I’ve posted two substacks arguing that the coming technological advance will be good for everyone. I showed that AI and robots don’t eliminate the need for human work, based on 1. the limitless need for more wealth and 2. the Law of Comparative Advantage.

But I’ve now reached a deeper level of understanding. It came from thinking about the common idea that AI will spare us the drudgery, the boring “grunt” work, so that we can focus on what’s more creative.

But why can’t machines do creativity? And what does it mean if they can? What if machines come to be able to write hilarious sitcoms, compose deeply moving music, invent things that aren’t just obvious applications of existing knowledge?

Wouldn’t that be wonderful?! A better-than-human creativity is just what we need.

We hear, “Don’t worry, AI won’t be as smart as we are.” But I’m saying the opposite: the “smarter” the machine, the more valuable it is—valuable to all human beings.

We understand this in regard to physical tasks. We invented automobiles to be superior to foot travel. We invented steam shovels to be able to lift more than the strongest man could. In fact, the plain old shovel is valued because it digs better than human hands can.

We feel empowered, and are empowered, when we operate powerful tools.

We will come to love this new technology for what it can do. AI is a power tool for the mind.

What’s the fear? That problems will get solved too easily? That production costs will fall too much, making it too easy to obtain the things we want? That science, technology, and medicine will achieve too many wonders?

The call to stop the development of AI means: “Stop AI before it makes building a house 5 times cheaper, eliminates traffic jams, invents fusion-based electric power, and lets us live centuries without aging.”

The crux of my new level of understanding is that intelligence is a supreme value. And that implies to simulated intelligence as well.

We are long accustomed to physical simulations of human mental functions. Adding machines (remember them?) didn’t actually add, subtract, multiply or divide. Those are mental functions. Adding machines turned gears with numbers painted on them, then human minds could interpret the numbers as arithmetic results.

Phonograph records, CDs, and audio files don’t actually talk or sing. Books don’t actually “contain ideas.” They contain ink patterns that a reader’s mind can use to grasp the author’s ideas.

Likewise, “machine intelligence” is just electrical circuitry and software that produces, in accordance with the laws of physics, physical results that we can interpret as answers to our questions.

Machines are not conscious, so they aren’t literally intelligent, but they can be made to produce an output that can be used to solve intellectual problems. Without being alive or conscious, they can do for us what super-geniuses would do.

In that sense, working with super-smart machines will be like discovering and communicating with space aliens from a far more advanced society. Gaining all that knowledge rockets us into the future.

Intelligence is a supreme value. It’s human intelligence that has taken man from the mud to the moon. The simulation of human intelligence promises advances as great . . . or greater.

Anyone who values himself and wants to make the most of his time on this earth will seize with both hands the opportunity to benefit from smarter-than-us devices.

A personal footnote

AI has come to fruition just at the right moment: we are drowning in information overload. AI is just the right power tool for managing it. Let me give a personal example.

Over the last 30 years, I have published on “HBL” some 10,000 posts on philosophy and related topics. My posts are mixed in with about 60,000 more by other authors. AI is helping me extract mine from the 70,000.

But, more impressively, AI will pick out the ones I wrote on the philosophy of science and sort them among 5 headings: mathematics, physics, biology, psychology, and economics.

And, much more impressively, the AI agent will prepare a draft of a monograph on my views in each science, organized hierarchically, and tell me how my views have changed over the years.

As if that weren’t enough, AI will analyze my arguments for logical strengths and weaknesses, and for how my points should “land” with an intelligent but skeptical reader.

The thoughts and arguments will be mine, the hierarchical structure it uses will be mine, and the style will mimic mine.

Without AI, this book would take at least 5 years to finish, if I ever would.

How good will AI’s simulation of intellectual work be? Not as good as it will be using the AI of 3 months later.

We ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

Tweet

… is from page 195 of Arnold Kling‘s excellent 2004 book, Learning Economics:

Outsourcing is the basis of all economic activity. Every time we trade in the market instead of doing something ourselves, we are outsourcing.

DBx: Yes.

And the burden of persuasion lies heavily on those persons who insist that the economics of Jones’s outsourcing of tasks to persons outside of the political jurisdiction in which Jones lives differs categorically from Jones’s outsourcing of tasks to person within the same political jurisdiction in which Jones lives.

The post Quotation of the Day… appeared first on Cafe Hayek.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Donald Trump has for a long time criticized the concept of birthright citizenship — the idea that U.S. citizenship extends to anyone who was born within the U.S.'s borders. Rather than wait for a Supreme Court decision about it, Trump announced his own legislation titled "Birth-Wrong Citizenship."

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Similar to the reaction of umpires to Major League Baseball's adoption of its new "Automated Ball-Strike System" to challenge calls, the United States Supreme Court has denounced the new "Automated Bench Scrutiny" system implemented to determine whether they decided a case wrong.

SPACE — In accordance with Canadian law, the crew of NASA's Artemis II mission successfully euthanized Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen after discovering he'd suffered a light bruise during takeoff.

Chris Bayliss weighs up UK energy minister Ed Milliband and this politician’s determination to press on with his decarbonisation, Net Zero agenda, facts of reality be damned:

Others may argue that making reasonable concessions to public opinion at critical moments might benefit the green agenda in the long run, by limiting the chances of a backlash. But climate politics lives or dies by its sense of inevitability. There are only so many true believers like Miliband or Al Gore who get near positions of power. The movement is only effective so long as it retains its power over the cynical or weak-willed — the likes of Angela Merkel, David Cameron or Boris Johnson. And that power comes from the green movement’s monopoly on a vision of the future, at least in terms of energy.

With nuclear power largely removed from the discussion, opposition to the green agenda can only talk about fuels associated with the past — gas, oil, sometimes coal. If jaded politicians want to look modern and relevant, they are forced to talk about renewables. They can tell the weary public that they just have to get used to it, and that it’s the future whether they like it or not. It might not make them popular, but it makes them look potent. This is why “backsliding” is considered the most deadly sin by climate campaigners. In order to maintain that impression of inevitability, policy must only ever be seen to move in one direction. “True believers” are under an even greater obligation to hold the line, or face the wrath of the movement.

The green ratchet is bearing a huge load of bad ideas in British energy policy that don’t hold logical water even if you share their assumptions about the severity of climate change. Most obviously these relate to the electricity system and the atrophying of firm generation capacity in a system that relies on gas back-up when intermittent sources do not produce. There is a growing public awareness that critical detail has been excluded by renewables proponents, and this is responsible for the growing cost of electricity, rather than wholesale gas prices.

Reading all this, it is hard not to think of how Milliband, and others who share his views, hold the intellectual equivalent of the sunk cost fallacy.

Meanwhile, at the Daily Sceptic:

The climate science world (‘settled’ division) is in shock following the discovery in ancient ice cores that levels of carbon dioxide remained stable as the world plunged into an ice age around 2.7 million years ago. Levels of CO₂ at around 250 parts per million (ppm) were said to be lower than often assumed with just a 20 ppm movement recorded for the following near three million-year period. In addition, no changes in methane levels were seen in the entire period. Massive decreases in temperature with occasional interglacial rises appear to have occurred without troubling ‘greenhouse’ gas levels, and this revelation has caused near panic in activist circles.

 

I remember the late Brian Micklethwait, of this parish, telling me a while back that sooner or later, the lies and exaggerations of the climate change alarmists would be exposed, and the anger of electorates over what has been allowed to pass would have major consequences. Remember, gentle reader, that much of the deindustrialisation of the West, and all that this implies, has been driven by those who championed the end of fossil fuel production.