AI and Bureaucracy
There’s been a lot of anguish & moral panic about the AI writing, recently. I see most of it, as stupid and hypocritical. AI generated stuff is clearly superior to the human-created one. Much and much superior. Today I will show you how.
First, we need to understand the culture we live in. Most of our life, we spend within the confinement of large, bureaucratic structures. School. University. Corporation. All of that under the umbrella of a yet greater and more Leviathan-ish bureaucracy of the state machine.
It is the bureaucracy that sets the rules, and it is the bureaucratic preferences that we must (and will) adjust to, and not the other way around. It is very important to understand that. Now one thing you need to realise about bureaucracy is that it has a strong (extremely strong!) preference for monotony.
That is only natural. Bureaucracy does not know reality, and cannot process reality in all of its complexity (no one can). All it can work with is very simple mental models, based on a few standard categories, and few parameters you need to optimise for. Now what you need to know is that bureaucracy does not choose the most accurate model (also, how does it know it is the most accurate), but the more scaleable one.
When I say scaleable, I mean that you can give this model to an average, or somewhere below the average executors, and they will understand it more or less correctly, and will perform standard, predictable actions based on it. And that the upper management high above will understand what these executors are doing, again, more or less correctly. And that is only possible when you are doing standard operations, with standard objects, based on the transparent (important!) criteria.
Bureaucracy hates diversity, and does not know what to do with it. Everything it knows it how to works with a few categories of objects and optimise for a few parameters. That is the perfect world from the bureaucratic perspective. That’s what informs its preferences. Consequently, whenever possible it will be selecting for monotony, and against diversity, over the long run creating the most monotonous landscape possible. Physical. Social. Intellectual.
You have a preference for monotony. You are selecting for monotony. And, in the end, you end up with monotony, as all types of actors (including humans) will be adjusting themselves for your preferences.
This largely comes from necessity. Everything outstanding, unusual, bizarre - puzzles bureaucracy, as its mental models are simply not fit to deal with it. The most it can do, is to classify the object not falling into any of its standard categories, into the separate category of ‘bizarre’, and throw it all away, into the trashbin.
That is a major reason, why the large institutions always ultimately fail. They fail, because they have missed too many opportunities, and the trashbin in their storage is full of diamonds. Which they cannot see, and recognise as such.
Bureaucracy is based on transparency, it is based on objectivity, because otherwise it will simply not work. It can work only with what is transparent and legible. It can work only with the well known. Now a great deal of stuff is not very well known, and much of what is not well known is important.
Frame it this way, and you will realise how a great mighty industrial company from the US or Europe suddenly loses everything to a palaeolithic workshop from China. The great and mighty are strictly limited to what is under the lamppost. The shameful and deplorable can venture outside. In fact they must, because everything under the lamppost has been already devoured by the great and mighty. They HAVE TO venture outside, into the epistemological darkness
