Dipshit - But Then She's A Lawyer

A form of the planner's delusion

Artificial Intelligence is going to ruin the world, save it, be terribly important, drown us in bad novels - as if we’ve not enough of those already - and, well, whatever other bats folk have rolling around belfreys.

We should perhaps reserve our ire over this shouting match for this particular dipshit:

Also, if something is so complex that it can’t be explained, then there are certain areas where it shouldn’t be used.

Sigh. It’s exactly when we cannot explain exactly how it works out that we use these complex methods.

Now, obviously we’ve indications of dipshitness abounding here:

Susie Alegre is an international human rights lawyer and author, originally from the Isle of Man, whose focus in recent years has been on technology and its impact on human rights. As a legal expert she has advised Amnesty International, the UN and other organisations on issues such as counter-terrorism and anti-corruption.

Ho Hum.

Let us consider the humble banana. 50 p or whatever they are these days. Maybe 99p the kg for all I know. The most popular fruit in the country apparently - despite the fact that it’s not, in fact, a fruit. So, what will be the outcome of a change in the price of bananas?

This is a complex problem. There are those plantations that work at nothing but growing bananas. There are those refrigerated shipping lines (a banana boat, these days, pretty much carries nothing but bananas, directly owned fleets they are). A cold store chain. The last stage of which they reveal the ‘nanas to basic atmosphere, so they ripen, then into the shops in all their yellow waxiness.

What’s the reaction to the price changing to 1 p a ‘nana? To £10? Folk going to buy more? Fewer? Supply, in the very short term (OK, months) is likely to be completely inelastic. Over years and decades near entirely elastic. Demand might change more in that short term - certainly, it’ll change more than supply will in the short term. For there’s already a few month’s worth in the supply chain on its way to the corner store.

Now, we can take a stab at a guess. A lower price will increase the consumption of and demand for bananas. A higher one choke it off. But we’re not absolutely certain of that. For example, there’s something called a Giffen Good which has the near absurd property of demand increasing as prices rise (this is different from a Veblen Good, where it is desire that rises as price does, for the whole Veblen point is to be something expensive which shows that you’re the sort of person who can afford expensive). Giffen Goods really exist too - back when China was still a subsistence economy wheat noodles in the north and rice in the south.

They’re the basic food stodges of the areas. Everyone’s living on the edge, always. So, if the basic food rises in price then everyone has to reduce any other expenditure so as to still be able to stay alive - spending upon a Giffen Good *rises* as the price does. People substitute away from the more expensive and tastier food to eating more - or only - basic stodge. This hasn’t - as far as I know at least - been tested on all other basic stodges but I’d say it’s a fair bet. In a subsistence economy when the basic food rises in price then all other expenditure gets stopped in order to be able to still get that 2,000 kcal a day of the basic foodstuff.

Bananas might be so embedded in the modern diet that this would happen. Folk would divert income from other spending in order to maintain banana consumption. I don’t say it’s likely overall, but there will be some out there for whom this will be true. That is, true for some but not for society.

But the point here is that we don’t, in fact, know. The only method we’ve got of working it out is to do it. Then use that vastly complex mechanism, the market, to work it out for us.

You see where I’m going with this? The Soviets tried to have a wholly understood economy. GOSPLAN decided upon volumes, things, prices, produced. Logically and even scientifically. The end result was no bugger had much of anything. Not even the basic stodge.

At one point in the early 1990s I was doing some subediting on a Russian economic magazine (the English language version, obviously) and I still recall one piece based on a public survey. 68% of Russians had never bought a potato. No, this wasn’t the absence of the potato from the Russian diet - Hah, no - but the absence of the potato from that scientifically planned GOSPLAN economy. 68% of Soviets were still growing their own potatoes. That description of the Soviet Union as Upper Volta with rockets wasn’t all that far off - it was still, in many ways, a basic peasant economy.

I was actually there when Boris freed food prices. Replacing that planned, understood, thing with the complexity - and the impossibility of understanding its complexity - of the market is exactly what filled the shops with food.

Now do you see the point here? The dipshittiness of the basic demand being made about AI? The lawyer is saying that unless we already understand it all we shouldn't be using it. But the entire point of the use of these complex not-understood things is that we don’t, in fact, know how it all works. Therefore we use this miracle thing to work it out for us.

To say that we can’t use AI until we know what the result will be is the same as saying we’ve got to use economic planning because we don’t know what the market outcome will be. We’ve even that long experiment - the 20th Century - to tell us how that worked out. Those who didn’t use the not-understood complexity remained shit poor.

And now really think about it. We don’t, in fact, have a good model of human consciousness. Don’t know why it works other than we’re able to observe that it does. So, sure, we could decide not to use consciousness - but enough about human rights lawyers……..