Sources: capitalism

Detailed history of the dark influence of Jack Welch on capitalism and its domination by market fundamentalism. A grotesque pageant of gleeful destruction and harm perpetrated by the masters of growth-driven but non-productive companies leading economic ideology.

This is a long essay that will make you angry early and if you aren’t apoplectically furious by the end you either don’t care or drank the kool-aid. Ends with an excellent summary of the reality of the current state of generative “AI”.

ACX’s 2023 book review contest offers another winner. A nicely balanced, only partly skeptical review of Why Machines Will Never Rule the World by Jobst Landgrebe and Barry Smith. The book argues against AGI on the grounds that math-based, deterministic computing systems can’t replicate fundamentally non-linear, complex systems that produce biological intelligence.

Captain of Team Human realizes the clamour from the tech-bros about AI risk and for AI regulation is just another play for legislative aid in capturing another market…

Cory Doctorow applies his usual cutting analysis to the AI hype that has overwhelmed the common-sense of most commenters, especially tech enthusiasts and a few credulous academics. ChatGPT is new and impressive so it shouldn’t be surprising that media are overreporting; what is surprising is the unself-conscious and unreflective attention from people who should know better. The technology is new and we don’t know what it is for yet and, as usual, we have to wait to find out. What isn’t going to happen immediately is the extinction of humans by chat-bot AGI, but what probably will happen is corporate hacks will figure out ways to use it to put pressure on labour and inflate their ability to extract capital from credulous legislators.

This is exactly the kind of thing Cory is good at reminding us to be careful of and this is a pretty good shot across the bow of AI hype credulity.

Noah brings it… Who was the more active deregulationist: Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan? The answer is a surprise entirely contrary to the standard neo-con->neo-liberal mythology. Of course, it isn’t quite as simple as that…

Interviewed by Claudia Dreifus, Naomi Oreskes talks about the role of “market fundamentalism” in subverting education, culture, science, and public knowledge on critical issues for policy, from banking to climate change. She describes the agenda of Chicago School economists and neo-liberal conservatives to promote anti-government sentiment and ultimately undermine public mechanisms for representing reality.

This is a really good introduction to a whole cluster of urgent problems covered in her books, written with Erik Conway, The Merchants of Doubt and, more recently, The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market.