Rock solid
Saki (Hector Hugh Munro) once observed that “The inhabitants of Crete have more history than they can consume locally”. Whenever we go to Donegal, I feel that its lucky inhabitants likewise have a surplus of interesting geology.
Quote of the Day
How little our careers express what lies in us, and yet how much time they take up.”
- Philip Larkin
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Van Morrison | Purple Heather
Long Read of the Day
America’s Coming Plutocracy
Compelling essay by Francis Fukuyama triggered by the news that on September 5, Tesla’s board had announced an incentive package for Elon Musk that offered him a trillion dollars if he met some very ambitious goals for Tesla’s stock.
Tesla’s trillion-dollar pay package to Elon Musk was ostensibly intended to keep Musk focused on improving Tesla’s performance without being distracted by politics, his other businesses, or his relentless postings on X. The offer has already been criticized on business grounds. It seems very unlikely that Tesla’s stock can actually hit the price targets set in the deal, given the damage that Musk has already done to the brand with his political activities, and the increasing competition from China as well as legacy car makers who are moving into the electric vehicle space. Future growth will depend on untested technologies like robotaxis and humanoid robots, where there will be competition, technological setbacks, and uncertain demand.
But what is offensive about this offer to anyone concerned about the future of democracy is its sheer size. The U.S. federal budget deficit for this year is expected to come in at $1.9 trillion, and the Republicans’ Big Beautiful Bill is expected by the Congressional Budget Office to add another $3-4 trillion over the next decade. So if Musk wins this payout, he could single-handedly close a significant part of the national deficit, and personally fund all the Medicare, early childhood education, foreign aid, and other programs being cut as part of the BBB’s effort to minimize the deficit. Given that U.S. GDP last year was about $28 trillion, the payout implies that one man contributed more than 3.5 percent of the nation’s total output, while the other 340 million of us produced the remaining 96.5 percent.
Underlying the Tesla board’s offer is the view that a single individual can create a trillion dollars of new wealth. This feeds into the Ayn Randian narrative that progress is made by individual geniuses who spring up out of the earth like gods and bring benefits to the rest of us…
The personal wealth that the tech industry has produced for a small number of individuals sets our era apart from the era of Carnegie, Rockefeller, Morgan, Vanderbilt et al. They were, of course, fabulously rich and powerful. But none of them had wealth than rivalled the GNP of nation states. This won’t end well.
My commonplace booklet
Striking quote by Nick Carr:
”One way to think about AI-based text-generation tools like OpenAI’s GPT-3 is as clairvoyants. They are mediums that bring the words of the past into the present in a new arrangement. GPT-3 is not creating text out of nothing, after all. It is drawing on a vast corpus of human expression and, through a quasi-mystical statistical procedure (no one can explain exactly what it is doing), synthesizing all those old words into something new, something intelligible to and requiring interpretation by a living interlocutor. When we talk to GPT-3, we are, in a very real way, communing with the dead.”
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