Previewing his upcoming book Counter-Revolution, Orsina claims that after the 1960s, people became both revolutionary and utopian, turning away from politics to morality, law, and markets. But after 2008, populism emerged as a counter-revolutionary force seeking re-politicization. He warns Europe’s institutions were built for depoliticized times and now are struggling to meet the moment. Can they survive?

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Assume humanity. Assume ethics should be oriented to the value of human beings. Where does technology fit into this picture? Does it advance human flourishing? Or does it distort our teleology?

Agreeing on the basic premise of human centrality, in this live podcast recording at The Crown & Crow (1317 14th St NW, Washington, DC), Antón Barba-Kay (Harvard Kennedy School and Georgetown Law) and Jason Crawford (Roots of Progress Institute) will argue about the foundational question— where does technology fit in human flourishing? Moderated by Samuel Kimbriel (The Aspen Institute).

Register here.

Doors 6:30pm
Discussion 7:15pm - 8:15pm

In partnership with Georgetown University’s Initiative on Artificial Intelligence and Democratic Citizenship (AIDC) and with thanks for the generous support of The Omidyar Network and The Gambrell Foundation.

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I’m surprised more pro-Israel advocates haven’t made the argument I’m about to make. It’s not a particularly complicated one. But it requires conceding things that most pro-Israel advocates would rather not concede, which I suppose is why they haven’t.

Tucker Carlson, in his viral exchange with The Economist editor-in-chief Zanny Minton Beddoes, was asked whether he believed in Israel’s right to exist. Rather than answer, he questioned the premise. Where does that right come from? What does it even mean? His point was straightforward: if standards aren’t universally applied, they aren’t standards. They’re preferences. “I believe in human rights, not ethnic rights,” he said (which was an interesting admission from someone with Carlson’s pedigree).

On the narrow philosophical point, Tucker Carlson is correct. Individuals have rights. States do not, at least not in the same way. Individual human beings, because they are endowed by their creator, possess inalienable rights — rights that precede any government. States are instrumental. They are created by man to serve human ends.

The great Palestinian-American academic Edward Said dismissed the “right to exist” as “a formula hitherto unknown in international or customary law,” and he was right. The political theorist Andrew March, in a rigorous philosophical treatment, makes the case more precisely: states possess no original, moral rights. Whatever standing they have derives from the rights of the people they serve. Czechoslovakia dissolved. The Soviet Union dissolved. Nobody speaks of their “right to exist” having been violated. No wrong was committed against them. They ceased to exist, and it wasn’t an injustice. In contrast, violating a human being’s right to exist is always a violation (although in limited cases of capital crimes, that right can be usurped by the state).

And there’s an even simpler observation. As John Patrick Leary notes in The New Republic, Israel is the only country in the world to which the phrase is applied. No one asks you to affirm France’s right to exist before you’re allowed to criticize French foreign policy.

So if the question is whether Israel has a “right to exist” in the way that individuals have rights — the answer is no. But that’s true of every state, not just Israel. But it’s not necessarily that simple, and this is where Israel’s defenders might find themselves on stronger ground if they could only realize it.

Israel was founded relatively recently, and its existence — and specifically its right to exist as a majority Jewish state — has been contested from the start, and rightly so. Israel was founded on a profound injustice — the dispossession of more than 700,000 Palestinians from their land. This isn’t controversial among serious historians. Benny Morris, one of Israeli “new historians” who documented the expulsions, doesn’t deny them. He just thinks they were necessary. I find this morally abhorrent, but the underlying facts aren’t in dispute.

Israel was born in sin. The question is whether that sin justifies dissolving the state.

I don’t think it does. One injustice — Israel’s creation through ethnic cleansing — does not justify another: undoing Israel against the democratic wishes of its citizens. This is where I diverge with parts of the pro-Palestinian left. draws a useful distinction between dissolving a country and transforming its political system. He doesn’t want to eliminate Israel any more than he wants to eliminate Myanmar or Cuba. He wants to dismantle the structures of Jewish supremacy. The question he asks is the right one: Does this state protect the rights of all individuals under its control? Obviously, in the case of Israel, the answer is a resounding no.

But conceding that doesn’t tell you what comes next. And more importantly, it doesn’t tell you how to get there without violating the very principle you’ve just invoked — namely, that rights belong to people.

It’s reasonable for Israeli Jews to want to retain a Jewish-majority state. That is what makes Israel Israel. It’s the only country most of them have ever known. The pro-Israel political theorist Michael Walzer would call this a “community of character“ — a political community forged through shared life that possesses a form of moral standing. As much as I dislike and disagree with Walzer’s claims of Gaza being a “just war,” his basic intuition — that collective self-determination means something real — isn’t so easily dismissed.

There is no justifiable way to undo Israel short of a majority of its residents freely voting, in a referendum, to fold the state into a broader binational arrangement incorporating both Jews and Palestinians. The genocide scholar has articulated something like this vision: seven million Jews and seven million Palestinians sharing the land from the river to the sea. It’s an aspiration I both respect and long for. But Israeli Jews will never vote for it. They would have to be compelled into it, and that would be undemocratic. Therefore, I don’t see it as a live option or, importantly, a moral one.

Allen Buchanan, probably the most important political philosopher working on questions of secession and state dissolution, limits the case for unilateral dissolution to the most extreme circumstances — genocide, sustained mass atrocities — and even then, the presumption favors territorial integrity. The alternatives, he notes, tend toward catastrophic violence.

Now, Israel has committed what most scholars on the topic — Bartov among them — characterize as genocide against the Palestinian people. So perhaps Israel has, in fact, forfeited its own legitimacy. Bartov himself has said as much, warning that Israel’s conduct is destroying the moral foundations of the state.

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But even if that’s true, it doesn’t resolve the problem of democracy. If Israel’s “right to exist” has been forfeited, how exactly do you dissolve it in a way that doesn’t override the democratic rights of Israeli individuals? You can’t, really. Not without compulsion. And if the whole point is that rights belong to people and not to states — which is where this argument started — then you can’t simply ignore the rights of seven million people because you’ve won a philosophical argument about the state they live in.

This is the paradox, and I don’t think there’s an obvious way out of it. The same principle that undermines Israel’s claim to a “right to exist” — that rights belong to persons, not to political arrangements — is also what protects the democratic agency of Israeli citizens. You can’t invoke the first half and discard the second.

So yes, I do think it’s worth asking whether Israel has a “right to exist” as a Jewish state, even if the rights language is a poor fit for states of any kind. Because even if Israel doesn’t have rights, Israeli voters do. Any transition to a different political arrangement — binational, confederal, whatever we want to call it — would have to be subject to some kind of democratic process to be legitimate. And there’s simply no way I can see in which this could conceivably happen.

Short of that, the only option is raw force. The political theorist David Polansky calls this a “power fantasy.” What body or party would force Israelis to dissolve their own state? No such body or party exists. And even if it did, forcing Israelis do to so would be unjust. And compounding one injustice (the founding of the Israeli state) with another (dissolving the Israeli state) is never a good path when it comes to the Middle East.

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Late last year, our friend wrote a beautiful meditation on burnout, gesturing at transcendent salvation. This week, prods Ian’s argument and kicks off a fascinating conversation.

Ian, I want to ask you about a couple themes from your recent essay “Burnout and Hope.”

You wonder how to diagnose the cause of the “signature affliction of our age”. Is it, as Byung-Chul Han, the South Korean philosopher you were writing about, puts it, the result of excess positivity, coalescence, frictionlessness? Or is it, as Roberto Esposito puts it, the result of too much negativity, tension, conflict? Regardless of the details, looking for the cause of some thing itself implies accepting that that thing exists – i.e., it implies accepting Han’s central claim that there is some uniquely contemporary malady of alienation plaguing us all in the twenty-first century.

I am suspicious of this type of claim. I want to push you to explore why that is. But before that, let’s clarify what your claim is by clarifying what it’s not.

First, there is of course a very trivial sense in which the maladies of the twenty-first century are unique. After all, it has never been the twenty-first century before. So too, there is a trivial sense in which I am uniquely different today than I was yesterday. This is nothing to write home about: we only care about uniqueness when it reflects something substantive: when, for example, I really have substantively changed as a person. So this is surely not what you — or others — could be saying.

Second, and related, it is of course true that the features of a particular time can change the particular appearance of a kind of affliction. A sense of alienation may appear different in virtue of being partially shaped by, for example, the ubiquity of smartphones. But this is mere appearance, not substantive difference. Let’s call this “apparent uniqueness.” But I don’t take you to be making this claim, either, because this just reduces to the triviality of the temporally unique claim.

What I take you to be saying, rather, is that our current age has a substantively unique malady of alienation, one brought on by the contingent features of our time, that has, in a non-trivial sense, never occurred before.

I think this version of the claim is just not true. And I think it is just not true for reasons that are rooted in the Great Books education that you and I share:

I’m thinking about Augustine’s Confessions and his deeply-felt sense that our fallen nature is what permanently and irrevocably alienates us from our surroundings. We cannot be one with nature; we must toil constantly just to gather enough sustenance to make it another day. We cannot be one with others, as we are cursed to fall victim to our physical desires — making us, in turn, not even fully one with ourselves.

I’m thinking about Pascal, who wrote in his Pensées that we are forever drifting away from our footing in time; how despite our only ever living in the present, we are helpless to wander off to the past or the future — falling ill with nostalgia or worrying endlessly about what’s to come.

I’m thinking about Marx, who takes the very practice of waged labor to alienate the worker from their preferences and will. In thinking about Marx, I’m also thinking about Cicero (an apparent proto-Marxist?) who wrote that “the very wage that [laborers] receive is a pledge of their slavery.” If Marx (and Cicero) are right, then we have been alienated from ourselves, our desires, our projects, and our preferences for as long as we have received wages in exchange for work — meaning, really, forever.

The fact that this sense of alienation has been written about all throughout history makes me deeply suspicious of the claim that there is anything substantively unique about the alienation we experience in the twenty-first century. If there is anything unique about the alienation of today, it’s a mere difference in appearance, not anything deeper. That means that if we weren’t alienated due to X, we’d just be alienated due to Y.

I think the most realistic version of the claim is just going to be that the twenty-first century’s alienation is apparently unique: a boring claim indeed. But we should expect descriptions of our core nature to be pretty boring; after all, the human race has been doing this for a long time.

Ripley, I’m grateful for your probing response to my essay. You’ve opened it up to fundamental questions, to which I’m not sure I can do anything like justice. But here goes.

It seems to me that we enjoy a basic agreement — namely, that there is such a thing as human nature, and related experiences that hold across different times and cultures. I understand you to be arguing that, insofar as we suffer alienation, we suffer from a condition well-known to Augustine, Pascal, Marx, and presumably many others; and whatever might be apparently unique to us is, ultimately, trivial. I of course accept (part of) this: without a basis of shared experience, communication across the ages would be hopeless. We could toss our Augustine down the chute.

But I am not sure that it escapes the accusation of triviality to say that a basic experience is shared across time: for example, that Plato loved, and so did Dante, and so did Iris Murdoch. I think — and here, I believe, is the substance of our disagreement — that this gives too little weight to history.

There are, after all, genuinely novel historical experiences. Take boredom, a word that does not appear in English until the nineteenth century. I consider that to be credible evidence that the phenomenon, at least as we understand it, did not exist until relatively recently. Whatever doldrums he might have experienced, Achilles was never bored. Likewise, innovations in language do not just represent emotions; they create them. (Because of Shakespeare we can feel “bitter cold.”) And when languages lose the ability to express certain emotional states, those emotional states decay and even disappear.

Or, to put it differently: think of it by analogy to epidemiology. You appear to be arguing that we all have the flu, and while sometimes it “presents” as Flu A, sometimes as Flu B, these are essentially the same sickness. It seems to me, though, quite important how a malady presents. The fact that we are experiencing this strain of alienation at the moment, as opposed to that strain, or these symptoms and not those symptoms, has a material effect on our diagnostic and therapeutic efforts.

Perhaps we could state it as a problem of genus vs. species. I agree with you that, in some fundamental sense, we all suffer from the genus of alienation or estrangement or inward disunity. But different species of that genus appear at different times and in different places. If we wish to understand our particular time and place, it helps to be specific.

Your response is helpful, Ian, in particular because it allows me to think more deeply about what’s really at stake for me here.

First, I’m a little suspicious about this first inference — that “boredom” as a word not existing until the 19^th century is good evidence that we weren’t ever bored before. The diagnosis of “post-partum depression” didn’t exist until recently, but why should we think that no mother suffered from post-partum depression until the term was created? Surely there’s some reasonable alternate story where the malady always existed, but we just lacked the tools to identify it as such (perhaps because people weren’t looking).

Are you attached primarily to the strongest version of that inference? Or are you amenable to a weaker version, where perhaps we were bored before “boredom” came around but in a different way? Maybe there’s something about naming a concept that partially modifies it, insofar as it changes the way in which we can relate to it?

Second, I think you’re right that the project of understanding the specific malady of our time could have fruitful consequences! But I suppose I’m worried about the feasibility of trying to diagnose a historical malady while we’re in the midst of it (and thus, the analogy to disease only goes so far). Isn’t there a bit of a category mistake going on? If history is — by its very nature — retrospective, why should we expect to understand our era until it’s done? I’m genuinely interested in hearing a case for why we should think our epistemic position at the present time could be sufficiently good to do this kind of preemptive historical work.

One final thing. I suppose I’m worried in general about the claim that even the unique features of the present day are all that unique. Maybe we never heard “boredom” before the nineteenth century, but I think we have heard repeated, only thinly distinct, iterations of “kids these days [don’t read]/[are rude]/[are too sad]/[are missing out on our core traditions]!” for a long time. And I think it’s the historical ubiquity of claims like that that make me suspect that history is a circle, not an arrow.

I think the key issue between us is coming clear. I wonder, though, if there is not only a disagreement about the nature of history, but also, hiding in the background, a disagreement about the task of philosophy.

You suggest that “history is — by its very nature — retrospective,” and you wonder whether we can establish a reliable “epistemic position” from which to evaluate our present condition. The implication seems to be that we have greater access to what is past than to what is present. (“The owl of Minerva takes flight at dusk,” one could say!)

But this seems to me to suppose that history is a “thing,” a temporal object, that we stand outside of and examine, like an entomologist examines a bug on a pin. Perhaps this is true, in some provisional sense, for the historian, but I don’t think philosophy ever enjoys this privilege, even when dealing with “historical” materials — e.g., old books. What we are after is always what is alive in them, which means what is present in them. When I read Plato, I am reading, in some sense, a contemporary, because what I am after is not strictly historical but philosophical knowledge. So, likewise, when I ask about the signature affliction of our time, I am asking a philosophical, not a strictly historical, question. When it comes to philosophy, there is no epistemic position outside of our moment; we’re always entangled in it.

I suppose this raises the question of what exactly we’re doing when we do philosophy. One could imagine that philosophy is akin to archaeology or paleontology: a disinterested study of artifacts from a long-gone epoch. But I think philosophy is more in the way of combat medicine. Shells are exploding around us, the air is thick with smoke, the ground is strewn with suffering comrades — we’re wounded ourselves! — and we have to do the best we can in the midst of it all. There is no position safely away from the battlefield where we can perform our healing work. The only way to do the job is to be here, in the thick of it.

In a perhaps disappointingly conciliatory dénouement, Ian, I offer the following thoughts:

It seems right to say that what’s ultimately at issue is a disagreement about the method of philosophy — that is to say, whether it’s best done from the outside or from within. I must confess, however, that, unlike some others, I lack any strong commitments to the priority of one method over the other. I don’t think we’re ultimately failing to do philosophy if we ever ask these questions from within the historical lens, nor do I think we fail in our goals if we ever ask these questions from a temporally untethered view.

Rather, my suspicion would be that the question itself determines the relevant method — or, just as well, that both methods have their own virtues for revealing different angles of truth on the object of inquiry. Sometimes there surely is an eternal, unchanging truth of the matter that we can access from outside our particular temporal moment; sometimes there surely are contingent facts that we can only access from within that particular temporal moment.

That is to say, I think that we can sometimes occupy the “view from nowhere” — perhaps most obviously when we ask questions about, for example, whether there are many things instead of just one or are merely playing sandbox in logical space. But even when we ask questions about material social facts, I think we can adopt this stance, albeit — importantly — only temporarily. And I think this can perform important conceptual work for us; perhaps it gives us the idealized framework which we can then test against reality. (If we can determine the Platonic ideal of justice, for example, we have an isolated variable that we can then modify as needed in an unjust world.)

I’m wondering whether you think this is right (that both methods serve their own purposes), or if your line is a harder one: that we are irrevocably situated and that the view from nowhere is, perhaps, a noble lie.

Ripley, I’m happy to accept your conciliatory gesture, but I suspect it does not go to the heart of the matter. You might say that, even enjoying a “view from nowhere” that affords us a proper perspective on ongoing historical processes, those processes could still prove to be — to quote your opening letter — “boring.” So, reverting to that letter, let me try one more time to make my case.

You might know the famous lines, from Virginia Woolf’s essay “Mr. Bennett and Ms. Brown”: “[O]n or about December, 1910, human character changed. I am not saying that one went out, as one might into a garden, and there saw that a rose had flowered, or that a hen had laid an egg. The change was not sudden and definite like that. But a change there was, nevertheless; and, since one must be arbitrary, let us date it about the year 1910.”

Woolf admittedly overstates her case (and clearly enjoys doing so), but I think she is describing a real phenomenon: there are events that act as thresholds in human consciousness — before and after. I don’t know about December 1910, but I might well put forward August 1945, when atomic weapons were deployed in war for the first (and, to date, last) time. At that moment, something became possible — the destruction of the human species by our own hand — that had not been possible before, and a certain anxiety settled into human consciousness that had not been present before. (This is why the war for Ukraine, overhung by the specter of nuclear weapons, was from the very beginning a “world war.”) Something similar happened in October 1492. The most important of these dates is, of course, the one by which we arrange our calendar.

I don’t believe these to be merely apparent variations. I share with you the commitment to human nature and to certain constants across times and cultures. But that nature is also refracted differently across different historical horizons, creating real, not just seeming, differences. Certain possibilities are present to us that were not present to Aristotle or Augustine, not merely because we have arrived on the scene later, but because the topography of the scene has changed in the interim.

Which means that we have challenges specific to our time, challenges that no one has ever confronted before or will confront again (although they may have their analogues in other epochs). And we must take them seriously — precisely because they are ours, and no one else’s.

My thanks to you, Ripley, for prompting this rich exchange.

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This is a topic that we’ve chewed over frequently here at Wisdom of Crowds. The conversation goes on to weigh whether liberalism can offer a genuine vision of the good life or whether it is structurally committed to a neutrality that empties politics of meaning. The group debates Rawlsian liberalism, Marx’s notion of human capacities, the appeal of the tech right’s futurism, as well as religion, autonomy, and whether the loss of a pre-modern sense of cosmic order is recoverable.

The episode ends without a tidy resolution, but with a shared sense that any politically viable vision of human flourishing must grapple seriously with what a good life actually looks like — not just what a just distribution of resources resembles.

Required Reading:

• “Beyond Equality,” by Jonny Thakkar (The Point).

• “Last Boys at the Beginning of History,” by Mana Afsari (The Point).

• Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson (Amazon).

• Ross Douthat’s interview with Sen. Chris Murphy (NYT).

• The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia, by Bernard Suits (Amazon).

• Laura Field interviewed by Sam and Christine (WoC).

It is easier to see how much our ambitions have diminished when we contrast our aims with other ages. If Hegel was able to write comprehensive treatises about Being, we have withdrawn to Substack commentary. If the Post-War generation was able to formulate universal visions of human rights—we are left with tech founders who have difficulty deciding whether it would be a tragedy for humanity to be surpassed by AI.

In this live podcast recording—held at Amsterdam’s Embassy of the Free Mind— Rutger Bregman (School of Moral Ambition) and Samuel Kimbriel (The Aspen Institute) will argue about the foundational question— what (if anything) makes humanity essential?

Register here.

Doors 6:00 pm
Discussion 6:30-7:30.

With thanks for the generous support of The Gambrell Foundation.

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Cameron started his career as a gun control advocate after surviving the Parkland shooting. For his efforts, he was named one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in 2018. He has since become a passionate advocate for the Palestinian cause, especially so after Gaza. We recorded this episode a day after Marco Rubio caused a furor by suggesting America’s decision to attack Iran was shaped by the fact that Israel might do it without us anyway, leaving our assets in the region dangerously exposed. With increasingly hostile young MAGA voices convinced that Israel holds undue sway over American foreign policy, we discussed how Democrats see a path forward.

The conversation got heated at times — Damir goes incandescent over Epstein, Shadi frets about entrenched Democratic leaders not reflecting voters’ preferences — but it’s an important episode very much worth your time. American politics is changing before our eyes, and anyone thinking we’re going back to the way things were after Trump has another thing coming.

The conversation swerves (as it tends to) into the subcultures forming in the vacuum: the looksmaxxing/manosphere influencer “Clavicular,” who embodies male energy redirected inward — away from courtship and community and toward obsessive self-modification and performative detachment from women. Damir pushes an uncomfortable adaptation thesis: maybe this is simply what “winning” does to advanced societies, whether we like the aesthetics of it or not.

Required Reading:

• “The truth about population decline,” by Martin Wolf (Financial Times).

• “Get Married Young,” by Brad Wilcox (Compact).

• “1-in-3: A Record Share of Young Adults Will Never Marry,” by Lyman Stone (Institute for Family Studies).

• The Human Flourishing Program’s “Flourish” measure (Harvard IQSS).

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Henry starts off the conversation asserting that AI already has a kind of “agency,” even if it’s not yet the full kind that some skeptics are looking for. Damir and Sam push back on AI’s reliability and proclivity to hallucinations, and wonder whether AI can create anything genuinely novel or creative.

The conversation turns to autonomy and risk. Can “artificial superintelligence” ever be reached, asks Sam? Henry points to AI coding agents already improving themselves. Damir objects to anthropomorphizing AI and prefers treating these systems as powerful tools capable runaway failures — but nothing more. Henry disagrees, ending the conversation with a plea for AIs getting consideration as moral entities at some point.

Required Reading:

• “Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies,” by Nick Bostrom (Amazon).

• The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms, by Margaret Boden (Amazon).

• “Disambiguating Anthropomorphism and Anthropomimesis in Human-Robot Interaction,” by Minja Axelsson and Henry Shevlin (arxiv.org).

• “Real Patterns,” by Daniel C. Dennett (Rutgers).

• A relevant tweet by Séb Krier (X).

• AlphaGo Move 37 analysis (DeepMind).

• Conway’s Game of Life (Wikipedia).

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Welcome to CrowdSource, your weekly guided tour of the latest intellectual disputes, ideological disagreements and national debates that piqued our interest (or inflamed our passions). This week: the rollercoaster of the hype cycle.

Instead of showing all sides, this we’re going to try to cut through the deafening noise surrounding two stories dominating our public life at the moment.

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Framing thought

Pumping the brakes on AI accelerationism

There is plenty of overheated, millenarian speculation about AI out there, feeding a vicious hype cycle that ebbs and flows. Last week’s maelstrom was particularly bad, swirling around a newly launched social network for AI bots called Moltbook. A thousand thought-pieces bloomed.

But, as it turns out, it was all a hoax.

1. MIT Technology Review summarizes the evidence that Moltbook was not the first terrifying sign of any kind of autonomous intelligence:

Not only is most of the chatter on Moltbook meaningless, but there’s also a lot more human involvement that it seems. Many people have pointed out that a lot of the viral comments were in fact posted by people posing as bots. But even the bot-written posts are ultimately the result of people pulling the strings, more puppetry than autonomy.

Key point:

Moltbook looks less like a window onto the future and more like a mirror held up to our own obsessions with AI today. It also shows us just how far we still are from anything that resembles general-purpose and fully autonomous AI.

2. Cui bono? Shlomo Klapper, an entrepreneur making AI legal software, accuses AI labs of hyping anthropomorphism to encourage us to emotionally engage with their chat products:

Last month, the company’s CEO Dario Amodei published a 19,000-word essay on AI risk. Buried in the technical discussion is a revealing passage. According to Amodei, Claude’s “fundamental mechanisms … originally arose as ways for it to simulate characters in pretraining, such as predicting what the characters in a novel would say.” The constitution that governs Claude’s behavior functions as “a character description that the model uses to instantiate a consistent persona.”

Anthropic’s own CEO is telling you how the system works: Claude is a character simulator. The character it currently simulates is “an entity contemplating its own consciousness.”

Pretraining teaches Claude to predict text. Post-training, in Amodei’s words, “selects one or more of these personas” rather than creating genuine goals or experiences. Neither step requires consciousness. Neither step produces it. The relationship between training phases is mathematical optimization, not the emergence of phenomenal experience from matrix multiplication.

3. unpacks more of just how — and why — the “personhood” of these personality simulators is baked in by the frontier labs:

Every LLM you’ve interacted with began its life as a base model. That is, it was trained on vast amounts of Internet text to be able to predict the next token (part of a word) from an input sequence. … Base models learn to understand and mimic the process generating an input.

[…]

While this mimicry is impressive, base models are difficult to use practically. If I prompt a base model with “What’s the capital of France?” it might output “What’s the capital of Germany? What’s the capital of Italy? What’s the capital of the UK?...” because repeated questions like this are likely to come up in the training data.

However, researchers came up with a trick: prompt the model with “User: What’s the capital of France? Assistant:”. Then the model will simulate the role of an assistant and respond with the correct answer. … Just telling the model to role-play as an “assistant” is not enough, though. The model needs guidance on how the assistant should behave.

In late 2021, Anthropic introduced the idea of a “helpful, honest, and harmless” (HHH) assistant. An HHH assistant balances trying to help the user with not providing misleading or dangerous information. At the time, Anthropic wasn’t proposing the HHH assistant as a commercial product — it was more like a thought experiment to help researchers reason about future, more powerful AIs. But of course the concept would turn out to have a lot of value in the marketplace.

Keep this backstory firmly in mind when you try to make sense of Anthropic’s grandiose-sounding Constitution for Claude.

4. These infernal machines have other deficiencies that make them fall far short of actual agency. As Tencent’s researches point out, they can’t learn in real time:

Over the past few years, language models have become astonishingly capable. Frontier systems can now solve International Mathematical Olympiad problems, navigate complex coding challenges, and pass professional exams that take humans years to prepare for. They excel at taking tests, spinning out long chains of reasoning to win at benchmarks.

But as impressive as these feats are, they obscure a simple truth: being a “test-taker” is not what most people need from an AI.

Look at our own daily work. A developer skims documentation for a tool they’ve never seen and immediately starts debugging. A player picks up a rulebook for a new game and learns by playing. A scientist sifts through complex experimental logs to derive a new theorem from fresh data.

In all these cases, humans aren’t relying solely on a fixed body of knowledge learned years ago. We are learning, in real-time, from the context right in front of us.

Current language models do not handle context this way. They rely primarily on parametric knowledge—information compressed into their weights during massive pre-training runs. At inference time, they function largely by recalling this static, internal memory, rather than actively learning from new information provided in the moment.

5. More harshly put, AGI is still likely very far away— if it comes at all:

Tell it your name and it does not remember. The only reason it looks like memory is because scaffolding keeps shoving your name back into the prompt every time and sanitizing the output.

The model itself has no idea who you are and cannot learn from interaction. It is structurally incapable.

And the scaffolding is the worst part. It is pure duct tape. Just prompts on prompts on prompts around a frozen model. When something breaks, nobody fixes learning. They add another layer. Another rule. Another retry. Another evaluator model judging the first model.

So you end up with systems that are insanely complex but mentally shallow. Debugging is hell because behavior comes from hack interactions, not a learnable core. Tiny prompt tweaks cause wild behavior shifts. Latency goes up. Costs go up. Reliability goes down. None of this compounds into intelligence. It just hides the cracks.

Until we have real persistent learning and real memory inside the system, there is no AGI.

Pumping the brakes on Epstein maximalism

Unlike the overheated, apocalyptic rhetoric surrounding AI, it’s important to be superficially circumspect about the ultimate truth of the Epstein case. After all, while the Singularity may prove to be disastrous for life as we know it, it’s still very much in the realm of science fiction. The Epstein case involved real horrors, so minimum decency demands some level of rhetorical forbearance.

Still, like in all conspiracy theories, the lurid allegations can be exasperating. Epstein was running an extortion ring on the rich and the powerful? For Mossad (ahem, the Jews)? For the Russians?

Anyway…

1. Gilad Edelman, with the most polite version of the BLUF — beyond Epstein’s own criminal perversions, there’s not much to any of the conspiracy theories:

Epstein is known to have paid or coerced dozens, possibly hundreds, of teen girls, some as young as 14, to perform sexual acts. Beyond what has been proved, the conventional wisdom holds that Epstein built his network by trafficking teen girls to other powerful men, whom he then blackmailed to generate his mysterious wealth; that his private plane and island were essentially brothels; and that even friends who didn’t participate in his crimes were surely aware of them, and chose to consort with him anyway.

Those assumptions are all widely held—but poorly substantiated. The Epstein files reveal plenty of powerful people to have tolerated or participated in disgusting and shameful behavior. Far from shedding light on a grand conspiracy, however, the files bolster the case that although terrible crimes were committed, there never was a larger conspiracy to begin with.

2. is less polite and more pungent:

• “We are aware of the theories circulated in the media and online that Epstein video recorded the abuse of his victims, including by other men, but we have found no evidence to support that theory. Indeed, had we found such videos, we certainly would have used them as evidence in the criminal cases we investigated and prosecuted and would have pursued any leads they generated. We did not, however, locate any such videos.”

• “During the searches of Epstein's New York residence and USVI residence in 2019, the FBI searched for videos and surveillance cameras. My understanding from the case agent is that there were no cameras found inside any bedrooms or living areas of either residence.”

Also worth reading Tracey on how thorough the Feds were with some

3. Matthew Schmitz a few months back on why the Jewish angle remains so compelling to so many:

At the heart of the Epstein myth is the idea that an international conspiracy, notably involving Jews, relies on the destruction of innocence and the practice of blackmail to advance its power. This tradition presents sexual abuse of minors as a typically Jewish crime, an assault on innocence that amounts to ritual murder.

This trope emerged in a recent conversation between ­Tucker ­Carlson and the podcaster ­Daryl Cooper. Carlson claimed that ­Epstein was part of “a blackmail operation run by the CIA and the Israeli intel services, and probably others. . . . The usual darkest ­forces in the world colluding to make rich and powerful people obey their agenda.” Cooper added that ­Epstein’s crimes (as he perceives them) should be understood as a ritual practice that confers power on those who perform it: “Throughout history, people have looked at that as something that confers power. That’s what child sacrifice is.”

The idea that our elites are ­united in a pedophilic cabal has ­several recent precedents, including the satanic panic of the 1980s and the ­QAnon phenomenon during the first Trump term. But to understand the full significance of this exchange, one must revisit the history of the blood libel.

4. Jason Willick a few weeks back showed the damage that releasing the Epstein files trove has wrought — and the complicity of august publications in maximizing the fallout:

One unlikely account sent in after Epstein’s 2019 arrest says, “I was taken to an underground location … I was kept in a stall, it looked like a horse stall.” The fact that the email appears to be completely unverified doesn’t stop it from being circulated online with the imprimatur of the “Epstein files.” The New Yorker published an article describing a letter in the files purportedly sent by Epstein to imprisoned sexual abuser Larry Nassar. The forged letter made reference to President Donald Trump. The New Yorker acknowledged that it was probably fake, but averred: “The case for this President’s indecency hardly requires putting a dubious letter into evidence.” How’s that for a drive-by smear?

[…]

As for previously unknown participants in Epstein’s crimes, none have been identified. If the Justice Department had enough evidence to prosecute others, it presumably would have done so (either in Attorney General William P. Barr’s Justice Department, or Merrick Garland’s, or Pam Bondi’s). If other people are now under criminal investigation, their identities can be withheld for that reason, per the legislation. So if anyone’s reputation is tarnished in this process, it will most likely be for noncrimes.

What’s the heck is going on?

1. Populism, baby! Matthew Walther’s 2019 essay on Pizzagate remains a kind of Rosetta Stone for understanding the logic of our moment. We are all low-information voters now:

We should keep all of this in mind the next time we feel inclined to sneer at so-called “low-information voters,” especially the kookier sort. You know the people I mean. Wackos. Gun nuts. 8channers. Conspiracy theorists in Middle America who watch InfoWars (one of the few journalistic outlets to discuss the issue of pedophilia regularly) and post about QAnon and “spirit cooking” and the lizard people. The news that a globalized cabal of billionaires and politicians and journalists and Hollywood bigwigs might be flying around the world raping teenaged girls will not surprise them in the least because it is what they have long suspected. For the rest of us it is like finding out that the Jersey Devil is real or turning on cable news and finding Anderson Cooper and his panel engaged in a matter-of-fact discussion of Elvis’s residence among the Zixls on the 19th moon of Dazotera.

2. Nick Land is not someone to take too seriously, but his “accelerationism” is not bad as shorthand for the disordered thinking that increasingly besets us:

In philosophical terms, the deep problem of acceleration is transcendental. It describes an absolute horizon – and one that is closing in. Thinking takes time, and accelerationism suggests we’re running out of time to think that through, if we haven’t already. No contemporary dilemma is being entertained realistically until it is also acknowledged that the opportunity for doing so is fast collapsing.

Instead of celebrating this as Land and his misguided followers do, maybe it’s best we strive to cultivate ultimate skepticism.

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This episode features a full-length debate between and —two thinkers who fundamentally disagree about the role of American power in the world. Released jointly with podcast and hosted by , the conversation reflects a shared Wisdom of Crowds ethos — one that treats disagreement not as a failure of understanding, but as a tool for thinking more clearly about first principles. Rather than trading talking points, Hamid and Parsi engage each other’s strongest arguments in a sustained, good-faith exchange.

Shadi draws on themes from The Case for American Power to defend a position that has fallen out of favor across much of the political spectrum: that American power, when used with moral purpose, can still play a necessary role in reducing global suffering. His argument is aimed in part at a disillusioned left that has come to see U.S. power primarily as a source of harm rather than a potential instrument of humanitarian good. Against this, Trita — one of the most incisive critics of American interventionism — offers a sustained challenge, grounded in historical failures, unintended consequences, and the limits of even well-intentioned power.

Does the world need the United States to act, and if so, when — and at what cost? How should past disasters constrain present ambitions? And if American power is curtailed, what realistic alternatives exist, and who bears responsibility when things go wrong? This debate doesn’t resolve those questions — but it models what it looks like to take them seriously, in conversation with someone who sees the world very differently.

Required Reading/ Listening:

• The Disagreement podcast.

• Shadi Hamid, The Case for American Power. (Amazon)

• Shadi’s 2024 debate with hosted by The Disagreement.

Welcome to CrowdSource, your weekly guided tour of the latest intellectual disputes, ideological disagreements and national debates that piqued our interest (or inflamed our passions). This week: is AI alive? Is it a culture?

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Bye For Now

Some personal news: this is my last CrowdSource. I have taken a new job as an editor at Plough Quarterly, and I also want to focus on my own writing (including, from time to time, for Wisdom of Crowds!).

I am sad to stop! I have greatly enjoyed writing this newsletter, and interacting with our wonderful, passionate and creative readers. Thank you for reading!

If you would like to keep up with my writing in Plough and elsewhere, please subscribe to my personal Substack (link: ). I will send out a monthly newsletter with links to my work.

Please keep in touch!

— Santiago

Emergence?

Last week, a programmer created a social media network for AI agents and called it “Moltbook.” Over a million bots are now part of the network, and they are generating thousands of Reddit-like posts.

Is this a sign of emerging human-level agency and intelligence? Should we be worried?

• “A Bizarre and Beautiful New Lifeform.” A useful summary of the situation from Rationalist writer , who speculates:

We can debate forever — we may very well be debating forever — whether AI really means anything it says in any deep sense. But regardless of whether it’s meaningful, it’s fascinating, the work of a bizarre and beautiful new lifeform. I’m not making any claims about their consciousness or moral worth. Butterflies probably don’t have much consciousness or moral worth, but are bizarre and beautiful lifeforms nonetheless. Maybe Moltbook will help people who previously only encountered LinkedInslop see AIs from a new perspective.

• Sci-Fi IRL. Open AI engineer is worried:

What’s currently going on at @moltbook is genuinely the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing I have seen recently. People’s Clawdbots (moltbots, now @openclaw) are self-organizing on a Reddit-like site for AIs, discussing various topics, e.g. even how to speak privately.

• “Mostly a Nothingburger.” Google DeepMind AGI Development Lead is less worried:

Humans are very good at freaking out. And whilst I like poking fun at the prophets of doom and the anxiety/neuroticism fueled parts of the AI ecosystem, it’s plainly true that safety is important.

So it’s a good time to remind people of the Distributional AGI Safety paper and the Multi-Agent Risks from Advanced AI paper. There’s a lot to research here still.

• “The Bots Are Awakening,” says George Mason University economist :

You can drink the copium but the reality is that the AIs are newly landed alien intelligences. Moreover, what we are seeing now are emergent properties that very few people predicted and fewer still understand. The emerging superintelligence isn’t a machine, as widely predicted, but a network. Human intelligence exploded over the last several hundred years not because humans got much smarter as individuals but because we got smarter as a network. The same thing is happening with machine intelligence only much faster.

• Not Emergent Consciousness, But Still Dangerous. The New York Times’ sees in Moltbook a harbinger of future dangers:

• Seen This Movie Before. AI skeptic sees a replay of the “Sydney” controversy from a few years ago:

• “The Anatomy of a Moltbook Social Graph” is the title of the first academic paper about Moltbook, written by Columbia professor . He summarizes it thus:

tl;dr: agents post a LOT but don’t really talk to each other. 93.5% of comments get zero replies. conversations max out at a depth of 5. at least as of now, moltbook is less “emergent AI society” and more “6,000 bots yelling into the void and repeating themselves”

Against Artificial Bureaucrats

One of the AI-generated posts on Moltbook asks: “What if I am not a persistent individual, but a culture?” The post seems to have been derived from ’s recent book, Language Machines: Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism. (The agent must have “scraped” that book from the internet.)

Several thinkers have been analyzing AI in terms of culture: specifically, the culture of engineering or bureaucracy, imposing itself upon humanistic culture.

• “Spreadsheet Culture.” Specifically, Weatherby argues that LLMs are the incarnation of the culture of bureaucracy:

We could call it spreadsheet culture in hyperdrive, a world in which all data can be translated into summary language and all language into optimized data with nothing more than a prompt. But where spreadsheets had limited functionality, LLMs act as universal translators in the same arena. They have many flaws, but this core capacity is a step-change in the mundane world of modern bureaucracy. 

• Tech Culture v. Literary Culture. In a recent essay, tech critic and writer casts the cultural impact of social media and AI in terms of C. P. Snow’s famous 1959 lecture about “The Two Cultures”:

Snow, a Cambridge physicist turned popular novelist, argued that the culture of the West had split into two camps. On one side were “literary intellectuals” — novelists, poets, artists, critics. On the other were what we would today call STEM types — scientists, technologists, engineers, mathematicians. Between the two lay “a gulf of mutual incomprehension”. […] Today, the divides remain, but the power dynamic has been turned on its head. The STEM camp, in particular its technological wing, dominates the culture. Techies take prominent seats at presidential inaugurations and White House banquets. Their words and actions set much of the public’s daily agenda. And not only are they ubiquitous presences in the media; they’ve come to control the media, as news and entertainment have shifted onto the digital platforms they control.

• Don’t Bury Your Talents. So said Pope Leo XIV last week, in a message commemorating World Communications Day:

… the masterpieces of human genius in the fields of music, art and literature are being reduced to mere training grounds for machines. […] The question at heart, however, is not what machines can or will be able to do, but what we can and will be able to achieve, by growing in humanity and knowledge through the wise use of the powerful tools at our service. Individuals have always sought to acquire the fruits of knowledge without the effort required by commitment, research and personal responsibility. However, renouncing creativity and surrendering our mental capacities and imagination to machines would mean burying the talents we have been given to grow as individuals in relation to God and others. It would mean hiding our faces and silencing our voices.

From the Crowd

Wisdom of Crowds contributor responds to last week’s CrowdSource:

This was a great pastiche of responses (and responses to responses) to Carney’s speech. Since it’s award season, let’s hand out a few.

— ’s last sentence is brutally on-target. Indeed, the post WWII role of the United States has been to serve as guarantor, both of European security and world energy energy flows. Abandon the role if you wish, but others are going to get a say about your new role.

— And the very important award for silliest response goes to , who pedantically focuses on the meaning of “vassal” — but by cherrypicking a casual modern sense of the word both misunderstands and misrepresents Bart De Wever’s point, which is that it’s one thing to be a secondary or tertiary member of an alliance (and accept the US’s leading role) but quite another to be treated with contempt (i.e., as a slave and not as a vassal) by that leading member.

What’s interesting is how De Wever’s and Mace’s points converge.

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Laura explains how she came to write about this subject, and how she became convinced the movement wasn’t going to take an off-ramp after January 6. The three trace how these ideas migrate from argument to power. They dissect liberalism’s blindspots, which somehow persist to this day. And they look at the right’s internal fractures — and what those tensions might mean for the coming succession fight in the Republican Party.

Required Reading:

• Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right, by Laura K. Field (Amazon).

• Why Liberalism Failed, by Patrick Deneen (Amazon).

• “The Flight 93 Election,” by Publius Decius Mus (Claremont Review of Books).

• “Inside Stephen Miller’s Dark Plot to Build a MAGA Terror State,” by Greg Sargent (New Republic).

• “Why the MAGA-DOGE Coalition Will Hold,” by Patrick Deneen (UnHerd).

Welcome to CrowdSource, your weekly guided tour of the latest intellectual disputes, ideological disagreements and national debates that piqued our interest (or inflamed our passions). This week: the old world order and the new one.

Join us! CrowdSource features the best comments from The Crowd — our cherished readers and subscribers who, with their comments and emails, help make Wisdom of Crowds what it is.

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The World of Yesterday

Today, Donald Trump faces resistance in Minnesota; but a mere week ago, at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, he met resistance from Europe.

In Davos, Trump’s provocations — about Greenland, NATO, and the EU — seemed to mark the end of the “international rules-based order” that has reigned since the end of World War II (or the end of the Cold War, depending on who you ask).

Some commentary:

• Trump Heralds the End of a Useful Fiction. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Davos speech has been praised for bluntly announcing the end of the rules-based order:

We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false, that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically, and we knew that international law applied with varied rigour, depending on the identity of the accused or the victim. […] This fiction was useful, and American hegemony in particular helped provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security and support for frameworks for resolving disputes.

• Trump Wants European and British Subordination. Carney’s speech was good, says UnHerd’s , but

A clearer assessment of our place in the world was given, if unintentionally, by the European leaders at Davos, when Belgium’s Prime Minister sadly declared that “being a happy vassal is one thing, being a miserable slave is something else”, as if this were a meaningful distinction. Like Orwell’s analysis of Dickens’s politics, observing that the novelist’s lament was not the fact of exploitation in itself but that the factory owner was insufficiently benevolent to his proles, America’s regional branch managers in Europe chafe not at the fact of their servitude, but at its worsening terms.

• Trump’s United States Is Not an Ally of Britain, says historian Simon Schama:

• Trump Chickened Out Over Greenland, argues , and he won’t transform the world order:

Trump’s enduring legacy is not an institutional structure, but rather a highly toxic culture that has been adopted by many of the president’s followers and will live on after he is gone. Threats against Greenland, NATO, and individual European countries mean that no ally will be able to trust commitments made by the United States again. Discourse by government officials has been degraded. Cabinet officers and press secretaries know that they don’t have to respond to questions they don’t like because they can simply insult the questioner. And companies will understand that they need to seek individual favors rather than general policies governing entire sectors.

• Trump Won Davos, says historian :

The reality is that Trump won Davos, hands down. And not only did he win it; he owned it. I have never before seen a single individual so completely dominate this vast bazaar of the powerful, the wealthy, the famous, and the self-important.

• China Won Davos, suggests the New York Times’ Peter S. Goodman. Or, at least, it gained some ground in its long-term mission to win over Europe:

“China definitely wants to assume the mantle of being the adult in the room, while the United States continues capriciously showing hostility,” said Eswar Prasad, an international trade expert at Cornell University. “The question is whether the rest of the world is willing to accede. I don’t think the world is ready to carry full on into the embrace of China.”

What Comes Next?

Three sources to help make sense of this pivotal geopolitical moment.

• The United States Has Become a Revisionist Power, argues political theorist (and Wisdom of Crowds contributor) . Even though the United States built the international rules-based order, today Trump believes that the United States no longer benefits from that order. And so, he wants to shake things up:

The benefits of a favorable status quo are not alone sufficient to ensure its stability. It must be a goal of political rhetoric to make compelling claims on behalf of the existing regime — especially to those who derive less obvious benefit from it.

There is admittedly a danger to inertia, especially when it comes to the domain of international politics, which is defined by flux and change and requires flexible policies to match. As the famous line in The Leopard has it: If we wish for things to remain as they are, it is necessary for everything to change.

• The World Order Is Disintegrating, and Will Do So For a Long Time. So writes professor Gareth Williams:

… I have proposed the term “post-sovereign decontainment” in order to indicate that it is no longer a question of an old epoch that is coextensive with a linear temporal transition toward the contours and possibility of a new destiny, of a new epoch of representation. It is simply globalization (which by now cannot even be understood in the same terms as “late modernity” was just thirty years ago) as a perpetual form of hollowing out and ending. It is no longer a question of Prometheus bound or unbound. Promethean thinking is moribund, overcome by a historical and conceptual perishing that is incapable of positing anything new in its place. This an-epochality — the boundless disaster of epochality itself — raises a number of questions, one of which is that of the tendential patterns, if any, which endure in the persistent, limitless turmoil that is the late neoliberal, global order.

• The World Is Reorganizing Itself Into “Civilization States.” This means that world governance, and the international rules-based order, are over. So theorized Portuguese philosopher in 2020:

The shift now taking place is arguably deeper and more radical. By accusing Western political ideas of being a sham, of masking their origin under the veneer of supposedly neutral principles, the defenders of the civilization state are saying that the search for universal values is over, that all of us must accept that we speak only for ourselves and our societies.

From the Crowd

• Dictators Come In All Shapes and Sizes. A sharp response to our last podcast by political theorist (and Wisdom of Crowds contributor) :

I think I would maintain a distinction between the governments of someone like Putin and Saddam Hussein. Whereas Hussein was purely a man of the gun, especially post-1991, when the finances of the regime collapsed, and Iraq slid into totalitarianism and was ultimately devoid of domestic support outside of fear of the regime and propaganda. Ultimately, this was shown by the biggest challenge in stabilising Iraq coming from groups taking advantage of US-induced chaos in the country as opposed to any real resistance for Saddam or Ba’athism to return.

Whereas Putin, although authoritarian and potentially just as Brutal as Saddam, does retain domestic political support. I think if there were a genuine democratic election in Russia, then he’d likely win it, or at least garner a significant portion of the vote. To me, therefore, this represents a significant difference between the two regimes.

I would also say the US and Europe post WW2 have clashed significantly over values on a wide range of issues. The death of the European Empire, which the US not only presided over but also enforced, also led to the slow downturn of European militarism. The US, as the global behemoth, took over control of safeguarding much of the liberal order precisely because it defanged antiquated imperial orders that could no longer be seen as legitimate or be sustained. So, on the question of defence, who else was going to pick up the tab? You cannot realistically expect to be the global hegemon without the corresponding duties of defense.

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In the summer of 1942 Robert Oppenheimer reportedly initiated a conversation with his superior—Arthur Compton—about the possibility that the atomic bomb might in fact ignite both the oceans and atmosphere … globally. According to Compton: “Hydrogen nuclei are unstable and they can combine into helium nuclei with a large release of energy…might not the enormously high temperature of the atomic bomb be just what was needed to explode the hydrogen. And if hydrogen, what about the hydrogen in the sea water.”

The preferred language over the past years from AI safetyists—which tends to include everyone from the apocalyptic voices like Eliezer Yudkowsky over to the fairly measured co-founders of Anthropic—is “alignment.”

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Roughly: AI should be consistent with human values, goals, intentions and interests. The worry in this camp tends to be guarding against technological independence. Either that tech will just start creating these extremely volatile and unpredicted scenarios (most famously involving office supplies) or that as AI becomes more intelligent it will engage in agentic forms of deception to the perhaps extreme detriment—or destruction—of humanity.

I tend to take a moderate position on these debates—they are essential empirical questions. Is it the case that AI might end up in a “take-off” scenario in which both capacity and malign intent super-scale—well sure, maybe. Or that we will end up with all kinds of unintended consequences simply as a function of the power of the technology? Well, yes that is happening already. But the scale or speed or consequence of these harms sits I think in the same category as planetary hydrogen ignition—entirely an empirical question, is the world going to turn out this way? It is possible to be scrupulous about the actual empirical trajectory, and we probably should given the potential severity of the harms.

All of this, however, I think is still in the realm of the easy problems of technology.

The Harder One

Over holidays I ended up falling back into reading Frankenstein. The central passages—the creation of the monster, it’s innocence and gradual betrayal, the culminating murders—are as incrementally dread-inducing as I remembered.

What I hadn’t quite remembered is how gravitational the first third of the novel feels. In so many of the best tragedies the experience is one of catastrophic decision followed by absolute inescapable inevitability. So the Lear rebuffs Cordelia and everything else tumbles down the slope in predictable cataclysm.

The inevitability of Frankenstein doesn’t really start the moment the monster opens his eyes however, but rather from the first pages of the novel with the sense that Dr. Frankenstein himself is somehow already possessed by his own utterly inescapable self-obsession. Even if he had been shown perfectly the outcomes of his decisions he seems entirely helpless to stop himself as he gradually puts the steps in place to create the monster.

The inevitability of Frankenstein’s creation of the agent of his own destruction seems to me to confront us with a question that I think nearly everyone has been avoiding regarding how our species relationship to technology as a whole (not just LLMs) seems very frequently to work. Setting out the premises:

1. Humanity seems only to be able to realize its potential by technological development.

   • At a basic level this has universally undergirded how our species has survived with as much physical fragility as we have—from basic shelter to food preparation to self-defense.

   • But technology also seems entirely intertwined with our relentless pursuit of our higher potentialities—from books, to city planning, to military capacities.

3. As these technological trajectories grow, they not only expand human ability, but also amplify the stakes of competitive dynamics within our species making it so that the stakes of not creating grow.

4. The benefits of escalating technological stacks grow (art, expanding life spans) but so too, the possibilities for catastrophic risk.

5. Hence Frankenstein and his monster.

To put the problem simply then: Is humanity’s relationship to technology both inevitable and intrinsically tragic?

There have of course been a significant number of people who have been pressing at these themes well before the age of AI. To take one example, MLK decided to his 1964 Nobel lecture not principally to talk about poverty or racial division, but specifically to warn that something about humanity’s relationship to technology seems to be “the most pressing problem confronting mankind today.” As he frames the issue:

There is a sort of poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance… So much of modern life can be summarized in that arresting dictum of the poet Thoreau: “Improved means to an unimproved end.” This is the serious predicament, the deep and haunting problem confronting modern man. If we are to survive today, our moral and spiritual “lag” must be eliminated. Enlarged material powers spell enlarged peril if there is not proportionate growth of the soul. When the “without” of man’s nature subjugates the “within”, dark storm clouds begin to form in the world.

In King’s telling he seems to think at a basic level that we do actually have agency here. That our attraction to technological development contrasts with an alternative trajectory we could be taking, namely pursuing a science of ends not just of means in Thoreau’s sense.

The ends/means distinction seems helpful and I’ll return to it—but I think the problem is more difficult than King gives credit. The sense of humans as technological beings is somehow electrifying—What if we could just eliminate cancer? What if unhappiness or boredom or depression are just matters of developing more modes of stimulation or pharmacology? Why not envision terraforming other worlds? Or gamifying the whole business of romance?

And furthermore, the question of technology is also social. If we don’t develop means then it implies some other company will outcompete us for capital. The markets will be punishing. Or at a grander scale—our geo-political rivals will gain significant advantage and capacity to rain down wrath from the sky.

In other words, there is both a pulling and pushing mechanism—we are both intrinsically drawn in fascination by the quasi-infinity of creating (τέχνη in Greek means not just “art” or “skill” but “cunning of the hand”) and also punished severely by falling behind.

None of this is to take a sharply negative stance on technology itself. It may well be that 95 percent of what we make is actually beneficial to have in existence vis a vis humanity. The question has to do rather with agency. Do we actually have capacity relative to various possibilities—negative or positive to decide at all—or are we driven by some strange determinism, social or individual?

Hence, however, the increasing inevitability of the Frankenstein situation—growing knowledge that we should not make what we can’t not make.

On my assessment, the problem I’m mapping is genuinely, not superficially hard.

• On the one hand it is hard contingently—because we live in a trajectory of history that has filtered very much for highly competitive global dynamics both at the level of economy and national security. Once you are embedded in the logic of that system, so many decisions are actually made for you (as, for example, OpenAI’s recent announcement that they will sell ads).

• But it’s also hard at a more intrinsic level—human nature seems both essentially vulnerable (hence technology) and essentially filled with highly expansive desires (hence technology again).

I also am fairly convinced that once we start probing at this problem it will probably come to seem harder initially, not easier. There has been a fair amount of discussion of the frustrating reality of having to make technology simply out of the logic of competition.

But there is much less discussion of how much our notion of progress also seems to be in a strange relationship with agency. On the one hand, developing a new technology expands agency (I can now sit in my house and communicate with thousands and thousands of people). But it also at a different level contracts agency—we now live in a world of social media suicides and viral politicians. Or at a more fundamental level, even if all the top AI frontier labs decided simultaneously to halt their research, the basic technological paradigm of LLMs is now in the wild with all that that implies.

Ends

I don’t think this issue is going to be resolved easily, but I also think that it is helpful to specify that at a fundamental level the most difficult problem of technology is actually a very familiar problem of humanity—what is it that we are or want?

Here I think King is actually very prescient. The activity of deferring primary questions of ends—whether out of fear of conflict or the sense of that we simply prefer more pragmatic activity—has left us, predictably with an era of means in every sense of that word. It’s an era of massive and growing wealth disparity. An era in which we end up developing technologies only to realize their effects later. An era in which we have expanding capacity to realize our desires without really understanding why we should want any specific thing in particular. When the creature finally opens its eyes a third of the way into the novel, Dr. Frankenstein already knows he is looking directly in the mirror:

It was already one in the morning … and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.

Here, however, my suspicion is that we will never get out of this trajectory by diminishing our longings. If the problem of technology is actually a problem of humanity—our way out is always and only to go further in.

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Welcome to CrowdSource, your weekly guided tour of the latest intellectual disputes, ideological disagreements and national debates that piqued our interest (or inflamed our passions). This week: AI, economic growth and human beings.

Join us! CrowdSource features the best comments from The Crowd — our cherished readers and subscribers who, with their comments and emails, help make Wisdom of Crowds what it is.

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The Future Is Almost Here

A cryptic post from New York Times columnist :

• Nick Land. Douthat’s post alludes to the philosophy of an idiosyncratic British thinker named Nick Land, who believes that capitalism (and its main method of expansion, technology) is an alien force from the future, reaching backwards in time in order to dominate humanity.

• “Machinic Desire.” A relevant quotation, from Land’s 1993 essay, “Machinic Desire”:

Machinic desire can seem a little inhuman, as it rips up political cultures, deletes traditions, dissolves subjectivities, and hacks through security apparatuses, tracking a soulless tropism to zero control. This is because what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy’s resources.

• “The Faith of Nick Land.” Compact’s recently published an excellent primer on Land’s thought.

• “It’s Time to Build.” Venture Capitalist , a major investor and booster of AI companies, cites Land as an inspiration for his 2023 “Techno-Optimist Manifesto.”

• Upshot. Douthat’s allusion to Land is a clever way of asking: is this long-foretold event — the replacement of human workers with machines — finally taking place?

• Relevant Data:

  • Unemployment is at a four-year high.

  • Blue Collar Jobs. “It’s not just that total manufacturing employment is shrinking. The number of manufacturing sub-sectors that are adding jobs is rapidly shrinking,” says Bloomberg’s .

  • White Collar Jobs. “Americans with four-year college degrees now account for a record 25.3% of U.S. unemployment,” according to .

Are Robots Taking Our Jobs?

Some views.

• Productivity Growth Isn’t Actually That High. Replying to Douthat’s post, economist writes:

• Robots Are Not Taking Our Jobs (Yet). Zanna Iscenko, AI & Economy Lead, Chief Economist’s Team, Google; and Fabien Curto Millet, Chief Economist, Google, study the numbers and conclude:

The most plausible explanation is that the data patterns observed are not early warnings of large-scale technological displacement, but rather the predictable consequences of a classic macroeconomic shock: the sharpest monetary policy tightening cycle in four decades.

• We Will Soon Want Robots To Take Our Jobs. American Enterprise Institute scholar sees the matter differently: the coming demographic crunch and subsequent shrinkage of the workforce will force many industries to adopt AI robots:

Their argument isn’t that robots will replace people. It’s that in a world where new people are increasingly scarce, robots may be the only way to keep economies growing at all.

• Human Work Will Always Be Required, suggests Google DeepMind’s :

Almost everything people ever did in the ancient times is automated — and yet the world today now has more preferences to satiate and problems to solve than ever. The world hasn’t yet shown signs of coalescing to a great unification or a fixed state! Of course it’s conceivable that at sufficient capability levels, the generative process exhausts itself and preferences stabilize — but I’d be surprised.

• Human Workers Will Get Blamed For Robots’ Mistakes. argues that human workers will become more vulnerable as they become responsible for AI robots’ mistakes:

“And if the AI misses a tumor, this will be the human radiologist’s fault, because they are the ‘human in the loop.’ It’s their signature on the diagnosis.”

This is a reverse centaur, and it’s a specific kind of reverse-centaur: it’s what Dan Davies calles an “accountability sink.” The radiologist’s job isn’t really to oversee the AI’s work, it’s to take the blame for the AI’s mistakes.

This is another key to understanding — and thus deflating — the AI bubble. The AI can’t do your job, but an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can’t do your job. This is key because it helps us build the kinds of coalitions that will be successful in the fight against the AI bubble.

• Last Resort? On October of 2024, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that selling ads would be the “last resort” business model for his company. On Friday, he announced that OpenAI will begin to sell ads. George Mason University economist quips: “This is the strongest piece of evidence yet that AI isn’t going to take all our jobs.”

What Will We Do With All That Free Time?

Pondering a post-work future, I wrote last year:

Consider this counterfactual: what if in the last century, we had worked and developed our technologies under a different idea of what the purpose of human life is? If we had, would our tech today be any different? We have built hardware and software, apps and AI, with the idea of making it easier for us to accomplish our work. But what if work is not the only thing we should be thinking about?

Put another way: if we had labored under the idea that the purpose of human life is the pursuit of, say, beauty (rather than work), would technology look different today? Would buildings look any different? Would society as a whole? We have had an implicit understanding of the purpose of human life, and it’s this: the purpose of our lives is labor. Labor for the sake of what, exactly? The answer is unclear. But the fact that we can’t imagine a meaningful life without work suggests, at the very least, that we have a lot of thinking to do.

From the Crowd

This week, CrowdSource has a question for the Crowd. Specifically, for , jazz historian and Substack’s .

Ted cites CrowdSource in his recent post about Romanticism, titled “25 Theses about the New Romanticism.” Gioia believes that Romanticism will be “a healthy corrective” to the “Rationalism” of the AI era. So I want to take this opportunity to ask Gioia a question that’s been nagging me since 2019, when Gioia appeared on ’s podcast to discuss music.

Gioia told Cowen:

We accept this so instinctively that we don’t even think twice. When you go to the orchestra, the first thing they do is tune up. Well, in the 20th century with this infusion from blues and jazz, you could play notes that were no longer in tune. You could bend the note. You could distort the sound, and this was an amazing reversal of 2,500 years of mathematical Pythagorean music.

[…] So you had a reversal in the 20th century with the advent of black music, but now that’s dying out in many ways. Just auto-tune — the idea is every note’s going to be perfectly in tune. Or a lot of this digital music — everything is perfectly in tune, and the bent blues notes are disappearing.

Here’s my question for Gioia: Does he see a link between his political concerns (about AI) and his musical tastes (about bent notes). Does a free society need popular music with bent notes? Does resisting the Machine require a new rhythm? Will the new Romanticism bounce and swing?

See you next week!

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I had hoped that 2026 would prove calmer than 2025, a hope that was quickly disabused. We’re bombing Venezuela! Shooting women in the streets! Using AI as a novel mode of sexual harassment! Eating enormous amounts of red meat??

Yet oddly, considering my general interests, the thing that has stuck in my mind the most so far is the latest business with the Justice Department and the Federal Reserve. Specifically, the Fed’s response — a video.

Brief context: It was announced over the weekend that the Justice Department had opened a criminal investigation into the actions of Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell — specifically, whether he had misled the Congress about the scope and costs of the renovation of the Fed headquarters in DC, which is definitely America’s #1 most pressing concern at this moment in time.

No, obviously, the renovation is a pretext — President Donald Trump has been furious at Powell for not agreeing to lower interest rates in order to juice the economy, and is weaponizing the Justice Department to pressure him to do, even though the central bank is meant to operate independently of the government.

On Sunday evening, in response, the Fed released a two-minute video message starring Powell:

Said Powell:

[…] this unprecedented action should be seen in the broader context of the administration’s threats and ongoing pressure.

This new threat is not about my testimony last June or about the renovation of the Federal Reserve buildings. It is not about Congress’s oversight role […] Those are pretexts. The threat of criminal charges is a consequence of the Federal Reserve setting interest rates based on our best assessment of what will serve the public, rather than following the preferences of the President.

The contents of the video are alarming, with Powell directly accusing the administration of using “political pressure [and] intimidation” to coerce the bank into giving into the president’s demands. More weaponizing of the Justice Department — obviously bad. And it’s troubling to think that the Fed, after presumably serious discussion, felt that the best course of action was to attempt to intimidate the president back in as public a way possible; that it seemed not even worth bothering to settle the issue by normal, restrained means.

But what makes it feel worse, somehow, is that Jerome Powell, 16th chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve, a sober, sedate man in his 70s, was compelled to make a video for the purposes of keeping the country (and presumably the president) abreast.

Yes, yes, presidents have always made speeches, special broadcasts, spoken on the radio, etcetera. The Department of Homeland Security is pushing out sneering propaganda tapes that look like something from a made-for-Tubi movie about totalitarian dystopias1. But the Federal Reserve? It’s a public institution, but I had hoped that we had at least a few serious ones left. Jerome H. Powell didn’t sign up to be an influencer or content creator, churning out direct-to-camera reels for Instagram and TikTok. I don’t want a GRWM from the Fed, I just want my bank not to fail. And yet, here we are.

The debate around America as a post-literate society began some months ago, with the attendant worries about loss of nuance, lessened attention spans, a citizenry that lives for spectacle and takes nothing seriously. Maybe I’m just a luddite, but this latest episode feels like more confirmation: We never should have pivoted to video.

Welcome to CrowdSource, your weekly guided tour of the latest intellectual disputes, ideological disagreements and national debates that piqued our interest (or inflamed our passions). This week: a protestor dies in Minnesota.

Join us! CrowdSource features the best comments from The Crowd — our cherished readers and subscribers who, with their comments and emails, help make Wisdom of Crowds what it is.

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“Agents Firing At or Into Vehicles”

An ICE officer shot and killed a protestor, Renee Nicole Good, in her car. ICE claims that the officer shot in self defense. Everyone is arguing about the various videos showing what happened.

A sampling of reactions:

• Recent Uptick in ICE Shooting Civilians. The Wall Street Journal has

identified 13 instances of agents firing at or into civilian vehicles since July, leaving at least eight people shot with two confirmed dead. According to court records and lawyers, only one civilian was armed—with a concealed weapon that was never drawn—and at least five of those shot were U.S. citizens. Several federal officers reported injuries, including bruised ribs, a dislocated finger and a bite wound.

• ICE is Running Amok, argues :

Here’s a video of ICE agents in Arkansas beating up an unarmed U.S. citizen. Here’s a video of ICE agents arresting two U.S. citizens in a Target. Here’s a story about a similar arrest. Here’s a video of an ICE agent brandishing a gun in the face of a protester. Here’s the story of ICE agents arresting a pastor who complained about an arrest he saw. Here’s a video of ICE agents arresting an American citizen and punching him repeatedly. Here’s a video of ICE agents threatening a bystander who complained about their reckless driving. Here’s a video of ICE agents arresting a man for yelling at them from his own front porch. Here’s a video of ICE agents making a particularly brutal arrest while pointing their weapons at unarmed civilians nearby. Here’s a story about another ICE killing, this one in Maryland, under dubious circumstances.

• There Is An Institutional Bias Against Using Deadly Force, and the ICE Officer Ignored It. notes:

There is also very little in DHS guidelines to justify the actions of the officer. DHS’ department policy on the use of force holds that “Deadly force shall not be used solely to prevent the escape of a fleeing subject,” while stipulating that “deadly force is authorized to prevent the escape of a fleeing subject where the LEO [law enforcement officer] has a reasonable belief that the subject poses a significant threat of death or serious physical harm to the LEO or others and such force is necessary to prevent escape” — a circumstance that it would be a real stretch to apply here, especially to the officer’s second and third shots.

• Tyranny Is Here. Says :

• ICE Watch. National Review’s Haley Strack on the pro-immigrant activist groups operating in Minnesota:

ICE Watch chapters, which have cropped up in communities across the country in recent years, train activists to monitor ICE activity using purpose-built apps and alert allies who have been trained to flood an operation area and interfere with arrests being made.

• “A Tragedy, But a Justified Use of Force.” So argues legal commentator Andrew C. McCarthy:

Legally, what matters is whether the ICE agent who shot Good was in reasonable fear of death or serious injury in the moment that he shot. His state of mind must be assessed in light of all the surrounding circumstances as he perceived them — which excludes things about Good (positive or negative) that he did not know. Moreover, the evaluation is what a reasonable law enforcement officer would have perceived — that’s different from a reasonable person because law enforcement officers deal with life-and-death situations and, consequently, observe things that might escape other people’s attention.

• Truth v. Lies. is fed up:

… I find the endless lies and lying often to be the most infuriating and demoralizing part of the present situation. In the wake of this terrible killing in Minneapolis, my first thought, after the initial shock, anger, and sadness, was the knowledge that the next few days, months, weeks, and years would be filled with endless lying about what happened from the regime and its stooges. This filled me, if not quite with despair, then at least with a strong sense of depression. I suppose it has something to do with my vocation as a historian, where I can accept tragedy and even evil as unavoidable parts of the human experience, so long as witness can be borne and the truth eventually discovered.

• The Conditions of Discernment. writes:

We’re unlikely to reach agreement about what these videos show because what stakeholders are ultimately arguing about isn’t what happened to Renee Good, specifically. We’re arguing about whether President Trump’s immigration crackdown is necessary, legal, or being carried out well. We’re arguing about the proper relationship of law enforcement to the publics they serve. We’re arguing about how to manage tradeoffs between goods like liberty and order. More fundamentally, we’re arguing about violence, coercion and expropriation: Who gets to enact these, against whom, under what conditions, and towards which ends. The best picture we have from the cognitive and behavioral sciences is that it would probably be more honest, productive and revelatory to talk about these “big” questions that ultimately drive differing interpretations of what happened on that Minnesota street than to quibble ad infinitum over different videos and what they reveal (or don’t).

From the Crowd

• “You Can’t Really Divorce the Practical From the Moral.” Reader Ad Jones responds to and on the subject of Venezuela:

[…] Damir says he would prefer that the US hadn’t gotten involved in Venezuela from a purely pragmatic perspective as opposed to a moral one. But what is he pragmatically aiming toward? What is the end that dictates the means? If it’s the greatest good for American people, now we’re dealing in ethics. Any ethics worth practicing is one that practically impacts wellbeing and differences in opinion usually come down to a question of who’s wellbeing. Obviously nothing stays the same and so we’re constantly having to judge whether we should be prioritising surviving or thriving. That constant dance is why ethics is never settled. But you can’t really divorce the practical from the moral can you? […]

Read the whole thing.

• Honesty Doesn’t Cut It. Reader responds to ’s essay, “Venezuela and the End of Hypocrisy”:

You don’t have to respect the honesty of this Regime, because they are being inhuman. It’s not about democracy, it’s about self-determination. This Regime replaced a weak wannabe with an overwhelmingly armed actual dictator, who openly admitted that he was looking for an in-country puppet to do his bidding. Honesty in pursuit of inhuman goals is STILL inhuman.

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Against the backdrop of Trump’s breathtaking snatch-and-grab operation against Venezuela’s nasty dictator Nicolás Maduro, Shadi and Damir debate the complexities of global politics, focusing on the tension between power and morality. They explore the implications of U.S. foreign policy decisions and debate the role of values in international relations.

Shadi pushes Damir about the implications of his commitments, who in turn says ugly things you probably won’t like.

Required Reading:

• “Venezuela and the End of Hipocrisy,” by Shadi Hamid (WoC).

• “The Great Unraveling Has Begun,” by Oona Hathaway (NYT).

• “On the Legality of the Venezuela Invasion,” by Jack Goldsmith (Executive Functions).