Best Of

Back when Al Gore and Newt Gingrich invented the internet, although people knew it could be revolutionary/useful/dangerous, no one could have predicted the vast complexity and second-tier effects that resulted. But humans are still humans, in all our fabulous diversity, we just have a powerful tool to enable and magnify -- but not invent -- the native talent. Artists, scientists, and horse rustlers moved to the internet, but the internet didn't invent art, science, or crime. AI seems similar to me: It will change everything and it will change nothing. I expect it won't reduce my ability to discover things that match my (peculiar) taste, and I don't think it likely that human talent will become more rare; quite the contrary I'd imagine. I certainly expect things to get pretty interesting, but I also expect to still be able to go for a hike, play the piano, have interesting dreams, cold beer, and hot showers. I'm expecting something akin to turning up the gain in a circuit: signal-to-noise will get worse, the signal itself will get amazing, art and science will both boom, sleazeballs will get sleazier, scams will get scammier, Jundo will beam a 5-dimensional treeleaf directly into all our synapses, and Bill Gates won't need to use vaccines to implant his microchips any more. But even with all those and many unimagined-yet miracles to come, I think/hope we'll still need soap and windshield wipers and loud electric guitars played raucously.

We invented the wheel, then we invented propulsion, then we flew the Flyer at Kitty Hawk, then we flew to the MOON. Welcome AI -- let the future begin!

I'll just say that the US is very large and diverse. Each state is the size of an average country, we have a federal system of government where each state has a lot of control over how it is governed. Since it is one country though people can move easily from one region to another without needing to change citizenship or currency, etc., so there is a lot of self sorting. Its easy to move and live with more like minded people.

I've lived in the same area for 50 years and have rarely witnessed the attitudes you talk about. I've seen the Christian identitarianism prominently displayed when I've traveled to certain other areas and I've experienced some of the competitiveness occasionally when dealing with people from outside my region. For example I just did a lot of work for someone who grew up here but moved out east for her professional life and just recently moved back to retire. People in her neighborhood would stop and make small talk and she'd talk to me about how this seemed really weird to her, like they were up to something. She also was much more perfectionistic and passive aggressive than I'm used to dealing with.

The competitiveness seems from my perspective like more of an elite professional thing. I listen to podcasters who live in that world and they talk about trying to let that sort of thing go and a desire to develop attitudes that just seem like part of my everyday working class life.

Mainly I'm saying don't judge us all by the headline grabbing extremists.