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Preventive Incantation

It doesn’t matter how one feels* about AI as a technological problem. It is much more of a financial problem, a threat similar to others that preceded it but special in its own special way. Purveyors already know the limits of the technology but dangle the potential profits as unlimited.

Because all the convenient confusion can be difficult to parse, a cultural interpretation of the crisis requires urgent attention. And thanks to Short Attention Span Theater – the single, unwavering truism threading society together – it needs to be brief and concise. Enter The Great Crash, 1929 by John Kenneth Galbraith into evidence:

…there is deep faith in the power of incantation. When the market fell many Wall Street citizens immediately sensed the real danger, which was that income and employment – prosperity in general – would be adversely affected. This had to be prevented. Preventive incantation required that as many important people as possible repeat as firmly as they could that it wouldn’t happen.  This they did. They explained how the stock market was merely the froth and that the real substance of economic life rested in production , employment, and spending, all of which would remain unaffected. No one knew for sure this was so. As an instrument of economic policy, incantation does not permit of minor doubts or scruples.

To the mighty extent that AI hype runs riot, our savvy age turns the power of incantation into cynicism verging on a new art form. Machine learning is so deeply ingrained into every sector that it simply must work and cannot fail, to coin a phrase. It must be powerful if important people are warning that it might take over.

Meanwhile, circularity: Tech giants investing in each other’s AI products and projects, driving valuation and demand for power, water, chips, and data centers, and inflating the perception of market consensus. We love the miasma of mortgage-backed securities in the morning.

Circularity > singularity.

Image: Screenshot from Bloomberg March 20, 2026

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Artificial Everything

[Too] many conversations about encroaching technology and artificial everything – we should just call it that, as we have no real definition for intelligence, much less understand what it means – compel further examination. Let’s go in.

First off, let’s acknowledge a basic premise.

We’re edging along a process of abdicating our personal sovereignty by our own choosing. I can’t tell you not to install a front door camera and spy on your neighbors or not to let slopGPT be your therapist. But let’s at least acknowledge how much we submit to all of this voluntarily. It’s not the illusion of choice, but still actual choices that we make continually. All the while creeps a sort of helplessness about what is being done to us. It is imperative to maintain our wits at such a time – such as a time as may come, such a time as now.

It is necessary to demonstrate how modern imagination is captured – and defended. Among the multitude of familiar arguments on which to draw, public and private liberties, civic duty and overwhelming loss of self esteem among our fellow citizens compel a checklist on the rescue mission should one be required.

There is extraordinarily powerful hype and propaganda supporting the inevitability of artificial everything. The laziness of corporate media has made this so much easier; excellent at completing PR circles, not so very good or interested in explaining things, rewarded for the combination with diminished honor and loss of prestige. Though a quite visible slight of hand, effort to acknowledge this process reminds us that we remain far from powerless. The sheer vastness of all we’re not thinking about and discussing enough also require some work on our part, to investigate, to understand, but first just to care about. When we get to the place where this work is not optional – and hey, we like work. It’s one our fears about AE, that it will take work away from us –  we’ll be well on our way to better places. If you’re already there, congratulations. You’ve got plenty of work to do.

Image: Author photo of work on a wall.

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More from Less

Nice catch from Klein via Yglesias:

Robert Frank, an economist at Cornell University, is one of the more innovative tax thinkers I know. In particular, I’ve always been partial to his proposal for a progressive consumption tax (pdf). So I ran the plan by him, as well. “The progressive budget proposal is of course an enormous improvement over the bizarre Ryan budget,” he said, “which for all its chest thumping about facing up to the hard choices, does nothing — absolutely nothing — to reduce long-run deficits.” But like Gale and Burman, Frank wanted to see more simplification and reform. In particular, he wanted more attention given to what we tax with an eye toward two-fers: raising more money off of things we want less of. “When we enter congested roadways, or buy heavy vehicles, or drink to excess, or emit CO2 into the air, we impose costs on others,” he says. “Taxing such activities kills two birds with one stone: It generates much needed revenue, and it curtails activities that cause more harm than good. Because these taxes make the economic pie bigger, it makes no sense to object that we can’t afford them.” He recommended this piece (pdf) for more on those ideas.

Emphases from the link. But the key: raising more money off of things we want less of. The whole idea of a two-fer has only yet manifested itself in the heads and hearts of those who want to keep their tax money and penalize the poor, children and the elderly by teaching them some kind of lesson.

But Frank’s is the real way to get to the things that matter, one that also has many corollaries, among them: make sure more people finish school and can go to college, wherever they are from, so that they can get jobs and spend a long productive life of at least intermittent happiness paying taxes. Hello?

Banning certain kids from college is stupid. Not taxing the externalities of energy production, ditto.