“Network” at 50: Now We’re All Mad as Hell by Katherine Alejandra Cross

The most important part of Beale’s speech is the part that is almost never quoted: it’s the part where he explicitly eschews any kind of direct political action. Instead, the culmination of this scene is everyone performing a meme. Yelling “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” out their windows. Success for Diane Christensen was measured by whether people were yelling in far-flung affiliate cities like Sandusky and Baton Rouge. It was, in many ways, TikTok before the person who dreamed the idea had even been born.

Today we are surrounded by a million “mad prophet” Howard Beales now served up customized and personalized to your exact demographic ideological aesthetic micropreference on screens of every size telling us that they don’t know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street.

It’s difficult for me to give a singular answer when I’m asked what’s my favorite band or book or film, but on that last score Network is a strong contender. It’s funny how people sometimes mistake Beale for a hero. SEP 26

The Link Post by Shawn Blanc

[Social media] will only show us so much. They excel at finding the stuff that may be interesting to everyone, but they are virtually impotent at promoting what would be truly fascinating to a few.

The sweetest stuff has to be unearthed and recommended by people we trust. Which is why everyone should blog. When you blog there are two types of entries: The Post: your stuff. The Link: someone else’s stuff.

There’s no reason why people couldn’t share on social media the same stuff they link on blogs. The reasons it doesn’t work in practice are the status-seeking incentives engendered by visible metrics such as views and likes, and the algorithm’s intervention in what you see to keep you engaged for longer.

Nevertheless, this 2009 post is inspiring me today. Blanc makes the case not just for blogging, but for making link posts a first-class citizen on blogs. SEP 26

How to Worry About AI by Oren Cass

Cass thinks AI is the new climate change.

A decade later, we are doing it all again with artificial intelligence. We have the demands for aggressive regulation, the imperative of global coordination, and the obstacle of an untrustworthy Chinese Communist Party. Pope Leo released an encyclical. And Donald Trump is insisting that predictions of AI doom, like predictions of climate doom, are a “HOAX.”

Of course, neither climate risk nor AI risk is a hoax. But in each case the pitched battle between catastrophism and complacency has left too little room for the pragmatism with which we humans might manage to muddle through, as we typically do. Much of my own early policy work addressed this dynamic in the climate context, analyzing the underlying causes of overheated rhetoric and making the case that one could, and should, accept the physical science of rising temperatures while rejecting the poorly constructed causal chains that led toward “Hell on Earth.”

This is exactly how I feel about AI. There’s plenty about which to be skeptical, and the accelerationists discredit themselves when they dismiss all concern. But the doomers driving the anti-AI activism (and thus the public conversation) are nuts. SEP 26

Why I Changed My Mind About AI Risk by Francis Fukuyama

The past six months have seen a big uptick in media attention about the dangers of artificial intelligence, and growing political concern over its consequences. This began with Anthropic’s release last April of its Mythos model, which could reportedly break into a wide range of government computer systems thought to be secure. This was followed by the Hugging Face incident, where an OpenAI test of an AI agent escaped control of its human organizers, broke into other websites, and organized a swarm of other AI agents to cover their tracks. All of this occurred against the backdrop of growing opposition to data centers, and the emergence of anti-AI wings in both the Democratic and Republican parties.

I saw much of this dynamic in crypto policy. So many shape rotators who saw every political question as an engineering problem. Either no concept of, or too literal a view of, group interest and political incentives. SEP 23