The end of the Enlightenment?
Greetings patrons,
It’s time for another research update. In this letter, three things:
I informed you thusly
Back when I had time to watch TV (before children), I was a fan of the The Big Bang Theory. In one episode, the gang are going to watch a screening of Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Sheldon (the curmudgeony main character) urges them to arrive early to get a spot at the front of the line. But they don’t, and they end up at the back of the line, prompting Sheldon to rant:
Under normal circumstances I’d say ‘I told you so’. But, as I have told you so with such vehemence and frequency already, the phrase has lost all meaning. Therefore, I will be replacing it with the phrase, ‘I informed you thusly’.
This, my friends, is how I feel about American politics. Back in January (just after Trump’s inauguration), I wrote a deep dive into how Republicans were (and are) the party of plutocracy. Indeed, the evidence is so overwhelming that to now see federal Republicans axing social spending and sending caviar to the rich is so unsurprising that saying ‘I told you so’ seems pointless. Anyone who is surprised is either ignorant or brainwashed (or both). So I will wearily follow Sheldon and simply say ‘I informed you thusly’.
Disenlightenment now
While I commend journalists who report on the daily debauchery of the Trump administration, writing about current events is not my thing. What interests me more is how our situation fits into the long arm of history — especially the changing tides of ideology.
To that end, I’ve been working on a follow-up to my recent piece on the deep roots of fascist thought. As is typical for me, the empirical work has been finished for a while … the bottleneck is knowing what to say about the results. While I’m still formulating my thoughts, I will share a key finding.
Some context. In my essay on fascist ideology, I argued that one way to think about fascism is that it’s a rejection of Enlightenment ideals — the belief in reason, evidence and humanism. Interestingly, this rejection seems to be backed by the currents of word frequency. Over the last three centuries, the frequency of fascist jargon moves counter to the frequency of Enlightenment jargon. See the chart below. (Both sets of jargon are determined by selecting over-used words within each corpus.)
What’s ironic is that many of the leading Enlightenment thinkers — men like Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Thomas Paine — were Americans. So it is depressing that the modern US is now the epicenter of neofascism and the rejection of Enlightenment thinking.
Of course, there’s much more to say on this topic, and much more evidence to discuss. So stay tuned.
No sign of general-purpose robots
In other news, the unrelenting rollout of AI continues to be top of mind. A few weeks ago, Erald Kolasi and I discussed the uses, threat, and hype of AI. You can listen to our conversation here.
What’s fascinating is the degree to which AI has started to replace ‘intellectual workers’. For example, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella claims that up to 30% of the company’s code is now written by AI. Sure, this claim may be largely hype, but it contains an interesting grain of truth, which is that neural networks seem to be fairly good at doing tasks that humans once thought were ‘high minded’ — things like coding, writing essays, recalling facts, playing chess, etc. On the other hand, AI shows no signs of doing ’low-minded’ tasks like installing your toilet or wiring your house.
In short, the tech future we are getting is nothing like what mid-20th-century science fiction writers envisioned. Looking at 19th-century trends in automation, writers like Isaac Asimov foresaw a future in which robots gradually replaced all forms of manual labor. But this didn’t happen, largely because building general-purpose robots has turned out to be much more difficult than we anticipated.1 And so the future we are getting is one in which the trades flourish while tech workers become the new Luddites. It’s an upside down world.
Until next time
Speaking of the trades, summer seems to be the time when I learn DIY skills that high-school me thought silly, but forty-year old me recognizes are quite important. That’s a long-winded way of saying that I’m busy with repair projects and haven’t found much time for research. (If only ChatGPT could fix my house.) Regular writing will hopefully resume next month.
Until then, thanks for your support!
Best,
Blair
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One of the lessons here is that evolution hides much of the difficulty in tasks we find trivial. Millions of years of evolution have endowed us with a mind and body that can easily navigate complex landscapes and do a variety of difficult manual tasks. But our AI systems have no access to this evolutionary history, since it is almost all subconscious. That’s why it’s often the tasks we do with ease that prove the most difficult to automate. ↩︎