How will AI impact politics?
Specifically I'm interested in this question from the perspective of what I observe in the responses I get when I'm not concise or leave crucial details out. This in and of itself seems to be a "training ground" for people to start to truly grasp just how expansive human knowledge has become. By formulating well thought out questions you will get better answers. People will be rewarded for thinking critically about the problems they're trying to get answers to. Not that this wasn't already the case, it's just that some people just don't try. With AI it seems to fill a gap that makes critical thinking accessible to pretty much everyone. Putting it plainly, AI will respond with an answer to the question you ask. Ask better questions get better answers. As people learn / continue to become better at critical thinking, I think a natural progression is that we'll all (relatively rapidly) become better at formulating our position on issues. The "spin" games that some disreputable media thrive in today, will naturally become harder and harder to sustain.
This in and of itself (to me) is reason to be very optimistic about the future of politics in the US and around the world.
There is the criticism that the media is harmful and 'biased' because of the interests of the people who own it (conservative) or who work in it (liberal) but a more fundamental criticism that says it gets things wrong by its very nature which includes the works of Neil Postman, Marshall McLuhan, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, Ben Bagdikian [1], Johnathan Schell, Hunter S. Thompson, etc.
I've lived long enough that I've had the experience that an "event" [2] takes place -- I see it live on TV, then the recap on the evening news, then in the daily paper the next day, then in a weekly paper like The Economist, I read more articles about it, and I think I know what happened.
25 years later a book comes out that is very well research and they combed over the primary sources and interviewed lots of people who were involved and it seems to me that what happened is very different from what I remembered, some of that is my memory being fuzzy [3] but some of it is that journalists write the first draft of history and don't get it quite right?
So I think that's what you're up against.
We're also up against something new in the social media age in that you're aware of the editorial function of the TV channel or newspaper to some extent (but nowhere near as much as you should -- because 10,000x as many things happened today and did not get in the news as did get in the news) but when you see something in social media you think other people care about it as opposed to the editors. Ezra Klein was speculating in his last podcast, for instance, that if Elon Musk was at war with Donald Trump he might amplify Xes about the Trump-Epstein connection which could be devastating because it creates the appearance (and reality) of a movement.
[1] who pointed out the conflict between the owner and journalist mentioned above
[2] l’événement in French theory. Since everything else is under-translated in French theory I think this word, used technically by various authors, ought to be dragged into English
[3] If I was an LLM would we call this "hallucination?"
Was just thinking about Chomsky. Almost impeccable cred, he's Jewish, but not a hidden nepo baby, at least not the way Mamdani or Obama are :) I mean "activist parents"
Chomsky is like the "activist theory" version of Gibson.. not enough humanity. Even Graeber falls short, he's like Bruce Sterling, or Stephenson. (Bruce must be fully french-theorified by now ;) We need an Ursula K :) K-theory!
We need a break even from McLuhan, towards Ivan. This-- AI-assisted! --thread gets it started
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44612434
>Illich relates this story: "Recently I was talking to my night-watchman, Marcos, about his 11 year old son who works in a barbershop. I noted in Spanish that his son was still a nino. Marcos answered with a guileless smile, 'Don Ivan, I guess you are right.' I felt guilty for having drawn the curtain of childhood between two sensible persons."
>Thanks Claude for validating my hunch about the late-century subtweet.
We need vitriol so subtle, yet so un(-British)-Canadian(-emigrant)* one tastes it like an elixir !!?? Channel the inner Quebecois if you have to. AI could help. In theory. Prompt: "edgy but not lordly"?
*Referring to McLuhan, Jacobs, Gibson etc. one is not allowed further northwards than Portland :)