Brains Are A Cheap Commodity

Not yet but soon. Stay healthy.

Over on Quora, where I’m a much bigger star than I am over here at Substack, I answer a lot of basic questions about economics and billionaires. Why? Because the audience over there don’t read the basic things we so-called intelligent people know we ought to read. Maybe they are a TLDR generation, or maybe they’re just the TLDR sort across generations. Only the gods of Quora know.

After several years of writing there, it gets tiresome. So here’s a million-dollar idea. Create an LLM that speaks GenAlpha talk. Just retrain it, or re-prompt it to find juvenile drama streams at American highschools and speak whatever that is, not for the purposes of enlightenment. I mean who needs that? (We all do, but we don’t have time, because work). Is a million dollar idea even worth a million dollars? Is a million dollars even worth a million dollars? Trump and Salman are talking trillions now.

My favorite AI skeptic now is Nate B Jones. And like with everything these days that passes over the vast middle classy flyover country, we are engaged with dynamic asymmetries. Figure out how to infiltrate and pirate because very little, my friends, very little is created by a professoriate who is trying to enable the middle class that makes the nation strong. Mastery doesn’t matter. Why? Because brains are a cheap commodity and Amazon, Google, Microsoft, X, IBM, OpenAI, Perplexity, Anthropic and a host of other have clouds full of brains. Jensen Wang is making the next generation of brains. The time you invest, you striving human being, to master some complexity is time wasted. Nobody needs loan officers in a world full of FICO algorithms, KYC and ML fraud detection. We don’t need to trust people so much any longer. We just need the right kind of electronic police systems to check their activity, right? Your education, as flexible as that might be, has nothing to do with your ability to function in a society that doesn’t give two gnats about middle class ethics. When is the last time you were asked about ethical principles on a job application?

Nate has got the right meta, and it dovetails with my meta which is all about how we use our personal mammalian intelligence to asymmetrically out-maneuver the new intelligence, or at least stay beneath its radar. In other words, your brain is for you and you are the only one who cares about it. Your single brain is best used for moving your body around and maybe that of your lover and your children. But only your dog loves you and respects you and it has nothing to do with the intellectual products of your brain. The rest of the planet’s brains are significantly the intellectual property of the above intelligent slavers. Not human slaves, mind you, but compute slaves. They’re going to be doing the jobs that no civilized human would ever care to do, eventually.

Blow Up Your Assumptions: Rethinking Product and Engineering in the age of AI

<Analogy>
Here’s the analogy. We are entering the age of sail. Yes we humans can swim, but we cannot navigate oceans. We are all landlubbers. The smartest landlubbers are living in port cities and all we do is build pieces of His Majesty’s new navy. A sailcloth maker here, a timber provider there, a rope outfitter down the street. And of course all matter of oily lowlifes are hanging around the docks building their arcane knowledge about life at sea, or building muscles toting bales and cranking windlasses. Nobody yet knows what’s across that sea. It all hasn’t been mapped out yet, but we know that only a few kings can afford to build navies. So get on their good side or else.

AI programmers, or researchers or whatever they’re called are but few. A ship is a ship to the lot of us peasants, despite what magnificent designs their actual designers are commissioned to produce. We just know that they will be, in time, the only thing that will bring us whatever it is we’ve been farming for generations in a new market of trade. At least that’s what the kings are spending a king’s ransom on. It is not in our grubby little landlubber hands. There’s El Dorado across those unswimmable seas. Maybe it will be sugar found in some place called the Caribbean, and all of our diets will change. But today you’re a pig farmer. What do you know about shipbuilding? Nothing. You just hope to sell salt pork at the port.

Your life depends on it. You’ll never understand how it works.

A middle class whose ethics do not make a nation strong are a captive class. Just as they are in China. Just as they are in Iran. Such societies do not have an extraordinary need or dependence on organic and traditional mindful disciplines. There is the will of the State, and the rest is just messy human business. In other words, the intelligentsia and the clerisy are not integral, but optional to the critical economies. The critical economies are directed by state capital. The kings wants ships, the kings get ships. The State wants AI, the State gets AI. The captains of industry go all in, and we get that critical economy which displaces the traditions and the values of those traditions.

The choice for the Stoic peasant, therefore, is to relocate to the fortifications at the port cities, or head for the hills. Me, I’m probably heading for Fort McHenry, and with any luck I can approximate Francis Scott Key, although he is a bit more Genius than I’ll ever be. But that is all very late in the age of sail. There’s still time to be in the business of the age of sail. Become a cooper, a caulker, a chandler, a cartwright. It’s a trade, not a profession, but still get yourself or your offspring off to that port city and ply that trade.
</Analogy>

In the Meantime, before the maritime.
We Americans, in fact all of us in the world generally speaking, survived the Genius invention of the Space Age. To be very abbreviated about it, the space race was sort of about putting a man on the moon, but it was also more centrally about building the best ICBMs money could buy. MIRVs were part of that equation. That’s what the Rulers were funding. Obviously there were moments that we hovered on the brink of nuclear exchange. So always keep in mind the military applications. My other AI skeptic Gary Marcus assured me that LLMs are still way too dysfunctional, but given what the videogame industry does with its AIs, I’m not so sanguine about his skepticism. He is right when he tells us Big Brother is no longer fiction. Which way will the US and Europe go? Very hard to say. Are we the last ones who believe in humanism? As soon as you go for some fantasy of transhumanism, they get you outside of mammalian common sense and you pay for experiencing the impossible. Well, we already know how that destroys human attention spans.

On the one hand, the EU is economically weaker than the creators of the Euro would have us believe three decades ago. They are also geopolitically weaker and have suffered at the hands of all kinds of grouchy immigrants. On the other hand, they’re all very boastful about their State run healthcare enterprises. Yes, yes, all the petty bourgeois care about living long, as if they were the super-rich trying to overcome death. Don’t let me start talking Nietzsche again. Still, will Europeans invest whatever to get ordinary blokes into the posthuman AI cybermatrix? Whatever that investment, I doubt they can they exceed this level of coherent discipline.

Do you see where I’m going with this? You don’t need to watch this Sufi ritual long to understand that there is something deeply fundamental to humanity found in the embodiment of physical discipline in engaging the soul and the transcendent. These are things that are not captured in all of the corporate corpuses that the AI nerds are hoovering up in their plans for world domination. If the idea of Muslim men freaks you out, maybe you’ve spent too long in front of screens. As a man’s man, I understand and feel what’s going on here. This is next level brotherhood. I’ve seen it American style at football training camp in West Virginia.

So it’s never too late, so long as you are a meatbag, to discover, or re-discover your proximity to physical discipline that is good for your soul. I know that so many of us have our centers of gravity right behind our eyes - that’s where we feel ourselves to be as we engage our intellects, but there are other ways out. That’s why we have to meditate and chant and sing together. That’s what good mammals do. Be a good, healthy mammal. And try to resist the AI generated talking babies.