She's reviewing a current book:
In 2018, I was in the audience at a Pitch Day event in San Francisco as two computer science majors pitched to potential investors an app that allowed them to jump the beer line at the stadium so they wouldn’t miss any of the game. The deck was crisp and compelling. The young men were good looking, confident, and articulate. The idea? I left while everyone was applauding.
I thought back to this moment while reading Alexander Karp and Nicholas Zamiska’s bracing new book, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West (Crown Currency, 2025). I thought of the pitch again this week when I saw a NYT front page story about Phoebe Gates, daughter of Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates, and her new online shopping tool.
What led an entire generation to spend its energies on vanities? Why is the apex of world historical advances in technology just another phone app that matches people to things (and other people) efficiently? Where is the collective patriotic fervor and moral grounding of eras past? Is the problem political? Cultural? What would it take to turn Silicon Valley’s productive energies toward the safety and flourishing of our nation?
These are just a few of the provocative questions raised by Karp, co-founder of Palantir, and his co-author Zamiska, Palantir’s legal counsel and head of corporate affairs, in their bestselling book. The growing praise suggests that these questions have been pressing for some time.
In their call for the shiny app-building sector to put aside childish things and turn toward more serious and patriotic endeavors, the authors might have also noted the damage done to the higher education market.
Robbins spends some time taking a careful look at the book, but here's her final paragraph:
The Technological Republic offers a compelling diagnosis of the technology sector’s drift from national purpose toward frivolous consumerism. Yet in calling for a renewed technological republic built on ownership and cultural cohesion, Karp and Zamiska leave a crucial question unanswered: what role will the humanities, the disciplines that cultivate "truth, beauty, and the good life,"play in this reimagined future? If shared culture, language, and storytelling are as essential to national solidarity as the authors argue, then those who teach these traditions deserve more than a footnote in their vision. Without integrating what we do into the ownership culture, Karp and Zamiska risk reproducing the problem their book identifies: a society rich in technological capacity but impoverished in meaning, purpose, and collective identity.
I offered a long comment:
I started reading this, Hollis, and started getting impatient about a quarter to a third of the way in, so I did what I often do in these situations. I skipped all the way to the end to see where this is going. “Yet in calling for a renewed technological republic built on ownership and cultural cohesion, Karp and Zamiska leave a crucial question unanswered: what role will the humanities, the disciplines that cultivate “truth, beauty, and the good life,”play in this reimagined future? If shared culture, language, and storytelling are as essential to national solidarity as the authors argue, then those who teach these traditions deserve more than a footnote in their vision.” That’s all I need. I am quite willing to assume that you are a competent reader of this book and so you rummaged around between lines looking for at least some scraps of awareness. As far as I can tell, the people who build this technology, who fund it, who rhapsodize about how wonderful it is, and who natter on about the need the build, they’re narrowly educated people who don’t know what they don’t know and are proud of it.
My standard analogy for this situation, crude as it is, is that the current AI enterprise is like a 19th century whaling voyage where the captain and crew know all there is to know about their ship. They can get more speed out of it than any other crew, under any conditions, they can tack into the wind, they can turn it, if not on a dime, at least on a $50 gold piece. If whaling were about racing, they’d win. But whaling isn’t about racing, it’s about killing whales. To do that you have to understand how whales behave, and you have to understand the waters in which the whales live. On those matters, this captain and crew are profoundly ignorant; they haven’t even sailed around Cape Horn.[1]
That’s the AI industry these days.
I got interested in the computational view of mind decades ago. Why? Because I set out to do a structuralist analysis of “Kubla Khan” and couldn’t make it work. I ended up with an analysis that didn’t look like any structuralist analysis I’d ever seen, nor any other kind of literary analysis. The poem was structured like a pair of matryoshka dolls, it looked like a pair of nested loops.
I ended up writing a dissertation which was as much a quasi-technical exercise in computational linguistics as in literary theory. I chose one of Shakespeare’s best known sonnets, 129, The Expense of Spirit, as my example, and published my analysis in the 100th anniversary issue of MLN: Cognitive Networks and Literary Semantics. That represents a serious attempt to come up with a computational analysis of a profound and deeply disturbing human experience, compulsive sexuality.
The current crew will tell you, I’m sure, that that represents old technology, symbolic technology, which has been rendered obsolete by machine learning. Guess what? David Hays (my teacher and mentor) and I both knew that symbolic technology was not fully up to the job, that it had to be grounded in something else. And we were working on something else at the time, but meanwhile we did what we could with the tools we had. My point is that in order to conduct the analysis had I to spend as much time thinking about human behavior and language as I did about the technical devices of knowledge representation. Whatever success I may have had in that work, I paid for it in thinking about the human mind.
The current regime is quite different. They don’t have to think about the human mind at all. If Claude is capable of writing decent prose, well, that didn’t cost the folks at Anthropic anything. They got it for nothing. And so that’s the value they place on the human mind. For them I’m afraid “truth, beauty, and the good life” are just empty words they trot out for the hype. Theirs is an Orwellian technology. They’re stuck on the wrong side of 1984.
[1] As I’m sure you know, Mark Andreessen likes to use whaling as a precedent for venture capital. Out of curiosity, I did a little digging and found an article by Barbara L. Coffee in the International Journal of Maritime History, “The nineteenth-century US whaling industry: Where is the risk premium? New materials facilitate updated view.” It’s quite interesting. Those whaling captains kept good records, and those records have been preserved. After examining the records of 11,257 voyages taken between 1800 and 1899 Coffee concluded: “During the nineteenth century, US government bonds, a risk-free asset, returned an average of 4.6%; whaling, a risky asset, returned a mean of 4.7%. This shows 0.1% as the risk premium for whaling over US government bonds.” What are the chances that current investment in LLMs will do better? Oh, there will be some success, but averaged across the whole industry and over the longterm?
No comments:
Post a Comment