At Least Five Interesting Things: Will of the Masses Edition

These notions of change were shaped and hemmed in by the complex of “intellectual assumptions that have dominated the last two decades,” Giussani said. Among them: “Businesses are the engines of progress. The state should do as little as possible. Market forces are the best way at the same time to allocate scarce resources and to solve problems. Pe

... See more

On AI policy : Lately, lots of powerful people have been balking about the idea of AI safety. At the woefully misnomered AI Action Summit in Paris, Vice President JD Vance dismissed the idea of AI safety and suggested that as long as America beat everyone else in creating superintelligence, the rest would all take care of itself.

In Arena , the pro... See more

Precisely because technology is now moving so fast, and parliaments and dictators alike are overwhelmed by data they cannot process quickly enough, present-day politicians are thinking on a far smaller scale than their predecessors a century ago. Consequently, in the early twenty-first century politics is bereft of grand visions. Government has bec

... See more

Ours is a finite world marked by constraints. To a large extent, these constraints define the five crises set to radically shape the course of the coming century. Together, these crises – encompassing climate change, resource scarcity, ever-larger surplus populations, ageing and technological unemployment as a result of automation – are set to unde

... See more

recent years, Giussani noticed how elites seemed increasingly guided by lite facsimiles of change. These ideas largely exempted markets and their winners from scrutiny, despite their immense power in deciding how people’s lives were lived and their support for a system that produced extraordinary fortunes and extraordinary exclusion. These notions

... See more