Month: March 2024

I've long argued that eventually AI will get better than human beings at everything, which in turn means we'll all be out of jobs.¹ During the Industrial Revolution this didn't happen because while machines took over a lot of jobs, they also created a lot of new jobs for humans (like designing and maintaining machines). AI is different. If it can do anything, then by definition any new job you can think of can also be done better and cheaper by AI. It's game over.

But along comes Noah Smith with a clever counterargument. He doesn't deny that AI will improve, or even that it will eventually get better at everything. His case is more subtle.

In a nutshell, he suggests that no matter how good AI gets, it will always be valuable enough to be allocated to the highest value tasks. This means there might still be lots of jobs left for humans. Even if we're comparatively lousy at them, it could make sense to keep at them if it frees up AI for more important work.

Here's an example to make this concrete. Suppose we're invaded by aliens who are intent on killing us all. This is an existential threat, and it would therefore make sense to dedicate 100% of our compute power to fighting the aliens. A robot might still be a better farmer than a human, but we'd all grow our own food if it meant increasing the number of robots defending the planet.

So how likely is this? The most obvious real-world answer is that compute power is likely to grow so much that every human task can be done by a fraction of a percent of the world's total AI—and the more AI grows, the tinier the human fraction gets. Technically this doesn't matter: in the case of the alien invasion, for example, you'd still want to use every last petaflop of compute on fighting back no matter how much you had.

But that sort of existential threat is fanciful. In the real world, there are always lots of frictions and adjustments. It seems unlikely that we'd all keep working just because, technically, that last 0.01% of compute power could be put to better use. It would have to be a helluva better use, no? An improvement of 1% in GDP wouldn't cut it.

So it's a nice argument, but I don't buy it. It seems vanishingly unlikely that, politically, we'd condemn ourselves to lives of drudgery based on an ultra-purist free-market promise that it's for the best. We certainly never have before.

¹Or 99% of everything if you insist on believing that chemical computers will always be able to do a few things better than digital computers. It doesn't matter. It's mass unemployment either way.

What's the right way of covering the endless stream of ugly and apocalyptic language that Donald Trump uses to inspire his MAGA followers? Here's an example from yesterday: many news outlets reported that Trump had threatened a "bloodbath" if he's not elected. But if you listen to his remarks, he's talking about a bloodbath in the US auto industry unless he's elected and places high tariffs on Chinese cars:

George Conway says, sure, Trump was probably talking about cars in this clip, but it doesn't really matter:

What matters is that he consistently uses apocalyptic and violent language in an indiscriminate fashion.... He catastrophizes *everything* to rile up his cultish supporters, and to bind them to him, and to make them willing to do his bidding.... And so it doesn’t matter what he’s specifically referring to at the moment. He could be talking about trans people in public bathrooms or the state of the auto industry or the border—it doesn’t matter.

Conway is right. At the same time, it's just plainly misleading not to make it clear that Trump was talking about US automakers.

The thing is, Trump is so relentless that there's really no conflict here. You can report his remarks accurately, as you should, and still have plenty of material left over to make Trump's overall tone clear. One obvious way is to put his comment in the context of all his other apocalyptic language: immigrants as vermin, Joe Biden as the most corrupt president in history, I am your retribution, death and destruction if he's charged with a crime, demonic forces destroying the country, this is the final battle, etc.

Or, even easier, just report the rest of his speech. For example, there's the very beginning, where, as usual, he ditched the national anthem in favor of a paean to the "hostages" of January 6.

There's just no good reason to exaggerate what Trump says. All it does is give him yet another excuse to call out how unfairly he's treated—with some justice—while accomplishing nothing that the truth doesn't accomplish just as well.

Here's yet another reason not to panic over TikTok:

For the first time in TikTok’s history, its user growth is stagnating, according to people familiar with the matter.... U.S. average monthly users ages 18 to 24 declined by nearly 9% from 2022 to 2023, according to the mobile analytics firm Data.ai. Some users in their 20s say they have gotten off the app entirely to focus more on life and work.

Teens are notoriously faddish, and their favorite social media networks change rapidly. TikTok is big enough and has enough inertia that it will stay popular for a long time, but it won't be the "it" network forever. As with all things teen, what goes up must eventually come down.

There's a reason that I've been willing to defend Joe Biden almost immediately against the various mopery and dopery he's been accused of over the years. It's because he's been in the public eye for half a century and we all have a pretty good idea of who he is.

When Tara Reade accused him of harassment, I was skeptical from the start. People who do that stuff get a reputation and Biden doesn't have one.

Bribes and corruption? Biden has never been wealthy or flaunted his belongings. I've never been even slightly concerned that anyone would someday dig something up on him.

Deliberately stealing classified documents when he left office in 2017? The guy's a Boy Scout and always has been.

Regardless of what you think of Biden policywise—and feel free to hate him for raising taxes on the rich or canceling student debt if you want—everyone in Washington DC knows what he's like as a person. He's gregarious, decent, honest, a little goofy, and a family man. His worst fault is regaling audiences with stories of his life that are maybe a little less than 100% accurate.

That's it. That's the guy. Trying to pretend he's something else is just never going to work.

Bob Somerby quoted Sen. Katie Britt today saying that human trafficking across the Mexican border has grown from $500 million in 2018 to $13 billion today—meaning 2021. Is this really true?

Nope. It's a widely cited statistic, but as near as I can tell every single repetition can be sourced back to a New York Times piece from 2022 that says:

The sheer number of people seeking to cross made migrant smuggling an irresistible moneymaker for some cartels, [Patrick Lechleitner] said.

The enterprises have teams specializing in logistics, transportation, surveillance, stash houses and accounting — all supporting an industry whose revenues have soared to an estimated $13 billion today from $500 million in 2018, according to Homeland Security Investigations, the federal agency that investigates such cases.

This has nothing to do with human trafficking, which is (mostly) a matter of kidnapping young girls and forcing them into prostitution. The $500 million figure comes from a passing remark in testimony by Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, and it's an estimate of the amount that coyotes make from smuggling people into the US.

As for the $13 billion figure, who knows? There's no source given except HSI, and I was unable to find an HSI estimate anywhere for anything. But it's probably also a smuggling number, since that's the subject of the Times story.

However, even as a smuggling number it should be treated with extreme skepticism. What are the odds that human smuggling increased 2600% in three years? Come on.

So how much has trafficking across the southwest border increased? The best evidence I can come up with is the number of people tried in court:

Prosecutions are up since 2018, but referrals and convictions haven't changed at all. They're both up about 5% since 2018.

Unless HSI has become wildly less competent at busting human trafficking operations, a 5% increase in referrals probably means about a 5% increase in trafficking.

Not 2600%. Not even close.

The first test of delivering food aid to Gaza via the sea is a success:

I've been shocked by the hardliners who are actively contemptuous of these efforts. It's one thing to say that the only real solution is a ceasefire, but it's quite another to oppose humanitarian efforts like food drops and seaborne deliveries just because the war hasn't stopped.

In other news, a large shipment of food from Turkey was finally released from the port of Ashdod a few days ago and has now reached Gaza. Israel has also opened a new road crossing from the village of Beeri in northern Gaza, allowing more aid to get directly to Gaza City, which still has about 300,000 residents even after the evacuations early in the war.

In a few weeks the larger US seaborne efforts will start up, even as airdrops directly into Gaza continue.

This is all heartbreakingly too little and too late. But the combination of political pressure and facts on the ground have finally gotten things moving. In the end, even Bibi Netanyahu recoiled at the prospect of tens of thousands of Gazan children dying of starvation in refugee camps. This was most likely for cynical reasons of optics, but who cares? All that matters is that we're finally getting food in, one way or another.

In polls, about half of Americans think Joe Biden's age would affect his ability to do the job. As usual, though, it's instructive to see how this breaks down:

It's not "Americans" who think Biden is too old. It's Trump supporters.

A Boeing 737 lost a fairing in flight today between San Francisco and Medford, Oregon. Joe Weisenthal has questions:

I'm curious about this too. So I went to Wikipedia's "List of accidents and incidents involving commercial aircraft," which doesn't include every single in-flight incident but does include every "notable" incident for large commercial airliners. Then I went through each one involving either a Boeing or an Airbus commercial jet. For the past ten years, here are the number of incidents that were caused by a mechanical failure of some kind (i.e., not weather, maintenance, or pilot error):

The two Boeing incidents this year are the door plug that blew out on an Alaska Airlines flight in January and then today's incident. The two incidents involving the MCAS system on the Boeing 737 MAX 8 are in 2018 and 2019.

There are two main takeaways from this:

• There hasn't been any kind of increase in Boeing failures. In fact, the past three years have been pretty quiet.
• However, over the past decade there have been 22 Boeing failures compared to 7 Airbus failures. Both companies have roughly the same number of airplanes in service.

So Boeing planes are pretty safe, but Airbus planes are even safer. OTOH, while I was going through the list I did notice a surprisingly large number of Airbus incidents involving bombs, hijackings, and missiles. Take your pick.

Donald Trump offers up a thoughtful critique of Chinese control over social media:

If you are going to do it to TikTok, do it to Facebook. And what you can do is let them sell TikTok. Let them sell it in the market.... Take it away from China control. But I think China controls Facebook, also. Because they have tremendous power in that company.

Set aside Trump's screw-loose maundering about China controlling Facebook. The more fascinating question is: Do what to Facebook? What precisely does Donald have in mind?

And also: Do interviewers even bother with followup questions any longer when they talk to Trump? Or is the pretense that he makes any sense not worth the trouble anymore?

It's sort of remarkable how many of Donald Trump's former aides now oppose his reelection. Here's a list. These are only principal officers, not the dozens of deputies and assistants who have also turned on him, and all of them were initially appointed by Trump himself:

1. Vice President Mike Pence

2, 3. Chiefs of Staff John Kelly, Mick Mulvaney

4, 5. Secretaries of State Rex Tillerson, Mike Pompeo

6, 7. Secretaries of Defense Mike Esper, Jim Mattis

8. Attorney General Bill Barr

9. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos

10. Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao

11. HHS Secretary Alex Azar

12, 13. National Security Advisors John Bolton, H.R. McMaster

14. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley

15. Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats

16, 17, 18. Directors of Communications Stephanie Grisham, Anthony Scaramucci, Alyssa Farah Griffin