starting to change: A bill passed the US Senate a few months ago that would legalize banking to cannabis businesses in states where it is legal, and President Biden recently pardoned everyone in federal prison for simple cannabis possession. Now, why can’t we just make cannabis legal!?

The War on Drugs hasn’t just been a disaster for all the thousands of people needlessly imprisoned.

(Of course they had it the worst, and we should set them all free immediately—preferably with some form of restitution.)

The War of Drugs has also been a disaster for all the people who couldn’t get the treatment they needed, because we made that medicine illegal.

And for what? What are we even trying to accomplish here?

Prohibition was a failure—and a disaster of its own—but I can at least understand why it was done. When a drug kills nearly a hundred thousand people a year and is implicated in half of all rapes, that seems like a pretty damn good reason to want that drug gone. The question there becomes how we can best reduce alcohol use without the awful consequences that Prohibition caused—and so far, really high taxes seem to be the best method, and they absolutely do reduce crime.

But where was the disaster caused by cannabis, psilocybin, or ahayuasca? These drugs are made by plants and fungi; like alcohol, they have been used by humans for thousands of years. Where are the overdoses? Where is the crime? Psychedelics have none of these problems.

Honestly, it’s kind of amazing that these drugs aren’t more associated with organized crime than they are.

When alcohol was banned, it seemed to immediately trigger a huge expansion of the Mafia, as only they were willing and able to provide for the enormous demand of this highly addictive neurotoxin. But psilocybin has been illegal for decades, and yet there’s no sign of organized crime having anything to do with it. In fact, psilocybin use is associated with lower rates of arrest—which actually makes sense to me, because like I said, it makes you more compassionate.

That’s how idiotic and ridiculous our drug laws are:

We made a drug that causes crime legal, and we made a drug that prevents crime illegal.

Note that this also destroys any conspiracy theory suggesting that the government wants to keep us all docile and obedient: psilocybin is way better at making people docile than alcohol. No, this isn’t the product of some evil conspiracy.

Hanlon’s Razor: Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.

This isn’t malice; it’s just massive, global, utterly catastrophic stupidity.

I might attribute this to Puritanical American attitude toward pleasure (Pleasure is suspect, pleasure is dangerous), but I don’t think of Sweden as particularly Puritanical, and they also ban most psychedelics. I guess the most libertine countries—the Netherlands, Brazil—seem to be the ones that have legalized them; but it doesn’t really seem like one should have to be that libertine to want the world’s cheapest, safest, most effective antidepressants to be widely available. I have very mixed feelings about Amsterdam’s (in)famous red light district, but absolutely no hesitation in supporting their legalization of psilocybin truffles.

Honestly, I think patriarchy might be part of this. Alcohol is seen as a very masculine drug—maybe because it can make you angry and violent. Psychedelics seem more feminine; they make you sensitive, compassionate and loving.

Even the way that psychedelics make you feel more connected with your body is sort of feminine; we seem to have a common notion that men are their minds, but women are their bodies.

Here, try it. Someone has said, “I feel really insecure about my body.” Quick: What is that person’s gender? Now suppose someone has said, “I’m very proud of my mind.” What is that person’s gender?

(No, it’s not just because the former is insecure and the latter is proud—though we do also gender those emotions, and there’s statistical evidence that men are generally more confident, though that’s never been my experience of manhood. Try it with the emotions swapped and it still works, just not quite as well.)

I’m not suggesting that this makes sense. Both men and women are precisely as physical and mental as each other—we are all both, and that is a deep truth about our nature. But I know that my mind makes an automatic association between mind/body and male/female, and I suspect yours does as well, because we came from similar cultural norms. (This goes at least back to Classical Rome, where the animus, the rational soul, was masculine, while the anima, the emotional one, was feminine.)

That is, it may be that we banned psychedelics because they were girly. The men in charge were worried about us becoming soft and weak. The drug that’s tied to thousands of rapes and car collisions is manly. The drug that brings you peace, joy, and compassion is not.

Think about the things that the mainstream objected to about Hippies: Men with long hair and makeup, women wearing pants, bright colors, flowery patterns, kindness and peacemongering—all threats to the patriarchal order.

Whatever it is, we need to stop. Millions of people are suffering, and we could so easily help them; all we need to do is stop locking people up for taking medicine.

How do we stop overspending on healthcare?

PNRJ inequality, macroeconomics, market failure, politics, public policy, statistics , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Dec 10 JDN 2460290

I don’t think most Americans realize just how much more the US spends on healthcare than other countries. This is true not simply in absolute terms—of course it is, the US is rich and huge—but in relative terms: As a portion of GDP, our healthcare spending is a major outlier.

Here’s a really nice graph from Healthsystemtracker.org that illustrates it quite nicely: Almost all other First World countries share a simple linear relationship between their per-capita GDP and their per-capita healthcare spending. But one of these things is not like the other ones….

The outlier in the other direction is Ireland, but that’s because their GDP is wildly inflated by Leprechaun Economics. (Notice that it looks like Ireland is by far the richest country in the sample! This is clearly not the case in reality.) With a corrected estimate of their true economic output, they are also quite close to the line.

Since US GDP per capita ($70,181) is in between that of Denmark ($64,898) and Norway ($80,496) both of which have very good healthcare systems (#ScandinaviaIsBetter), we would expect that US spending on healthcare would similarly be in between. But while Denmark spends $6,384 per person per year on healthcare and Norway spends $7,065 per person per year, the US spends $12,914.

That is, the US spends nearly twice as much as it should on healthcare.

The absolute difference between what we should spend and what we actually spend is nearly $6,000 per person per year. Multiply that out by the 330 million people in the US, and…

The US overspends on healthcare by nearly $2 trillion per year.

This might be worth it, if health in the US were dramatically better than health in other countries. (In that case I’d be saying that other countries spend too little.) But plainly it is not.

Probably the simplest and most comparable measure of health across countries is life expectancy. US life expectancy is 76 years, and has increased over time. But if you look at the list of countries by life expectancy, the US is not even in the top 50. Our life expectancy looks more like middle-income countries such as Algeria, Brazil, and China than it does like Norway or Sweden, who should be our economic peers.

There are of course many things that factor into life expectancy aside from healthcare: poverty and homicide are both much worse in the US than in Scandinavia. But then again, poverty is much worse in Algeria, and homicide is much worse in Brazil, and yet they somehow manage to nearly match the US in life expectancy (actually exceeding it in some recent years).

The US somehow manages to spend more on healthcare than everyone else, while getting outcomes that are worse than any country of comparable wealth—and even some that are far poorer.

This is largely why there is a so-called “entitlements crisis” (as many a libertarian think tank is fond of calling it). Since libertarians want to cut Social Security most of all, they like to lump it in with Medicare and Medicaid as an “entitlement” in “crisis”; but in fact we only need a few minor adjustments to the tax code to make sure that Social Security remains solvent for decades to come. It’s healthcare spending that’s out of control.

Here, take a look.

This is the ratio of Social Security spending to GDP from 1966 to the present. Notice how it has been mostly flat since the 1980s, other than a slight increase in the Great Recession.

This is the ratio of Medicare spending to GDP over the same period. Even ignoring the first few years while it was ramping up, it rose from about 0.6% in the 1970s to almost 4% in 2020, and only started to decline in the last few years (and it’s probably too early to say whether that will continue).

Medicaid has a similar pattern: It rose steadily from 0.2% in 1966 to over 3% today—and actually doesn’t even show any signs of leveling off.

If you look at Medicare and Medicaid together, they surged from just over 1% of GDP in 1970 to nearly 7% today:

Put another way: in 1982, Social Security was 4.8% of GDP while Medicare and Medicaid combined were 2.4% of GDP. Today, Social Security is 4.9% of GDP while Medicare and Medicaid are 6.8% of GDP.

Social Security spending barely changed at all; healthcare spending more than doubled. If we reduced our Medicare and Medicaid spending as a portion of GDP back to what it was in 1982, we would save 4.4% of GDP—that is, 4.4% of over $25 trillion per year, so $1.1 trillion per year.

Of course, we can’t simply do that; if we cut benefits that much, millions of people would suddenly lose access to healthcare they need.

The problem is not that we are spending frivolously, wasting the money on treatments no one needs. On the contrary, both Medicare and Medicaid carefully vet what medical services they are willing to cover, and if anything probably deny services more often than they should.

No, the problem runs deeper than this.

Healthcare is too expensive in the United States.

We simply pay more for just about everything, and especially for specialist doctors and hospitals.

In most other countries, doctors are paid like any other white-collar profession. They are well off, comfortable, certainly, but few of them are truly rich. But in the US, we think of doctors as an upper-class profession, and expect them to be rich.

Median doctor salaries are $98,000 in France and $138,000 in the UK—but a whopping $316,000 in the US. Germany and Canada are somewhere in between, at $183,000 and $195,000 respectively.

Nurses, on the other hand, are paid only a little more in the US than in Western Europe. This means that the pay difference between doctors and nurses is much higher in the US than most other countries.

US prices on brand-name medication are frankly absurd. Our generic medications are typically cheaper than other countries, but our brand name pills often cost twice as much. I noticed this immediately on moving to the UK: I had always been getting generics before, because the brand name pills cost ten times as much, but when I moved here, suddenly I started getting all brand-name medications (at no cost to me), because the NHS was willing to buy the actual brand name products, and didn’t have to pay through the nose to do so.

But the really staggering differences are in hospitals.

Let’s compare the prices of a few inpatient procedures between the US and Switzerland. Switzerland, you should note, is a very rich country that spends a lot on healthcare and has nearly the world’s highest life expectancy. So it’s not like they are skimping on care. (Nor is it that prices in general are lower in Switzerland; on the contrary, they are generally higher.)

A coronary bypass in Switzerland costs about $33,000. In the US, it costs $76,000.

A spinal fusion in Switzerland costs about $21,000. In the US? $52,000.

Angioplasty in Switzerland: $9.000. In the US? $32,000.

Hip replacement: Switzerland? $16,000. The US? $28,000.

Knee replacement: Switzerland? $19,000. The US? $27,000.

Cholecystectomy: Switzerland? $8,000. The US? $16,000.

Appendectomy: Switzerland? $7,000. The US? $13,000.

Caesarian section: Switzerland? $8,000. The US? $11,000.

Hospital prices are even lower in Germany and Spain, whose life expectancies are not as high as Switzerland—but still higher than the US.

These prices are so much lower that in fact if you were considering getting surgery for a chronic condition in the US, don’t. Buy plane tickets to Europe and get the procedure done there. Spend an extra few thousand dollars on a nice European vacation and you’d still end up saving money. (Obviously if you need it urgently you have no choice but to use your nearest hospital.) I know that if I ever need a knee replacement (which, frankly, is likely, given my height), I’m gonna go to Spain and thereby save $22,000 relative to what it would cost in the US. That’s a difference of a car.

Combine this with the fact that the US is the only First World country without universal healthcare, and maybe you can see why we’re also the only country in the world where people are afraid to call an ambulance because they don’t think they can afford it. We are also the only country in the world with a medical debt crisis.

Where is all this extra money going?

Well, a lot of it goes to those doctors who are paid three times as much as in France. That, at least, seems defensible: If we want the best doctors in the world maybe we need to pay for them. (Then again, do we have the best doctors in the world? If so, why is our life expectancy so mediocre?)

But a significant portion is going to shareholders.

You probably already knew that there are pharmaceutical companies that rake in huge profits on those overpriced brand-name medications. The top five US pharma companies took in net earnings of nearly $82 billion last year. Pharmaceutical companies typically take in much higher profit margins than other companies: a typical corporation makes about 8% of its revenue in profit, while pharmaceutical companies average nearly 14%.

But you may not have realized that a surprisingly large proportion of hospitals are for-profit businesses—even though they make most of their revenue from Medicare and Medicaid.

I was surprised to find that the US is not unusual in that; in fact, for-profit hospitals exist in dozens of countries, and the fraction of US hospital capacity that is for-profit isn’t even particularly high by world standards.

What is especially large is the profits of US hospitals. 7 healthcare corporations in the US all posted net incomes over $1 billion in 2021.

Even nonprofit US hospitals are tremendously profitable—as oxymoronic as that may sound. In fact, mean operating profit is higher among nonprofit hospitals in the US than for-profit hospitals. So even the hospitals that aren’t supposed to be run for profit… pretty much still are. They get tax deductions as if they were charities—but they really don’t act like charities.

They are basically nonprofit in name only.

So fixing this will not be as simple as making all hospitals nonprofit. We must also restructure the institutions so that nonprofit hospitals are genuinely nonprofit, and no longer nonprofit in name only. It’s normal for a nonprofit to have a little bit of profit or loss—nobody can make everything always balance perfectly—but these hospitals have been raking in huge profits and keeping it all in cash instead of using it to reduce prices or improve services. In the study I linked above, those 2,219 “nonprofit” hospitals took in operating profits averaging $43 million each—for a total of $95 billion.

Between pharmaceutical companies and hospitals, that’s a total of over $170 billion per year just in profit. (That’s more than we spend on food stamps, even after surge due to COVID.) This is pure grift. It must be stopped.

But that still doesn’t explain why we’re spending $2 trillion more than we should! So after all, I must leave you with a question:

What is America doing wrong? Why is our healthcare so expensive?

Homeschooling and too much freedom

PNRJ education, personal, public policy, science and academia, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , , ,

Nov 19 JDN 2460268

Allowing families to homeschool their children increases freedom, quite directly and obviously. This is a large part of the political argument in favor of homeschooling, and likely a large part of why homeschooling is so popular within the United States in particular.

In the US, about 3% of people are homeschooled. This seems like a small proportion, but it’s enough to have some cultural and political impact, and it’s considerably larger than the proportion who are homeschooled in most other countries.

Moreover, homeschooling rates greatly increased as a result of COVID, and it’s anyone’s guess when, or even whether, they will go back down. I certainly hope they do; here’s why.

A lot of criticism about homeschooling involves academic outcomes: Are the students learning enough English and math? This is largely unfounded; statistically, academic outcomes of homeschooled students don’t seem to be any worse than those of public school students; by some measures, they are actually better.Nor is there clear evidence that homeschooled kids are any less developed socially; most of them get that social development through other networks, such as churches and sports teams.

No, my concern is not that they won’t learn enough English and math. It’s that they won’t learn enough history and science. Specifically, the parts of history and science that contradict the religious beliefs of the parents who are homeschooling them.

One way to study this would be to compare test scores by homeschooled kids on, say, algebra and chemistry (which do not directly threaten Christian evangelical beliefs) to those on, say, biology and neuroscience (which absolutely, fundamentally do). Lying somewhere in between are physics (F=ma is no threat to Christianity, but the Big Bang is) and history (Christian nationalists happily teach that Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, but often omit that he owned slaves). If homeschooled kids are indeed indoctrinated, we should see particular lacunas in their knowledge where the facts contradict their ideology. In any case, I wasn’t able to find any such studies.

But even if their academic outcomes are worse in certain domains, so what? What about the freedom of parents to educate their children how they choose? What about the freedom of children to not be subjected to the pain of public school?

It will come as no surprise to most of you that I did well in school. In almost everything, really: math, science, philosophy, English, and Latin were my best subjects, and I earned basically flawless grades in them. But I also did very well in creative writing, history, art, and theater, and fairly well in music. My only poor performance was in gym class (as I’ve written about before).

It may come as some surprise when I tell you that I did not particularly enjoy school. In elementary school I had few friends—and one of my closest ended up being abusive to me. Middle school I mostly enjoyed—despite the onset of my migraines. High school started out utterly miserable, though it got a little better—a little—once I transferred to Community High School. Throughout high school, I was lonely, stressed, anxious, and depressed most of the time, and had migraine headaches of one intensity or another nearly every single day. (Sadly, most of that is true now as well; but I at least had a period of college and grad school where it wasn’t, and hopefully I will again once this job is behind me.)

I was good at school. I enjoyed much of the content of school. But I did not particularly enjoy school.

Thus, I can quite well understand why it is tempting to say that kids should be allowed to be schooled at home, if that is what they and their parents want. (Of course, a problem already arises there: What if child and parent disagree? Whose choice actually matters? In practice, it’s usually the parent’s.)

On the whole, public school is a fairly toxic social environment: Cliquish, hyper-competitive, stressful, often full of conflict between genders, races, classes, sexual orientations, and of course the school-specific one, nerds versus jocks (I’d give you two guesses which team I was on, but you’re only gonna need one). Public school sucks.

Then again, many of these problems and conflicts persist into adult life—so perhaps it’s better preparation than we care to admit. Maybe it’s better to be exposed to bias and conflict so that you can learn to cope with them, rather than sheltered from them.

But there is a more important reason why we may need public school, why it may even be worth coercing parents and children into that system against their will.

Public school forces you to interact with people different from you.

At a public school, you cannot avoid being thrown in the same classroom with students of other races, classes, and religions. This is of course more true if your school system is diverse rather than segregated—and all the more reason that the persistent segregation of many of our schools is horrific—but it’s still somewhat true even in a relatively homogeneous school. I was fortunate enough to go to a public school in Ann Arbor, where there was really quite substantial diversity. But even where there is less diversity, there is still usually some diversity—if not race, then class, or religion.

Certainly any public school has more diversity than homeschooling, where parents have the power to specifically choose precisely which other families their children will interact with, and will almost always choose those of the same race, class, and—above all—religious denomination as themselves.

The result is that homeschooled children often grow up indoctrinated into a dogmatic, narrow-minded worldview, convinced that the particular beliefs they were raised in are the objectively, absolutely correct ones and all others are at best mistaken and at worst outright evil. They are trained to reject conflict and dissent, to not even expose themselves to other people’s ideas, because those are seen as dangerous—corrupting.

Moreover, for most homeschooling parents—not all, but most—this is clearly the express intent. They want to raise their children in a particular set of beliefs. They want to inoculate them against the corrupting influences of other ideas. They are not afraid of their kids being bullied in school; they are afraid of them reading books that contradict the Bible.

This article has the headline “Homeschooled children do not grow up to be more religious”, yet its core finding is exactly the opposite of that:

The Cardus Survey found that homeschooled young adults were not noticeably different in their religious lives from their peers who had attended private religious schools, though they were more religious than peers who had attended public or Catholic schools.

No more religious than private religious schools!? That’s still very religious. No, the fair comparison is to public schools, which clearly show lower rates of religiosity among the same demographics. (The interesting case is Catholic schools; they, it turns out, also churn out atheists with remarkable efficiency; I credit the Jesuit norm of top-quality liberal education.) This is clear evidence that religious homeschooling does make children more religious, and so does most private religious education.

Another finding in that same article sounds good, but is misleading:

Indiana University professor Robert Kunzman, in his careful study of six homeschooling families, found that, at least for his sample, homeschooled children tended to become more tolerant and less dogmatic than their parents as they grew up.


This is probably just regression to the mean. The parents who give their kids religious homeschooling are largely the most dogmatic and intolerant, so we would expect by sheer chance that their kids were less dogmatic and intolerant—but probably still pretty dogmatic and intolerant. (Also, do I have to pount out that n=6 barely even constitutes a study!?) This is like the fact that the sons of NBA players are usually shorter than their fathers—but still quite tall.

Homeschooling is directly linked to a lot of terrible things: Young-Earth Creationism, Christian nationalism, homophobia, and shockingly widespread child abuse.

While most right-wing families don’t homeschool, most homeschooling families are right-wing: Between 60% and 70% of homeschooling families vote Republican in most elections. More left-wing voters are homeschooling now with the recent COVID-driven surge in homeschooling, but the right-wing still retains a strong majority for now.

Of course, there are a growing number of left-wing and non-religious families who use homeschooling. Does this mean that the threat of indoctrination is gone? I don’t think so. I once knew someone who was homeschooled by a left-wing non-religious family and still ended up adopting an extremely narrow-minded extremist worldview—simply a left-wing non-religious one. In some sense a left-wing non-religious narrow-minded extremism is better than a right-wing religious narrow-minded extremism, but it’s still narrow-minded extremism. Whatever such a worldview gets right is mainly by the Stopped Clock Principle. It still misses many important nuances, and is still closed to new ideas and new evidence.

Of course this is not a necessary feature of homeschooling. One absolutely could homeschool children into a worldview that is open-minded and tolerant. Indeed, I’m sure some parents do. But statistics suggest that most do not, and this makes sense: When parents want to indoctrinate their children into narrow-minded worldviews, homeschooling allows them to do that far more effectively than if they had sent their children to public school. Whereas if you want to teach your kids open-mindedness and tolerance, exposing them to a diverse environment makes that easier, not harder.

In other words, the problem is that homeschooling gives parents too much control; in a very real sense, this is too much freedom.

When can freedom be too much? It seems absurd at first. But there are at least two cases where it makes sense to say that someone has too much freedom.

The first is paternalism: Sometimes people really don’t know what’s best for them, and giving them more freedom will just allow them to hurt themselves. This notion is easily abused—it has been abused many times, for example against disabled people and colonized populations. For that reason, we are right to be very skeptical of it when applied to adults of sound mind. But what about children? That’s who we are talking about after all. Surely it’s not absurd to suggest that children don’t always know what’s best for them.

The second is the paradox of tolerance: The freedom to take away other people’s freedom is not a freedom we can afford to protect. And homeschooling that indoctrinates children into narrow-minded worldviews is a threat to other people’s freedom—not only those who will be oppressed by a new generation of extremists, but also the children themselves who are never granted the chance to find their own way.

Both reasons apply in this case: paternalism for the children, the paradox of tolerance for the parents. We have a civic responsibility to ensure that children grow up in a rich and diverse environment, so that they learn open-mindedness and tolerance. This is important enough that we should be willing to impose constraints on freedom in order to achieve it. Democracy cannot survive a citizenry who are molded from birth into narrow-minded extremists. There are parents who want to mold their children that way—and we cannot afford to let them.

From where I’m sitting, that means we need to ban homeschooling, or at least very strictly regulate it.

Israel, Palestine, and the World Bank’s disappointing priorities

PNRJ current events, development economics, inequality, macroeconomics, politics, public policy, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Nov 12 JDN 2460261

Israel and Palestine are once again at war. (There are a disturbing number of different years in which one could have written that sentence.) The BBC has a really nice section of their website dedicated to reporting on various facets of the war. The New York Times also has a section on it, but it seems a little tilted in favor of Israel.

This time, it started with a brutal attack by Hamas, and now Israel has—as usual—overreacted and retaliated with a level of force that is sure to feed the ongoing cycle of extremism. All across social media I see people wanting me to take one side or the other, often even making good points: “Hamas slaughters innocents” and “Israel is a de facto apartheid state” are indeed both important points I agree with. But if you really want to know my ultimate opinion, it’s that this whole thing is fundamentally evil and stupid because human beings are suffering and dying over nothing but lies. All religions are false, most of them are evil, and we need to stop killing each other over them.

Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia are both morally wrong insofar as they involve harming, abusing or discriminating against actual human beings. Let people dress however they want, celebrate whatever holidays they want, read whatever books they want. Even if their beliefs are obviously wrong, don’t hurt them if they aren’t hurting anyone else. But both Judaism and Islam—and Christianity, and more besides—are fundamentally false, wrong, evil, stupid, and detrimental to the advancement of humanity.

That’s the thing that so much of the public conversation is too embarrassed to say; we’re supposed to pretend that they aren’t fighting over beliefs that obviously false. We’re supposed to respect each particular flavor of murderous nonsense, and always find some other cause to explain the conflict. It’s over culture (what culture?); it’s over territory (whose territory?); it’s a retaliation for past conflict (over what?). We’re not supposed to say out loud that all of this violence ultimately hinges upon people believing in nonsense. Even if the conflict wouldn’t disappear overnight if everyone suddenly stopped believing in God—and are we sure it wouldn’t? Let’s try it—it clearly could never have begun, if everyone had started with rational beliefs in the first place.

But I don’t really want to talk about that right now. I’ve said enough. Instead I want to talk about something a little more specific, something less ideological and more symptomatic of systemic structural failures. Something you might have missed amidst the chaos.

The World Bank recently released a report on the situation focused heavily on the looming threat of… higher oil prices. (And of course there has been breathless reporting from various outlets regarding a headline figure of $150 per barrel which is explicitly stated in the report as an unlikely “worst-case scenario”.)

There are two very big reasons why I found this dismaying.


The first, of course, is that there are obviously far more important concerns here than commodity prices. Yes, I know that this report is part of an ongoing series of Commodity Markets Outlook reports, but the fact that this is the sort of thing that the World Bank has ongoing reports about is also saying something important about the World Bank’s priorities. They release monthly commodity forecasts and full Commodity Markets Outlook reports that come out twice a year, unlike the World Development Reports that only come out once a year. The World Bank doesn’t release a twice-annual Conflict Report or a twice-annual Food Security Report. (Even the FAO, which publishes an annual State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report, also publishes a State of Agricultural Marketsreport just as often.)

The second is that, when reading the report, one can clearly tell that whoever wrote it thinks that rising oil and gas prices are inherently bad. They keep talking about all of these negative consequences that higher oil prices could have, and seem utterly unaware of the really enormous upside here: We may finally get a chance to do something about climate change.

You see, one of the most basic reasons why we haven’t been able to fix climate change is that oil is too damn cheap. Its market price has consistently failed to reflect its actual costs. Part of that is due to oil subsidies around the world, which have held the price lower than it would be even in a free market; but most of it is due to the simple fact that pollution and carbon emissions don’t cost money for the people who produce them, even though they do cost the world.

Fortunately, wind and solar power are also getting very cheap, and are now at the point where they can outcompete oil and gas for electrical power generation. But that’s not enough. We need to remove oil and gas from everything: heating, manufacturing, agriculture, transportation. And that is far easier to do if oil and gas suddenly become more expensive and so people are forced to stop using them.

Now, granted, many of the downsides in that report are genuine: Because oil and gas are such vital inputs to so many economic processes, it really is true that making them more expensive will make lots of other things more expensive, and in particular could increase food insecurity by making farming more expensive. But if that’s what we’re concerned about, we should be focusing on that: What policies can we use to make sure that food remains available to all? And one of the best things we could be doing toward that goal is finding ways to make agriculture less dependent on oil.

By focusing on oil prices instead, the World Bank is encouraging the world to double down on the very oil subsidies that are holding climate policy back. Even food subsides—which certainly have their own problems—would be an obviously better solution, and yet they are barely mentioned.

In fact, if you actually read the report, it shows that fears of food insecurity seem unfounded: Food prices are actually declining right now. Grain prices in particular seem to be falling back down remarkably quickly after their initial surge when Russia invaded Ukraine. Of course that could change, but it’s a really weird attitude toward the world to see something good and respond with, “Yes, but it might change!” This is how people with anxiety disorders (and I would know) think—which makes it seem as though much of the economic policy community suffers from some kind of collective equivalent of an anxiety disorder.

There also seems to be a collective sense that higher prices are always bad. This is hardly just a World Bank phenomenon; on the contrary, it seems to pervade all of economic thought, including the most esteemed economists, the most powerful policymakers, and even most of the general population of citizens. (The one major exception seems to be housing, where the sense is that higher prices are always good—even when the world is in a chronic global housing shortage that leaves millions homeless.) But prices can be too low or too high. And oil prices are clearly, definitely too low. Prices should reflect the real cost of production—all the real costs of production. It should cost money to pollute other people’s air.

In fact I think the whole report is largely a nothingburger: Oil prices haven’t even risen all that much so far—we’re still at $80 per barrel last I checked—and the one thing that is true about the so-called Efficient Market Hypothesis is that forecasting future prices is a fool’s errand. But it’s still deeply unsettling to see such intelligent, learned experts so clearly panicking over the mere possibility that there could be a price change which would so obviously be good for the long-term future of humanity.

There is plenty more worth saying about the Israel-Palestine conflict, and in particular what sort of constructive policy solutions we might be able to find that would actually result in any kind of long-term peace. I’m no expert on peace negotiations, and frankly I admit it would probably be a liability that if I were ever personally involved in such a negotiation, I’d be tempted to tell both sides that they are idiots and fanatics. (The headline the next morning: “Israeli and Palestinian Delegates Agree on One Thing: They Hate the US Ambassador”.)

The World Bank could have plenty to offer here, yet so far they’ve been too focused on commodity prices. Their thinking is a little too much ‘bank’ and not enough ‘world’.

It is a bit ironic, though also vaguely encouraging, that there are those within the World Bank itself who recognize this problem: Just a few weeks ago Ajay Banga gave a speech to the World Bank about “a world free of poverty on a livable planet”.

Yes. Those sound like the right priorities. Now maybe you could figure out how to turn that lip service into actual policy.

What most Americans think about government spending

PNRJ politics, public policy , , , , , , , , , ,

Oct 22 JDN 2460240

American public opinion on government spending is a bit of a paradox. People say the government spends too much, but when you ask them what to cut, they don’t want to cut anything in particular.

This is how various demographics answer when you ask if, overall, the government spends “too much”, “too little”, or “about right”:

Democrats have a relatively balanced view, with about a third in each category. Republicans overwhelmingly agree that the government spends too much.

Let’s focus on the general population figures: 60% of Americans believe the government spends too much, 22% think it is about right, and only 16% think it spends too little. (2% must not have answered.)

This question is vague about how much people would like to see the budget change. So it’s possible people only want a moderate decrease. But they must at least want enough to justify not being in the “about right” category, which presumably allows for at least a few percent of wiggle room in each direction.

I think a reasonable proxy of how much people want the budget to change is the net difference in opinion between “too much” and “too little”: So for Democrats this is 34 – 27 = 7%. For the general population it is 60 – 16 = 44%; and for Republicans it is 88 – 6 = 82%.

To make this a useful proxy, I need to scale it appropriately. Republicans in Congress say they want to cut federal spending by $1 trillion per year, so that would be a reduction of 23%. So, for a reasonable proxy, I think ([too little] – [too much])/4 is about the desired amount of change.

Of course, it’s totally possible for 88% of people to agree that the budget should be cut 10%, and none of them to actually want the budget to be cut 22%. But without actually having survey data showing how much people want to cut the budget, the proportion who want it to be cut is the best proxy I have. And it definitely seems like most people want the budget to be cut.

But cut where? What spending do people want to actually reduce?

Not much, it turns out:

Overwhelming majorities want to increase spending on education, healthcare, social security, infrastructure, Medicare, and assistance to the poor. The plurality want to increase spending on border security, assistance for childcare, drug rehabilitation, the environment, and law enforcement. Overall opinion on military spending and scientific research seems to be that it’s about right, with some saying too high and others too low. That’s… almost the entire budget.

This AP NORC poll found only three areas with strong support for cuts: assistance to big cities, space exploration, and assistance to other countries.

The survey just asked about “the government”, so people may be including opinions on state and local spending as well as federal spending. But let’s just focus for now on federal spending.

Here is what the current budget looks like, divided as closely as I could get it into the same categories that the poll asked about:

The federal government accounts for only a tiny portion of overall government spending on education, so for this purpose I’m just going to ignore that category; anything else would be far too misleading. I had to separately look up border security, foreign aid, space exploration, and scientific research, as they are normally folded into other categories. I decided to keep the medical research under “health” and military R&D under “military”, so the “scientific research” includes all other sciences—and as you’ll note, it’s quite small.

“Regional Development” includes but is by no means limited to aid to big cities; in fact, most of it goes to rural areas. With regard to federal spending, “Transportation” is basically synonymous with “Infrastructure”, so I’ll treat those as equivalent. Federal spending directly on environmental protection is so tiny that I couldn’t even make a useful category for it; for this purpose, I guess I’ll just assume it’s most of “Other” (though it surely isn’t).

As you can see, the lion’s share of the federal budget goes to three things: healthcare (including Medicare), Social Security, and the military. (As Krugman is fond of putting it: “The US government is an insurance company with an army.”)

Assistance to the poor is also a major category, and as well it should be. Debt interest is also pretty substantial, especially now that interest rates have increased, but that’s not really optional; the global financial system would basically collapse if we ever stopped paying that. The only realistic way to bring that down is to balance the budget so that we don’t keep racking up more debt.

After that… it’s all pretty small, relatively speaking. I mean, these are still tens of billions of dollars. But the US government is huge. When you spend $1.24 trillion (that’s $1,240 billion) on Social Security, that $24 billion for space exploration really doesn’t seem that big.

So, that’s what the budget actually looks like. What do people want it to look like? Well on the one hand, they seem to want to cut it. My admittedly very rough estimate suggests they want to cut it about 11%, which would reduce the total from $4.3 trillion to $3.8 trillion. That’s what they say if you ask about the budget as a whole.

But what if we listen to what they say about particular budget categories? Using my same rough estimate, people want to increase spending on healthcare by 12%, spending on Social Security by 14%, and so on.

The resulting new budget looks like this:

Please note two things:

  1. The overall distribution of budget priorities has not substantially changed.
  2. The total amount of spending is in fact moderately higher.

This new budget would be disastrous for Ukraine, painful for NASA, and pleasant for anyone receiving Social Security benefits; but our basic budget outlook would be unchanged. Total spending would rise to $4.6 trillion, about $300 billion more than what we are currently spending.

The things people say they want to cut wouldn’t make a difference: We could stop all space missions immediately and throw Ukraine completely under the bus, and it wouldn’t make a dent in our deficit.

This leaves us with something of a paradox: If you ask them in general what they want to do with the federal budget, the majority of Americans say they want to cut it, often drastically. But if you ask them about any particular budget category, they mostly agree that things are okay, or even want them to be increased. Moreover, it is some of the largest categories of spending—particularly healthcare and Social Security—that often see the most people asking for increases.

I think this tells us some good news and some bad news.

The bad news is that most Americans are quite ignorant about how government money is actually spent. They seem to imagine that huge amounts are frittered away frivolously on earmarks; they think space exploration is far more expensive than it is; they wildly overestimate how much we give in foreign aid; they clearly don’t understand the enormous benefits of funding basic scientific research. Most people seem to think that there is some enormous category of totally wasted money that could easily be saved through more efficient spending—and that just doesn’t seem to be the case. Maybe government spending could be made more efficient, but if so, we need an actual plan for doing that. We can’t just cut budgets and hope for a miracle.

The good news is that our political system, for all of its faults, actually seems to have resulted in a government budget that broadly reflects the actual priorities of our citizenry. On budget categories people like, such as Social Security and Medicare, we are already spending a huge amount. On budget categories people dislike, such as earmarks and space exploration, we are already spending very little. We basically already have the budget most Americans say they want to have.

What does this mean for balancing the budget and keeping the national debt under control?

It means we have to raise taxes. There just isn’t anything left to cut that wouldn’t be wildly unpopular.

This shouldn’t really be shocking. The US government already spends less as a proportion of GDP than most other First World countries [note: I’m using 2019 figures because recent years were distorted by COVID]. Ireland’s figures are untrustworthy due to their inflated leprechaun GDP; so the only unambiguously First World country that clearly has lower government spending than the US is Switzerland. We spend about 38%, which is still high by global standards—but as well it should be, we’re incredibly rich. And this is quite a bit lower than the 41% they spend in the UK or the 45% they spend in Germany, let alone the 49% they spend in Sweden or the whopping 55% they spend in France.

Of course, Americans really don’t like paying taxes either. But at some point, we’re just going to have to decide: Do we want fewer services, more debt, or more taxes? Because those are really our only options. I for one think we can handle more taxes.

How will AI affect inequality?

PNRJ current events, ethics, futurism, inequality, public policy , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Oct 15 JDN 2460233

Will AI make inequality worse, or better? Could it do a bit of both? Does it depend on how we use it?

This is of course an extremely big question. In some sense it is the big economic question of the 21st century. The difference between the neofeudalist cyberpunk dystopia of Neuromancer and the social democratic utopia of Star Trek just about hinges on whether AI becomes a force for higher or lower inequality.

Krugman seems quite optimistic: Based on forecasts by Goldman Sachs, AI seems poised to automate more high-paying white-collar jobs than low-paying blue-collar ones.

But, well, it should be obvious that Goldman Sachs is not an impartial observer here. They do have reasons to get their forecasts right—their customers are literally invested in those forecasts—but like anyone who immensely profits from the status quo, they also have a broader agenda of telling the world that everything is going great and there’s no need to worry or change anything.

And when I look a bit closer at their graphs, it seems pretty clear that they aren’t actually answering the right question. They estimate an “exposure to AI” coefficient (somehow; their methodology is not clearly explained and lots of it is proprietary), and if it’s between 10% and 49% they call it “complementary” while if it’s 50% or above they call it “replacement”.

But that is not how complements and substitutes work. It isn’t a question of “how much of the work can be done by machine” (whatever that means). It’s a question of whether you will still need the expert human.

It could be that the machine does 90% of the work, but you still need a human being there to tell it what to do, and that would be complementary. (Indeed, this basically is how finance works right now, and I see no reason to think it will change any time soon.) Conversely, it could be that the machine only does 20% of the work, but that was the 20% that required expert skill, and so a once comfortable high-paying job can now be replaced by low-paid temp workers. (This is more or less what’s happening at Amazon warehouses: They are basically managed by AI, but humans still do most of the actual labor, and get paid peanuts for it.)

For their category “computer and mathematical”, they call it “complementary”, and I agree: We are still going to need people who can code. We’re still going to need people who know how to multiply matrices. We’re still going to need people who understand search algorithms. Indeed, if the past is any indicator, we’re going to need more and more of those people, and they’re going to keep getting paid higher and higher salaries. Someone has to make the AI, after all.

Yet I’m not quite so sure about the “mathematical” part in many cases. We may not need people who can solve differential equations, actually: maybe a few to design the algorithms, but honestly even then, a software program with a simple finite-difference algorithm can often solve much more interesting problems than one with a full-fledged differential equation solver, because one of the dirty secrets of differential equations is that for some of the most important ones (like the Navier-Stokes Equations), we simply do not know how to solve them. Once you have enough computing power, you often can stop trying to be clever and just brute-force the damn thing.

Yet for “transportation and material movement”—that is, trucking—Goldman Sachs confidently forecasts mostly “no automation” with a bit of “complementary”. Yet this year—not at some distant point in the future, not in some sci-fi novel, this year in the actual world—the Governor of California already vetoed a bill that would have required automated trucks to have human drivers. The trucks aren’t on the roads yet—but if we already are making laws about them, they’re going to be, soon. (State legislatures are not known for their brilliant foresight or excessive long-term thinking.) And if the law doesn’t require them to have human drivers, they probably won’t; which means that hundreds of thousands of long-haul truckers will suddenly be out of work.

It’s also important to differentiate between different types of jobs that may fall under the same category or industry.

Neurosurgeons are not going anywhere, and improved robotics will only allow them to perform better, safer laparoscopic surgeries. Nor are nurses going anywhere, because some things just need an actual person physically there with the patient. But general practictioners, psychotherapists, and even radiologists are already seeing many of their tasks automated. So is “medicine” being automated or not? That depends what sort of medicine you mean. And yet it clearly means an increase in inequality, because it’s the middle-paying jobs (like GPs) that are going away, while the high-paying jobs (like neurosurgeons) and the low-paying jobs (like nurses) that remain.

Likewise, consider “legal services”, which is one of the few industries that Goldman Sachs thinks will be substantially replaced by AI. Are high-stakes trial lawyers like Sam Bernstein getting replaced? Clearly not. Nor would I expect most corporate lawyers to disappear. Human lawyers will still continue to perform at least a little bit better than AI law systems, and the rich will continue to use them, because a few million dollars for a few percentage points better odds of winning is absolutely worth it when billions of dollars are on the line. So which law services are going to get replaced by AI? First, routine legal questions, like how to renew your work visa or set up a living will—it’s already happening. Next, someone will probably decide that public defenders aren’t worth the cost and start automating the legal defenses of poor people who get accused of crimes. (And to be honest, it may not be much worse than how things currently are in the public defender system.) The advantage of such a change is that it will most likely bring court costs down—and that is desperately needed. But it may also tilt the courts even further in favor of the rich. It may also make it even harder to start a career as a lawyer, cutting off the bottom of the ladder.

Or consider “management”, which Goldman Sachs thinks will be “complementary”. Are CEOs going to get replaced by AI? No, because the CEOs are the ones making that decision. Certainly this is true for any closely-held firm: No CEO is going to fire himself. Theoretically, if shareholders and boards of directors pushed hard enough, they might be able to get a CEO of a publicly-traded corporation ousted in favor of an AI, and if the world were really made of neoclassical rational agents, that might actually happen. But in the real world, the rich have tremendous solidarity for each other (and only each other), and very few billionaires are going to take aim at other billionaires when it comes time to decide whose jobs should be replaced. Yet, there are a lot of levels of management below the CEO and board of directors, and many of those are already in the process of being replaced: Instead of relying on the expert judgment of a human manager, it’s increasingly common to develop “performance metrics”, feed them into an algorithm, and use that result to decide who gets raises and who gets fired. It all feels very “objective” and “impartial” and “scientific”—and usually ends up being both dehumanizing and ultimately not even effective at increasing profits. At some point, many corporations are going to realize that their middle managers aren’t actually making any important decisions anymore, and they’ll feed that into the algorithm, and it will tell them to fire the middle managers.

Thus, even though we think of “medicine”, “law”, and “management” as high-paying careers, the effect of AI is largely going to be to increase inequality within those industries. It isn’t the really high-paid doctors, managers, and lawyers who are going to get replaced.

I am therefore much less optimistic than Krugman about this. I do believe there are many ways that technology, including artificial intelligence, could be used to make life better for everyone, and even perhaps one day lead us into a glorious utopian future.

But I don’t see most of the people who have the authority to make important decisions for our society actually working towards such a future. They seem much more interested in maximizing their own profits or advancing narrow-minded ideologies. (Or, as most right-wing political parties do today: Advancing narrow-minded ideologies about maximizing the profits of rich people.) And if we simply continue on the track we’ve been on, our future is looking a lot more like Neuromancer than it is like Star Trek.

AI and the “generalization faculty”

PNRJ cognitive science, computer science, critique of neoclassical economics, current events, ethics, futurism, inequality, public policy , , , , , , , , , ,

Oct 1 JDN 2460219

The phrase “artificial intelligence” (AI) has now become so diluted by overuse that we needed to invent a new term for its original meaning. That term is now “artificial general intelligence” (AGI). In the 1950s, AI meant the hypothetical possibility of creating artificial minds—machines that could genuinely think and even feel like people. Now it means… pathing algorithms in video games and chatbots? The goalposts seem to have moved a bit.

It seems that AGI has always been 20 years away. It was 20 years away 50 years ago, and it will probably be 20 years away 50 years from now. Someday it will really be 20 years away, and then, 20 years after that, it will actually happen—but I doubt I’ll live to see it. (XKCD also offers some insight here: “It has not been conclusively proven impossible.”)

We make many genuine advances in computer technology and software, which have profound effects—both good and bad—on our lives, but the dream of making a person out of silicon always seems to drift ever further into the distance, like a mirage on the desert sand.

Why is this? Why do so many people—even, perhaps especially,experts in the field—keep thinking that we are on the verge of this seminal, earth-shattering breakthrough, and ending up wrong—over, and over, and over again? How do such obviously smart people keep making the same mistake?

I think it may be because, all along, we have been laboring under the tacit assumption of a generalization faculty.

What do I mean by that? By “generalization faculty”, I mean some hypothetical mental capacity that allows you to generalize your knowledge and skills across different domains, so that once you get good at one thing, it also makes you good at other things.

This certainly seems to be how humans think, at least some of the time: Someone who is very good at chess is likely also pretty good at go, and someone who can drive a motorcycle can probably also drive a car. An artist who is good at portraits is probably not bad at landscapes. Human beings are, in fact, able to generalize, at least sometimes.

But I think the mistake lies in imagining that there is just one thing that makes us good at generalizing: Just one piece of hardware or software that allows you to carry over skills from any domain to any other. This is the “generalization faculty”—the imagined faculty that I think we do not have, indeed I think does not exist.

Computers clearly do not have the capacity to generalize. A program that can beat grandmasters at chess may be useless at go, and self-driving software that works on one type of car may fail on another, let alone a motorcycle. An art program that is good at portraits of women can fail when trying to do portraits of men, and produce horrific Daliesque madness when asked to make a landscape.

But if they did somehow have our generalization capacity, then, once they could compete with us at some things—which they surely can, already—they would be able to compete with us at just about everything. So if it were really just one thing that would let them generalize, let them leap from AI to AGI, then suddenly everything would change, almost overnight.

And so this is how the AI hype cycle goes, time and time again:

  1. A computer program is made that does something impressive, something that other computer programs could not do, perhaps even something that human beings are not very good at doing.
  2. If that same prowess could be generalized to other domains, the result would plainly be something on par with human intelligence.
  3. Therefore, the only thing this computer program needs in order to be sapient is a generalization faculty.
  4. Therefore, there is just one more step to AGI! We are nearly there! It will happen any day now!

And then, of course, despite heroic efforts, we are unable to generalize that program’s capabilities except in some very narrow way—even decades after having good chess programs, getting programs to be good at go was a major achievement. We are unable to find the generalization faculty yet again. And the software becomes yet another “AI tool” that we will use to search websites or make video games.

For there never was a generalization faculty to be found. It always was a mirage in the desert sand.

Humans are in fact spectacularly good at generalizing, compared to, well, literally everything else in the known universe. Computers are terrible at it. Animals aren’t very good at it. Just about everything else is totally incapable of it. So yes, we are the best at it.

Yet we, in fact, are not particularly good at it in any objective sense.

In experiments, people often fail to generalize their reasoning even in very basic ways. There’s a famous one where we try to get people to make an analogy between a military tactic and a radiation treatment, and while very smart, creative people often get it quickly, most people are completely unable to make the connection unless you give them a lot of specific hints. People often struggle to find creative solutions to problems even when those solutions seem utterly obvious once you know them.

I don’t think this is because people are stupid or irrational. (To paraphrase Sydney Harris: Compared to what?) I think it is because generalization is hard.

People tend to be much better at generalizing within familiar domains where they have a lot of experience or expertise; this shows that there isn’t just one generalization faculty, but many. We may have a plethora of overlapping generalization faculties that apply across different domains, and can learn to improve some over others.

But it isn’t just a matter of gaining more expertise. Highly advanced expertise is in fact usually more specialized—harder to generalize. A good amateur chess player is probably a good amateur go player, but a grandmaster chess player is rarely a grandmaster go player. Someone who does well in high school biology probably also does well in high school physics, but most biologists are not very good physicists. (And lest you say it’s simply because go and physics are harder: The converse is equally true.)

Humans do seem to have a suite of cognitive tools—some innate hardware, some learned software—that allows us to generalize our skills across domains. But even after hundreds of millions of years of evolving that capacity under the highest possible stakes, we still basically suck at it.

To be clear, I do not think it will take hundreds of millions of years to make AGI—or even millions, or even thousands. Technology moves much, much faster than evolution. But I would not be surprised if it took centuries, and I am confident it will at least take decades.

But we don’t need AGI for AI to have powerful effects on our lives. Indeed, even now, AI is already affecting our lives—in mostly bad ways, frankly, as we seem to be hurtling gleefully toward the very same corporatist cyberpunk dystopia we were warned about in the 1980s.

A lot of technologies have done great things for humanity—sanitation and vaccines, for instance—and even automation can be a very good thing, as increased productivity is how we attained our First World standard of living. But AI in particular seems best at automating away the kinds of jobs human beings actually find most fulfilling, and worsening our already staggering inequality. As a civilization, we really need to ask ourselves why we got automated writing and art before we got automated sewage cleaning or corporate management. (We should also ask ourselves why automated stock trading resulted in even more money for stock traders, instead of putting them out of their worthless parasitic jobs.) There are technological reasons for this, yes; but there are also cultural and institutional ones. Automated teaching isn’t far away, and education will be all the worse for it.

To change our lives, AI doesn’t have to be good at everything. It just needs to be good at whatever we were doing to make a living. AGI may be far away, but the impact of AI is already here.

Indeed, I think this quixotic quest for AGI, and all the concern about how to control it and what effects it will have upon our society, may actually be distracting from the real harms that “ordinary” “boring” AI is already having upon our society. I think a Terminator scenario, where the machines rapidly surpass our level of intelligence and rise up to annihilate us, is quite unlikely. But a scenario where AI puts millions of people out of work with insufficient safety net, triggering economic depression and civil unrest? That could be right around the corner.

Frankly, all it may take is getting automated trucks to work, which could be just a few years. There are nearly 4 million truck drivers in the United States—a full percentage point of employment unto itself. And the Governor of California just vetoed a bill that would require all automated trucks to have human drivers. From an economic efficiency standpoint, his veto makes perfect sense: If the trucks don’t need drivers, why require them? But from an ethical and societal standpoint… what do we do with all the truck drivers!?