Unreal Bird #5: Thoughtless

Moon on a clear night.
I took out my childhood telescope to see the planets last week, but the lens was fogged. Alas.

Thanks for reading Unreal Birds, a newsletter about how tech, media, and capital undermine democratic accountability.

As usual, events have overtaken me; I prostrate myself before the march of time. We're at war with Iran—read Nate Schenkkan always, but especially here on Trump's illiberal interventionism (he's down for nation-destroying, but not nation-building.)

Also, Anthropic and the Pentagon had a falling out. That could be a whole newsletter on its own, but you should at least read Henry Farrell on what it tells us about "arbitrary state power," and this piece in Transformer had me thinking the real villain might be the permissive US surveillance laws we made along the way.

In this issue:

  • I have a new piece for the Kettering Foundation on the dangers of our "K-shaped" democracy, and I spoke to the Northeast Ohio Indivisible chapter about citizenship and AI.
  • How will long-term AI use affect human thought?
  • Field Notes: Heterodox free speech warriors are full of it. Maybe the left is winning the AI debate? And the Knight First Amendment Institute wants to reconstruct US free speech protections.
  • Scroll to the bottom to see dogs!

What I'm up to

First, I recently had the pleasure of speaking to the Northeast Ohio Indivisible chapter about AI and citizenship. I don't think there's video, but I am making my slide deck (and speaker's notes) available here.

I also have a new piece for the Kettering Foundation titled "Addressing Our K-Shaped Democracy." It's based on polling results from Kettering and Gallup about how Americans view democracy and civic participation.

The results are not heartening! A majority (51 percent) say US democracy is performing poorly overall, while only 24 percent believe it is performing well.

I borrow the phrase "K-shaped" from recent economic discourse. Americans are frustrated with the economy despite reasonable growth and employment numbers. Why? The answer is inequality: economic growth being driven in part by consumer spending in the upper income brackets, while lower income brackets are struggling to get by. They're diverging like the top and bottom halves of the letter "K."

Our politics also resemble this divergent shape. While media, scholars, and civil society spend a tremendous amount of time thinking about partisanship and polarization, these stories are largely about the top half the K. Many Americans have decided to sit out our partisan forever war:

The report [finds] that “those with no party ties—non-leaning independents—are less positive about democracy.” Only 43 percent of this group agree that democracy is the best system of government, with another 43 percent declaring themselves neutral... Perhaps surprisingly, those who feel neutral toward both parties are less likely to support democracy than those whose feelings toward the parties are negative (from 31% to 59%).

The polling data also suggests many of these people aren't doing well in other ways:

... if the data is broken down by age, income, level of education, or level of community belonging—related to what Robert Putnam called “social capital”—these numbers become even more negative for the young, the less advantaged, and the more isolated.

Finally, it warns that this attitude is cyclical: citizens who are less satisfied with how government works in their community are less likely to participate in their democracy, leading to poorer social outcomes, leading to less faith in government, repeating ad nauseum:

The report tells similar stories about those who report lower satisfaction with local services (46 percent believe democracy is best) and those who often feel lonely (58 percent).

How any policymaker can look at those numbers and not see an emergency is beyond me.

Thoughtless

When I was twenty, it was obvious that my generation was going to be shaped by social media networks like Facebook and Twitter. When I was thirty, the same could be said for the Gen Z and TikTok. Now that I'm nearly forty, I think a lot about the ten-to-twenty-year-olds who are using LLMs to access information. Who will they grow up to be?

I've made this point before, but shortcuts can come at a cost. A new app, Einstein, says it can do homework and take tests for you. It's forcing college instructors to adapt and devaluing forms of remote education that working people rely on to access higher education. In his newsletter, Dave Karpf writes about how LLMs are eating the processes of tenure and peer review alive. At Amazon, staff are asking whether its famous culture of justifying proposals through writing is being sloppified (this piece is paywalled but you can read the first half, and it's worthwhile.)

The Amazon piece brings me to another, which is closer to (my) home. On February 16, the editor of Cleveland.com, Chris Quinn, wrote a piece describing how a young applicant withdrew from consideration for a reporting job because they learned their stories would be written by AI. He lamented that journalism schools are not teaching for the future. (FWIW, if you google "AI in journalism schools," you will find dozens of programs offering courses on AI, but never mind that.) The Washington Post picked up the story here.

Quinn's piece attracted a lot of attention, much of it negative from journalists who believe—like I do, and like Amazon purportedly once did—that writing is a form of organized thinking.

If economic pressures force newsrooms to replace thoughtful reporting with AI stenography, we'll be worse off for it. I don't blame Quinn for trying to innovate; Cleveland.com is a sort of rump state formed after the closure of the Cleveland Plain Dealer in 2020. Quinn is painfully aware that in media, innovation is a prerequisite for survival.

But we won't know what shortcuts like these cost us tomorrow, or even next year. Ask me in a decade, when today's ten-year-olds are adults.

Field notes

Snoot watch

Sleeping greyhound wearing pajamas in a sunbeam.
Snoozle.

Humble plea

This newsletter is mostly powered by caffeine. If you've made it this far, consider buying me a coffee at the link below:

Buy Me A Coffee