the BSDs in the AI Age

[James K. Lowden]

On Mon, 6 Apr 2026 14:19:55 -0400
Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:

> Most of the AI boosters I'm seen seem to be banking on these problems
> being solved before it becomes a really serious problem, or on gains
> in efficiency due to AI use offsetting the increase in energy costs

I guarantee no AI booster has an answer to:

	Socialize the risk
	Privatize the reward

We are not fully funding the accounted-for cost of these models, and
they are not funding the unaccounted-for costs, otherwise known as
externalities.  The environmental damage, social harm, and political
harm have scarcely entered the "national conversation", as it's called.

A few at the fringe argue for some kind of moratorium until we get our
arms around what is happening, and that simple idea is too radical for
most.  But it's not radical enough.  

Either 

1.  this whole AI thing is another dot-com bust after which all that
will remain are some depleted VC funds and hulking half-built data
centers and power plants, or

2.  the investors are right, and a world-changing powerful tool will
wind up in the hands of a fortunate few to whom the rest of us will owe
fortune and favor, because our very ability to earn a living and
communicate will rest on their benevolence.  

There is a theory that the rate of change in any person's lifetime has
been accelerating since the Industrial Revolution.  I don't know if
turn-by-turn directions and instantaneous free global communication is
"more change" than the Brooklyn Bridge or subways or public sanitation
or social security.  But if I measure my childhood against my
grandparents', if I ask how relevant their experience was to my life,
and ask the same about my grandchildren, I'm inclined to say things are
changing much faster than the political system is adapting, and
probably faster than it can adapt.  

For example, we have had social media for a couple decades.  It was not
crucial to Obama's election, but it was to Trump's.  The bulk of the
adult population came of age when media was mediated: when editors
decided what to print, and publishers were liable for libel.
Consequently, most of us never saw in the media outright lies and faked
images unless we had Enquiring minds.  We knew not to take alien
abductions too seriously.  

Now, a majority of those same Americans are subjected to manipulated
media, which editing algorithms are attuned to  each reader's
proclivities, and whose publisher is legally immunized by Section 230
of the Internet whatever act.   So Ivermectin maybe is a cure and red
meat the new bran.  Worse, there is no law against promulgating fake
and defamatory images, or against publishing private information to
create a target for anonymous abuse.  

What has congress done about that?  What has any legislature done, or
consider doing?  Taking cell phones out of schools and insisting on age
limits for Facebook, I guess that's something.  I guess it's a finger
in the dike while the whole town floods.  

An *obvious* remedy to sorting out AI-produced images and content from
not would be a *law* that requires all such content to be watermarked.
Yes, that law would be ignored by some criminals, as laws always are.
But we wouldn't have to ask if the latest press release (quaint term,
see?) from the Republican Party was real or faked.  Criminality has
consequences.  

Just as obvious: that hasn't happened and isn't happening.  The power
of these media  have captured the institutions that would corral them.  

The list of unanswered undiscussed social problems is long and
lengthening.  Our stolen privacy.  The concentration of "old" media in
the hands of the new tech aristocracy, whether Bezos or Ellison.  The
rank privatization of healthcare and, increasingly, education. The lack
of social mobility in the country that invented it.  The ubiquity
of toxins like PFAS in our environment.  A president promising war
crimes in our name, with nary a nod to congress.  

It took 10 years for Unsafe at Any Speed and the rising carnage of
automotive death to result in seatbelts in new cars, and another decade
for their use to become mandatory.  In about the same span of time, the
citizens of New York in an earlier era introduced public sanitation and
fire protection.  Cigarettes went from Bogart-cool to
Bloomberg-banned.  Our parents and grandparents did those things.  

Those social problems were met by an intact civil society and body
politic.  ISTM the problems we face now are a parasite on that body
itself, and due the accelerating rate of change we haven't had time (as
a body) recognize what it's doing.  

If AI is alternative #2, a political system so inept that it couldn't
hold Microsoft or Facebook to account will be no match for our new
overlords, to whom AI, and we, will belong.  

--jkl