Shelly’s view
The other day I asked one of the most voracious readers I know for the best business books he’s read recently. Like a lot of my productivity-maxxing friends these days, he sent me a Claude readout, beginning with Thomas Friedman’s 2005 book The World is Flat and followed by a series of similar shopworn airport classics.
Friedman’s paean to globalization was the embodiment of conventional wisdom — two decades ago. Now, it’s at the core of a fading center-left consensus that has lodged itself deep into our new shared digital brains, via a vast body of text, including Friedman columns (part of a sprawling New York Times lawsuit against OpenAI) and the derivative corpus, from Reddit to old newspaper columns.
We’re in a moment of politicized concern about AI ideology. Elon Musk fears the technology will spread the “woke mind virus.” Tyler Cowen is pressing to be sure it will have a “Western soul.” My more modest worry is that these brilliant machines will be steering us in a kind of backward loop to the conventional wisdom of the recent past — a kind of cerebral slop.
When I asked my boss about this concern, he replied that the problem is in the machine. The AI “trains models to please human raters, and human raters tend to prefer agreeable, inoffensive, center-left-coded responses,” he said in a Slack message. “The result is a kind of bureaucratic blandness with a particular ideological coloring, reinforced by the training data’s provenance (mostly text produced by educated, English-speaking, online populations).” This analysis, he acknowledged, was pasted directly from Claude.
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Room for Disagreement
LinkedIn cofounder and venture capitalist Reid Hoffman argues that while adopting AI is a difficult transition for society, it is also a “cognitive Industrial Revolution.”
“There’s a flood of discussion around AI that tends to be negative and concerns a decrease in human agency,” he said in an interview with the Guardian last year. “And, while that is a common response to new technologies, in previous cases it hasn’t come to pass — human agency has increased — and I predict the AI revolution will land in the same place.”
Notable
- Researcher Sven Nyholm broke down in a paper how to determine whether AI has driven cognitive enhancement, including the difference between individual and group intelligence.