Weekly Grounding #30
News, links, writing
Weekly Groundings are published every Friday to highlight the most interesting news, links, and writing I investigated during the past week. They are designed to ground your thinking in the midst of media overload and contribute to Handful of Earth’s broader framework. Please subscribe if you’d like to receive these posts directly in your inbox.
Without further ado, here’s this week’s Weekly Grounding:
“Is the American Dream Really Dead?”
Weekly Grounding #29 discussed Americans’ rapidly declining faith in the American dream alongside troubling data on life expectancy and suicide. Rana Faroohar’s review of David Leonhardt’s recent book, Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream, expands on these topics at The Financial Times: “For the last half century, US incomes have stagnated and wealth inequality grown. A typical family in 2019 had a net worth slightly lower than the typical family in 2001. ‘There has not been such a long period of wealth stagnation since the Great Depression,’ Leonhart writes. What’s more, life expectancy is down — a rare and disturbing anomaly for a rich nation — as is social mobility.” Faroohar continues: “In Leonhardt’s analysis, changes to three things — political power, culture and investment — mean that average, working Americans have been left behind. Since the late 1960s, the ‘old labor’ of the New Deal has been hijacked by a new and more entitled ‘Brahmin left,’ increasingly made up of college-educated elites that talk down to workers rather than with them. In a country that fundamentally skews more socially conservative, the Democratic party has also become too radically progressive on social issues such as abortion, immigration and LGBTQ rights. Because of this, they have lost the electoral votes needed to push through badly needed economic policies such as long-term public investment, as well as more progressive taxation, plus healthcare and educational reform, that would temper rising inequality. Add in a ‘greed is good’ culture of self-interest and global market forces pushing only what’s good for the quarter, and you get a country in decline.”
“Class Conflict and the Democratic Party”
Speaking of the “Brahmin left,” a topic addressed previously in Weekly Grounding #14, this analysis by
for argues that the “key schism that lies at the heart of dysfunction within the Democratic Party and the U.S. political system more broadly is between professionals associated with ‘knowledge economy’ industries and those who feel themselves to be the ‘losers’ in the knowledge economy—including growing numbers of working-class and non-white voters.” Al-Gharbi provides a rigorous history of the “increasing dominance of knowledge economy professionals over the Democratic Party” that is well worth reading leading up to the 2024 election. He notes that “professionals tend to be far more supportive of immigration, globalization, automation, and artificial intelligence than most Americans because they make professionals’ lives more convenient and significantly lower the costs of the premium goods and services they are inclined towards. Those in knowledge professions primarily see upsides with respect to these issues because their lifestyles and livelihoods are much less at risk—indeed, they instead capture a disproportionate share of any resultant GDP increases—and their culture and values are largely affirmed rather than threatened by these phenomena. Others may and often do experience these developments quite differently.”
“The Rage Behind The Dublin Riots”
Immigration is a focal point in the political division between professional and non-professional class voters, not just in the United States, but across Western societies. This division was brought into sharp relief by the recent riots in Dublin (discussed previously in Weekly Grounding #29).
provides background to the riots, documenting the “hundreds of peaceful protests all over Ireland” in response to the government’s increasingly brazen open borders policy: “While the media, the government, and nongovernmental organizations rigidly framed the protests as the work of monstrous extremists and ideologues, amateur footage of the events typically showed locals—mothers with children and old people—voicing fears for the safety of their neighborhoods and criticizing the government’s policy blunders; in one absurd case, residents of a village of 100 people were expected to house almost 1,000 migrants.”
“How Israel Uses an AI Genocide Program to Obliterate Gaza”
- synthesizes recent reporting on the Israeli artificial intelligence system, called “Gospel”, that is “generating lists of targets so rapidly the military cannot keep up.” He writes: “Speaking of the military’s new reliance on Gospel, Aviv Kochavi, the former head of the Israeli military, told the Israeli Ynet website earlier this year: ‘In the past, we would produce 50 targets in Gaza per year. Now, this machine produces 100 targets a single day, with 50 per cent of them being attacked.’ The goal, he observed, was to address a ‘problem’ in earlier bombing campaigns against Gaza that the Israeli military quickly ran out of Hamas and Islamic Jihad targets its human staff could identify. A former intelligence officer told 972 [Magazine] that the Targets Administrative Division that runs Gospel had been turned into a ‘mass assassination factory.’ Tens of thousands of people had been listed as ‘junior Hamas operatives’ and were therefore treated as targets. The officer added that the ‘emphasis is on quantity and not on quality.’”
“Maybe We Already Have Runaway Machines”
Gideon Lewis-Kraus reviews David Runciman’s new book, The Handover: How We Gave Control of Our Lives to Corporations, States, and AIs, for The New Yorker. The book approaches the problem of “AI alignment” (aligning artificial intelligence with human values) from the perspective of other alignment problems surrounding the state and the corporation. Runciman theorizes states and corporations as machines that are radically out of alignment with the scale and scope of human values. Lewis-Kraus summarizes one of Runciman’s important arguments as follows: “It would be one thing if our most pressing concern were peaceful coexistence between humans and machines. But the more relevant prospect for unease is the rapport between machines and machines—between the automata of the state and the corporation and their A.I. kin. Some of the potential consequences are obvious: in the use of automated weaponry, for example, or comprehensive state surveillance of the kind that China, which has directed an enormous amount of resources into A.I. development, is pioneering. Even in the absence of a true artificial superintelligence, we might find ourselves beset not by a single alignment problem but by multiple overlapping ones.”
What grounded your thinking this week? Feel free to share in the comments.