Optimizing for old battles
About 3/4 of our management expertocracy is optimizing for old battles. It’s a pattern which is pervasive in Western Civilization, which is one of the reasons everything is so weird right now. Gather together a group of bureaucrats to solve a real problem, it’s still there 50 years later doing …. things. Things which are probably not important or even helpful. New people get hired to work on new things, and the old fungoid bureaucracy is still there doing things which may or may not be helpful.
As an example, it is bizarre to me that people want to genetically engineer rice to produce vitamin-A. Also that USDA approved rice is required by law to be “fortified” with a bunch of crap nobody needs. Dealing with the latter: nobody in the US needs “fortification” in their goddamned rice or anything else. Most people in the US are over-provisioned with nutrients, and those who aren’t can take a goddamned vitamin pill. In particular, adding iron to rice is fucking insane. Men do not need iron in their diet. They get enough from meat, eggs or legumes that they eat. There’s reason to believe iron in particular in USDA fortificants is dangerous. It’s not something humans evolved to eat, and it’s not the same chemical as exists in actual food. The other shit: vitamin-A and some B vitamins: vitamin-A might also be …. suboptimal, and I don’t want that crap in my food. Wash your rice, fellow Americans. It removes some of the arsenic, but mostly it removes the slop the vendors are required to add to the rice. Genetically engineering rice to produce vitamin-A; what could go wrong? Considering recent track record of “muh scientists” it seems like a lot could go wrong. These substances were added to rice and flour back in the day because people didn’t eat much of anything else. It’s an 80 year old health intervention; literally something we did in WW-2 to help the soldiers and imposed on the colonies afterwords. Can we revisit this idea? I don’t think it’s helping, and it might be hurting people.
Folic acid is another, possibly even more alarming nutritional example. The US government mandates (since 1998) it be put in stuff like cereal and bread. The idea is to prevent folate deficiency, which can cause neurological issues, especially in infants; folate deficiencies can cause neural tube defects in infants, a rare and awful condition. The problem is folic acid and folate are different substances, and they behave differently in the human body. Folic acid does not exist in nature, at all; only in the test tube and in “fortified” american grains. It’s so different from natural folates, it is used to induce kidney damage in animal experiments. Folic acid needs to be metabolized in the body into folate, and one can develop actual antibodies against it, which causes problems with the folate receptor. Autistic kids have a lot of these antibodies fiddling with their folate receptors. This supplement came about because of experiments on rats, who process folic acid differently from humans. A fact which wasn’t figured out until 2009, 11 years after the mandates (which have spread worldwide). It was seen as a harmless addition which was an unambiguous public health win, but nobody has bothered thinking about whether there might be problems with this chemical, despite all the behavioral and health problems that have sprung up since the stuff was mandated in the food supply. This isn’t something I’ve fully figured out, and I wouldn’t stake my life on the idea, but it looks like it could be bad and it is unambiguously clear that the public health organizations are determined to put this bullshit in everyone’s flour, with no thought for whether this might actually be harming more people than it helps. Concerned citizen scientists have a website you can look at. There’s also a video including Covid Grandpa which made me aware of it.
Cholesterol: there is a fairly strong correlation between heart disease and high levels of LDL cholesterol. Unfortunately, there is also a fairly strong correlation between long life and high levels of LDL cholesterol when the patient is older. What means? The standard doctor thing is cholesterol bad, giving a number of interventions which may or may not marginally increase lifespan, while having terrible side effects. They tried another intervention recently: crispr gene therapy to reduce cholesterol. That one is unambiguously bad; one of the participants in the trial died already. The reality is, various bureaucrats have decided cholesterol bad, and are managing the number. Actual scientists driven by truth-seeking are still puzzled by this correlation, and notice other things are better predictors of cardiovascular disease. For example, the ratio of HDL to triglycerides; lots of HDL is good, lots of triglycerides is bad. Most people with high LDL have a lot of triglycerides because they’re sustained on a diet of sugar and grease, so this correlation could be measuring the same thing. I sometimes have high LDL (mostly when doing something keto-like with low fiber, which is a known phenotype which also doesn’t have increased CVD risk), always high HDL and never high triglycerides. Also no heart disease in my family. Other scientists notice a particular kind of heart disease is anti-correlated with cholesterol. Also, dementia, which ought to be disturbing to anti-cholesterol bureaucrats, but somehow isn’t. Others notice CVD’s biggest risk factor is actually insulin resistance. There are other ideas; APO-B is another one which people take drugs to control. Same problem as LDL: you’re controlling a number correlated with a risk, not the risk. When you look at the risk after you control the number, not so much. Yet we still have imbeciles talking about putting statins in the goddamned water. All public health officials talking about putting anything in the food or water should be machine gunned into a ditch, and the remaining ones need to look at the current state of the research with some consequences (perhaps shipping them to El Salvador to aid with their public health problems) if they get it wrong. Of course this will never happen, as the unseeing bureaucracy is dedicated to number go down. The reality is, LDL is correlated with a whole bunch of other stuff, and the metabolic dysfunction that causes heart disease isn’t caused by the presence of LDL. They need to go find the discriminating factor here, and treat that. Dispensing statins to everybody isn’t useful.
Consider another example: pollution from cars. Particulates, unburned hydrocarbons, nitrogen dioxides, carbon monoxide: 60s cars were farting out some nasty shit (including lead vapor). You could kill yourself idling a car in the garage back in the day. Car exhaust is now pretty clean; even smoky diesels are now barely smoky. The bureaucracies continue to drive these numbers down: new US standards coming again in 2027, this despite car exhaust being quite breathable now (don’t try this at home). The relentless pressure to build more electric vehicles is also related to this. Meanwhile, tires and braking material leave obvious layers of dirt everyplace near cars being used. You breathe that shit; it’s not good. Car tires are probably the biggest source of microplastics in people’s lives. Braking material is basically asbestos (ceramic brakes are floated as a longer lasting alternative, but nobody knows if the dust they make is worse or better -there’s less of it anyway). If you live in a city in southern Europe you’re also surrounded by mopeds which have no emission laws associated with them: or if they do I don’t know how they manage to smell like 1960s era car exhaust. Yet, the car makers are required every couple of years to reduce their pollutant levels: they’re not doing anything about the big problem, but making everyone’s lives worse optimizing on the old problem.
Chemicals in the environment: I think it’s great we stopped pumping heavy metal and other chemical waste into rivers to make newspaper or whatever. This is a real achievement and has had tremendous long term health benefits. Unfortunately, other regulatory agencies allow companies to put nasty stuff in your clothes and on your skin; in food containers, on frying pans: they even require manufacturers to put “fire retardant” chemicals in your furniture and in children’s clothing. You can’t put it in the ground or in the water, but you have to put it in furniture and children’s clothing; mostly because of an old California law. This stuff is dangerous; it’s probably a big chunk of why men’s testoterone and sperm count has been declining. Back in the 70s when California dipshits forced manufacturers to start adding this crap to furniture, it probably seemed like a good idea. It’s not a good idea. Of course like all shitty ideas from California it’s now a federal standard: U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) is in charge. Supposedly they’re investigating the flame retardants, but I’m not optimistic they’ll be removed from our lives. The bureaucracy is concerned with burning furniture, which as far as I can tell only happens when dipshits fall asleep smoking on flammable furniture. Why not just ban flammable furniture? You could dump hot coals on any of my furniture and pretty much nothing would happen: no weird chemicals needed.
These problems all have their origins in bureaucratic heat death. When bureaucracies were created, they were innovative and productive organizations. I know it’s hard to believe, but USDA, the FDA and the EPA were once as innovative and productive as early years NASA. Now … not so much. People have been complaining about PFUAs and stuff like fire retardants to the EPA for decades. But the squirreley numskulls who warm the chairs there are too busy doing the crap they’ve been doing since Nixon created them by fiat in 1970. Optimized for old battles. Most of which are already won.
On cultures that build
I tire of the Andreessen spurred discussion of “cultures that build.” I agree with the sentiment; I do miss the America that could make stuff.
I am annoyed that numskulls refuse to face the actual fact of the matter. The historical entity which built most of the stuff you see around you no longer exists. That civilization is dead. Full stop; the end. In fact, the predominant social energy of the moment, backed by most of the mainstream organs of respectable thought, most government agencies, virtually all corporations and collectives, and right thinking people everywhere is to wipe out any remaining historical reminders of that civilization because of muh feels. For example:
People who dislike the idea of tearing down statues are so thoroughly politically vanquished they can’t prevent the destruction of statues of the historical founder of the country. Pardon me if I laugh at the concept of becoming a “culture that builds” at this present moment in time. US culture and its colonial offspring are now cultures of destruction; both at home and abroad. Virtually all organs of US power are organized to not only prevent building things; they’re organized to destroy things.
see a pattern here?
I would say that the chances of the US becoming “a culture that builds” is about the same as the present day municipality of Venice becoming a powerful trade and naval empire in the Adriatic and Bosphorus. The knowledge is gone. The cultural capital is gone; the society that produced those kinds of productive people hasn’t existed in decades. The physical ability to do this is gone; thanks to the globalization our genius economists told us was inevitable, the US lacks the factories, mines and shipyards required to build things. The human material who would actually do the building is gone: dimwit MBAs destroyed the skilled working classes, atomized their communities, continue to demonize and demoralize them and utterly destroyed the kind of basic low level education and social cohesion required to have a productive workforce.
Our technocrats (aka you lot and the morons you went to college with) themselves are typically not capable of working with matter any longer, preferring more profitable and more fashionable masturbatory financialized nonsense that doesn’t pollute the environment. Instead of building Project Pluto, modern american technocrat and managerial types prefer making dopamine rat mazes such as Facebook, imbecile glass bead games like “quantum information theory” or abstract quasi-religious bullshit such as… woke collitch culture and its sinister city-burning, cancel-culture Jacobin offspring.
In fact, one of the main things the US produces at the moment is the type of people who think “cultures that build” are so horrible, visible reminders of them need to be removed from the public square. We don’t produce many innovators, but we produce plenty of people who think remaining builders should be persecuted and made to apologize for having the temerity to excel. We’ve created a managerial caste who is so psychologically fragile they can’t even abide images of success. What are they going to do when they’re asked to do something difficult like invent the transistor or discover DNA, or even skirt San Francisco Zoning Laws?
Let me posit this, fellow builders of things. Politically speaking, the kind of changes required for the country to go back to its past of building and inventing cool things will involve at minimum dealing with the kinds of loathesome barbarians tearing down statues and burning cities. Those people have to be prevented from interfering with both built structures and the present day builders of things. There are a lot of them and they have a lot of free time on their hands to get up to mischief.
Not only that; a productive future will involve active persecution of the evil dimwits responsible for making chimping barbarians think it’s OK to burn it all down. There are a lot of their lot too, and they’re generally comfortably ensconced in schools, foundations, non-profits, government bureaucracies, large corporations, entertainment complexes and other such places of institutional power. These are the people who would implement any government or societal policy. You have to either change their minds or get them out of the way somehow.
These bozos would be pretty easy to deal with if we had the political will to do so. I’m not even talking physically, though there is that; most are noodle-armed vegans or two twinkies from a heart attack. Many of these mentally ill assclowns are so hysterical they actually require trigger warnings to get through the day. You could probably take away their antidepressants and they’d all have to check themselves into the booby hatch. This alone would probably double US economic output. Just removing crazy people from positions of responsibility instead of promoting them would be an enormous help.
Every historical example of a society turning to a productive direction (I dunno, post Revolution France, or Deng era China) involved defanging tin pot Robespierres before anything good happened. Removing statue toppling city burners and their encouragers and enablers as active dangers to the rest of society is table stakes for making a society of builders. The more serious issue is the MBA types who think it’s just fine to ship middle class jobs to the third world, or import new helot worker classes to destroy the bargaining power of local labor because “muh free markets.” These people are sharks, they’re wreckers, and it is they who have weaponized the “woke culture” of the left to prevent the actual left (as opposed to numskulls who think overturning a statue helps anything) from raising their taxes.
None of them are interested in investing money in productive directions; they’re all about pyramid schemes and looting the remaining human and physical capital. These fuckers are burning the proverbial furniture to warm themselves. They’ll have to go, and they won’t go easy because they have all the loot and no loyalties beyond their bank accounts. That includes almost everyone in Andreessen’s shitty industry (reminder: “VC” means “toilet” in Russian): almost none of them are interested in investing in things involving innovation or matter. They’d rather invest in garbage which skirts hotel and taxi laws or become sneaker loan sharks, making everyone else more miserable in the process by socializing the costs.
The society we have right now is a result of the people that compose it. Outcomes won’t change until you at least change minds of the people in charge of running the day to day operations of it. Are you willing to ship NPR reporters, Goldman Sachs bankers, Ford foundation grant administrators, pornographers, Booz Allen Hamilton consultants, mid-level tech managers, 99.8% of Venture Capitalists, and all the 3rd assistant secretaries of education to a potato picking Gulag in North Dakota? Are you willing to at least get them fired so they have to get jobs at Burger King, and put your supposedly waiting-in-the-wings non kakistocrats in charge of their bureaucracies? To be honest, me neither; that’s probably why we can’t have nice things. We’ve built our cages out of iphones, twitter, prozac and people obsessed with their feels and the doings of their crotches. You won’t get any more Edisons or Wozzes or Bardeens in America as long as hysterical imbeciles and demonic looters are preeminent and people who actually lower the entropy of the universe, past, present and future, are demonized.
It’s over; the US has has a remarkable run as a place where regular people could have a nice life, and exceptional people could make exceptional contributions. “Vanished under night’s helm as if it had never been.” Genap under nihthelm, swa heo no wære. Acting like some minor tweak in policy is going to reverse this is laughably insane. Policy fiddling is a ghost dance; trying to bring back 1945 in America when we had a competent and productive civil service, nuclear lightning in our hands, our enemies vanquished at our feet, a largely virtuous and almost fanatically united society, sitting on top of the stock of the world’s capital with a host of giant new high technology factories. That reality and that America is long gone. It has run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible; it is bleedin’ demised. That society isn’t pining for the fields; it’s pushing up the daisies. I’m standing in front of you with a dead parrot society.
I realized it was too late about 7-8 years ago, and organized my life around my exit strategy. The country is too far down kakistocracy, and the remaining decent people are too deluded about the root causes and their potential remedies to ever change things. If you’re still in the US, you live in an evil empire of chaos and destruction, and the best of you are probably serving the worst ends of it.
You can cower under your desks with home-made diapers on your faces hoping some member of a productive society invents a vaccine for the Chinese Lung Butter or whatever phantom (and entirely inflicted by our kakistocrat mandarins) terror of the moment afflicts you. Those N95 factories aren’t coming back, let alone Bell Labs type innovations; even if you wish really really hard.
Cybersyn and Allende’s Semi-Automated Luxury Socialism
One of the interesting “what ifs” of history is “what if the 70s-80s commies used computers to do their planned economy.” Men like Kantorovich, Nikolay Fedorenko and Victor Glushkov helped develop some of the mathematical tools and computer systems which would have made this possible.There were abortive attempts to build this in East Germany (pdf link), the Soviet Union and Allende’s Chile. As far as I can tell, the Soviet and German efforts were crushed by old guard party rednecks who feared losing control to technocrats. Oddly, Allende’s attempt at this, which would have been constructed of bone knives and bearskins, seemed to come closest to being deployed.
The visionary behind this was Fernando Flores, who is still alive despite being Allende’s minister of finance and later “General Secretary” back in the early 1970s. Flores was inspired by a sort of futurist “cyberneticist” operations research proponent named Stafford Beer. Operations research is generally now thought of as the field of applied work involving optimization; linear programming and all that. In those days it was something more general: mathematics applied to the problem of management. Guys like Beer with this sort of training ended up running large parts of the war economy.
It’s difficult for me to characterize what “cybernetics” is, probably because it doesn’t really mean anything. Norbert Wiener, who I respect, coined the phrase, and more or less defined as a hand wavey general study of systems of feedback and control mechanisms. As far as I can tell, “cybernetics” was a complete bullshit field, and what it really meant was “I know futuristic looking words and have Wiener’s book on my shelf; pay me more.” Stafford Beer was a proponent of “management cybernetics” which, as far as I can tell, meant “using data to make business decisions.” The books are hysterical; you can go look at them on filesharing sites. They appear to be total horse shit. FWIIW the Soviets more or less agreed with me, at least in 1947; the field of cybernetics was condemned as “a science of obscurantists, a pseudoscience wedded to obscurantist epistomology.”
This looks like it pertains to something real; nope
Flores hired Beer. Beer cut his rates to $500 a day (about $2500 in today’s money) along with unlimited cigars, chocolate and wine; items the Chilean government had a surplus of. Mind you the Chilean government was being starved of dollars at the time as a form of colonial pressure, just as the Venezuelan government is now in 2019. The results were hilarious.
The thing Beer built for the Chilean government is most famous for its control room, so we’ll start there. It had a bunch of cool chairs where powerful human intelligences would examine data on the walls and vote on the cybernetically optimal next steps. The chairs are TOTALLY not based on Captain Kirk’s control chair from Star Trek; every account of the thing makes certain to mention this. I assume Beer got a lot of shit over it, and rightly so, because he totally copied this from Star Trek. Or, if he didn’t, his designer did.
The chairs come equipped with ash trays (men of power always smoked in those days) and a place for a whiskey glass, presumably in case Castro or Beer wanted to relax while making important decisions. There are 7 of the chairs to make sure they can always achieve consensus when they vote. They use ridiculous glowing geometric buttons (like on Star Trek) instead of keyboards. The main reason is because they’re all hardwired to physical mechanisms; the images and graphs on the wall are not computer generated or directly interfaced with a computer at all. They’re slides and viewgraphs that are manually put in there by human helpers behind the walls. The lack of keyboard has also attributed to keyboards being “feminine” or confusing to men, which may be true in some way, but which doesn’t make any sense, as male factory workers used the teletypes to communicate factory data with home base.
The important pieces in the background, besides the workers behind the curtain, were the computer, an antique that they had on hand, and dozens of teletype machines they distributed to factories and control points to relay important metrics and data back to home base. These metrics would be entered into the computer (by hand), which would presumably generate reports (it’s not clear this ever happened) which would be manually turned into viewgraphs and slides by artists. The display of these slides would then be controlled by heavy drinking/smoking men in Captain Kirk Star Trek chairs, just like when they show you their vacation photos on a carousel slide projector. Except it was 7 people controlling the projector and arguing about what it all means.
People go on about how futuristic this was, because … I dunno, muh internet and muh powerpoint is used to make business decisions now. The reality is, Beer built the Allende government the economic equivalent of one of those WW-2 era RAF air defence sector station operation rooms with a little futuristic woo slapped onto it. It has some trappings of high technology with the Star Trek like buttons, but those buttons really didn’t do much of anything. The data allegedly eventually feeding back to the computer could have been more effectively gathered by people on the telephone with yellow legal pads rather than the teletype, just like it was in a WW-2 era RAF air defence command center. In fact, factory managers ended up routing around the central command center and teletype process by calling up other factory managers and working out potential supply issues.
The one time it was allegedly useful was during a CIA organized truckers strike. You’d expect any central data/controll station to be useful in a crisis situation, more for putting decision makers in a room where all the data is available than anything else. Pretty sure the slides, assuming any were made for the event, and the computer, assuming any data was entered into it, were not helpful here.
It may have eventually been a helpful tool if Pinochet hadn’t taken over, thrown many of those involved out a helicopter, and destroyed the room of socialist power. The fancy appearance of it was almost entirely Potemkin village though. It relied on people entering stuff into the system at the collection end. It relied on “data science” people writing code. And it relied on artists marshalling the data into useful and insightful visual reports. It also relied on people who managed the factories to obey, and in a timely fashion; presumably once you finished your whiskey and cigars, you summoned a telephone to tell the factory workers what to do. All of these things are guaranteed to more or less fail.
Even small design decisions were foolish. The controls; why should everyone in the room be able to control the view? How could everyone in the room control the view? We don’t give everyone a remote when we do powerpoint now. Beyond that, how does the cigar smoking drunk in the chair know what slides are where when he’s pressing his buttons? It changes every meeting, and some boob in the background could screw up the order of the things. Who sets the agenda? I strongly suspect the guys in the chairs would be shouting through the walls to get the secretaries to pull up different slides. Also the voting buttons. Seems very scientific and futuristic to have the seven cigar puffing drunks in the Captain Kirk chairs voting by some kind of electrical secret ballot to make decisions. Why wouldn’t they just say “dude this sucks?” How would it make a difference? And of course, there was no way to actually transmit decisions using all this fancy electronics, besides the telephones they should have used in the first place.
The SAGE system was a real world embodiment of this sort of thing, built 15 years earlier. Unlike Cybersym, it was a real time system, with real time data flowing into a central processing unit, and real time commands being sent out to remote bases. SAGE also had human operators who helped the computer make the right decisions. SAGE worked (we think) because it actually was entirely networked, and the data flowed quickly, and split second decisions were absolutely necessary. SAGE also didn’t have any goofy fake control panels with a place to put your liquor, or LARPY telex stuff where secretaries had to do data entry to put the data into a computer. But, at the time, it was probably fairly difficult to see this, and people who watched a lot of Star Trek were probably impressed.
I’m not sure how the detailed history of this played out. It’s entirely possible American spooks ramped up their efforts to depose Allende in part because of fear of this. US economists and analysts almost always overrated Soviet and communist efficiencies. In part this happened because the Soviets would occasionally surprise people with things like Sputnik. In part it was rice bowl politics; you get a bigger budget for the scary threat rather than the third world threats made of coconuts and rubber band slingshots. But mostly it was because the technocrats and economists who purported to study Soviet economics thought their own farts smelled of roses. Western economists in those days were not the mere bean counters and toadies for capital they are today: they had vast powers to regulate the economy, set prices and so on. They just assumed more regulation of the economy would cause it to run more efficiently. They believed their own bullshit.
The threat of a more efficient civil service is taken very seriously by governments. For examples from history, the late Imperial government of Russia was seen as a great threat by Germany as it had developed an efficient and productive civil service. One which was rapidly industrializing the country and improving its logistics with a fraction of the per capita civil service manpower of Germany. WW-1 may have been partially a result of this fear. I can’t prove any of this without access to spook internal documents and reports on Cybersyn. But I do have the example of an article in New Scientist who described Cybersyn as potentially “one of the most powerful weapons in history.” I mean, it very obviously wasn’t and probably couldn’t have been with the approach they took. But the CIA had no real way of knowing this.
As a sort of weird coda to all this, apparently Brian Eno and later David Bowie and David Byrne befriended Beer. I kind of wonder what they talked about, or if they just partied. As mountebanks go Beer seemed like a fun guy. Any proto data scientist who puts ashtrays and whiskey cup holders in a Captain Kirk control chair can’t be all bad, even if he was full of shit.
Bones send whiskey and smokes, stat
https://www.newstatesman.com/world/2018/08/project-cybersyn-afterlife-chile-s-socialist-internet
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/13/planning-machine
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/cybernetic-revolutionaries
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/04/allende-chile-beer-medina-cybersyn/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2003/sep/08/sciencenews.chile
AI is not eliminating jobs
Midwits keep asserting that “AI” is going to eliminate jobs. They say things like “those jobs aren’t coming back because of AI” (or screws or whatever other dumb excuse: but they’re real sure about those jobs not coming back). These are not statements of scientific or technological fact, or even a reasonable prediction based on present trends. These are ideological political statements. “AI” is a soundbite/fnord excuse for not doing anything about the policy problems of the present.
The ruling caste of American tech and FIRE lizard people continue to make these statements, not because they are inevitable, but because this is their desired future. Their preferred future is a population consisting of powerless, preferably drugged up serfs on the “universal basic income” dole, ruled over by our present ruling class of grifters, rentiers, pyramid scheme salesmen, watched over by a surveillance hellscape. The lizard people would like to continue our present policy of de-industrializing the country, breaking what little labor negotiating power US citizens have, and atomizing people to their raw protoplasm. It’s almost like a Freudian slip. Don’t bother agitating for any rights, slave, we soon will have electric Golems and won’t need you!
The most murderous drug dealers who ever existed … Google’s AI dude thinks they’re great! https://twitter.com/JeffDean/status/1093953731756867584
Oh I am sure the Google doofs would like to develop and control some strong AI, and perhaps a robot maid to replace Juanita. I, too, would like to have a magic technology which gives me infinite power, and a robot maid to iron my shirts. If I were a Silicon Valley oligarch rather than a humble nerd, I might develop delusions the pile of C++, Javascript and tech drones which made me rich could become a Golem of infinite power. Personally, I would build rockets. At least I could get away from lizard people who want to turn the world into a soy dystopia.
If these clowns really believed that “AI” were something actually like an “AI” which could replace humans in general tasks, they’d use it to replace computer programmers. At one point in history, people believed CASE tools would eliminate most programmer jobs. How’s that working out for the AI geniuses at Google? They can’t even automate devops jobs; devops being one of the most automatable roles in tech companies. Devops tasks don’t seem much different from a computer strategy game.
Google’s “AI” team can’t do this useful thing, which, even by my lights, actually seems achievable. Yet somehow, google boobs think they’re going to violate Moravec’s paradox and replace drivers. Think about that for a minute. It’s becoming clear that autonomous vehicle “technology” as sold to people for the last 10 years is basically fraud, and is still stuck in the 1980s when Ernst Dickmanns was driving around the autobahn with Sun Workstations in his back seat. Demonstrations of this tech always have a human in the loop (remote or in vehicle), because moving automobiles without human control are death machines under most circumstances.
Inside of the UniBwM autonomous experimental vehicle VaMP, at the rear bench where the computing system was installed for easy access and monitoring. This was at the PROMETHEUS demonstration in Paris in October 1994 | Photo by Reinhold Behringer
Even assuming I’m wrong and the media hyperbole is right and full level 5 autonomous vehicles are “right around the corner” Google also has zero business interest in “disrupting” driving. Google is a tech driven advertising company with a collection of loss leaders. Yet they go after this preposterously difficult, possibly impossible task. Why not disrupt a business they presumably know how to disrupt, like that of the lowly ops engineer? At least this would be good for their bottom line, and it would be a real step forward in “AI” rather than a parlour trick perpetuated by marketing nerds and started by obvious mountebanks.
From a semiotics point of view, this shows astounding hostility to the types of people who drive cars and trucks for a living. Drivers are … ordinary, usually uneducated, salt of the earth people who have a fairly independent lifestyle and make a decent living. Google overlords must really hate such people, since they’re dumping all this skrilla into ruining their lives for no sane business reason. They will almost certainly fail, but man, why would you try to blow up those people’s lives? If this country really wanted to get rid of driving, or considered it a serious problem that there are too many cars on the road, or thought that people now employed as drivers should do something else, we had a solution to this problem invented in the late 1800s.
The other professions people “think” will be replaced always seem to be low caste irritations or lawyers (lol). You regularly hear “experts” talking about how presently common jobs won’t exist in 20 years because of “AI.” I’ve said multiple times now that all estimates for delivery of something in 20 years are bullshit. A prediction that a technology will do X in 20 years means “we don’t know how to do this, but we want your money to fool around with anyway.” Controlled nuclear fusion researchers being the most amusing case of the perpetual 20 year rice bowl. 20 years is a magic number, as it’s plenty of time for a technological mountebank to retire; and it’s at least 2-3 generations of tenured academics, which is enough to turn a scam subject like “quantum computing” or “nanotech” into an actual field.
“AI” doesn’t exist. Machine learning is a force multiplier and productivity enhancer for statisticians. If you believe the “automation”=”no more jobs” ding dongs, machine learning should have at least automated away the job of statistician. Yet somehow, the statistician (aka “data scientist”) jobs are among the best paid and most in-demand jobs out there at present.
The last job category I can think of which was automated away is Flight Engineer on airliners. It mostly went away because of automation of airliners, but it wasn’t even computer related; just normal improvements of systems monitoring and reliability; good old mechanical and systems engineering. Despite 1/3 fewer seats in airliner cockpits, there are now more people with airline flight officer jobs now than ever before. Planes got cheaper and there are more of them servicing vastly more people.
The example of Flight Engineer is how the world works. Technological advances increase human power over nature and makes more things possible. Actual “AI” advances, should any eventually materialize, will work exactly like this.
AI has eliminated exactly zero professions, and essentially no jobs. Since the best prediction tool for a market is generally a random walk, my forecast is, barring giant breakthroughs, this trend of “nothing important actually happened” regarding AI job destruction will continue. If you disagree with me and have an alternate prediction on a normal human (aka 5 or 10 year) timescale, I am happy to entertain any long bets on whatever platform you care to use.
Locklin on science 
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