Authors, AI, and Happiness

Happiness comes from human relationships, but information technology has replaced relationships with text and images on screens thereby reducing our happiness. AI will likely further remove us from human relationships by substituting authors with chatbots. When we read an author (a novelist, a playwright, a poet, a columnist) we are connected to them and their personhood at some level. This human connection, however indirect, is still valuable and a source of well-being. Reading AI-generated text only connects us to machines, which doesn’t correlate with happiness. Replacing authors with robots will weaken human relationships and likely cause a deterioration in quality of life.

To those who say "art is never free of politics"

I say, "No glass of water is ever free of bacteria either but the less the better."

The Big Moral Question

The big moral question is whether we humans change ourselves to fit laws or whether we change laws to fit ourselves.

Belief in God, Belief in Love

Atheists often say that God is a delusion, but we should love one another. This is inconsistent. The criteria they use to dismiss the existence of God can also be turned against love. The atheist says humans tend to believe in God because it is an evolutionary “trick”—belief in a higher power had some evolutionary advantage in the past that made us believe in something not real. This is also true of love. Atheists say you can’t believe in God because you can’t see Him, but when has anyone ever seen the feeling called love? If someone claims to have felt God personally in their heart, the atheist dismisses this as a trick of evolution, so why isn’t feeling love personally in our heart also a trick of evolution? Why should we discard one illusion—God—but not the other—love? The atheist has no answer.

Is “Love it or Leave it” a valid slogan?

A common argument in favor of capitalism is that competition provides alternatives and therefore disciplines providers of goods and services. That is, if Albertson’s has bad products at bad prices and bad service, you can “just leave” and shop at Safeway. Some extend this logic to the political world and say, “If you don’t like your country’s political products, you can just leave, so don’t complain about your country’s policies or try to change them, instead just find a new country.” In other words, use the “competition” of different nation states and “buy” your political “products” from a competing nation state. This is the logic behind the “love it or leave it” slogan that was so popular among critics of anti-war protestors in the 1960s. This analogy doesn’t work and the “love it or leave it” slogan is incorrect for the following reasons: 1. Prohibitively High Cost: In the market for everyday products, such as groceries, the costs of “just shopping somewhere else” are close to zero—it usually entails just going across the street—while the costs of moving to another country are so high as to be prohibitive. Obviously, the monetary costs of moving to another country are high, but that is nothing compared to the non-monetary costs involved. “Cost,” in the most important sense, means what you give up to take a course of action and here are just a few of the things you are “giving up” in moving to another country: your job, your friends, your family, your spouse and children and grandchildren (unless they agree to come with you and incur all of the costs themselves), your social connections, associational belonging and personal networks, a sense of connection to a place as well as rootedness and heritage, familiarity with a place and its mores, the ability to communicate (if you go to a country that speaks a different language). You’d also have to undergo the costs of selling a home and selling all of your assets. Basically, the costs of moving to a new country are all the costs of hitting “reset” on life. The “plane ticket” cost of immigration is only the tiniest fraction of the actual costs involved. 2. Closed Countries. We don’t live in a world with open borders, so even those willing to “incur” the costs of moving to a new country are still stuck with the problem that the country might not want them. Albertsons keeps its doors wide open for you if you get tired of shopping at Safeway, but Japan does not keep its doors wide open for you if you get tired of living in the United States. 3. Non-Valid Alternative. Third, and finally, immigration usually does not solve the problem: the idea of marketplace competition between countries presumes that there’s another place you like better. We can’t assume there is an ideal society ready to receive us when our society goes in a less ideal direction. If someone doesn’t like the high tax rates in the USA, it’s not a logical response to “just leave” to Canada, because Canada has even higher tax rates. The logical response is to use democratic means to change the tax rates in the USA. So, yes, complaining about tax rates and working to change them is a much better response than the “just leave” response proposed by some people who haven’t thought through the issue.

My Predictions for the Year 2024

Everything I’ve seen suggests that the best way to make predictions about complex phenomena is to baseline using the status quo. So following that heuristic, here are my predictions for the coming year: - The American economy will continue to grow, albeit at a slower rate than the historical average (2-3% instead of 3-4%) - The labor market will continue to experience a shortage, with unemployment below the historical average (it will remain below 4%) - The inflation rate will continue to be low (1-4%) - Interest rates (federal) will continue at their current rate (5-6%) - The national debt will continue to rise quickly ($2-3 trillion) - Joe Biden will be re-elected president - The War in Ukraine will continue unresolved without U.S. direct involvement - The War in Israel will continue unresolved without U.S. direct involvement - AI will be increasingly used but won’t disrupt the job market, higher education, publishing, journalism, or any other realms it is supposed to “radically change” - We will not have widespread use of driverless cars - American Democracy will not be overthrown in a Trump or anti-Trump coup Will I be wrong about some of these predictions? Almost certainly, but I’m guessing that they will be less wrong than our notable pundits currently predicting the opposite.