AI reads

This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: Inevitable. The whole series is here. Please share this email; you can sign up free below.

I’m in the Memphis area with James, collecting some stuff he’s been storing at his mom’s house, eating barbecue, and running on suburban sidewalks to nowhere.

I’ve also been reading a lot, and purposefully. You might know that I’m on the harder end of AI skepticism, in practice if not in theory—a pull-the-plugger. One aim of Elon Musk’s government hijacking is explicitly to replace human cognitive labor with machines en masse. Whether or not Musk has the technical or interpersonal skill to realize it, the attempt may end up being a pretty big dot on the AI timeline.

Either way, it’s my view that AI workforce replacement will stir a political realignment in the United States, and—absent economic collapse or a public-health catastrophe—it could be decisive as soon as 2028.

For now, some reading recommendations. Each of these pieces has absorbed me completely. I’m a latecomer to scrutiny of Musk, whom I long found more irritating and distasteful than menacing. No longer. I’d love to hear your recs back!

Nate Silver: Elon Musk and spiky intelligence - breaking down the smartness and dumbness that make up this singular mind.

Kyle Chayka / The New Yorker: Techno-Fascism Comes to America. “Instead, Mimura said, Japan ‘kind of slid into fascism’ as bureaucrats exercised their authority behind the scenes, under the aegis of the Japanese emperor. As she explained, techno-fascist officials ‘acquire power by creating these supra-ministerial organs and agencies, subgroups within the bureaucracy that are unaccountable.’ Today, Elon Musk’s DOGE is the Trumpian equivalent.”

Ezra Klein in conversation with Martin Gurri: A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics. Gurri: “So part of the difficulty of this political moment is that we look at it in very old-fashioned ways — Democrat, Republican. But I look at the ground level, and I see this fermenting mosaic of different passions. I think it’s very fluid. Maybe the overall numbers, not so. And as long as we’re given this choice of Republican and Democrat, maybe that won’t change. But I’m wondering how long that’s going to last.”

Still on my to-read list: letters from former Musk associates Philip Low and Sam Harris. (I’ve read coverage of these but haven’t made time to read the primary sources yet.)

Lastly, I don’t endorse this, and had long held off on reading it, but I finally gave in and I think it’s important, as a human, to be aware of the logic behind ”techno-optimism.” It’s hallucinatory, but it’s also a pure expression of an ideology that’s reshaping our world even now:

Marc Andreessen: The Techno-Optimist Manifesto

Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com.