A lot of the theoretical concepts behind this... They need updating to account for the last generation of experience. For the most part, the concepts were developed in the context of the industrial revolution(s) and manufacturing.

We are talking about manufacturing here, but the US economy in the last generation is a story about software, services, non-manufacturing firms and manufacturing firms the side step (as best they can) the core paradigm of manufacturing economics.

Competitive pricing, substitutes and alternatives, a strategic paradigm governed by market prices, marginal costs, and manufacturing quality... This is relatively marginal paradigm in the US economy, certainly in terms of market cap. In china, it is their bread and butter.

Low margin, highly competitive components manufacturing... Is that really a forte a free market societies in 2026? We outsource the "commodity value add" parts of the process. We certainly do not put them at the center of corporate strategy.

I agree about "corporate rot." I don't think anyone has a good answer to this either. China included. In practice, the best solution appears to be young vibrant companies. VW or Ford vs Tesla & BYD. VW and Ford exist because of history. Tesla & BYD exist because they perform well.

Schumpeter's free market solution was creative destruction... But, we've never really had a system for promoting this.

Part of the problem is that in a global market, allowing a company to fail creates room in the market for renewal, but there's no guarantee that your country will fill it. If Germany had come down hard on VW after the turbo diesel scandal... They probably would have just ceded market share to Korea or China or the US or something.

I feel that our understanding of trust and antitrust, along with the legal and regulatory premises... Just isn't very useful in the 21st century.

I understand the motivation, and justification for employing antitrust. Google's business model, and much of modern tech economy is really all about Monopoly-like market power.

In fact, one of the main concerns for AI investors is price competition, insufficient lock-in, weak network effects and consumer choice. They call this commodification... a telling choice of word. It's a worry that $trn valuations are impossible without something resembling monopoly to ensure longevity and high margins.

Peter Thiel gave a talk in favour of monopoly. It's worth reading. Even if you completely disagree, there are some subtle points that are relevant either way. A company facing market dynamism, price competition... Is unlikely to be investing billions in speculative r&d, for example.

Our core ideas about Monopoly, and antitrust... Tend to be highly derived of the industrial revolution, which is in turn all about manufacturing. Capital, labor, technology, marginal costs, marginal utility, price theory, etc. you can count the number which it's coming off the assembling line to understand the productivity of the firm. The product is concrete, and therefore productivity can be reasoned about.

There's no real way of applying this to Google. Google's users generally don't pay anything. Google doesn't have marginal costs.There is no price. The AdWords auction, is very clearly designed assuming monopolistic dynamics.. the seller is price maker and the buyer is a price taker. Prices are set as close as possible to buyer marginal value. Competition has no effect on pricing.

Otoh, where is the EU or any other antitrust regulator going with any of this. In the 90s, the Microsoft Monopoly was the biggest antitrust case. They used their os Monopoly to crush Netscape.

Now that it's history, we can look back and learn that the antitrust case just didn't matter one way or another. Nothing was really gained by victory, and nothing would have been lost by defeat.

The theory appears to be (a) regulated capitalism is good (b) tech monopolies clearly have market power and abuse it. There is no theory of desired outcome or the benefits of such an outcome. Are they regulating monopolies, preventing monopolies, pursuing an abstract notion of Justice?

I think we can just call that "good" education vs.. the best we can do.

If you are thinking about the individual, you are going to be thinking about individualization... Like the coach of a gymnastics team, chess club or whatnot.

I agree that from a societal, governmental or taxpayer pov... It's different. That is the "true" perspective if you are doing national policy, which is why that "woke stuff" is so often a disaster when applied to national education systems.

But... as a student or parent... not thinking about it individualistically is pretty pathological.

IMO, the pressures leading to degradation are all somehow linked to universalization:

(a) Resource constraints. Student/teacher ratios. The availability of good teachers, at scale. A great teacher is the ultimate lever. But great teachers in every class, with enough time and energy to invest in every student... very hard to achieve at national scale.

(b) Voluntary, self-motivated students who want to learn vs checked-out teenagers that just want to pass the exam with minimum effort... it's a massive difference. It's the difference between a world class gymnastics club and the PE class from an 80s teen movie. Even if half the class is highly motivated, it can't be like the gymnastics club when half the class is there involuntarily.

The visionary, optimistic concepts are usually focused on what students can achieve when motivated and willing. Universal, mandatory education rarely achieves this attitude.

(c) The bureaucracy required for scale. Decisions about teaching methods, standardized testing and whatnot... these can be performing terribly for years and decades before getting dropped. A department starts judging schools or teachers by standardized tests... and then a whole generation falls into a stale "teaching to the test" paradigm that disillusions both teacher and student.

"Why are we doing this" - because we have to.

It's fascinating that technology brings up such questions.

But the slop question... I think the slop question is different. LLMs are new. But, slop is a product of media as it happened to exist when LLMs showed up.

> an era defined by AI slop and strip-mining every corner of life for eyeballs and dollars.

High velocity, low effort, algo-driven viral spam... that was already there when AI entered the room. It was already sloppy. It was already a centerpiece of our politics, info-space, entertainment. The business models already existed. The audience was already primed.

TV news was already slop. Reddit, twitter and whatnot were already slop. Democratization of media turned out to be a race to slop.

Even this "storytelling space" was pretty worked over. In the early days of online video TED created a very successful method for "storytelling coaching." A way to take any person with any kind of experience and make them into a story. One that resonates. At first it was great. Over time, it became used up. Slop. Formats and methods milked for everything they're worth.

>The full apparatus of commercial civilization, operating without a theorist in sight.

I don't get this framing. Who thinks that markets are a product of theory? Why does the author keep hammering this point?

In any case... there are lots of commercial/numerical tablets available. Most of them, I believe. And... the records go all the way back to the beginnings of Summerian proto-writing. Cuineform was used for records before it was used for prose.

My hunch is that many/most assyriologists are more interested in political history, myth and suchlike. There is probably a lot of room for researchers who want to work on the economics.

Anthropic's IP was created by harvesting and "distilling" other people's IP. Copyrighted materials, and the commons... which they have essentially privatized.

The commercial goal is to avoid competition. One of the main worries for AI is "commoditization" which has come to mean "not a monopoly." To that end, it doesn't matter is the competitor is Chinese American or other.

Their motivation here is clearly protectionism. The argument they make to politicians is national security. The legal argument is IP-theft, violation of service agreements or whatnot.

This is all very dangerous. Commercial interests repackaged as national security can lead to armed conflict.

Reasoning by analogy in this case is not abstraction. It's just shifting the determination to choice of analogy.

Meanwhile, irl.. The best analogy is recent tech Innovations. The internet, social media...

Online copyright was basically instituted when large tech companies were ready to do it, and it was to their advantage.

Youtube, for example, built itself to massive size and locked in network effect advantages largely by violating copyright.

At some point, the legal ambiguity was a problem for their ad business. They were ready to move into the current revenue share influencer-treadmill model for content. At this point online, copyright enforcement was necessary to reduce the risk of being flanked by a new video platform.

The iPod, which resurrected Apple, ran on copyright infringement, and copyright Greyzones.... Until the point when their interests flipped. They're negotiating position opposite labels , Network effect considerations, Etc.

Intellectual property, broadly, does not start out as an intuitive/emergent natural right. It is created by legislative process, ecplicitely taylored to the needs of an interst group and/or national interest.

Writers, publishers, inventors, IP holding companies...

The legal rhetoric around legal arguments... is rhetoric. It is not the reason why decisions are made. It is how decisions or justified post fact.

No one is going to burden aI companies, at this point. The rights of copyright holders are a trivial matter compared to the potential of AI, the risk to certain labor markets, and such.

Eg low-end disruption. I have already seen "Ai lawyer" at play here.

A colleague of mine is involved in a long class action against a builder. The group chats have gone absolutely chaotic this year... as members consult heavily with LLMs and the (real) lawyer can't deal with the volume of action.

Another friend is a wholesaler and does a lot of small-scale commercial deals. Contracts have gotten bigger and negotiation has gotten more involved as "Ai lawyers" read and write these contracts.

Employment contracts are much more likely to be negotiated, referenced, etc.

So... These are all routes to "classic" disruptive innovation. It's not replacing billable hours at law firms. It is replacing non-consumption.

Law is adversarial. A formal legal letter requires a form of legal letter in response. Law generates its own demand.

I would be watching a lot more for ground up innovation, rather than adoption at firms.

Side note: (a) This new pope is very good at "political rhetoric" and (dare I say) polemic. He's a lot more relevant than recent popes. (b) There seems to have been a vibe shift, re: secular sentiments towards religion.

There is potentially a lot happening at this intersection... say catholicism and AI.

For example... LLMs make scripture a lot more accessible. That tends to be impactful, historically. It's Augustine, Aquinas, Spinoza and Schmidt. This kind of thing is a niche interest... even among the faithful, but an important niche. And... it just answers your questions, patiently.

It's also a therapist, confidant and advice giver... potentially a confessor or priest. Talk of "making an AI god" got a little stale, but... there are many ways that LLMs might take god-like roles in people's lives.

Predictions are futile, but I suspect we are going to see AI encroachment into religious/spiritual domains. I further suspect that good, natural, conversational audio is the bottleneck.

Personally... I'm curious about this Pope/AI thing. I find it interesting.

In fact, reading these sentences with ad-lib on the subject tends to give these sentences interestingly different connotations.

Talent, drive, inherent traits interacting with learnable traits, learning curves, etc. What you are good at. What you are good at getting better at.

"Blank slate" is a better ethic. It's sort of the basis for modern public/political moral perspectives. But also for personal ethos... the "growth mindset* is a much better ethos and mentality.

But Otoh... we are who we are. We have the body we have. The genes we have. The childhood development we have. The education and experience we have. The personality we have. Etc.

We don't really have the have the culture of weighing these, and "knowing ourselves" via a mattwr-of-fact, calculating examination.

That said... It's hard to deny the romanticization and projection point above.

Beer goggles can be a mind expanding POV, but you need to be aware of it or you just end up being wrong for silly reasons.

A sober look at different is a good thing. Ooh... I agree that better and more advanced org concepts are likely still to be developed. But Otoh...

LLMs are an alternative to search engines, which endangers google's whole ad business.

"AI mode" search is a sort of bridge. It gets Gemini a lot of customers that otherwise would not have used an LLM at all.

They may get stuck trying to keep the llm pattern similar enough to the search engine that the adwords business working more or less the same way.

This could be self limiting.

Irl, (a) different people's ways of working with ai are a million little islands and (b) bottlenecks vary enormously by coder and codebase/task.

Also... I think our era has an intrinsic bias that change=progress, productivity, etc.

Take the "networked computing revolution" of 1990-2000. These computers did land on every desk and every pocket. They are administration powerhouses. Excellent for all manner of administration tasks.

But... what this netted out to is "change." We send a lot more emails than we did letters. We communicate a ton. Secretaries went extinct. But "administration" grew.

A university faculty typically has more admins. Companies hire more accountants, HR, project managers, etc.

Maybe administration was never really a bottleneck.

Code has a lot of this. Everyone has a road map, wishlist, etc. It appears as though "code capacity" is the bottleneck. But maybe most of those companies can't really generate much more value from more software.

Anecdotally, it seems that many mid-tier shops are migrating/ modernizing their stack, and suchlike.

I haven't heard of many belting out features, and increasing prices or sales.

Most bottlenecks are upstream of another bottleneck. Few are a "dam."

To some extent, we tell as many lies as we can get away with. Some answers are more convenient then others.

"Why" this is taking so long, like "why did this fail?" are prone to broadly agreed lies. Sometimes this is for obvious blame liability reasons. Often, this is because the lie conflicts with some "meta."

One such fallacy is the idea that software=value. Code= money, because it cost money to write. Features=revenue. Etc.

Irl.. startups produce features very quickly because they actually need features. They start with zero features.

But... LinkedIn, visa or even Facebook.... What they are short on is opportunities to develop code with value. Ie... Something that will increase revenue.

FB aren't resource constrained. They're demand constrained. If there were a "write code, make revenue" opportunity available... they'd have taken it already.

This totally conflicts with the experience of working somewhere. That's because you have wishlists, road maps and deadlines.... and it always appears that demand for code is sky high.

Precise motives are hard to work out as a general rule. Ultimately, it often comes down to a decision that decision makers like or don't like for a confluence of reasons.

More conventional forms also, to some degrees and in some times and places.

Many of the ancient people's of Mesopotamia leave little or no trace of their languages. Hebrew, an iron age language, leaves only scraps dating to the iron age. One of 2-3 complete sentences from the whole kingdom of Judah is an inscription commemorating the completion of a waterworks project for Jerusalem. They wrote it on papyrus and it does not survive.

Neighboring iron age cultures are known from single artefacts.

The Easter Island script was seemingly written on banana leaf.

There is no deep archeological record of knotted strings.

Speculation from a sense of evidence is trick. Personally, I think writing and proto writing existed and was invented and lost many, many times. Thousands maybe.

Also, while impressive... A scaled up in advanced literary culture is not necessarily necessary, or even useful.

Egypt for example, are those Monumental temples and pyramids, mortuary hieroglyphs and what not necessary? Useful?

It's hard to distinguish between the outputs of the civilization, and its objective needs. There may have been many ways of doing complex, large, dense civilization.

Elamite, Sumerian, Akkadian and other languages of that region were written on clay... which lends very well to mass production and extremely well to preservation. They also had large populations and urban centres.

These are all very big multipliers of evidencence. A clay tablet has >1000X more survivability than papyrus, velum or even painted pottery.

Meanwhile... there isn't much writing in central and south America either... even when/where population density and urbanism is high.

Khipu, knitted strings, are the most common known writing system. There's evidence for the existence of other writing systems... but not much of it. Hence, undeciphered one-offs.

You also need to consider that writing has different uses. Most development of literacy examples start with some pretty limited use cases.

Writing isn't like fire, instantly useful to everyone everywhere.