We Are Not Just Consumers

And "society" only exists as collections of "me's" and "us's".

Both of these obvious facts should go a far way to show what's wrong with Dylan Allman's The Ego vs. The Machine.

Here is a very telling paragraph:

But here’s the hard pill to swallow: Your insecurities should not hold back the tide of innovation. The ego’s fragility should never be the yardstick by which societal progress is measured. When you subordinate technological and creative advancement to the preservation of your own self-importance, you engage in a form of collective narcissism that serves no one.

And here is another one:

When you react defensively to technological advancements that challenge your skill set, you are acting out of a false sense of self-interest at the expense of broader societal progress that would ultimately benefit you, along with everyone else. You’re hurting everyone, including yourself, because you don’t want your ego damaged. It is rather awful. If you can’t win in the marketplace, you are not a victim. You deserve to lose.

So, if "society" is a collection of egos, or of collections of them, what does "societal progress" even mean, when pitted against "egos"?

And if the people who promote "societal progress" are so eager to pretend it benefits "you, along with everyone else" why are they (I suppose Dylan Allman represents some kind of "legio") so eager to at the same time pretend "you deserve to lose"?

Society is not an organism, and we are not its cells. We don't live for "society" and pretending we do is a much deeper flaw of Marxism than any collectivism in specific economic arrangements. Society is however the environment in which we usually live. Or societies are the environments. Not all of them are equally good or equally bad for any given man. I have on purpose left Sweden, at first imagining to get to Austria, but then getting to France. Because the three societies are of unequal value to me, Sweden probably the worst.

But society is for this reason a thing we act about — not just on the market, but also in politics and in writing or other kinds of publications. I see a young man, identifying himself with self flattery beyond "narcissism" (whatever that might mean) with "the tide of innovation" ... and telling people who dislike that "tide" to step aside. Electricity is made with tidal power, not so much with human muscle power. I do not see massive interests among the general population to identify with this self flattery. If anything, some people are keenly aware, it will not be seen kindly by some to oppose it. Therefore they'll shut up and put up, or even fawn on the tendency they feel to weak to fight, even in words.

But on top of that, he is superstitious about what AI can do:

AI models are doing precisely what human brains have done for millennia—absorbing, synthesizing, and regenerating ideas. The difference is that they do it faster, more efficiently, and unburdened by ego or the illusion of originality.

In fact, AI can deal in colours defined by pixels, and it can deal in words defined by collections of letters. But it absolutely can't deal with ideas. It can give the illusion of doing so by being used with moderate doses or with lots of human corrections added. AI is also unburdened by any ambition of truth, or meaning, that's why it can work so fast.

However, there are ways to work around its weaknesses, and the Brilliant course with the publicity "are you worried about AI? — you should be worried about AMY" has got that right. And people like Dylan Allman could for some time wield such an advantage to the disadvantage of more traditional competition. My point is less to propose a concrete measure, though I must say that France is better than UK in many ways precisely because La Jacquerie was more successful than the Luddites. It is more to ask people to call out and contradict ideologues of progress like him.

He pretends that our expression of choice on the market place is sacrosanct, and all other expressions of choice are suspect or even evil. This seems very much like the hypocrisy of Constitution Cynics who pretend that the ones abstaining from voting or forming parties they can wholeheartedly vote for deserve to have their lives ruled by those who do vote for parties they can wholeheartedly identify with, or who form or are active in such parties.

As for positive arguments, Dylan offers none, he replaces them with a kind of psychoanalysis of the resistance.

As if the fact a shrink can find a chink in a personality, when looking hard enough, when being biassed enough, proved anything.

Meanwhile, he presumes what he should have been proving, and calls this presumption being "brutally honest" ...

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Porphyrius of Gaza
26.II.2024

PS, if you think I'm unfair to AI, see what ChatGPT can do for a sequel of LotR ...

We Asked AI to Write a Sequel To The Lord of the Rings...
The Broken Sword | 13 April 2023
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONBUcQVqwuE