The Daily Planet #94: The AI Bubble, Part 19

We are now into the last week of covering the AI Bubble; this week I am going to focus on its impacts on culture at large. I will start with an article by Shalizi and Farrell on AI being the latest in a long line of Shoggoths such as bureaucracies, corporations and markets, i.e., institutions that aggregate and compress human knowledge and then control our lives by doing so.

F & S explore the widespread fear surrounding LLMs, often depicted as monstrous, alien entities referred to as "shoggoths," inspired by H.P. Lovecraft's horror fiction. This metaphor captures anxieties about artificial intelligence becoming uncontrollable or surpassing human intelligence in a catastrophic "Singularity." However, the authors argue that such fears overlook a crucial point: humanity has long lived with vast, impersonal systems that resemble these "monsters." Markets, bureaucracies, and democratic institutions are enormous, complex, and often incomprehensible systems that shape our lives, yet they are human creations and have existed for centuries.

Kafka wrote the Trial and the Castle for a reason!

These systems process immense amounts of tacit knowledge - unspoken, informal information that no single person or government can fully grasp. Economists like Friedrich Hayek have shown how markets use price mechanisms to summarize this knowledge, enabling economic coordination without centralized control. Similarly, bureaucracies simplify complex realities into abstract categories to manage societies, while democracies distill the diverse opinions of citizens into polls and election results. These "monsters" can be harsh and indifferent, often harming individuals caught in their machinery, but they also provide collective benefits.

LLMs, the authors suggest, are another form of such "monsters." They are cultural technologies that reorganize and transmit human knowledge, not independent intelligences. Instead of fearing them as potential overlords, we should study how they interact with existing systems. LLMs might improve economic planning by better capturing tacit knowledge or assist bureaucracies in handling complex decisions. They could also transform democratic debate, for better or worse.

Artificial intelligence is a familiar-looking monster, say Henry Farrell and Cosma Shalizi

The academics argue that large language models have much older cousins in markets and bureaucracies