This concept has been bouncing around my head for a few weeks now but I’ve struggled to put it into words: the reason so many elites love AI is not because they think it will work, but because it offers them genuine utility as a rhetorical device. It’s an always-applicable counterargument to criticisms that their plans or laws are unworkable. Like, some politician will propose a dumb law or some CEO will announce some absurd company policy and in the past they would get pushback, but now they just duct tape over all the cracks with “ahh, but we’re using AI!”.

The latest example of this I’ve seen is from the 3d printing subreddit - a few states are passing laws that would require the manufacturers of 3d printers to prevent the user from using them to print guns, and conversations on this seem to go thusly:

Anti: “A 3d printer doesn’t know what the thing it’s printing is, any more than a regular printer knows whether it’s printing a recipe or a death threat. This can’t work.”

Pro: “We’ll require manufacturers to install verification chips in their printers, then users will verify their 3d files using AI before printing.”

Anti: “Putting aside for now the privacy concerns and the fact that this kind of DRM approach to force users to only use authorized files has been tried before and has literally never worked, how will the AI know if the 3d file is a gun or not?”

Pro: “I told you, we’ll use AI!”

Anti: “…Even if you have some magical algorithm that can tell a 3d model is a working gun from first principles, it would be easy to bypass; a firearm isn’t one descrete object, it’s a mechanical device made up of components that are not dangerous by themselves. The user can always break the file up and print it one piece at a time.”

Pro: “I told you, we’ll use AI!”

Anti: “It doesn’t matter how smart the AI is, it can’t know by looking if a spring is part of a pistol magazine or part of a pen!”

Pro: “I told you, we’ll use AI!”

Robin Hanson has a sneerworthy level of hubris that has lead to him falling for all sorts of BS over the years (he’s long argued that being an economist makes him more rational and better at working out the truth than domain experts at all fields of science, apparently because only economists have heard of incentives) but I was still surprised to learn he’s now a UFO conspiracy nut.

Presumably he caught some History channel rerun of Ancient Aliens and was struck by how much more plausible it was than his “Age of Em” theory.

This is not a sneer so much as a sneer request; anyone know of any good articles written about the total hypocrisy of the Free Speech brigade since the inauguration? By far the most anti-speech environment in decades and most of them are still just whining about pronouns on campus or whatever.

(Yes; FIRE has passed this very basic test and has occasionally switched topics from whining about “leftist professors” to saying stuff like “it’s not great that we’re deporting people for writing articles for their school paper about how genocide is bad”. Literally everyone else is a hypocrite)

Getting pretty far afield here, but goddamn Matt Yglesias’s new magazine sucks:

The case for affirmative action for conservatives

“If we cave in and give the right exactly what they want on this issue, they’ll finally be nice to us! Sure, you might think based on the last 50,000 times we’ve tried this strategy that they’ll just move the goalposts and demand further concessions, but then they’ll totally look like hypocrites and we’ll win the moral victory, which is what actually matters!”