{"id":1471891,"date":"2024-06-18T16:40:00","date_gmt":"2024-06-18T20:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/?p=1471891"},"modified":"2024-06-18T16:40:00","modified_gmt":"2024-06-18T20:40:00","slug":"ai-existential-crisis-or-excuse-for-cronyism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/ai-existential-crisis-or-excuse-for-cronyism\/1471891\/","title":{"rendered":"AI: “Existential Crisis” Or Excuse For Cronyism?"},"content":{"rendered":"

AI: “Existential Crisis” Or Excuse For Cronyism?<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Authored by Joshua Mawhorter via The Mises Institute,<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Several\u00a0months ago, I was on a long car trip with my dad, and we listened to a podcast that gave some\u00a0commentary<\/a>\u00a0on the following\u00a0headlines<\/a>\u00a0from the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0and the\u00a0Wall Street Journal<\/em>: \u201cAI Poses \u2018Risk of Extinction,\u2019 Industry Leaders Warn\u201d and \u201cAI Poses \u2018Risk of Extinction\u2019 on Par with Pandemics and Nuclear War, Tech Executives Warn.\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Obviously, this was in the wake of new AI technologies like ChatGPT and others. This is also not a new issue. <\/strong>In 2017, the\u00a0Wall Street Journal<\/em>\u00a0also\u00a0published<\/a>\u00a0\u201cProtecting Against AI\u2019s Existential Threat.\u201d Of course, AI has been impressively more developed recently, bringing the usual reactions\u2014assumptions that this technology will totally change everything, amused interest, reasonable concerns (e.g., students cheating), and the typical\u00a0hand-wringing.<\/p>\n

All this was in response to a recent statement from the Center for AI Safety, who posted an open letter with the following\u00a0warning<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u201cMitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.\u201d As these claims were made, even by creators of the technologies, I had a sneaking suspicion that I already knew what these AI companies wanted: cronyism. Not long after that, my suspicions were confirmed by the inevitable call for that one, vague, seemingly magical word that everybody\u00a0seems to demand in situations like these. That word is \u201cregulation.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Arguing a similar point soon after the announcement of this \u201cexistential threat,\u201d another writer from the\u00a0Wall Street Journal<\/em>\u00a0perceptively wrote an\u00a0article<\/a>\u00a0titled, \u201cAI is the Technocratic Elite\u2019s New Excuse for a Power Grab.\u201d<\/p>\n

That said, while there is certainly a penchant for the technocratic elite to form and expand bureaucracies in order to regulate, it is worth mentioning that very often these very companies are themselves the biggest proponents of government regulation of their industries.<\/p>\n

Why would private firms ever want cumbersome government regulation? The answer is\u00a0cronyism<\/em>. Cronyism, crony capitalism, \u201ccrapitalism,\u201d corporatism, managed capitalism, a \u201cmixed\u201d economy, or fascism are different titles for the same concept.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Whatever the designation, it is a public-private partnership that employs the powers of the state\u00a0to grant special legal privilege to non-State entities for their mutual benefit at the expense of the consumer\/taxpayer.<\/p>\n

Private businesses and government are often not enemies but very comfortable friends.<\/strong> More than that, their working together is always in the name of protecting the consumer\/taxpayer. Depending on their ideology, people might see themselves teaming up with business against the government or teaming up with government against business, but they rarely recognize that there is a third option\u2014government and business teaming up against the consumer\/taxpayer.<\/p>\n

By inviting \u201cregulation,\u201d private firms can use the legal apparatus of the government to limit competition, raise barriers to entry for competitors, restrict output for higher prices, and shift the costs of \u201chealth and safety\u201d standards to the taxpayers. These are options that businesses and industries would never have save an alliance with the state. The taxpayers will pay the government, via\u00a0bureaucratic agencies, to\u00a0inspect and maintain certain standards for businesses, which removes the costs of these standards from the business, subsidizes their operations, and places them on the taxpayer. Oddly enough, this regulative bureaucratic apparatus can simultaneously be burdensome by hampering the productive aspects of a business, assistive in providing for costs to businesses and industries that they would otherwise have to bear, and incompetent in the goal of protecting consumers.<\/p>\n

A costly regulatory burden for competitors, an attempt to capture the market, movement toward monopolization, the government as enforcer, and getting the consumer\/taxpayer to pay for bureaucracies to write more regulations and inspect standards: What business wouldn\u2019t at least be tempted?<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Cronyism has a long history. In fact, monopoly used to mean exclusive legal grants of government privilege to certain companies, not arbitrary standards like firm size, number of firms, or market share. Cronyism has also had a\u00a0long history<\/a>\u00a0in the United States, especially since the Progressive era (ca. 1890\u20131920). We are often told that the Progressive era involved the government intervening to stop monopoly when the truth is precisely the opposite\u2014the government intervened with a new bureaucratic technocracy, usually at the request of private firms, to stifle competition and impose monopoly.<\/p>\n

This took place in all sorts of areas, such as meatpacking, insurance, textiles, money and banking, etc. It turned out, according to G. Edward Griffin, that use of the\u00a0word<\/a>\u00a0\u201creform\u201d would be enough: \u201cThe American people are suckers for the word \u2018reform.\u2019 You just put that into any corrupt piece of legislation, call it \u2018reform\u2019 and people say \u2018Oh, I\u2019m all for \u201creform,\u201d\u2019 and so they vote for it or accept it.\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Furthermore, while the tendency in America was toward competition, this was unacceptable to many businesses who invited and embraced new \u201cregulations\u201d and \u201creforms.\u201d\u00a0Writes<\/a>\u00a0historian Gabriel Kolko, \u201cIronically, contrary to the consensus of historians, it was not the existence of monopoly that caused the federal government to intervene in the economy, but the lack of it.\u201d The simple solution\u00a0was<\/a>, \u201cMonopoly could be put over\u00a0in the name of<\/em>\u00a0opposition to monopoly!\u201d The same word was used, but the content could be the opposite. Government, itself a monopoly, was to monopolize industries because, if it didn\u2019t, monopolies might result!Many vaguely call for \u201cregulation\u201d because they may not know what else to ask for whenever\u00a0they see a problem, but often businesses call for it to use the governmental apparatus to their benefit at the expense of the consumer\/taxpayer.<\/p>\n

As the new and growing AI industry develops, it should be no surprise that they want\u00a0\u201cregulation.\u201d It is probably not that they really believe that the AI technology they produce is a literal threat to human existence, but that, by leaning into the scaremongering and the\u00a0statist non sequitur<\/a>, they can form a cozy relationship with the government first and legally limit competition to their benefit. The American people are suckers for \u201creform.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Tyler Durden<\/a><\/span>
\nTue, 06\/18\/2024 – 12:40<\/span><\/p>\n

\u200bhttps:\/\/www.zerohedge.com\/technology\/ai-existential-crisis-or-excuse-cronyism<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

AI: “Existential Crisis” Or Excuse For Cronyism? Authored by Joshua Mawhorter via The Mises Institute, Several\u00a0months ago, I was on a long car trip with…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":1471892,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1471891","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","wpcat-1-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1471891","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1471891"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1471891\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1471892"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1471891"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1471891"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1471891"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}