Yet Another Dance of Death

Homage to Rethel

When Adam delved

The brief sparring in the last Democratic primary debates over the question of automation has had the effect of filling my podcast queue with episodes from various shows on the subject of the "robo-pocalypse." The consensus among most seems to be that fear of automation is a red herring. Looking at the broad sweep of recent history, the true source of our economic malaise is if anything a marked decline in the rate of productivity growth (viz. Robert Gordon), which is precisely the opposite of what we would expect to see if the great menace to employment in this country were really that machines are becoming capable of performing our jobs so quickly and efficiently that they are putting us all out of work.

The Silicon Valley "Transhumanists" may delight in scaring the rest of us with their utopian, dystopian, and quasi-religious prophecies about the coming reign of machine intelligence - when we will all be reduced - or elevated, depending on your point of view - to a condition of splendid idleness by our new robot overlords. The bigger story in technology in modern times, however, is how little it has managed to affect our daily lives. While developments in information technology have transformed communication and entertainment, they have - as Matt Yglesias and others noted in this round of the great robot debate - left mostly untouched our other core industries.

Didion and Dunne's bad movie

In the early to mid-nineties, brilliant writer and prose stylist Joan Didion decided-- in collaboration with her husband, John Gregory Dunne -- to write the script for a Hollywood film starring Robert Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer. I'm sure they did so for understandable financial reasons.

For less obvious reasons, the movie is terrible. It is dull, confused, and pointless. There are about five different narrative threads that you think might amount to the film's story. None of them go anywhere. There are a series of people on the screen. But you can't stand any of them.

The screenwriting pair seem to have been aware of at least some of the film's deficiencies. Dunne even devoted an entire very entertaining book to describing the process of the film's creation. While he ultimately appears to think the movie turned out as more passable than it is, he does not rate it as anything higher than mediocre.

We really need that Popular Front

I have never been more afraid for the future of our country's institutions, or more persuaded of their imminent peril. Oh, to be sure, as a teenage leftist, I actually called for, demanded, the pulling down of the entire established order. Whether in my communist phase or my anarcho-syndicalist chapter, I didn't think that any of the current system was particularly worth salvaging. And then, when Trump was sharking his way toward office, I warned on this blog frequently that we were about to descend as a nation into quasi-fascism.

Both times, I meant it. I was being sincere, up to a point. But at the same time, I thought that I would "go on calmly eating good dinners for the next fifty years," to borrow a line from D.H. Lawrence. Whether urging that we ought to bring down the system or warning my contemporaries that it might be wobbling on its stilts, I still believed deep down that nearly everything would continue on -- as I knew it, in my life -- much as it had before.

Keynes and the Simulation Argument

Earlier this year, I devoted the latter half of a long rant to an attempt to debunk the "simulation argument" - a pseudo-philosophical head-scratcher that purports to prove that we are almost certainly living inside a computer simulation of reality (à la The Matrix). I return to the argument today, not because I have fresh points to make against it, but because I've found some added weight of authority for my position.

Briefly put, you may recall, the simulation argument goes like this: There are a number of possible accounts of reality. According to one particularly popular one, the naïve realist account, we are living in a universe that is external to ourselves, and whose nature accords with our own perceptions of it. In other words, the Thing-in-Itself exists objectively in much the same form that it appears to us, after it has passed through our sensory apparatus.

Curs'd conceit

As I feared I might, I've already been hearing the chorus of Trumpists, neoconservatives, and liberal hawks start up, collectively denouncing people who were in favor of Obama leaving Iraq but who now oppose Trump's leaving northern Syria (or at least oppose his doing so in this way, at this moment, with these consequences at stake). Despite detesting each other, all three groups have this week ever so briefly united in crying "hypocrisy" against erstwhile anti-interventionist leftists (like moi) who have supported previous U.S. troop withdrawals from the Middle East, but who are now condemning Trump's betrayal of the Kurdish fighters in northern Syria.

The Trumpians, of course, think this anti-interventionist "hypocrisy" is bad because we ought to support everything Trump does. The liberal hawk and neoconservative view, of course, is that people like me are right in this instance, but that we ought to have supported a robust U.S. military presence in Syria all along, and that we also ought to have opposed previous troop draw-downs as well.

So rah-rah-rah democracy...

Okay, so, supporting a general policy of troop draw-down is one thing. Asserting that the U.S. military role in the Middle East over the last two decades has been immensely destructive is, to be sure, the only rational view of the evidence. I of all people certainly believe in diminishing the U.S. military boot-print around the world. But suddenly throwing a long-standing U.S. ally to the wolves, as Trump has done today... that is something else entirely.

Here we have a tribal people, the Kurds, fighting a decades-long struggle to achieve independence from the autocratic governments that surround them. We have an authoritarian regime in Erdogan's Turkey with an appalling record of committing human rights violations in Kurdish territory. And we have the United States (up to now at least) tacitly encouraging Kurdish national aspirations along the way, overthrowing the Saddam Hussein dictatorship and allying with Kurdish fighters in its conflict with ISIS in Iraq and Syria.