The Post-Partisan Emporium

  Your call is important to us... The effectual truth of AI Matthew B. Crawford Over the last several years, I realized I was driving around town a lot to take care of little tasks that, in principle, could be done on the telephone, or on the web portal of some business or government entity. The frustrations of entering into that Kafkaesque world of chatbots that are “here to help,” or phone menus that seem imported from some generic template, are such that it is worth taking an hour to drive to the CVS pharmacy, or the DMV, or the UPS store, or some medical practice, and collar a human being. Usually they are able to solve my problem in short order. And increasingly, it seems, they are able to do so because they have some secret trap door that allows them to bypass the public-facing systems that I have to interact with. In the year of our Lord 2025, getting things done often requires finding, not the recent hire who just reads through the prompts on his screen and is trapped in th...

  AI as quintessence of our society Symbols and more symbols, and nothing behind them Carlos Ramalhete Of course, I used AI to generate an illustration, and of course, it couldn’t understand the prompt “floating symbols in human shape.” When I see the way people treat “Artificial Intelligence” (henceforth AI, which, as I already wrote, should be “artificial idiocy”), what really scares me is how often people perceive it as if it were a kind of superior intelligence. Just like the  fantasies of hyper-technological aliens , by the way; the only difference is that AI is here, while said aliens are not that much. But I shouldn’t be surprised, for one simple reason: AI is just a reflex of the societal situation in which urban people in rich countries (or in the richest enclaves of not-that-rich countries) spend their lives. That global minority lives in completely artificial environments, whose temperature is controlled, whose food comes in clean boxes, often in ready-to-eat form, ...