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Is AI The End of the World?
Over at Compact John D. Judis, he of The Emerging Democratic Majority, is worrying about AI using a Marxist economics analysis developed by a chap called Martin J. Sklar.
For Marx, the central engine of growth is the accumulation of capital, which he regards as equivalent to the accumulation of labor time.
That comes from the labor theory of value that Marx got from Adam Smith. Never mind that it was exploded by the marginal revolution of 1870, just four years after Marx published the first volume of Das Kapital. Lefties like Marxist economics, because it allows them to prophesy.
And so, the prophets say, all went well with accumulation until the 1920s.
[D]uring the 1920s, the output of goods soared but the hours spent producing them, and the number of workers engaged in producing them, stopped increasing. What he called the “disaccumulation of capital” began.
Well yes. What with steam power and gasoline power and electric power, labor was reduced to flipping switches and watching giant steel presses bash out car doors.
I must say that I enjoyed watching the workers install consoles into trucks on the Ford assembly line in Detroit a while back. The guy installing them would check a computer screen to see which console belonged in each truck as it came to his position. And then he’d put it in.
So instead of everyone hammering away at stuff on an anvil, lots of people got white-collar jobs designing and planning the automated production processes. And it got worse with computers.
And now with AI the white-collar workforce is worried. Here’s Peter McCrory, Anthropic’s head of economics, discussing the white collar angst.
As one software engineer put it: “Like anyone who has a white-collar job these days, I’m 100 percent concerned, pretty much 24/7 concerned, about losing my job eventually to AI.”
You know what? When I got my first job after graduating college with an engineering degree nearly 60 years ago, my employer set me to learn FORTRAN, and I spent the next decades programming or designing software for computer control systems. I’d attended a programming class on ALGOL at school, but never written a program in my life.
That’s how education works. The kiddies spend their first ten to twenty years twiddling their thumbs in class listening to a teacher. And then they get their first job and the education really doesn’t matter that much. Apart from the three Rs. And it sure helps to have mucked around with Algebra so you know how to set out a technical problem.
But yes. Automation really transformed manufacturing. And I am sure that AI is going to transform the whole white-collar world, from teaching to administration to lawyering to writing.
But there is opportunity. Richard Hanania, who started out life as right-wing nutcase Richard Hoste, is now writing a Substack series on quantum mechanics. Because you know what? He can use AI to guide him. I wonder if AI can help people understand advanced physics, from relativity to quantum mechanics. I don’t see why not. Here’s Google AI on Bell’s Theorem.
Bell’s Theorem proves that the physical world cannot be both local (no signal or influence can travel faster than light) and real (particles have definite, pre-existing properties before they are measured).
So what’s it all about, Alfie?
My approach is that I don’t mind that I don’t have a clue what reality really is. We humans have adapted our Theory of Everything over the years as we have understood more and more about our world. The interesting thing, to me, is that it doesn’t matter that we living things don’t know how the universe was created and what the fundamental nature of things is. We living things are born and live and die and we are composed of incredibly complex materials and codings.
But all it takes to get started is for a male and a female to copulate, and then sit back and watch. Do you realize how crazy that is?
And yet, not knowing the meaning of Life, the Universe, Everything, we still keep on trucking. And so does all the life here on Earth, and probably elsewhere as well.
That, if you ask me, is what is really weird.
| Mon, 19 Oct 2026 22:45:56 GMT |
Accelerating Towards What?
On Daily Skeptic they say that “Britain is Accelerating Towards Crisis”, invoking Nick Land’s accelerationism. It’s not just the Brits. The Frogs and the Yanks are just letting the system continue towards disaster because. Yes, obviously we can’t go on spending and borrowing, and we can’t go on importing radical Muslims, and we can’t go on with sub-replacement child-bearing. But nobody does anything to change course.
Accelerationism? Grok interprets Land’s idea thusly:
Capitalism is a positive feedback circuit in which commercialization and industrialization mutually excite each other in a runaway process. It is the primary engine of modernity’s “line of deterritorialization”—dissolving hereditary social forms, traditions, and fixed codes faster than they can be rebuilt.
Hello AI.
But I tend to the S-curve analysis in Carlota Perez book The Five Technological Revolutions. In her analysis new technologies trace an S-curve. The first half is a crazy exponential curve where the new idea is going to transform the economy. It ends in a financial bubble and crash, and then goes logarithmic as the new technology settles down and just becomes a part of the furniture.
By the way, look at this S-curve of real per-capita income in the US going back to 1800.
I’d say that growth has been declining in recent decades, and that means that Land’s accelerationism ends up decelerating. Unless AI picks up speed.
And really that makes sense, especially considering Stein’s Law: if something cannot go on forever, it will stop.
And that, I believe, explains the current political and economic situation in the West. We should contract the size of government and do a lot more things with the market, from pensions to healthcare, but we don’t, because every politician knows that you can’t ever reduce the handouts. Until the regime collapses.
For instance, I wonder what will happen in Iran with its Next Regime. It’s an interesting question, because the one time a government can do something different is when it comes into power just after the rubble has stopped bouncing.
But whatabout the US?
Right now the doomsters are all agreed that Trump will lose the House and probably the Senate in the midterms on November 3. And I must say that, when I wake up in the middle of the night, I don’t like it.
The DSA kiddies of which you’ve heard tell say they are going to pack the Supreme Court, add a few states, and abolish the Senate. And all will be well.
What they are trying to do, like the governments across the West, is act to stop the revolution that is coming. When the governments all run out of other peoples’ money.
The fact that the DSA kiddies have decided to demolish the entire US political system and replace it with their own single political will demonstrates that they don’t have a clue. They think that the problems of society today arise from hard-right insurrectionists maintaining their domination of society.
In fact our problems issue from the impossibility of continuing the current panoply of government programs and benefits and the impossibility of directing the economy from the political sector. This was pointed out over a century ago by Ludwig von Mises and backed up in 1945 by Hayek in “The Use of Knowledge in Society”. Hayek means the knowledge possessed by millions of individuals in the economy that is transmitted to them through the price system. He asks us to imagine a change in the supply of tin. Doesn’t matter why or how: the price communicates to all the actors in the world that they need to adapt to the change. Notice that the price system doesn’t tell anyone what to do. It just makes them all think about whether to adapt, how to adapt, and when to adapt. And get on with it.
The whole point of politics is really to tell us that there is no need to adapt. Adaptation is hard, and all of us would prefer to keep on same-old-same-old instead of doing the work to deal with the problem. And politicians are in the business of telling us what we want to hear.
What the DSA kiddies want to believe right now is that, by blowing up all the political institutions in the US, they can then step in and fix everything.
What the average person wants to believe is that they can continue to live and work as at present and consume the same government benefits and services, and nothing need change.
Reality is that we need to change, to respond to price signals, every day, or else things will get worse and the needed change will be bigger and more painful.
But as long as government can print and borrow money, it can put off decisions into the future. And that’s the way we like it. For now.
| Fri, 16 Oct 2026 22:55:53 GMT |
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Christopher Chantrill
He runs usgovernmentspending.com, the go-to resource for government finance data, and is a frequent contributor to the American Thinker. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Click for more.
“I love this guy.” — Steve Ballmer
A Commoner Manifesto
Commoners have nothing to lose but their shame
Every social movement will continue until it reaches absurdity — Ward Clark
Some people work for a living; other people vote for a living.
The simplest way to understand human society is as Three Layers such as Nobles, Yeomen, and Serfs.
My take on Three Layers is my Three Peoples Theory of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.
I believe that we moderns live in Three Worlds: the War World of politics, the Market World of the economy, and the Life World of family and neighborhood.
And the trouble with politics is that it reduces human society to a war against the enemy, as determined by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.
The world that we all live in today is the one created by the German Turn in philosophy, psychology, science, and meaning.
But our modern elite, the educated elite, has taken, I believe, a Wrong Turn and has imposed a cultural Great Reaction on the world, a lurch back to the primitive. This manifests in the elite’s conceited Activism Culture and its patronage of Subordinate people as its Little Darlings.
The principal reason for the elite’s Wrong Turn has been that it does not understand and does not want to understand how the Three Peoples’ Religions are necessarily different.
The root of the educated elite’s Wrong Turn is its conceit that it knows what the world needs. I think there is a better way; I call it “A Good Life Better than the Left”.
ABC of Politics – Activism Culture – “Anatomy of Revolution” – Allyism – Critical Theory – Downstream-ism – Dutch Finance – German Turn – Good Life – Great Reaction – Little Darlings – Perfect Plan – Women in the Public Square – Ruling Class – Three Layers – Three Peoples – Three Peoples Religion – Tribalism – Two Cultures – Wrong Turn
Today’s topic: Consequences of Jordan B. Peterson
