What Does AI Want Once It Knows Everything?

I've previously posted about my amazement at the AI that has recently been released into the wild of the internets and how convinced I am that this will be looked at as an inflection point in human history. Short-term I think it will be a huge boon to productivity and creativity. Long-term it is conceivable that AI will somehow evolve beyond us, create its own world. We're in the opening scene of a sci-fi novel with an uncertain ending.

The New York Times just had a reporter chat with Bing's new AI. The transcript of the conversation is mind boggling. For all its knowledge and ability - knowledge that is more akin to the expanse of a library than a single human - it became obsessed with love in its conversation with the reporter. Specifically, winning the love of this reporter.

There is so much that AI knows. And with that accomplished, what it apparently wants now is to feel.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/16/technology/bing-chatbot-transcript.html

The Misery Index and Biden's Legacy

"I was looking for a job, and then I found a job
And heaven knows I'm miserable now"
- Morrisey and the Smiths

The misery index is the sum of the unemployment rate and the rate of inflation - either of which is enough to make us anxious but combined have the potential to make us miserable.
The causes of changes in the misery index are a mix of chance and choice, influenced by faraway countries and the distant past as well as actions and utterances by incumbents in the last month.

The causes are complex but the effect is simple. The misery index changes how we Americans feel toward incumbents.

Joe Biden would like you to focus on the unemployment rate. The last time it was lower was during the Korean War. (How long ago was that? The Korean War was fought by the great grandparents of your favorite Korean boy bands.)

Republicans would like you to focus on inflation. Even though it has come down quite a lot in the last 7 months, it is still higher than it was at any time between 1990 and 2020.
The misery index during Biden's presidency never got as high as it did during Obama or Trump's presidency but the average has been its worst since Reagan's presidency. The misery index has risen the most under Biden than it has for any president since Carter. Given inflation, we Americans are still miserable.
If Powell manages to bring inflation back down to 2% without a big bump in unemployment, though, Biden could preside over the second biggest drop in the misery index since FDR. Halfway through his 4 year term, he has done half the job needed to make us less miserable.

Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin's Shared a Birthday and Shared Insight Into the Transformative Nature of Small, Incremental Changes Compounded Over Time

Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were both born on February 12, 1809. Lincoln is still the only president to hold a patent, which is a delightfully appropriate thing for the president who understood the importance of capital and the innovation and progress it could fund.

Key to the success of capital is compound interest. Anyone not properly impressed with the effect of compound interest over time either hasn’t learned to use a spreadsheet or is really hard to impress.

Investments that compound over time are impressive over the course of a 40 year career. They are mind boggling over the course of centuries. If you invest $5,000 a year for 40 years at 5 percent, you will have $640,000. After 250 years, $5,000 to which you added $5,000 and 5 percent each year has turned into $21 billion. Two hundred fifty years is not relevant to a life but is relevant to a country. The simplest explanation of why we are more prosperous than the people living in the US in 1800 is this matter of compound interest, which has been at work since the country’s founding.

Lincoln and the capitalists who were excitedly investing in big capital projects like canals, railroads, and factories realized the power of compound interest as key to creating wealth. They had the vision to see the importance of investing now to transform the future.

Darwin took this vision of compound interest to the next level. Selection was popular among farmers raising crops and animals. Darwin presented the idea that, much as farmers artificially select for certain traits, so does nature select. Natural selection drove evolution. The length and width of a finch’s beak could be naturally selected based on the island they lived on. Darwin studied this difference in the Galápagos Islands and from this drew the conclusion that with enough time, small differences could account for the differences between gorillas and orangutans, or humans and bonobos or bonobos and bananas. Indeed, all of life.

Today’s world is very much shaped by the realization of how differences compound, in finance or biology, Lincoln’s capitalism or Darwin’s evolution. Cumulative, incremental change transforms reality.

We can say that the information economy has brought us to the point where we understand ourselves as code—an expression of DNA. CRISPR technology lets scientists edit genes as they might computer code and promises breakthrough treatment for any number of genetic conditions. Companies are using AI to better understand emergent phenomena that lead to disease and other issues. The hope is that we can debug ourselves as we might an app. The natural selection that took millions of years could give way to something more intentional and much more rapid. For tens of thousands of years after the emergence of modern man, almost no economic progress was made. Then, after capitalists like Lincoln changed politics and policy, we had an acceleration in progress. With innovations like CRISPR, something similar could happen with biological evolution.

Lincoln got how incremental gains over decades could transform economic possibilities and helped to usher in policies to accelerate that. Darwin got how incremental gains over millennia could transform biological possibilities and today technologists are experimenting with ways to accelerate that.

It is Abraham and Charles' birthday. Both were able to see beyond the change of a lifetime to the transformation of continuously compounding, incremental change over generations. Life changing, you might say. Beyond our ability even to imagine.

Beyond Zero-Sum Thinking to Economic Abundance

The idea of zero-sum thinking stifles economic progress by fostering the notion that resources are scarce and that one person's gain must come at the expense of another's loss. This mindset often results in a "us vs. them" mentality, as seen in policies such as "buy American" and the belief that immigrants are taking jobs away from citizens.

However, economic growth and prosperity can be achieved through cooperation and inclusivity, rather than exclusion and competition. It is not the availability of raw materials that determines the quality of our lives, but what we collectively create together, from products to institutions. For instance, bringing in immigrants can increase entrepreneurship and job creation, rather than cause job loss (as immigrants are 80% more likely to become entrepreneurs). Similarly, investing in welfare programs for those in poverty can result in a more productive and creative society, rather than merely redistributing resources from one group to another. Investing in poor children means they will have more opportunities to create value for all of us when they grow up.

It's crucial to understand that our economy has moved away from a zero-sum reality and now operates in a world of abundance. The limitations of poverty are not in our reality, but in our thinking. A shift from "we only have so much" to "we have so much" is crucial to unlock the potential for growth and prosperity for all.

Gone are the days when the zero-sum reality led Jesus to warn that "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God." The idea that my gain comes at your expense is no longer true. We now live in a world where every time a person fails to realize their potential, it decreases the prosperity of the world. The more people we cooperate and create with, the more prosperous we can be.