#250YEARS: America's abundance

 

"America’s abundance was not created by public sacrifices to 'the common good,' but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes. They did not starve the people to pay for America’s industrialisation. They gave the people better jobs, higher wages, and cheaper goods with every new machine they invented, with every scientific discovery or technological advance — and thus the whole country was moving forward and profiting, not suffering, every step of the way."

~ Ayn Rand from her essay 'Theory and Practice,' collected in her book Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal

Choosing careers in an AI world

The daughter of a Microsoft AI tech bloke was choosing careers, so he ranked them. 

First problem: how would she even get started?

The most important thing to understand [he discovered] is also the most counterintuitive. AI is not demolishing careers from the top. It is removing the bottom rungs of the ladder first.
    Think about how almost every professional career develops. A “Big Four” trainee at the accountancy firms Deloitte, KPMG, EY or PwC reconciles spreadsheets and drafts standard documents. A junior solicitor reviews contracts. A graduate analyst builds financial models. These are the apprenticeship stages. They are how young professionals develop the judgment that eventually makes them irreplaceable.
    AI performs many of those tasks faster and more cheaply.

So that's a potential problem for the first in modern history: a whole generation graduating without a clear way to become experienced. An apprenticeship without the material on which to learn.

So is it time to give up?

Robots are going to take your job? No doubt. 

What if robots take all the jobs?  Hint: They can't.

Comparative advantage tells us that "new kinds of jobs will appear, as they always have when technology advances."

Ironically, most of the jobs people are afraid of losing -- such as programming jobs or truck-driving jobs -- were themselves created by technological advances....
    What new types of job will be created? I can no more project that than a man in 1956 could have projected that today there would be jobs in something called “social media”; or that money can be made by driving for Uber and by renting out living space through AirBnB.

One estimate is that alongside all the jobs displaced, around 170 million will be created. "The net picture is not collapse. It is transformation. And transformations reward the families who understand them early."

What's to understand, says the tech bloke, is the four things in which human beings do have a comparative advantage over any machine: Emotional intelligence. Creative vision. Physical dexterity. Ethical judgment. Based on that insight, the tech bloke ranked careers 

across nine categories including emotional intelligence, creative thinking and vulnerability to AI tools. A score closer to 100 per cent means the role depends heavily on things AI cannot replicate. A score closer to 35 per cent means much of the work is already within reach of automation.

Biggest winners: 

• healthcare 
• education
• skilled trades
• creative industries (for genuine creatives)
• tech, finance and law (for those at the level required to exercise judgement)
• diplomacy

Biggest losers are box-ticking jobs, "where tasks are most predictable and repeatable" -- oddly those where intelligence is least demanded:

• paralegal
• accountant
• data entry
• admin

And in this age of transformation, the biggest new career paths might just be something sitting "in the intersections between disciplines" -- something requiring "deep knowledge in a substantive field combined with genuine AI fluency."  A good metaphor for what that looks like, suggests author Derek Thompson, is how Alexander Dumas used to write his fiction, with a zillion research assistants and a writing programme looking like a small factory, "industrialising what he saw as the boring parts of his creativity—research structure, workflow—freeing his brain to do the thermonuclear storytelling." In other words, putting the "AI‑accelerated firehose of information" in the service of creativity, without losing that spark along the way.

And after all that, what did our AI-engineer's daughter decide to do in the end? "After many dinner table conversations, Thea said something that stopped me cold: 'Diplomacy cannot be outsourced to robots, Dad.' Instead of finance she chose to do international relations: learning how humans negotiate, build trust and resolve conflict. Every one of those skills is in the 90th percentile for AI resistance."

His final words of advice:

We are facing a particular moment in history. It is not one that will announce itself. There is no letter from school, no official notification that the world your child is preparing for has quietly become a different one.
    The families who will look back on this decade without regret are the ones who had the conversation early and trusted that a child who understands the world they are entering is far better equipped than one protected from it. Here are some first steps:
    If your child is 10 to 12, build the foundations: teach them to be curious by reading carefully and arguing a point. Curiosity is the hardest quality to automate.
    If your child is 13 to 15, have one conversation this week. Not a lecture. Ask what they think AI is doing to the world. Help them begin using AI tools, not to do homework for them, but to understand what these systems cannot do. That understanding is the first superpower.
    If your child is 16 to 18 and making real choices, look hard at where the four human superpowers appear in the careers they are considering. AI fluency is not optional any more. The wage premium for those who have it is visible and growing fast. “Wait and see” is not a neutral position. It is a decision. The data says it is the wrong one.

NB: The Economist magazine's analysis suggests AI may already be harming some graduates’ job prospects

We found that graduates in fields more exposed to AI have suffered markedly worse outcomes. Between 2022 and 2024 graduates in the least-exposed quintile—studying subjects such as education, philosophy and civil engineering—saw their average full-time employment rate fall by just 1.5 percentage points. Those in the most exposed quintile—including computer science, computer engineering and information science—suffered a 6.6 percentage-point drop (see chart 1 above). ... the trend continued for the class of 2025 (see chart 2 below).

RELATED:

"Which jobs can AI learn to do? We examine this for every occupation in the US economy."

What Jobs Can AI Learn? Measuring Exposure by Reinforcement Learning - CORNELL UNIVERSITY RESEARCH PAPER, 4 May 2026 

"We investigate the potential implications of large language models (LLMs) on the U.S. labour market."

An Early Look at the Labor Market Impact Potential of Large LanguageModels - UNI OF PENNSYLVANIA, Aug 2023

 

"AI is creating a crisis of authenticity."

"Like it or not, generative AI is becoming increasingly embedded in the process of seeking information, sharing ideas, and producing images. ...

"But I’m not sold on the narrative that generative AI marks the democratisation of communication, a new creative renaissance, or even a particularly good thing for productivity properly defined. As Neil Postman put it almost thirty years ago: “The question, ‘What will a new technology do?’ is no more important than the question, ‘What will a new technology undo?’” And given that AI is frequently pitched as a replacement for any human speech mediated through a screen, it stands to undo quite a lot. What’s at stake is nothing less than authenticity itself. ... AI is creating a crisis of authenticity.

"Why should we care? Because authenticity is foundational to trust, the thread that ties human relationships together ...

"[R]egardless of [a message's] content, knowing that [the sender] did not engage in the deliberative process of writing makes the message ring hollow: No matter how well-intentioned the messenger, it is not ultimately their message. It’s the seed of a thought filtered through an algorithm developed by a tech company. And you wouldn’t be wrong to feel demoralised about that. ...

"Trust does not simply materialise out of thin air ... It requires trustworthiness. ... [W]e might say that in a high-trust space, a well-adjusted person would presume authenticity unless given good reason not to. Unfortunately, knowing AI use is widespread, rarely disclosed, and often occurs without regard to context, it’s much harder to assume authenticity in online communication. ...

"[J]ust because authenticity is difficult to quantify, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t value it at all."

~ Talia Barnes from her article 'You Can’t Trust Anything Anyone Writes'

Why good ideas are oft-born as twins

"We often praise ideas for their originality and criticise other ideas for being insufficiently novel. So, what do we make of the fact that most important breakthroughs in sci-tech history—the telegraph, telescope, and transistor; the laws of calculus and gravity—were 'simultaneously invented' by independent people around the same time? (Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray notoriously filed for a telephone patent on the same day.)
    "Which is to say: Some of the most important ideas in the world weren't 'new' when the inventor we credit came up with them.
    "It's even more uncanny than that. Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace didn't just independently come up with the basics of evolution. They both cited the exact same essay—Malthus's infamous 'Principle of Population'—as inspiration for thinking about species evolution as a competitive game where unforgiving environments shape genetic survival. As @DavidEpstein writes in today's essay, adapted from his ... new book Inside the Box, the frequency of idea twins in history suggests that once a problem is framed by a generation of thinkers with sufficient clarity and precision, the answer almost 'wants' to be found."

~ @Derek Thompson summarising David Epstein's essay 'Why Your Best Ideas Aren’t Original'

"All abstract knowledge depends, for its meaning and validity, on other knowledge that sets the context for it. For example, algebra depends on addition, and calculus depends on algebra. The more complex the knowledge, the more extensive the knowledge that must precede it.
    "One major aspect of the fact that knowledge depends on other knowledge—the aspect most relevant to and most violated in education—is that more abstract knowledge depends on less abstract knowledge. This is the principle of the hierarchy of knowledge."

~ Lisa Van Damme from her article 'The Hierarchy of Knowledge: The Most Neglected Issue in Education'

"Valid concepts [once discovered] function as a 'green light' to induction, permitting [further] generalisations from observed particulars, while invalid concepts block or distort the process."

~ summary of the inductive process given in David Harriman's 2011 book The Logical Leap: Induction in Physics & Philosophy

"[I]nherent in this is that concepts are future-looking. A concept is like a policy or a commitment. It’s like forming a file. ... A file, if you have a filing system, does not only organise and condense data that one already has, it does so on the premise of keeping up with this method of organisation. ... 
    "[T]o form a concept [then] is to institute a policy of applying what one knows from the study of each instance to the study of each other instance, to regard the instances as interchangeable, at least within a certain context, within a certain, you know, varying in degree. And this policy applies to information yet to be discovered, as well as to the information one already has ..."

~ Gregory Salmieri from his 2006 essay 'Objectivist Epistemology in Outline'

What if robots take all the jobs? Hint: They can't.

"People have it all wrong" about AI and robots, says philosopher Harry Binswanger. 

Robots are going to take your job? No doubt.

What if robots take all the jobs?  Hint: They can't.

You may not keep this job. But your next one will pay so much more.  How can we know that?  Because, he argues, "We’re all going to get richer. The more that AI and robots can do for us, the richer we will get."

How so? Because AI and robots makes everyone’s labour far more productive -- and the result will be more goods produced, and hence "more wealth in the whole economy."

More wealth means more savings. More savings means more investment. And "more investment means more goods produced, which means a drop in the cost of living, which means a rise in the standard of living."

But how can he be so sure that if your job is replaced you'll be able to find a new one and "take part in this bonanza?"

The temptation is to answer by finding things robots won’t ever be able to do. “Robots will never be great chefs.” “Robots will never be venture capitalists.” “Robots will never write a first-rate symphony.”

That’s irrelevant. The point is that even if AI and robots could do everything better than any human being, that would enhance, not undermine, the value of human labour.

Why? The explanation comes from applying here an important truth discovered two centuries ago. In 1817, the great English economist David Ricardo identified “The Law of Comparative Advantage.”

Ricardo's Law of Comparative Advantage explains that no matter how poor you country may be at producing stuff, if both you and others specialise in what they each do best then, at the end of the day, we are all better off. It's best, for example, if Scotland trades whisky with France for claret and burgundy, rather than the other way around. ("It is the maxim of every prudent master of a family,"explained Adam Smith, "never to attempt to make at home what it will cost him more to make than to buy.")

Equally, the best way for New Zealanders to get cars and electronics is not to try making cars and electronics ourselves, but to process grass into milk powder, meat and wool so that New Zealanders can trade for those fancy devices. And when we do, we're all better off. ( If you're struggling with the concept, because it is remarkably subtle, PJ O 'Rourke's short explanation is one of the funniest on record, and undoubtedly the only one using Courtney Love to help explain things.)

Recognising that self-same principle of Comparative Advantage applies between people as it does to countries, economist Ludwig Von Mises expanded Ricardo's Law to make it "one of the most beautiful laws of the universe." Calling it the Law of Association he showed that specialisation allows even the less productive to benefit from working with the more productive -- or what his student George Reisman characterises as 'what the productive cleaner gains from the genius inventor.'

Even if the inventor can clean faster than a given cleaner, it still pays him to hire that cleaner because off-loading the cleaning work saves him time. He can then use that saved time in the area of his comparative advantage: inventing and selling more stuff.

Likewise, even if there comes a time when the robots can do everything better and faster than human beings, [even] more wealth will be produced if robots and humans each specialise in what they do best. Super-robots would produce more for us if we save them from having to do things that are less productive [for them].

(Of course we won’t be trading with robots: robots own nothing. Robots are owned by people, and those people will be paid for selling robots or for renting them out, just as you can rent power tools from Home Depot today.)

The Law of Comparative Advantage means humans will never run out of productive work to do. There will always be tasks that you don’t want to waste your rented or owned robots’ time in doing.

If you’ve got a robot building you a swimming pool, you don’t want him to stop to cook you dinner.

A chainsaw is a lot more efficient than a knife at cutting. But you don’t use a chainsaw to slice a loaf of bread. Particularly not if that chainsaw is being used by a robot to clear a place for a tennis court in your backyard.

So, rather than panic over “the rise of the machines,” let’s bear in mind the Law of Comparative Advantage ....

And let's recognise that "even with science-fictional super-robots, there will still be money changing hands and a price-system, just as now. You will still be paid for working in the field of your own comparative advantage.

New kinds of jobs will appear, as they always have when technology advances. Ironically, most of the jobs people are afraid of losing -- such as programming jobs or truck-driving jobs -- were themselves created by technological advances. There used to be an American saying: “Adapt or die.” Having the same kind of job as your father and grandfather did is not the American dream.

What new types of job will be created? I can no more project that than a man in 1956 could have projected that today there would be jobs in something called “social media”; or that money can be made by driving for Uber and by renting out living space through AirBnB.

The robots will make work much easier, more interesting, and much better paid.

Prepare to be enriched.

It's (still) all about the entrepreneur

"The 'AI will code for us' idea always skips over the 90% of the job that isn't coding.

"The real work is translating a vague business need into a precise, testable system. It's architecting something that won't fall over in 6 months. It's debugging a problem that only appears under a specific, bizarre set of conditions.

"Even with a perfect code generator, you still need someone who understands the problem deeply enough to tell it what to build. That part isn't getting automated."

~ Selim Erünkut commenting on the alleged obsolescence of coding [Emphasis mine.]

'The Reverse-Centaur’s Guide to AI'

"Start with what a reverse centaur is. In automation theory, a 'centaur' is a person who is assisted by a machine. You're a human head being carried around on a tireless robot body. Driving a car makes you a centaur, and so does using autocomplete.

"And obviously, a reverse centaur is a machine head on a human body, a person who is serving as a squishy meat appendage for an uncaring machine.

"Like an Amazon delivery driver, who sits in a cabin surrounded by AI cameras, that monitor the driver's eyes and take points off if the driver looks in a proscribed direction, and monitors the driver's mouth because singing isn't allowed on the job, and rats the driver out to the boss if they don't make quota.

"The driver is in that van because the van can't drive itself and can't get a parcel from the curb to your porch. The driver is a peripheral for a van, and the van drives the driver, at superhuman speed, demanding superhuman endurance. But the driver is human, so the van doesn't just use the driver. The van uses the driver up.

"Obviously, it's nice to be a centaur, and it's horrible to be a reverse centaur. There are lots of AI tools that are potentially very centaur-like, but my thesis is that these tools are created and funded for the express purpose of creating reverse-centaurs, which is something none of us want to be. ...

"Tech bosses want us to believe that there is only one way a technology can be used. ... The promise of AI – the promise AI companies make to investors – is that there will be AIs that can do your job ... Now, if AI could do your job, this would still be a problem. We'd have to figure out what to do with all these technologically unemployed people.

"But AI can't do your job. It can help you do your job, but that doesn't mean it's going to save anyone money."

~ Cory Doctorow from his speech 'The Reverse-Centaur’s Guide to Criticising AI'

RELATED:

"You don't work less. You just work the same amount or even more."

~ Frank Landymore, 'Researchers Studied What Happens When Workplaces Seriously Embrace AI, and the Results May Make You Nervous'

"The AI era is one of mythology ... a dynasty of bullshit"

"We are in the dynasty of bullshit, a deceptive epoch where analysts and journalists who are ostensibly burdened with telling the truth feel the need to continue pushing the Gospel According To Jensen. When all of this collapses there must be a reckoning with how little effort was made to truly investigate the things that executives are saying on the television, in press releases, in earnings filings and even on social media, all because the market consensus demanded that The Number Must Continue Going Up.

"The AI era is one of mythology, where billions in GPUs are bought to create supply for imaginary demand, where software is sold based on things it cannot reliably do, where companies that burn billions of dollars are rewarded with glitzy headlines and not an ounce of cynicism, and where those that have pushed back against it have been treated with more skepticism and ire than those who would benefit the most from the propagation of propaganda and outright lies."

~ Ed Zitron from his post 'Mythbusters - AI Edition'

"That’s the real lesson. Market power in technology is temporary because the underlying technology isn’t."

"History, it turns out, didn’t end for Big Tech. ...

"Take Alphabet, which took plenty of flak for its control of the search engine market. Dominance, sure. But forever dominance?

"OpenAI’s new AI-enabled Atlas browser directly threatens Google’s Chrome browser, as well as its search business, by replacing the URL bar with conversational AI. What Washington lawyers couldn’t do to Google, technological competition just might. ...

"The cycle endures: IBM begat Wintel, which begat Google—and now OpenAI is queuing up next. These 'forever companies' are discovering that in tech, forever lasts about 20 years, and the bill for staying that long runs to roughly half a trillion bucks a year. ...

"That’s the real lesson. Market power in technology is temporary because the underlying technology isn’t.

"Even if these winners of the past are also the winners in futurity, they will find themselves utterly transformed by the AI revolution as they provide users with new kinds of value."

~ James Pethokoukis from his post 'The “Forever Company” Myth About Big Tech Didn’t Last Forever'

"The doomsday mindset is causing widespread anxiety in young people

"Human beings have the unique ability to innovate their way out of problems, creating technological solutions that benefit both people and the planet. Unfortunately, children today are often bombarded with messages of an impending apocalypse that can only be warded off by lowering living standards and embracing 'degrowth.' ...

"Even popular culture sometimes promotes this apocalyptic degrowth mindset to children. ...

"Not only is the embrace of degrowth misguided, but research suggests that this doomsday mindset is causing widespread anxiety in young people. ... [T]hat anxiety is international: A study from 2021, surveying 10,000 children and young people aged 16–25 in 10 countries, found that 59 percent of respondents were very or extremely worried about climate change, and more than 45 percent of respondents said those feelings negatively affected daily life and basic functioning.

Human beings have the unique ability to innovate their way out of problems, creating technological solutions that benefit both people and the planet. Unfortunately, children today are often bombarded with messages of an impending apocalypse that can only be warded off by lowering living standards and embracing 'degrowth'...

"Instead of rushing to solutions that require lowering living standards via coercive government mandates or expensive taxpayer-funded subsidies, we should focus on the freedom to make technological advances that raise our standard of living while also mitigating environmental harm. An advantage of that approach is that it may also improve the mental health of young people..."

~ Chelsea Follett from her post 'The Kids Need Optimism, Not Doom and Degrowth'

The world's smallest violin

You know when they say, when you're whinging about some First-World Problem, that "here's the world's smallest violin playing for you."

And you know how you've wondered how small that might be?

Well, your question has now been answered. 

The answer is it's about the thickness of a human hair. Actually, even smaller than that. And it's made of platinum. 

Well done to the physicists at Loughborough University.

"Most people won’t pay for AI voluntarily"

"Most people won’t pay for AI voluntarily—just 8% according to a recent survey. ...

"Before proceeding let me ask a simple question: Has there ever been a major innovation that helped society, but only 8% of the public would pay for it?

"That’s never happened before in human history. Everybody wanted electricity in their homes. Everybody wanted a radio. Everybody wanted a phone. Everybody wanted a refrigerator. Everybody wanted a TV set. Everybody wanted the Internet.

"They wanted it. They paid for it. They enjoyed it.

"AI isn’t like that. People distrust it or even hate it—and more so with each passing month. ...

"When AI is added to a product, people want it LESS. Survey of 4,000 consumers show that only 18% prefer AI. Everyone else opposes it, or is indifferent.

"Experts are now warning companies that their mad rush to adopt AI may erode customer trust and hurt sales. ...

"The 'Wall Street Journal' concludes that companies should “beware of promoting AI in products.”

"And it’s more than just products and services. People don’t even want AI in texts or documents of any sort. ...

"Judging by the current situation, tech companies will move quickly. They don’t ask for permission. It just happens.

"What’s most shocking is that they have done all this before making AI reliable. Every day I hear accounts of stupid and ridiculous things coming from bots. You would think they would fix this mess before forcing AI on us.

"But here’s the harsh reality. They won’t fix it, because they don’t know how."

~ Ted Gioia from his post 'The Force-Feeding of AI on an Unwilling Public'

"What is troubling isn’t just the idiocy of the legislation, but that Luxon didn’t instinctively understand that it wasn’t the role of the state to monitor children’s screen time."

"The perverse outcomes resulting from adults seeking to protect children range from the mildly idiotic ... to the morally questionable ... Last week our current Prime Minister and the MP for Tukituki (Hastings), Catherine Wedd, added to this list with a proposal to prevent those under 16 from accessing social media.

"This will prove popular. Foolish ideas often are. Leadership is knowing when to say no ...

"Professor Jonathan Haidt has compiled compelling research on the malign impact of social media on young minds. [In actual fact, not at all compelling - Ed] ...

"Thanks to the work of Haidt and others, responsible — and even irresponsible — parents know of this issue and act accordingly. If we were governed by a party that believed in Individual freedom and choice, personal responsibility and limited government, that is where this story would end. ... [Instead] girls being mean to each other on Snapchat requires central government legislation ...

"What is troubling isn’t [just] the idiocy of the legislation, but that Luxon didn’t instinctively understand that it wasn’t the role of the state to monitor children’s screen time. ..."

~ Damien Grant from his column 'Banning under 16s from social media will prove popular. Foolish ideas often are'

"What we have here is (mostly) a failure to communicate"

 

"Below are 40 journal entries on the current state of public discourse.
    "Like the captain said in 'Cool Hand Luke', what we have here is (mostly) a failure to communicate.
    "But we’re now failing to communicate in totally new ways.

"1. All digital communication is reverting back to primitive ways. The emoji is like the hieroglyphic. The meme is akin to the cave painting. The text message is a throwback to the telegraph.
    "So it’s no surprise that people are scrolling on their phones. I can almost hear the rustle of the papyrus.

"2.Why do I see all these homemade videos of people talking into the camera while sitting alone in their cars?
    "They’re not even driving—just standing still. They’re literally going nowhere.
    "Is an empty automobile the new town square? ...

"3. Alexander Graham Bell would be shocked. The phone is now a device you use to speak into the void. You talk to nobody at all.
    "But we still keep talking.

"4. The most popular social media platforms will be those that allow people to avoid responsibility for what they say.
    "Every society has institutions of this sort. In ancient times, it was the bacchanalia. For us it is online shitposting and the burner account.

"5. Consider the etymology of the word ‘dictator’—from the Latin dictare (which translates as ‘to say often’). It thus designates a person who talks obsessively—repeating the same thing over and over.
    "It’s curious that dictators aren’t defined by their deeds, merely their monotonous talk. The assertion of power through repetitive speaking eliminates the needs for listening, or (at an extreme) even for action."

~ Ted Gioia from his post '40 Observations on Public Discourse'

Jeremy Clarkson v Elon Musk [updated]

Elon Musk (a sensitive wee chap) sued Jeremy Clarkson back in 2008 for a review of a Tesla. Clarkson won. Now, he's flipping the bird as well.

“The sudden pan-global decision to uncrowdfund Tesla and to break the door mirrors off as many of its cars as possible is not funny. But also, it’s kinda hilarious. Especially if you’re me. ...
    “Things are so bad that a friend of mine who was trying to save the world (and a few quid on the congestion charge) has now fitted a sticker to his Tesla saying he bought it before he knew Musk was an idiot ...
    "I said [in my review] it was unreliable, which it was; that it was ridiculously expensive, which it was; and that because it weighed more than most moons, it didn’t handle very well. Which it didn’t.
    "Musk was very angry about this and sued us for defamation, claiming I had a problem with electrical cars and had written the piece before even setting foot in the car.
    "He lost the case, and the appeal, and he’s never really got over it. He still claims I was biased and that we pretended his car had broken down when it hadn’t. Even though it had.
    "I should really have sued him back, but I feared he’d call me a paedo, so instead I just waited on the river bank for his body to float past. And now it has."

More background here:

UPDATE: 

"Tesla is being forced to change the name of its so-called 'Full Self-Driving' driver assistance feature in China.
As spotted by Electrek, the Elon Musk-led company is now going by the name "Intelligent Assisted Driving" in Chinese on its website. ...
    "The software itself appears to be suffering from some potentially dangerous flaws. Drivers had been testing the software — before it was paused — on public streets in China, racking up a huge number of fines. Chinese Tesla owners have found that the system is misinterpreting bike lanes as right turn lanes, running red lights, and hogging bus lanes illegally ...
    "The carmaker has already run afoul of regulators for its misleading naming convention — after all, as Tesla admits on its website, the "Full Self-Driving" feature doesn't make good on its promise of fully autonomous driving and requires drivers to be ready to take over at all times.
    "In 2022, the California DMV alleged that Tesla put out 'untrue or misleading' advertisements on its website in relation to its Full Self-Driving and Autopilot tech...
    "For almost a decade, Tesla has been marketing its driver assistance software using misleading language.
    'That's likely already had severe consequences. US regulators have linked the carmaker's software to hundreds of collisions and dozens of deaths, warning that Tesla's marketing is lulling its customers into a false sense of security."

To be clear, as one tester shows — whatever Musk tells the market to inflate Tesla's share price — the cars are neither self-driving nor autonomous. So be careful out there. [Main test section starts 8:10]

"Treaty of Waitangi politics intrude ever more conspicuously into many areas of our society and our public life." Including internet access!

"Treaty of Waitangi politics intrude ever more conspicuously into many areas of our society and our public life. 

• "Even New Zealand’s left-leaning mainstream media have picked up on the University of Auckland's compulsory indoctrination-rich Waipapa Taumata Rau course
• "Janet Dickson’s challenge to the Real Estate Authority over their compulsion on estate agents to undertake a compulsory professional development module called Te Kākano (The Seed)
• "another example in tertiary education concerns efforts to decolonise [sic] the Massey University BA degree ...

"Such examples barely lift the lid on the extent of Treaty indoctrination across the public service, the education and research sectors, businesses and professional regulatory bodies. For example, 

• the Midwifery Council’s Scope of Practice
• the cultural safety requirements imposed on practitioners by the New Zealand Psychologists Board, and 
• the Treaty-centric competency standards for New Zealand pharmacists ...

"A very heavy focus on one population is evident in the charters, mission statements and constitutions of many organisations in New Zealand. ... [I]t seems that even the Internet cannot escape the current identity politics. ... [even if s]uch technology is universally available to the entire world and, by its very nature, is not exclusive to any one ethnicity. In fact, it is one of the most democratising of any technology ...

"[And yet] the InternetNZ Council [which operates the regional registry for New Zealand, i.e, the .nz Register]... has on its agenda the ... overarching Strategic Goal of 'Centring Te Tiriti o Waitangi' as a Strategic Priority, and ethno-centric preferences that dominate five Strategic Goals and 13 out of 25 sub-goals [including] ...  

• Implement Ngā Pae: Pae Kākano | Horizon 1....
• understand what it means to InternetNZ | Ipurangi Aotearoa Group to be Tiriti-centric....
• embed Te Tiriti through our strategies, policies, practices, people capability to achieve digital equity, digital inclusion and access for Māori ...
• [ensure] a Te Tiriti o Waitangi perspective guides everything we do. ...
• [ensure] investment priorities are guided by clear objectives that promote equity, align with priorities identified by Māori in the sector.

"It is perfectly reasonable that effective engagement with Māori, as with all stakeholders, should be part of the mission of InternetNZ. However, by declaring that it will be Te Tiriti-centric, InternetNZ, like our universities, is implicitly taking a political stance, when as a user-focused organisation it should remain entirely neutral....

"The stated goals stand at odds with the principles of [worldwide] internet governance as identified, for example, by the global Internet Society[which undertakes] the global management of the Internet.  ...

"As a critical facility for Internet access for New Zealanders, InternetNZ needs simply to recommit to the fundamental principles of a globally interconnected world, that demonstrate no preference for any particular ethnic, religious, social, economic, national, cultural or racial grouping. ... 

"[W]e must avoid even the remote possibility that access to a .nz domain name could be frustrated because the user may not support one or more of the strategic goals outlined above, or New Zealanders’ rights and responsibilities being differentiated by race."

~ John Raine and David Lillis from their post 'In Case You Were Wondering – InternetNZ and the Treaty'

Generative 'AI' "is "90% marketing and 10% reality"

"You know what,  I think AI is really interesting and I think it is going to change the world. And at the same time I hate the hype cycle so much that I really don't want to go there.

"So my approach to AI right now is, I will basically ignore it, because I think the whole tech industry around AI is in a very bad position. It's 90% marketing and 10% reality.  

"In five years things will change. And and at that point we'll see what of the AI is getting used every day for real workloads instead of just — [you know] Chat GPT makes great demonstrations, and is being used in many areas — graphics design, things like that — but I really hate the hype cycle. And it's not just AI it's I think it's an industry problem." 

~ Linus Torvalds, creator and lead developer of Linux, interviewed at the 'Open Source Summit' in Vienna [37:34]

"Like many other technology waves, a bubble is kind of inevitable. When you pass the stage of initial excitement people would be disappointed that the technology doesn't meet a high expectation generated through the the initial excitement.

"We've seen this many times.  When the internet took off in the mid to late '90s ... and there there was a huge bubble at the end of '99 and until probably March of 2000 [when] the bubble burst. Similar for mobile internet. And this time for generative AI; I think we will also go through that kind of period too.

"But I think it's also healthy; it will wash out a lot of, you know fake innovations or, products that don't have a market fit. 

"But after that probably 1% of the companies will stand out and become huge, and will create tremendous value ... and I think we're just going through this kind of process this year."

~ Robin Li, Baidu CEO, interviewed at Harvard Business Review's 'Future of Business' conference 

Tech billionaires aren't crawling to Trump because they're powerful, argues Johan Norberg in this guest post. It's because they're weak...

The Flattery Towards Trump Reveals Fear

by Johan Norberg

TECH MOGULS AREN'T FLATTERING TRUMP because they're drunk on power, but because they're afraid. The political arbitrariness that began with Biden risks becoming even worse with Trump.

Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk were among the guests at Donald Trump’s inauguration. 

At Trump's inauguration, the new president was surrounded by a grinning, applauding Forbes list. Among them were the world’s three richest men, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg, as well as relatively less wealthy figures like the CEOs of Apple and Google. Sitting in more prominent seats than the incoming cabinet members, it certainly looked like the happy plutocrats had bought themselves a president.

They all donated to the inauguration fund and have, in other ways, signalled an approach. Bezos blocked the Washington Post’s official endorsement of Kamala Harris, and Zuckerberg admitted that Facebook became too woke and now needs to be more Texas.

Is the U.S. on its way to becoming a tech oligarchy? Biden’s speechwriters are among those warning of a tech-industrial complex with so much power that they threaten to disable democracy.

As a liberal, I’m conflicted. The only thing worse than a Trump administration run by big corporations is a Trump administration not run by big corporations. Since their position isn’t built on charming inflamed MAGA fans, but on solving technical and business problems in a global economy, they will exert a moderating influence. When Trump wants to imprison opponents, stop global trade, deport all migrants, or invade Greenland, they will try to get him to count to ten (though I no longer dare rule out anything regarding Musk).

Tesla’s 15% stock increase after Trump’s victory shows that someone's proximity to power is disturbingly valuable.

On the other hand, it’s impossible not to feel deep concern when the most powerful state and the largest capital are in the same boat. Tesla’s 15% stock increase after Trump’s victory shows that someone's proximity to power is disturbingly valuable. When I recently interviewed Musk, he said the state should act as a referee but not interfere in the game, which was wise. But it doesn't get better when a player wants to play referee.

Money doesn't buy elections—after all, Harris had more than the eventual victor—but it can buy influence with its recipients. Especially with someone as notoriously "transactional" (we used to say unprincipled) as Donald Trump. Just a year ago, Trump wanted electric car supporters to "rot in hell." Today, he is pro-electric cars, “I have to be because Elon endorsed me very strongly.”

But unsuitability is not the same as oligarchy. In fact, tech companies haven't assumed this role because they're so strong, but because they're so weak.

THIS IS MISSED IF YOU simply follow stock prices, but the big change in recent years is that Big Tech has gone from being everyone’s hero to everyone’s villain. After Trump’s 2016 victory, previously friendly Democrats started seeing social media as sewers of disinformation and demanded strict content control. The Biden administration also launched potentially devastating antitrust proceedings.

And no matter what they do, someone takes a swipe at them. When platforms became cosily progressive and moderated more content (even stories that turned out to be true), the right started seeing them as leftist censorship machines. Republicans like J.D. Vance and Josh Hawley demanded regulation and breakups. Trump threatened fines and monopoly laws to crush Amazon and Google. With few watertight principles for such power exercises, there are real risks of political arbitrariness. During the election campaign, Trump threatened to imprison Zuckerberg for life.

Tech giants suddenly realised they had lost all political allies.

This is especially dire as they simultaneously face existential risks in key foreign markets. Regulation-happy EU threatens their business models. Many were also shocked last year when Brazil's Supreme Court responded to Musk's refusal to block a series of X accounts by shutting down the entire platform and freezing Starlink’s assets—a completely different company with other stakeholders.

If Big Tech wants a chance in international battles over antitrust, censorship, and taxation, they need the U.S. on their side. Zuckerberg explicitly stated this in his recent repentance speech. The world wants to censor us, and “the only way we can counteract this global trend is with support from the American government.”

This isn't about people who love Trump. Except for Musk, none of the major players supported him before his victory. On the contrary, they’ve long fought against him but lost and are now pleading for mercy—and protection. Musk’s new role made it even more important to be there as a counterbalance to him since he's a tenacious critic who, among other things, has said that Amazon is a monopoly that needs to be broken up. Contrary to the notion of a homogeneous flock of bros, these men are jealous rivals vying for each other’s market shares. And suddenly a new Chinese AI model comes along that threatens all their inflated valuations.

So, the tech moguls aren't flattering Trump because they’re power-drunk, but because they’re scared. Bezos doesn’t humiliate himself with an ingratiating Amazon Prime documentary about Melania Trump because he can do whatever he wants, but because he can't.

The sad spectacle of the past few weeks has many calling for a mightier state to put the plutocrats in their place. On the contrary, I feel an urgent need for a few more independent billionaires who aren’t subject to such political arbitrariness that they constantly anxiously follow political trends.

* * * * 

Johan Norberg is a Swedish author and historian of ideas, devoted to promoting human progress, economic globalisation and classical liberal ideas.

This post is translated from Blacksmith, where it first appeared.

"People want reality—with all its energy and messiness. And that’s the one thing Silicon Valley cannot deliver."

"We are now a quarter of the way into the digitised 21st century, and screen interfaces no longer feel fresh or new or enlivening.
    "People want reality—with all its energy and messiness. And that’s the one thing Silicon Valley cannot deliver."

~ Ted Gioia, from his post 'Live Music Is Coming Back!'

By detaining Pavel Durov, says Will Duffield in this guest post, France threatens both free speech and Telegram’s unique neutrality.

France Detains Telegram Founder Pavel Durov

Guest post by Will Duffield

On August 24, French police arrested Telegram founder Pavel Durov moments after his plane touched down at Le Bourget airport outside Paris. He remains detained on “an arrest warrant alleging his platform has been used for money laundering, drug trafficking and other offenses,” according to French television network TF1. Although Durov has not been officially charged, his unprecedented arrest threatens Telegram’s unique neutrality.

Telegram is an instant messaging platform particularly popular in post-Soviet states. It allows its 900 million users to communicate via one-to-one, optionally encrypted, chat, and in large public channels. Durov created Telegram in 2013 as his previous social media platform, a Russian Facebook analog called VKontakte, was being expropriated by Putin-friendly oligarchs. Then, recounting resistance to FSB demands for Euromaidan channel data, police intimidation, and a Douglas Adams-inspired “so long and thanks for all the fish” resignation from VK, he was celebrated in the West as a dissident.

A 2014 New York Times profile titled “Once Celebrated in Russia, the Programmer Pavel Durov Chooses Exile” quoted Durov saying, “me myself, I’m not a big fan of the idea of countries,” and characterized him as “Neo from the ‘Matrix’ movies … moving from country to country … One day he is in Paris, another in Singapore.”

Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine and the attendant return of great power geopolitics has made stateless nomadship much more difficult. Everyone and everything—even social media platforms—have been expected to pick sides. Nevertheless, Telegram has remained uniquely neutral, and, until now, unmolested.

Since 2022, social media, and to an extent the entire internet, has been steadily separating into Russian and Western spheres. Both shifting user attitudes and state sanctions have played a role. The EU sanctioned the owners of VKontakte, prohibiting payments to the platform. At the same time, Russia banned Meta for “extremist activities” after Facebook and Instagram relaxed their hate speech rules to allow Ukrainian invective against Russian invaders. While WhatsApp has remained popular in both Russia and the West, its maximum group size, 1,024, is far smaller than Telegram’s 200,000 user limit, making Telegram the preferred platform for public conversation. Although there are a few prominent Russian state accounts on Twitter, and some Russians still lob insults at American volunteers on Instagram, division is the rule. Telegram is the exception.

Everyone on both sides of the war uses Telegram. They were already using it when Russia’s full invasion began and quickly pressed their favorite social media app into wartime service. Heads of state, government agencies, military units, and civilians all began to coordinate, troll, boast, and propagandize on Telegram. Ukraine’s security services set up chatbots to allow the reporting of Russian troop movements. Overnight, Telegram became simultaneously a digital Switzerland and a battlefield.

The unique circumstances of its birth had, until August 24, allowed the platform to remain awkwardly neutral throughout the two-and-a-half-year conflict. Although Russia tried to ban the platform in 2018, it didn’t stick, and by 2022 the Russian state itself had become too reliant on the platform—both for external and internal communication—to abandon it.

It didn’t have the same sort of moderation controversies as Meta when used by combatants because it did less to restrict violent speech to begin with and didn’t offer concessions to one side over the other. Indeed, Durov merely tried to assure Ukrainians that their data would be secure against wartime hacking. This isn’t to say Telegram isn’t unmoderated. But its combination of channel-based communication and largely reactive moderation—relying on user reports—creates a more laissez-faire moderation paradigm than more centralized, web-first platforms.

Because Durov had already left Russia and taken Telegram with him, it didn’t fall under the sanctions that affected the Russian-based internet and European services operating in Russia. Indeed, last year, I contrasted perceptions of the platform’s independence with perceptions of TikTok, writing “TikTok isn’t a small founder-run operation like Telegram, which while born in Russia, escaped its orbit and is now registered in the Cayman Islands and headquartered in Dubai.” However, Durov’s refusal to limit Russian use of Telegram and the platform’s commitment to light-touch moderation as other social media platforms have grown more restrictive, has gradually soured attitudes towards Telegram among many Western elites.

In the Second World War, Swiss neutrality was often disdained by the Allies, especially later in the war. Nevertheless, a neutral Switzerland had undeniable value, not only to journalists and spymasters but to many downed airmen as well. Likewise, even if a neutral Telegram offers Russia access on equal terms, it allows for the observation of Russian chatter and activity, the identification of captured soldiers, and the simple maintenance of pacific and familial ties between friends and family separated by the conflict. It is also the only place where ordinary Russians can get an uncensored view of their country’s awful military misadventure. These are all goods worth safeguarding.

Telegram’s neutrality might have become an annoyance, but this shift alone doesn’t explain Durov’s perplexing arrest. Telegram has long been more pugnacious in its relations with courts and regulators than most publicly traded platforms, but it is far from unique in offering encrypted messaging. In fact, end-to-end encrypted chat makes up a much smaller portion of its use than competing services. While Telegram’s “secret chats” are end-to-end encrypted, its massive public channels are not. If Telegram’s encryption is at issue, WhatsApp owner Mark Zuckerbeg and Signal founder Moxie Marlinspike and many other tech luminaries should avoid France.

More generally, it is hard to see how France has jurisdiction over Telegram. Telegram isn’t a French company. France might have personal jurisdiction over Durov as a French citizen, but operating a social media platform offering encryption isn’t a criminal act in France. To the extent that Durov’s arrest is related to Telegram’s platform policies rather than Durov’s private activity, France has just taken a hostage. France shouldn’t follow in the footsteps of Turkey and India.

Absent official clarity, speculation and likely misinformation abound. Some have claimed, without evidence, that Durov’s arrest is the roundabout work of the American State Department. Durov’s arrest is much more likely to have been prompted by French anxieties about Russian disinformation campaigns targeting Francophone Africa, where eight countries have experienced coups in the past four years. many of which brought them closer to Russia. Durov’s refusal to suppress such campaigns may have been the trigger for his arrest. It is also worth noting that while Telegram isn’t uniquely encrypted, it is simply the communications platform of choice—for everyone—in the parts of the world from which organised crime comes to Western Europe.

On August 26, Jean-Michel Bernigaud, Secretary General of Ofmin, a French child protection agency, muddied as much as he clarified in a Linkedin post saying, “At the heart of this issue is the lack of moderation and cooperation of the platform (which has nearly 1 billion users), particularly in the fight against pedophilia.” He, confusingly, attached a link to a documentary about pedophiles’ use of Instagram. French President Emmanuel Macron [already attached to Jacinda Ardern's anti-free speech attacks on social media] tweeted that he had “seen false information regarding France following the arrest of Pavel Durov,” and proclaimed France’s commitment to “freedom of expression,” “the spirit of entrepreneurship,” and “the rule of law,” but offered no greater clarity as to why his country had arrested Durov.

France owes Durov, Telegram users, and the internet as a whole, a rapid explanation. Its actions are already damaging its reputation as both a friend of liberty and a safe place to do business. More importantly, Durov’s opaque arrest threatens Telegram’s unique neutrality and potentially the safety of its users on both sides of the conflict. The appearance of capture can be just as damning as the real thing. If France is truly an ally committed to a free internet, it should free Pavel Durov.

* * * * 

Will Duffield is an adjunct scholar in the Cato Institute’s Center for Representative Government, where he studies speech and internet governance. His research focuses on the web of government regulation and private rules that govern Americans’ speech online.

His post first appeared at the Cato At Liberty blog.