8 thoughts on “Gormless in the Machine: On Running AI and Meat Avatars For Elective Office

  1. Just gonna lay down my well worn meat space marker that if you want efficiency, you are talking about organizations with a profit motive where the most amount of work with the least resource demands reigns supreme. Its not a good way to discuss government.

    Effectiveness is the marker you need to choose for government. And surprisingly, government at all levels is effective at delivering its services. This is of course separate from discussing whether taxpayers need or want all those services.Report

  2. Gormless is a great word. I wish it was used more often. Related but i wish we had less need to talk about people correctly described as gormless.Report

  3. In my head I read the Alexis de Tocqueville quote in Kyle Reese’s voice. And as you say, what we’re calling “AI” is indeed correctly identified as nothing more than a glorified search engine. Great article, Andrew.Report

  4. A million years ago, in anthropology, we learned about one of the ways that one of the indigenous tribes used to figure out where to hunt during lean parts of the winter.

    They didn’t ask Bob where to hunt because if Bob was wrong, well, everybody’d resent Bob (maybe kill him). You didn’t want to vote on where to hunt because if the demos was wrong, well, that’d easily turn into leadership by strongman (until, of course, the strongman was wrong about where to hunt one too many times).

    What this tribe did was burn a deer shoulderblade bone, kept aside for just this purpose, and the burning and scarring would create a map of the surrounding areas. The wiseman would look at the map, revealed by the fire and the ghost of the deer, and realize that this crack was a particular stream and that marred spot was a particular rock or tree and *THAT* is how the ghosts told us where to hunt!

    And if the shoulderblade was wrong? Well, those ghosts, man. They’re capricious. It’s not Bob’s fault. It’s not the fault of the demos. It’s not the fault of the holy man or the people who were reading the map given by the ghosts.

    It’s the ghosts’ fault.

    And this helped keep the tribe cohere with each other during starvation-level lean times.

    It makes sense to outsource this sort of thing to the ghosts during lean times.

    Less sense to do it in fat.Report

      1. (checks BMI)

        At this point, I’d say that we’re in “fat”, but it’s always relational at this point.

        Are we leaner or fatter than last year? Are we leaner or fatter than the year before?

        Are you fatter than you were four years ago?Report

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