The view from here
We’re in the Lake District for a few days, and a bit off its beaten tracks. Bliss!
Quote of the Day
”The quiet truth about AI is that it doesn’t replace the thing that was hard. It replaces the thing that was slow.”
He’s right. And that has implications that tech companies (and governments) are busy trying to ignore.
Ralph Vaughan Williams | The Lake in the Mountains
Seemed appropriate for the tranquillity all around us here.
Long Read of the Day
Austerity creates fascism
Splendid blast from Cory (Whom God Preserve)
My concern about a massive collapse in the capital markets isn’t that workers will suffer directly. Despite all the Wonderful Life rhetoric about your money being in Joe’s house and the Kennedy house and Mrs Macklin’s house, the reality is that the median US worker has $955 saved for retirement. You could nuke the whole financial system and not take a dime out of most workers’ pockets:
No, the thing that has me terrified about AI is that when it craters and takes the economy with it, that we will respond the same way we have during every financial crisis of the 21st century: with austerity, and austerity breeds fascism.
There’s a direct line from every K-shaped recovery to every strong-man who’s currently sending masked gunmen into the streets. The Hungarian dictator Viktor Orban rose to power after people who’d been suckered into denominating their mortgages in Swiss francs lost their houses when the currency markets moved suddenly, because the swindlers who’d sold them those mortgages took the position that wanting to live somewhere automatically made you an expert in forex risk, so caveat fuckin’ emptor, baby…
It’s a memorable piece, not least because it makes good use of a landmark research paper — “Public Service Decline and Support for the Populist Right” which looks at the linkage between austerity and support for fascists.
When public services go wrong, people don’t always know who to blame, but they definitely notice that something is going wrong, so when public services fail, people stop trusting the state, and that social contract starts to fray. They start to suspect that elites are lining their pockets rather than managing the system, and they “withdraw their support” for the system.
Which makes them easy meat for Farage & Co?
Linkblog
Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.
- Notes on Hong Kong by Rohit Krishnan. I’ve never been there, but if I were going this is what I’d bring.
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