Preparing for opportunities
I strongly recommend you listen to today’s discussion between Ezra Klein and Ben Buchanan, former Biden AI advisor.
A few months ago I wrote:
This [“AI”] is a revolutionary activity.
Of course, not all revolutions are progressive! The wheel can also spin “backwards” morally. But we don’t have to go back!
A tool that lightens the load of a worker can and should be made available to every worker.
Just like electricity, clean water and public roads have made the USA fabulously wealthy, language models have the potential to grow and distribute that wealth far more equitably.
Unfortunately, we appear to be headed in a very different and much more dystopian direction…
Either progressives get involved in this fight or we’ll forfeit it before it starts.
AI can only save, rather than destroy, democracy if it’s being used, at scale, by people who want a freer, more just society.
Those are not the people who run this country right now. Freedom and justice is a long term ROI, not a quarterly one.
Democracy does not survive, let alone thrive, when we “move fast and break things”. Democracy requires deliberation, which is slow, even if it also requires bold actions.
Either we collectively impose those values now, on and with the tools that will define the age that has already been born, or we slip further into the gangsterism we saw on display in the White House last Friday, February 28.
(Last Thursday, last Wednesday, last Tuesday…)
Again, listen to the whole interview.
II.
Two weeks ago, while I was at mass, my friend who is already living in this future, sent me a similar conjecture about what is coming. I replied with a quote from the prison abolitionist Mariame Kabe:
“I'll repeat that what is destroyed, makes way for new and better things.”
If that makes you think of Schumpeter’s “creative destruction”, it’s because during the 20th century the utopian drive was betrayed by authoritarian regimes and then coopted by “neoliberal” ones.
This is not the time to mourn for what could have been. This is the time to accept that the body politic is sick and radical interventions are needed. The best news I can provide about the worst news is that at least there is no clear democratic leadership. Because if it were the old guard, we might be tempted to despair.
Instead, we must feed our desire for new and better things. We must expand our ability to transform hope into action.
As I have said here before, we live in incredibly unstable times. Anyone who tells you how this all ends is lying.
We are not in an “end times”. We are at a violent beginning. What do babies do when they are born? They gasp and scream.
III.
As a few of you know more intimately, I am personally living on the knife’s edge of a better future for our family and one that is fundamentally dark; as it is bound by material constraints that will impose privation and a greater likelihood for suffering.
What I have learned during these long days and nights of existential fear has surprised me: love is free.
Pain and fear will blind us to this fact but it will remain just as true today as it did for the thousands upon thousands of years that kindness and solidarity have propelled us from savagery to the sublime.
As our son, who will soon turn 13 summarized it:
The most valuable thing in the world is free.
It’s a shocking truth because it goes against so much of the mythos of modern life: the pie doesn’t grow, zero sum: “I win, you lose.”
But as Christians – and Buddhists, and Hindus, and Muslims, and Jews, and even Freemasons – have declared again and again, on bread lines if not in front of firing lines, our ability to give ourselves to others, to expand our circle of concern, is our ultimate purpose on this planet.
We do it first with our families but we also do it by reminding ourselves that we are the family of humanity.
Without love there are no humanities – which, of course, are under direct attack right now. Without love there is no humanitarian aide – which, of course, is under attack right now. Without love there is no courage in the face of terror.
So, I ask you only to love one another as deeply as you can. Precisely because we are being forced to fear and hate.1
IV.
If you are not a believer, I am with you.
You need only consider the following: when humans act out of solidarity with one another, we produce wealth. When we act out of spite, we destroy the very mechanisms of wealth creation. You can take that to the bank. (Preferably, one that is insured.)
I recognize that what Christians have called the only commandment is often an asymptotic goal. A goal we endlessly approach but never reach. That’s fine. If you’re looking for more practical advice, as some of you have told me you are, here is a lively and short video making a very cogent argument for how to defeat the fascists who have overtaken the Land of the Free. ↩