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January 18 - February 25, 2024
More than seventy countries have been found running disinformation campaigns. China is quickly catching up with Russia; others from Turkey to Iran are developing their skills. (The CIA, too, is no stranger to info ops.)
A Carnegie Mellon study analyzed more than 200 million tweets discussing COVID-19 at the height of the first lockdown. Eighty-two percent of influential users advocating for “reopening America” were bots. This was a targeted “propaganda machine,” most likely Russian, designed to intensify the worst public health crisis in a century.
While bots and fakes aren’t difficult to make, most are of low quality, easily identifiable, and only moderately effective at actually changing targets’ behavior. High-quality synthetic media changes this equation.
“Infocalypse,” the point at which society can no longer manage a torrent of sketchy material, where the information ecosystem grounding knowledge, trust, and social cohesion, the glue holding society together, falls apart.
gain-of-function (GOF) research.
experiments deliberately engineer pathogens to be more lethal or infectious, or both.
Gain-of-function research and lab leaks are just two particularly sharp examples of how the coming wave will introduce a plethora of revenge effects and inadvertent failure modes. If every half-competent lab or even random biohacker can embark on this research, tragedy cannot be indefinitely postponed.
throughout history, tools and technologies have been designed to help us do more with less.
what happens if the ultimate side effect of these compounding efficiencies is that humans aren’t needed for much work at all?
the economist John Maynard Keynes called “technological unemployment.” In Keynes’s view, this was a good thing, with increasing productivity freeing up time for further innovation and leisure.
when technology damaged old jobs and industries, it also produced new ones. Over time these new jobs tended toward service industry roles and cognitive-based white-collar jobs.
These tools will only temporarily augment human intelligence. They will make us smarter and more efficient for a time, and will unlock enormous amounts of economic growth, but they are fundamentally labor replacing. They will eventually do cognitive labor more efficiently and more cheaply than many people working in administration, data entry, customer service (including making and receiving phone calls), writing emails, drafting summaries, translating documents, creating content, copywriting, and so on. In the face of an abundance of ultra-low-cost equivalents, the days of this kind of
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The economists Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo estimate that robots cause the wages of local workers to fall. With each additional robot per thousand workers there is a decline in the employment-to-population ratio, and consequently a fall in wages.
algorithms perform the vast bulk of equity trades and increasingly act across financial institutions,
automation is unequivocally another fragility amplifier.
AI’s rate of improvement is well beyond exponential, and there appears no obvious ceiling in sight.
new demand will create new work, but that doesn’t mean it all gets done by human beings.
The Private Sector Job Quality Index, a measure of how many jobs provide above-average income, has plunged since 1990; it suggests that well-paying jobs as a proportion of the total have already started to fall.
Countries like India and the Philippines have seen a huge boom from business process outsourcing, creating comparatively high-paying jobs in places like call centers. It’s precisely this kind of work that will be targeted by automation.
At the same time, a jobs recession will crater tax receipts, damaging public services and calling into question welfare programs just as they are most needed.
all this disruption will happen globally, on multiple dimensions, affecting every rung of the development ladder from primarily agricultural economies to advanced service-based sectors.
the ramifications will be hugely destabilizing for hundreds of millions who will, at the very least, need to re-skill and transition to new types of work.
underemployed, insecure, and angry populations.
augurs
Labor market disruptions are, like social media, fragility amplifiers. They damage and undermine the nation-state.
What gets lost in the analysis is that all these new pressures on our institutions stem from the same underlying general-purpose revolution. How they will arrive together, simultaneous stressors intersecting, buttressing, and boosting one another. The full amplification of fragility is missed because it often appears as if these impacts were happening incrementally and in convenient silos. They are not.
power is redistributed and reinforced across the entire sum and span of society.
Some individuals are greatly enabled; others stand to lose everything.
it is, in the slightly longer term, about a transformation of the very ground on which society is built. And in this great redistribution of power, the state, already fragile and growing more so, is shaken to its core, its grand bargain left tattered and precarious.
Or just the opposite.
Soon after the stirrup was introduced into Europe, Charles Martel, leader of the Franks, saw its potential. Using it to devastating effect, he defeated and expelled the Saracens from France.
heraldic
new technologies help create new centers of power with new social infrastructures both enabling them and supporting them.
growing access to power means everyone’s power will be amplified.
This ungovernable “post-sovereign” world, in the words of the political scientist Wendy Brown, will go far beyond a sense of near-term fragility; it will be instead a long-term macro-trend toward deep instability grinding away over decades.
swaths
subtle nudges and choice architectures that shape culture and politics today
the most powerful forces in the world are actually groups of individuals coordinating to achieve shared goals.
machine intelligence resembles a massive bureaucracy far more than it does a human mind.
There is already a pronounced and accelerating “superstar” effect, where leading players take ever more outsized shares of the pie.
The world’s top fifty cities have the lion’s share of wealth and corporate power (45 percent of big company HQs; 21 percent of world GDP) despite having only 8 percent of the world’s population.
the Samsung Group in South Korea. Founded as a noodle shop almost a century ago,
The Korean economic miracle was a Samsung-powered miracle.
chaebol,
Samsung Group revenue represents up to 20 percent of the Korean economy. For Koreans today, Samsung is almost like a parallel government, a constant presence throughout people’s lives. Given the dense network of interests and ongoing corporate and governmental scandals, the balance of power between the state and the corporation is precarious and fuzzy.
eBay and PayPal’s dispute resolution system handles around sixty million disagreements a year, three times as many as the entire U.S. legal system. Ninety percent of these disputes are settled using technology alone.
create private companies with the scale, reach, and power of governments.
Those companies with the cash, expertise, and distribution to take advantage of the coming wave, to greatly augment their intelligence and simultaneously extend their reach, will see colossal gains.
In the last wave, things dematerialized; goods became services. You don’t buy software or music on CDs anymore; it’s streamed. You just expect antivirus and security sof...
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All the big tech platforms either are mainly service businesses or have very large service businesses.
technology accelerates this dematerialization, reducing complexity for the end consumer by providing continuous consumption services rather than traditional buy-once products.
