🚀 Faster, Please! Week in Review #57
Please check out some highlights from my essays and interviews!
My free and paid Faster, Please! subscribers: Welcome to Week in Review. No paywall! It was a bit of a light week this week due to traveling, but still lots of good stuff.
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➡ This is big: I have a book coming out on October 3. The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised is currently available for pre-order pretty much everywhere, including Amazon. I’m very excited about it!
Melior Mundus
In This Issue
Essay Highlights
— Beyond the hype: Self-driving cars shifting into high(er) gear
— We fear AI. That's a problem.Best of the pod
— Transcript: My Q&A with economist Pete Boettke on why AI can’t plan the economy
Essay Highlights
🚘 Beyond the hype: Self-driving cars shifting into high(er) gear
When we first started hearing about autonomous vehicles, it didn’t take much nudging for a society soaked in techno-dystopianism to begin obsessing about the downsides. If a car could accomplish one of the seemingly most difficult tasks that humans do, surely there would be many other human activities — and jobs — these brilliant machines could also do. But self-driving technology has proven to be a tougher problem to solve than thought back in 2010. New technology can generate lots of hype followed by lots of disappointment. But that doesn’t mean the technology is junk or will never fulfill anywhere near its original promise. Oftentimes, more tech innovation, along with user learning and investment, are needed. As Manhattan Institute’s Jordan McGillis explains in a new report, “Autonomous Now: Why We Need Self-Driving Technology and How We Can Get It Faster,” the potential for AVs to improve road safety and reduce transportation costs remains pretty compelling. AVs equipped with autonomous driving systems are already safer than human drivers and have the potential to significantly reduce the more than 40,000 annual deaths caused by motor-vehicle collisions in the U.S. Given the tremendous benefits from mass AV adoption, this is truly a “Faster, Please!” situation.
😨 We fear AI. That's a problem.
Labor productivity in the nonfarm business sector jumped at a 3.7 percent annual rate last quarter, the biggest increase in nearly three years. Of course, this surge comes after a slump last year … which came after a surge during the pandemic. Overall, the numbers in recent years have not been great. And I wonder: If the those facts were more widely known and understood, would we be seeing the following downbeat poll numbers about AI? Via Vox: “72 percent of American voters want to slow down the development of AI, compared to just 8 percent who prefer speeding up.” Would we be seeing such dreary AI poll numbers if we had a more tech-positive culture where the importance of productivity growth driven by tech progress was more widely and deeply understood? Of course, American society has for years been soaking in dystopian sci-fi where AI is the ultimate villain. Lots of movies about that theme, but not so many about the opposite. If AI is a significant general-purpose technology, there will be disruption — and pushback to that disruption. Images of a better tomorrow would be incredibly helpful.
Best of the pod
🤖 My podcast chat with economist Pete Boettke on AI and the feasibility of 'technosocialism'
Pete Boettke is a university professor of economics and philosophy at George Mason University and director of the F.A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center. Last year, he and Rosolino Candela authored the paper, “On the Feasibility of Technosocialism.” (Podcast here and transcript here.)
I think the millennial or Gen Z socialist might listen to this whole conversation we've had, and at the end they might think, “Not wrong, just early. Once we get to artificial general intelligence, then the problem will be solved. So you may be right today, here in August, 2023, but in August, 2033, finally Moore's Law and some very smart software will prove you wrong.”
Let me just give you a warning of that kind of thinking, which I agree with you is the way that everyone thinks about this. My favorite Soviet economist is a man named Nikolai Bukharin. Nikolai Bukharin actually was the architect of the original plan towards communism. He wrote a book called The ABCs of Communism and wrote the policies that Lenin implemented between 1918 and 1921. He also then became the architect of the New Economic Policy where they retreated from socialism so that they could stay in power. The fact that he was such a major player in this made him a target for Stalin when Stalin engaged in his purges. And so Bukharin was lost after he first sided with Stalin to get rid of Trotsky, then Stalin outflanked him and got rid of Bukharin. However, in 1925, Bukharin wrote a famous paper defending the New Economic Policy. And in it, he points out that Ludwig von Mises, who he had actually met and studied with in Vienna before the revolution… Because he went to study and learned from the Austrian economists who were considered the leading critics of Marxism, and he was tasked to go there, learn, and then criticize the Austrians. And he wrote a book all on this as well. And he says Ludwig von Mises is the most learned critic of communism. He says that Mises’ analysis of why communism can't work explains why it is that we had to retreat in 1921. But then he says, we will have the last laugh because we will eventually reach a stage where we can then advance to socialism and we will defeat Mises’ argument. But for right now, we have to actually live with the reality that Mises is right. And then we go on.
In the horrors of the 20th century, that speech became Stalin's justification to explain why Bukharin was a right-wing deviationist, and then eventually he executed him. But that speech is a famous speech given to the politburo defending the New Economic Policy, and he makes this very argument that you just made: Socialism cannot work right now, but give us a generation and then we will have socialism. So do not take our power away from us, because we need the power today to do this. And one of my favorite American economists,Frank Knight, used to like to say that when people tell me that they need power to do X, I stop listening after the first three words: they need power. We have to be very conscious of what are the political consequences of concentrating such power in the hands of such few to be able to try to pursue these dream aspirations in terms of the functioning of our democratic society and free society. And we always have to be very vigilant about that, I would argue.
