This concept has been bouncing around my head for a few weeks now but I’ve struggled to put it into words: the reason so many elites love AI is not because they think it will work, but because it offers them genuine utility as a rhetorical device. It’s an always-applicable counterargument to criticisms that their plans or laws are unworkable. Like, some politician will propose a dumb law or some CEO will announce some absurd company policy and in the past they would get pushback, but now they just duct tape over all the cracks with “ahh, but we’re using AI!”.

The latest example of this I’ve seen is from the 3d printing subreddit - a few states are passing laws that would require the manufacturers of 3d printers to prevent the user from using them to print guns, and conversations on this seem to go thusly:

Anti: “A 3d printer doesn’t know what the thing it’s printing is, any more than a regular printer knows whether it’s printing a recipe or a death threat. This can’t work.”

Pro: “We’ll require manufacturers to install verification chips in their printers, then users will verify their 3d files using AI before printing.”

Anti: “Putting aside for now the privacy concerns and the fact that this kind of DRM approach to force users to only use authorized files has been tried before and has literally never worked, how will the AI know if the 3d file is a gun or not?”

Pro: “I told you, we’ll use AI!”

Anti: “…Even if you have some magical algorithm that can tell a 3d model is a working gun from first principles, it would be easy to bypass; a firearm isn’t one descrete object, it’s a mechanical device made up of components that are not dangerous by themselves. The user can always break the file up and print it one piece at a time.”

Pro: “I told you, we’ll use AI!”

Anti: “It doesn’t matter how smart the AI is, it can’t know by looking if a spring is part of a pistol magazine or part of a pen!”

Pro: “I told you, we’ll use AI!”

Getting pretty far afield here, but goddamn Matt Yglesias’s new magazine sucks:

The case for affirmative action for conservatives

“If we cave in and give the right exactly what they want on this issue, they’ll finally be nice to us! Sure, you might think based on the last 50,000 times we’ve tried this strategy that they’ll just move the goalposts and demand further concessions, but then they’ll totally look like hypocrites and we’ll win the moral victory, which is what actually matters!”

Scott Aaronson: “Open Letter to Anti-Zionists on Twitter”

Posting here rather than in a separate thread because I’m probably the only one who rememembers him from the old /r/sneerclub days, but he’s an endlessly fascinating figure to me - his ability to view literally every possible scenario through the lens of “poor innocent little smol-bean Scott just wants to discuss things rationally, but is persecuted by his ontologically evil foes and their self-righteous dupes” - doesn’t matter if it’s feminists objecting to his older incel-y posts, Sneer Club dunking on him, cops arresting him for stealing from an airport store or leftists not being fans of the genocide he supports… He must always be the victim. His enemies must always be unreasonable and motivated by hatred of him, specifically.