Most of the growth is. If we removed AI, the US would be in a severe recession right now. Most of the absolute market cap, employment, capital, and other metrics that are not directly coupled to growth paint a better distributed picture.
Of course, growth like this can only continue for so long without changing that.
I think "your everyday liberal professional" is more likely to be anti-AI because it is being advertised as a direct threat to their livelihoods, rather than for any more abstract reason. The latter includes both political allegiance stuff and the reasons those professionals would likely cite, like its energy requirements or the economic damage if the bubble bursts.
Whether or not you think it likely that this threat will materialize is beside the point. Workers never like it when someone is advertising that they will put you out of work.
No, because most people in say, California, which is very pro-tech, are perfectly fine with AI. But people in the Northeast are angry at it. It’s entirely cultural.
That observation[0] isn't particularly useful for arguing that it's a political allegiance thing. A lower fraction of voters in the pro-tech part of California (SFO, roughly) voted for Trump than, say, in NYC. Your observation cuts against the argument that political allegiance is the main driver, not in favor of it.
[0]- Assuming it's true, which in my experience it isn't especially, but this isn't the best argument.
You have no idea, you must not know that they are afraid of Waymos out in the northeast, they think they are evil or something, I'm not even joking.
Anyway, I didn't say it was a political thing I said it was a cultural thing. The average liberal is not someone who thinks primarily in political terms, they are just going about their lives unreflectively and they genuinely believe in the moral weight of their feelings, which are their primary guide. Now, I'm not saying that human life is not generally composed of its daily concerns, which tend to rule us, but for the average liberal politics is no different from acting on basic urges; like a mouse chasing the next piece of cheese in a maze, they cannot see that no turn will ever lead to their escape; that so long as they continue to chase the very next thing, they are trapped in constraints that have been laid out for them in advance. Like the conservatives of the 80s, there is always one more moral panic, one more thing that you're supposed to be upset about, one more cause to fight for. There is no stopping to think why this is something that is supposed to upset me, why is this something that needs to change. They are not able to go just one step beyond common opinion and wonder why there are so few avenues for them in the first place, they are not able to question why the maximum content of their decisions is good or evil, just or unjust, left or right. Yes any decision is binary, but one must be able to choose that for themselves, be able to consider the decision to leave the maze, even if they are, in the end, no more powerful than all the other rats, and there might not be any cheese outside of it; and there might be no end to the maze, and even very far from what you thought was the exit lay the bodies of those who attempted to leave before.
But anyway this is what I mean by primarily cultural. Liberals "drink matcha," go to running clubs, obsess over "consent" (they now have a term "weaponized consent," how absurd! that they are just realizing now that consent is always given within certain relations of power...) Whatever politics they have is on the same plane, they are doing it because its something to be done. Someone who thinks primarily in terms of politics, that is, in terms of the social dynamics of power, would never call themselves a liberal.
> Its just the thing that upsets me the most about your everyday liberal professional, how much they hate AI just because Trump is pro AI
That's what I'm refuting here -- that people here dislike AI just to be contrary to Trump. This is implausible.
And trying to lecture a life long New Englander who currently lives within the MBTA zone on what the culture is like in the northeast is maybe not the best look. We aren't afraid of Waymos here; the only people I've met who weren't jealous of them were taxi or Uber drivers. That supports my hypothesis, not yours.
I'm not sure why my experience differs from yours. When I was in the northeast recently I got into heated arguments with people, one person said they "hated Waymo" and refused to elaborate (but also said they used AI everyday for work), another said flat out that technology is evil, so I asked them if poor people should go without electricity. Then they restricted their argument to AI is evil, and that was a more nuanced (if not trite) debate, which they eventually conceded. But not without some gnawing and thrashing!
But I don't think that hating AI or technology or whatever to be contrary to Trump is a genuine political statement, its just reaction. It involves politics in the same way that everything we do involves politics, but it is not "consciously" political in the same way that a baby demanding care from an overworked mother is also not consciously political. Baby wants milk, your average liberal wants to feel self-righteous (they would honestly do better with the milk). Someone can claim anything they want is political, it does not mean they are doing it for genuinely political reasons, they are probably just doing it because they fear the censure of their friends and the dissolution of their social life. Not engaging with something because you are afraid of how it could harm you personally, consciously or no, is not an objective way of making a decision that effects society more broadly. Like, a baby will just die if it doesn't get milk, you won't necessarily die because some of your friends stop talking to you.
If you were in NYC, some of this may be a Boston/NYC difference. NYC is much more anti-Waymo (which I interpret mostly as an extension of being much more anti-car in general). There are also substantially different cultures between the two re: art and finance, which may have reflected on the AI questions.
I don't think you can decouple Trump from himself in this way without a concrete explanation. If some factor causes one to dislike something just because Trump likes it, then that same factor would influence voting. We have numbers for voting. When there are lots of other plausible explanations than Trump, the onus would be on you to demonstrate why more people are taking reverse-psychological cues from Trump in a place where more people also voted for him. Gesturing at "culture" doesn't do that.
I’m not sure I understand your point. Its not the case that more people voted for Trump in a place where more people are taking reverse psychological cues from him, but precisely the opposite case, the more people take reverse cues the less vote for him, which implies their positions are on account of reaction and not because they are genuinely reflecting on their social and political condition, which would elevate them to conscious political actors rather than people following a trend because they are afraid of going against it.
You are simply incorrect about that. More people voted for Trump in NYC (the typical exemplar of "the northeast") than in SFO (the exemplar of the part of California that is more pro-AI than NYC).
I think that absolute numbers in specific cities don't tell the full story. NYC also has far fewer people with college degrees than SFO, which would correlate more strongly with Trump supporters. I think that if you polled those who voted against Trump in NYC now, and asked them about their opinions on AI, you'd find they diverge significantly from those who did vote for him, whereas if you asked the same question to Trump voters and non Trump voters in SFO they would answer pretty much the same. SFO is also in California which does not have the same cultural relationship with technology as NYC or much of the Northeast, although the culture I'm describing stretches basically all over the east coast.
So, you're postulating that there is something of a Simpson's paradox going on in NYC between two largely separate cultures -- that of people with college degrees, and that without? This is theoretically possible, but conveniently not directly testable due to secret ballots. It is however indirectly testable in two different ways -- and the numbers still don't back you up.
2) Middlesex County, Massachusetts (roughly, the north half of greater Boston) is an alternative example to NYC that has a very similar proportion of college degrees compared to SFO (about 1% less). Middlesex County is in the northeast. About 42% of those voters voted for Trump, which is more than New York and more than double SFO. Suffolk County (with Boston proper) has very similar numbers to NYC for both college education and voting for Trump. This can't be explained as a cultural difference between NYC and Boston because the Suffolk ratios are so similar. It can't be explained as an educational difference between SFO and Boston because the Middlesex educational numbers are so similar but there are proportionally more Trump voters than NYC. It can't be explained as a cultural difference between Suffolk and Middlesex because first, they are direct neighbors sharing a public transit system, and second, Middlesex is considerably more traditionally leftist than Suffolk (leaning on that cultural difference would undermine your original argument).
I don't think a bifurcation of cognition is necessary to explain this. You get both people who claim to always think with words (to the point where they don't understand how it's possible to think without one), and people who claim never to outside of linguistic tasks like writing (to the point where they need "internal monologue" explained to them). In my experience, if you get down to it -- most people will have experienced cases of the thought preceding the word (you can skip the word, or not, but either way it demonstrates a thought without a word) and of the word preceding the thought (people who claim not to have an internal monologue will usually still do this sometimes when writing).
It's just that subvocalization is one powerful technique for organizing thoughts, but not the only one. If you had a swimmer who only ever learned the crawl stroke (freestyle), they might wonder how someone can swim without it. The difference, of course, is that the breaststroke is a demonstrable physical act whereas cognitive techniques are not. The monologuers are just more practiced at subvocalization-based reasoning, and the non-monologuers are more practiced at other types.
It's not that hard to exert limited control over which technique you're using -- and I think there are multiple nonverbal techniques. I'd encourage people to explore the space a bit. Subvocalization-first approaches are very good for linear progressions, whereas subvocalization-last (or never) approaches are usually better for big-picture reasoning.
I still think it's far more likely that people aren't describing the same thing. People are very, very bad at interpreting and experiencing their mind's inner workings. Then getting them to describe and compare those inner workings is, IMO, largely a fool's errand. I'll wait until someone develops an external validation of this to believe it.
I say this as someone who pays a lot of attention to my mind's inner workings (meditation etc, near-complete aphantasic) and the more I pay attention to the inner workings, the less I know the answer to whether or not I have an inner monologue.
> I still think it's far more likely that people aren't describing the same thing. People are very, very bad at interpreting and experiencing their mind's inner workings.
Are you thinking that the term "internal monologue" is being interpreted too literally and that any system of organized thought, even one without the apparent usage of words, could still be considered an internal monologue?
The obvious solution to the problem of abuse of the asylum system (which is in fact a real problem) is to hire more immigration judges so that claims are processed in a timely manner. Apart from getting rid of the asylum process entirely, that's the only long term solution. It's something Joe Biden made progress on (though he did overstate his progress), and Donald Trump reversed.
It doesn't show up in the short term numbers because it is a long-term solution. But Americans aren't interested in long-term solutions.
Tell me, how do you, as an immigration judge, actually judge someone that says their life is at risk due to x,y, or z but you have no way of actually verifying that? Especially when they crossed quite a few countries to get here? I don't see how that's an actual solution to the problem.
One could easily argue that Trump made for more progress as far as the immigration courts being backed up by simply not having an almost completely open border like we did with Biden.
Congress has remained in technical session (by having one member open and close the House each day) constantly for decades. Actually ending the session would be a rather significant departure, and I've heard of no plans to do so.
That has nothing to do with pocket vetoes. A pro-forma session blocks recess appointments. It also doesn't occur each day, congress can adjourn for up to 3 days without recess.
Pocket vetoes have occurred during mid session breaks (known as intrasession pocket vetoes). In recent years appellate courts have ruled that congress can appoint an agent to receive bills when not in session which would thus make pocket vetoes impossible. This has not been put to the test. Given the current republican supermajority on the supreme court, if a president were ever to assert that agents are invalid it would be now.
I am not interested in being dragged into an argument about this, and of course the supreme court can try to calvinball whatever they want. That being said, your interpretation is at a minimum disputed by one of the largest law firms in the country (https://www.thompsoncoburn.com/insights/pro-forma-session-10...).
I know, right? It used to be easy: just look for writing in a very long-winded style, almost as if the author is being paid per word, in a place where that sort of writing didn't belong. I think it was because that type of writing represented a disproportionate fraction of the tokens in the training data due to the long-winded-ness. Somewhere around a year ago, they figured out some way to deal with that problem.
Making election day a (normal) national holiday would not help. The type of service sector or emergency service job that makes it a problem to vote needs to work more on a national holiday, not less.
Making it a kind of super holiday where we mandate closure of everything from gas stations to non-emergency hospital services might help, but you're never getting the votes to make that change.
The goal is obviously to make US taxpayers pay for it, but give room for the admin to lie and say we aren't. Similar to how Mexico was going to pay for the useless border wall.
Of course, point 1 (which includes immediate stoppage of the fighting in Lebanon) isn't happening -- which sort of renders the rest of the thing moot anyway.
I need to give them credit for one thing: the sheer chutzpah to claim that America will get Gulf allies to pay for it, thereby reminding everyone about the promise that Mexico will pay for the border wall.
Of course, growth like this can only continue for so long without changing that.