"The less intelligent people have disproportionately been employed in positions with few important decisions to make. They have been laborers, factory workers, workmen, farmers, homemakers. "
Incidental to your point, but I think the reason standards have gone down in nursing (at least in the US) is that women are now allowed to be doctors.
Women make perfectly good medical professionals, and nursing used to be the highest status medical field generally open to them, so tons of competent, intelligent women went into nursing.
Now, many of those women opt to go into medicine instead. Of course some smart, competent people still go into nursing, but the draw of higher prestige and pay is hard to counteract, so the overall nursing pool suffers as a result.
This article connects with a lot of interesting issues.
One is that education standards have been increasing. The American production system (e.g. what Henry Ford devised) treated workers as machines and required them to make very few decisions. This worked well for employing illiterate (and sometimes non-English speaking) workers, but decisions about the details of production were made by people who didn't actually do the work. The Japanese system has the advantage that many of those detailed decisions are made by people who understand the work in a very detailed way ... but also, it uses a workforce that is much better educated and (due to the Flynn effect) more intelligent. But there's a tradeoff between moving decisions to more-specialized, more-intelligent people vs. moving them to people who know the action involved more intimately. This relates to the problem that the decisions that go awry when less-intelligent people do them are ones that have a broad scope and ordinary work doesn't give anyone the needed detailed knowledge.
> But because the most intelligent people are hired by the finance sector and IT sector instead, vacating positions in the public sector for the kind of people who would have been factory workers 30 years ago.
Although in Singapore, public sector jobs are the best paying, so they have very competent public servants.
On dumb people being "accountable" - it's not accountability if there's basically zero consequences for them messing up. Was anyone fired for that Swedish traffic imbroglio? I'd bet against it.
How often do you ever hear about government bureaucrats being fired for incompetence, or because they were "accountable" and messed up? Essentially never? Yeah, me too.
The "accountability" you're pointing at is entirely false. Arguably, AI will be a step *up,* because people can get mad and replace it with a different / better AI, whereas that never happens for *people.*
You posit " ai can't be held accountable" and thus have to employ more people in controller role.
What is " accountability"? Ai in many ways is way more accountable than people because information systems are built with logs and data measuring systems.
But there is another part ." accountability" is performed by someone who is more powerful that the subject who is held accountable.
In animal world "nature" holds animals accountable. Humans quickly ( by evolutionary standards) got most of the accountability into their own hands. By dominating natural systems with their own agency.
This domination was a product of systems ( language, tools , society) created by slightly more intelligent brain than previously existed.
And now we are on brink of creating intelligence of orders of magnitude more powerful than anything ever. The systems it will create will be similarly more impactful and powerful.
In a world with AI ai will be accountable to higher order systems than human bureaucracy. Humans will control AI no more than ants or chimps control us
Thank you for your thought-provoking article. James Burnham suggests in his "Managerial Revolution" that as businesses grew more complex, a separation occurred between ownership and control. Finance, effectively a managerial class, handles the universal allocation of resources—namely, credit. Consequently, they become a powerful group, despite not owning the resources they manage. The shift described in your post reflects not so much technological innovation as a result of changing power dynamics. Talented individuals gravitate towards the most lucrative positions.
The question of whether AI development will lead to an idiocracy essentially boils down to whether AI will grant more bargaining power to finance managers. After having witnessed so many talented physicists and computer science students enter the finance industry, I see no way for academia to compete with the finance industry in recruiting high-IQ individuals solely based on financial incentives.
The issue is not AI itself, nor is it a matter of socialism versus capitalism. Rather, it is the managerial class that stands to gain the most in the AI era. I would say any tech innovation that enhances a financial manager's capacity to independently manage more credit could worsen the situation.
"This all means that the descendants of production workers, who are no more intelligent than their ancestors, are increasingly working with decision-making. "
I'm not absolutely certain that's true, though.... I seem to remember something about how every 20-40 years, IQ tests have to be 're-normed' to 100 points, because we've gotten better at expecting more children to go further in education and to do a better job of learning how to take IQ tests.
I think the example I saw was that if you take a perfectly normal 16-yr-old out of a modern american high school, with dead-average test scores and a modern-era IQ score of exactly 100....
And then you take him to an English-Speaking country in WW1 that allowed 16-yr-olds to enlist under certain conditions, and gave him a standard WW1 Army IQ test.... He'd most likely score about a 140 or so. There are interesting debates on whether that means that kids are actually GETTING smarter, or if they're only getting better educated, or if they're only getting smarter for certain limited purposes of taking IQ tests. After all, in the British Army in WW1, it was pretty common to enlist full-grown adults who had simply stopped being educated at about the US 6th grade equivalent, age 12. School wasn't free or mandatory past that cutoff point.
I am reading *The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions and How the World Lost its Mind.* by Dan Davies. If Davies is correct, then AI is going to make things much better, not worse. Seems the problem is not 'we need smarter decision makers' -- and indeed the chapter on the financial crisis seems to indicate that taking the decision making away from the people on the bottom, and giving it to people higher up in the hierarchy is a large part of problem. No amount of smartness can overcome not knowing how the job is done by the people who do the work. Accountability problems happen because by the time you find somebody who has the agency to actually do something you have also found somebody who hasn't a clue about what should be done, yet often because they are bright greatly underestimate their own ignorance.
My post explains that the current LLM AI systems cannot be trusted to not hallucinate a wrong answer and that this is inherent in them. You cannot trust them, it is impossible to do so. If the wrong answer is for something that involves, say hazardous materials, then that wrong answer could lead to a fire or other disaster.
A smart well educated person would be likely to spot the LLM hallucination before something bad happens. A not so smart/well educated one probably won't.
I am happily reading your substack since at least 2 years, usually getting a fresh and spirited perspective on things I care about. Thank you for that! However, your classist understanding of intelligence ("...production workers, who are no more intelligent than their ancestors") defies every fiber of my being. Let me tell you that I come from a real socialist country, one of which ceased to exist in '89. The success those countries had in recruiting the brightest minds from the literal working class can not possibly have escaped you entirely?! Especially as you live in Sweden, which from my understanding is much more egalitarian than the US for example.
I have long believed that a major factor in the 2008 Global Financial Crisis was the desire to employ more college graduates who couldn't otherwise get the prestigious-sounding job they wanted.
"The less intelligent people have disproportionately been employed in positions with few important decisions to make. They have been laborers, factory workers, workmen, farmers, homemakers. "
Homemakers? Really?
Incidental to your point, but I think the reason standards have gone down in nursing (at least in the US) is that women are now allowed to be doctors.
Women make perfectly good medical professionals, and nursing used to be the highest status medical field generally open to them, so tons of competent, intelligent women went into nursing.
Now, many of those women opt to go into medicine instead. Of course some smart, competent people still go into nursing, but the draw of higher prestige and pay is hard to counteract, so the overall nursing pool suffers as a result.
This article connects with a lot of interesting issues.
One is that education standards have been increasing. The American production system (e.g. what Henry Ford devised) treated workers as machines and required them to make very few decisions. This worked well for employing illiterate (and sometimes non-English speaking) workers, but decisions about the details of production were made by people who didn't actually do the work. The Japanese system has the advantage that many of those detailed decisions are made by people who understand the work in a very detailed way ... but also, it uses a workforce that is much better educated and (due to the Flynn effect) more intelligent. But there's a tradeoff between moving decisions to more-specialized, more-intelligent people vs. moving them to people who know the action involved more intimately. This relates to the problem that the decisions that go awry when less-intelligent people do them are ones that have a broad scope and ordinary work doesn't give anyone the needed detailed knowledge.
> But because the most intelligent people are hired by the finance sector and IT sector instead, vacating positions in the public sector for the kind of people who would have been factory workers 30 years ago.
Although in Singapore, public sector jobs are the best paying, so they have very competent public servants.
On dumb people being "accountable" - it's not accountability if there's basically zero consequences for them messing up. Was anyone fired for that Swedish traffic imbroglio? I'd bet against it.
How often do you ever hear about government bureaucrats being fired for incompetence, or because they were "accountable" and messed up? Essentially never? Yeah, me too.
The "accountability" you're pointing at is entirely false. Arguably, AI will be a step *up,* because people can get mad and replace it with a different / better AI, whereas that never happens for *people.*
You posit " ai can't be held accountable" and thus have to employ more people in controller role.
What is " accountability"? Ai in many ways is way more accountable than people because information systems are built with logs and data measuring systems.
But there is another part ." accountability" is performed by someone who is more powerful that the subject who is held accountable.
In animal world "nature" holds animals accountable. Humans quickly ( by evolutionary standards) got most of the accountability into their own hands. By dominating natural systems with their own agency.
This domination was a product of systems ( language, tools , society) created by slightly more intelligent brain than previously existed.
And now we are on brink of creating intelligence of orders of magnitude more powerful than anything ever. The systems it will create will be similarly more impactful and powerful.
In a world with AI ai will be accountable to higher order systems than human bureaucracy. Humans will control AI no more than ants or chimps control us
Thank you for your thought-provoking article. James Burnham suggests in his "Managerial Revolution" that as businesses grew more complex, a separation occurred between ownership and control. Finance, effectively a managerial class, handles the universal allocation of resources—namely, credit. Consequently, they become a powerful group, despite not owning the resources they manage. The shift described in your post reflects not so much technological innovation as a result of changing power dynamics. Talented individuals gravitate towards the most lucrative positions.
The question of whether AI development will lead to an idiocracy essentially boils down to whether AI will grant more bargaining power to finance managers. After having witnessed so many talented physicists and computer science students enter the finance industry, I see no way for academia to compete with the finance industry in recruiting high-IQ individuals solely based on financial incentives.
The issue is not AI itself, nor is it a matter of socialism versus capitalism. Rather, it is the managerial class that stands to gain the most in the AI era. I would say any tech innovation that enhances a financial manager's capacity to independently manage more credit could worsen the situation.
"This all means that the descendants of production workers, who are no more intelligent than their ancestors, are increasingly working with decision-making. "
I'm not absolutely certain that's true, though.... I seem to remember something about how every 20-40 years, IQ tests have to be 're-normed' to 100 points, because we've gotten better at expecting more children to go further in education and to do a better job of learning how to take IQ tests.
I think the example I saw was that if you take a perfectly normal 16-yr-old out of a modern american high school, with dead-average test scores and a modern-era IQ score of exactly 100....
And then you take him to an English-Speaking country in WW1 that allowed 16-yr-olds to enlist under certain conditions, and gave him a standard WW1 Army IQ test.... He'd most likely score about a 140 or so. There are interesting debates on whether that means that kids are actually GETTING smarter, or if they're only getting better educated, or if they're only getting smarter for certain limited purposes of taking IQ tests. After all, in the British Army in WW1, it was pretty common to enlist full-grown adults who had simply stopped being educated at about the US 6th grade equivalent, age 12. School wasn't free or mandatory past that cutoff point.
I am reading *The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions and How the World Lost its Mind.* by Dan Davies. If Davies is correct, then AI is going to make things much better, not worse. Seems the problem is not 'we need smarter decision makers' -- and indeed the chapter on the financial crisis seems to indicate that taking the decision making away from the people on the bottom, and giving it to people higher up in the hierarchy is a large part of problem. No amount of smartness can overcome not knowing how the job is done by the people who do the work. Accountability problems happen because by the time you find somebody who has the agency to actually do something you have also found somebody who hasn't a clue about what should be done, yet often because they are bright greatly underestimate their own ignorance.
BTW poor education is quite different from low intelligence. Inability to read and write (or do basic sums etc.) is the fault of the education system.
Your idea that less intelligent / less educated people oversee AI to take responsibility takes a post I made on AI to make for lots of nightmare - https://ombreolivier.substack.com/p/llm-considered-harmful
My post explains that the current LLM AI systems cannot be trusted to not hallucinate a wrong answer and that this is inherent in them. You cannot trust them, it is impossible to do so. If the wrong answer is for something that involves, say hazardous materials, then that wrong answer could lead to a fire or other disaster.
A smart well educated person would be likely to spot the LLM hallucination before something bad happens. A not so smart/well educated one probably won't.
I am happily reading your substack since at least 2 years, usually getting a fresh and spirited perspective on things I care about. Thank you for that! However, your classist understanding of intelligence ("...production workers, who are no more intelligent than their ancestors") defies every fiber of my being. Let me tell you that I come from a real socialist country, one of which ceased to exist in '89. The success those countries had in recruiting the brightest minds from the literal working class can not possibly have escaped you entirely?! Especially as you live in Sweden, which from my understanding is much more egalitarian than the US for example.
In my experience, bureaucrats flee from accountability the way vampires flee from sunlight.
I have long believed that a major factor in the 2008 Global Financial Crisis was the desire to employ more college graduates who couldn't otherwise get the prestigious-sounding job they wanted.