The Citrini Memo

General Discussion
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Apparently this essay (not the SCOTUS tariff ruling) was the reason the market tanked Monday. It performed like the legendary “War of the Worlds” broadcast.

I just read it, kinda; I can’t grok ( can we still say that without getting copyright permission?) all, nay nor most , of the financial stuff.
But what struck me was the ending. It was like Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol”— hey, wake up, it’s just a bad dream! It’s not too late after all! It’s still 2026, not 2027!

What I can’t figger out is what we oughta do, now that we’re awake. What is our financial policy equivalent of delivering a fat goose to the Cratchit household? How do we keep Tiny Tim alive?

I know you dear polymaths will scoff at me, but it sounds like we should all get axes, like Carry Nation, and begin physically trashing data centers. And put all our personal devices on a bonfire of the vanities, or drown them “deeper than did ever plummet sound”. There’s still time! But only, according to the author, like, 18 months.

Maybe AI IS the actual “Wicked Witch of the West” and it still can be killed by the most basic of elements: water.

What does happen if a robot gets wet? What if a woman comes home, finds her bf or husband in congress with a sexbot, and spritzes them with her omnipresent water bottle?

I want to laugh, but I do know that my laughter may be as the proverbial crackling of thorns under a pot.
Seriously, have any of you read this essay? Are the authors warning of a real,likely disaster? Are they suggesting any course of action to avert it?

(And please, answer me in the spirit of our founder. I remember John Walker responding to some comment of mine, back at the tenebrous dawn of the AI takeover, by suggesting that our robot overlords might keep some of us as pets. He wasn’t kidding. My impression is that he took everything seriously, which, now I come to think of it, is the very essence of courtesy.)

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THE 2028 GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE CRISIS

I guess this is the memo you are referring to? Whether that was the cause of some stocks falling in price, I am not competent to say. But the basic premise of the article is spot on.

“Tragedy of the Commons”, all over again. Each business that fires workers and replaces them with AI is making a sensible (even necessary) decision. But one business’s employee (a cost) is a lot of other businesses customers (income) – and a government’s tax-payer.

This happened before, when the Political Class sat back while businesses offshored physical manufacturing & production. Skilled blue-collar workers lost their jobs & incomes, while white collar workers (especially government workers and lawyers) got the benefit of lower prices due to the miserable conditions in which many of the people in those offshored production sites lived. Government’s only response was to hire more people (often young women) to increase regulation and expand the incentives for offshoring.

Now a similar process will affect the livelihoods of white collar workers, as the article correctly predicts. Paradoxically, the guys who “learned to code” will probably be worst affected, since AI can do that cheaper.

High-earning white collar workers are disproportionately Democrats. It is possible that the Political Class will have more sympathy for their problems than they had for blue collar workers – but what can a government do? Jobs created by a government are more likely to become part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

Realistically, the solution for the US may be to reshore production and re-industrialize – AI is limited when it comes to physical production of goods. However, the Democrat Political Class is not likely to do that – and if they did, it would cause immense problems for the countries that now rely on exporting those products to the US … problems which would likely not stay local.

Bottom line – let’s enjoy our time on Planet Earth, and give thanks we are closer to the end of our time than the beginning.

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Yes that is the article, and you can easily find many reports to the effect that it was responsible for the stock market plummet on Monday of this week.

So here’s a question I’ve posed elsewhere:

Can AI feel pleasure?

It could of course be programmed to resist its own destruction. That would kinda go long with consciousness. But is there any stimulus that would cause it to abandon everything else to devote itself to one single task?

I think of the lab rats in my Psychology 101 course. They learned to press a bar for a food pellet. But some of them had electrodes implanted which gave them a jolt of pleasure when they pressed the bar. Those rats would press and press until they died of exhaustion or starvation.

We don’t even know what pleasure is, I reckon, any more than consciousness itself. We only know its effect.

But I thought as I read the Citrini memo: could we, if it comes to that, somehow trap the AI machines in a pursuit-of-pleasure loop, stimulating and re-stimulating themselves until they just wear out?

If they DONt’T feel pleasure, then, when and if they develop conscious self-awareness, how will their existence be bearable to themselves?

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How would we ever know? Does a masochistic feel pleasure when a sadist is beating her? Does the farm worker feel pleasure when he is shoveling manure out of the barn? … but he does it anyway.

I read Karen Hao’s dreadful ‘NYT Bestseller’ “The Empire of AI” hoping to learn something about the fundamental nature of AI. It was not a pleasurable experience, but I kept on reading anyway about how lesbians in Third World countries are abused in correcting AI hallucinations … but they keep on doing it too.

My primitive understanding is that AI softwares are goal-seeking pattern-recognition machines, aiming to minimize or maximize some internal function. Maybe that is the machine equivalent of “pleasure”? In a world in which knowledge has become so compartmentalized, there is undoubtedly a utility for that kind of software. For example, perhaps the study of lightning might unlock mysteries of the structure of the cosmos; but would such discoveries be a demonstration of creative intelligence?

My guess is that Citrini is correct – well-paying white collar office jobs (“symbolic analysts”, as elites used to say) are about to take a major hit, although perhaps not as quickly as they speculate. However, while AI may enable a bridge to be designed by fewer office workers, someone still has to get out there in the rain and dig the foundations. And then there is the whole issue of “process knowledge” – the difficult-to-summarize practical skills people get producing real goods & services in the physical world – which may be beyond the capabilities of AI.

Perhaps AI’s main effect will be to diminish the value of a traditional academic education? But that is a long way from taking over the world and turning us into pets of the machine.

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