“By the end of this year,” Michael Munger writes at Reason, “GPT4 chatbots will be able to produce, in less time than it takes to read this sentence, millions of texts on all the topics that you can think of, as well as those no one has ever thought of.”

Which, coupled with a couple of “conceptually simple” steps, leads to a “text singularity” in which writing as a human activity essentially stops. Artificial intelligences automagically write … well, all the things. People are reduced to mere readers.

As a working writer, I can’t help but shudder for the same reasons that inspired Ned Ludd and his disciples to rebellion against early factory automation in the 19th century. If machines can do what I do — better, faster, and cheaper — I guess I’m out of  the writing racket.

On the other hand, as a working writer, I’ve pointed out numerous times that automation is, generally speaking, a good thing.

Automation results in products that are more available, less costly, and often of higher quality.

And since that results in more demand for such products, it often creates more jobs than it eliminates — more people to bring material to the machine, more people to haul away and sell the machine’s output. In fact, England employed far more textile workers after the  automation of weaving than before, putting the lie to Luddism’s complaints.

Maybe I can get a job dusting cooling fins or replacing defective cables at the Big Writing Machine’s server farm.

Or maybe I won’t have to.

Much as it grinds my Austrian economics devotee gears to think so, it could be that the impending “text singularity” and similar developments are bellwethers leading us toward the post-scarcity of Aaron Bastani’s “Fully Automated Luxury Communism” — an age in which few if any humans really need to “work” because automation makes EVERYTHING abundant and free or nearly so.

That sounds like the better side of the utopian science fiction milieus I immersed myself in as a young reader. Whether we can avoid the worse sides — which usually involve political schemes to subjugate us all — is a different question.

It also sounds unlikely, but perhaps my long-held prejudice toward the value of human creativity, ingenuity, and motivation as the way toward a better future are skewing my viewpoint.

Either way, history runs forward, not backward. And the future promises, if nothing else, constant fascination.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

A week into 2023, The New York Times has gotten perspective on the news from further back than one week.

In the newspaper’s January 7-8 weekend edition, Carlos Lozada took “A Peek Behind the Curtain of American History” via a deep dive into Myth America: Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past.  (Not to be confused with Richard Shenkman’s Legends, Lies, and Cherished Myths of American History from 1989.)

The longtime editor of The Washington Post‘s 5 Myths series acknowledges that “some myths serve a valid purpose” when they provide a narrative for facts rather than being mere falsehoods, or akin to what Nigel Andrews called political spin “somewhere between the simple truth and the possible souping-up” in the Arnold Schwarzenegger biography True Myths.

Lozada pushes for a more complex interpretation; even focusing on outright deceptions from the right-of-center aisle of American politics implies that “left-wing activists and politicians in the United States never construct and propagate their own self-affirming versions of the American story.” Ironically, Lozada buttresses conservative framings while determined to push back against them.

Lozada lists “notions that free enterprise is inseparable from broader American freedoms” among the “myths peddled or exaggerated, for nefarious purposes, by the right.” While Trump slapped tariffs on Canadian imports that literally provided the paper on which dissenting views were printed, his opponents extended their dismission of free trade to civil liberties in general (earlier American left leaders like Henry George supported both.)

Lozada and Myth America contributor Eric Rauchway consider the New Deal unfairly maligned by misguided reactionaries, reinforcing what Ronald Radosh dubbed “The Myth of the New Deal.” That two of the essays forming the basis for Radosh’s were Barton Bernstein’s “The New Deal: The Conservative Achievements of Liberal Reform” and Howard Zinn’s “The Limits of the New Deal” —  and that Radosh saw them as understating the failure of the New Deal to break with the status quo — indicates how far it was from a partisan potshot.

“The Myth of the New Deal” was part of A New History of Leviathan, in which coeditors Radosh and Murray Rothbard attempted to “transcend the ideological myths that enable the large corporations to mask their hegemony over American society.” Rothbard balanced Radosh’s uncovering of the corporatist nature of the New Deal with a retrospective on how its policies amplified those set in motion by Franklin Roosevelt’s supposed antithesis, Herbert Hoover.

Marvin Gettleman and David Mermelstein observed that “although Rothbard’s critique is based upon a belief in the kind of free-market, laissez-faire principles that are usually associated with the political ‘right,’ many of the points he makes could easily be assented to by the ‘new left'” to which those editors of The Great Society Reader: The Failure of American Liberalism belonged.

If, as Chris Matthew Sciabarra noted in 2005, “mainstream politics offers no genuine opposition to FDR’s Old ‘New Deal’ or Bush’s New ‘Old Deal'” equally committed to “massive government intervention,” that may be because it has forgotten the old lessons of the New Left.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “In 2023, myths are true lies and new deals are old” by Joel Schlosberg, Newton, Iowa Daily News, January 12, 2023
2. “In 2023, myths are true lies and new deals are old” by Joel Schlosberg, Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman [Wasilla, Alaska], January 12, 2023
3. “In 2023, myths are true lies” by Thomas L. Knapp [sic], The Madill, Oklahoma Record, January 12, 2023

After four days of acrimony and 15 ballots, Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) finally became Speaker of the House early on January 7. Yay! Congress is finally back in business! Gridlock ends! The republic is saved!

Well, not really.  The whole sorry exercise was just another attempt to compete with professional wrestling for the attention of entertainment-seekers. Congress, unfortunately, was never OUT of business, except for exactly as long as, and precisely to the extent that,  it CHOSE to be out of business, for the purpose of attracting attention to its own supposed importance.

How vital is the position of Speaker? What’s its role and function? What can or cannot happen while the office remains vacant?

The answer to all those questions is “whatever Congress decides.”

For nearly 200 years, the position of Speaker was referenced a grand total of once in the US Constitution, in Article I, Section 2:  “The House of Representatives shall chuse their Speaker and other Officers.”

It wasn’t until 1967, when the 25th Amendment was ratified, that the Constitution ascribed any particular significance to the position at all, and that significance is fairly minor (he or she is one of the officials to be notified of presidential incapacity).

Apart from that single specific role, everything defaults to Article I, Section 5: “Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings.”

The only reason the House couldn’t swear in new members, consider and pass legislation, etc., until a Speaker was elected was that that’s how the House chooses to do things.

Nor was there any reason the House couldn’t have chosen to do things differently, even in the middle of the chaos.

The only conceivable — and exceedingly unlikely — material fallout from the position remaining vacant indefinitely would be if the president or vice-president had needed to let the Speaker know that the president was incapacitated, or if both the president AND the vice-president were incapacitated or killed and a Speaker was needed to fill the office of president. In which case the remaining anti-McCarthy holdouts in the Republican camp would have knuckled under in minutes rather than in days.

At any time in that four-day pageant, a majority of the House could have changed its rules to let it pick the Speaker by, say, drawing names from a hat. Or to proceed with the chamber’s other business and hold weekly votes to eventually fill the position. Or any sizable group of Democrats or Republicans could have changed their votes to elect McCarthy, or Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), or for that matter you or me (the Speaker need not be a House member).

What finally broke the impasse? Two things:

First, once the thing really got going, Republicans weren’t going to let it stop on January 6, the anniversary of the 2021 Capitol riot.

Second, once they were past January 6, they weren’t going to delay further and risk letting Saturday’s NFL schedule steal their thunder.

Which should tell you all you need to know about the ratio of drama to substance. It was just another TV show, folks.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY