I was introduced to it by The Hugonauts podcast. Have a great audio rendering of it[0].
I went into it not knowing anything about the book or the author and was really surprised to find out it was written over 100 years ago.
Whether so intended or not, I like to think it was a response to Angell's The Great Illusion.
Both were written at, and the film Moulin Rouge! strives to depict, a time whose specific and rather rancid vibe the phrase fin de siècle (literally 'end of cycle' sharing the relevant root with 'secular,' but in proper translation 'end of the century') was adopted into English to describe. That phrase has been occurring to me with some frequency this year.
> The company said artificial intelligence-related productivity gains were a factor in the layoffs. CrowdStrike said it plans to continue hiring in strategic areas.
Great post and Naur's paper is really great.
What I can't help stop thinking is of the many other cases where something should-not-be because being is less than ideal, and yet, they insist on being.
In other words, LLMs should not be able to largely replace programmers and yet, they might.
In some respects, perhaps in principle they could. But what is the point of handing off the entire process to a machine, even if you could?
If programming is a tool for thinking and modeling, with execution by a machine as a secondary benefit, then outsourcing these things to LLMs contributes nothing to our understanding. By analogy, we do math because we wish to understand the mathematical universe, so to speak, not because we just want some practical result.
To understand, to know, are some of the highest powers of the human person. Machines are useful for helping us enable certain work or alleviate tedium to focus on the important stuff, but handing off understanding and knowledge to a machine (if it were possible, which it isn't) would be one of the most inhuman things you could do.
Is Trump’s presidential reign turning the US into an oligarchy? Or did the US fall into oligarchic rule many years ago? In episode 127 of Overthink, David and Ellie dive into what an oligarchy looks like, the dangers of a country’s power being in the hands of the wealthy few, and whether or not oligarchic rule is new for the US. They look to the ancient Greeks for ideas on which form of government is conducive to the good life and explore how Aristotle’s notion of pleonexia relates to the current state of the US. Your hosts investigate how oligarchy morphs into tyranny, and try to answer the question, “How can we resist an oligarchy?” In the bonus, Ellie and David look at the four different types of oligarchy discussed by Jeffrey Winters.
I believe Lawrence Lessig also, in all but direct language, explained how citizens united was a revolution against the constitution that literally turned us into a plutocracy, a government where money votes for candidates. Once people with money choose candidates, those people can vote for candidates that let them consolidate power and make more money, which gives them more political power until power is centralized enough a few major players that own media and intelligence companies can rival the states ability to communicate information or perform "intelligence" tasks.
The purpose of intelligence could be said to find terrorists, but to someone like Peter Thiel, a journalist is a terrorist, so intelligence capabilities in private hands work against anyone fighting power held by private individuals.
If an intelligence apparatus is a function of state, then privatized intelligence is unfortunately indicative of private individuals with state like capabilities.
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