> Forgive me if I made assumptions. But when you gesture at popular culture's disdain for techies as some form of proof of our sins, you make it difficult to ta

> Forgive me if I made assumptions. But when you gesture at popular culture's disdain for techies as some form of proof of our sins, you make it difficult to take the argument seriously. They weren't assumptions; they were careless reading. Don't do that again. And yes, popular culture -- art -- matters, and depictions (representations) that have currency also matter. If this makes it hard for you to take me seriously, as you say, then you seem to have entered this conversation with a view that culture is irrelevant to begin with, so why are we arguing about culture? > Indeed, I'd love to see more on this. A Marxist might claim that the idea of economic merit and talent is but a facet of bourgeois society and a post-structuralist that the idea that one is owed economic merit at all is but a construction. I'm no Marxist and I'm no post-structuralist. I have no opinion on what constitutes 'merit' in the absolute sense, but I observe that rapidly converting our current order to a new one, where cognition is cheap and provided by LLMs produced by large, central organizations, is probably not going to go well, mostly because, as a practical matter, people's self-respect is depends on their role in the economic order. Maybe that can change, but not easily, and not soon, and probably not in time. > Forgive me in remarking that this sounds remarkably Burkean. Again, loose reading. I am not claiming that actual merit (how much a human being is worth) has some connection to their economic output. I observe, as a matter of fact, that, in modern western democracies, we act as if this is the case; suddenly changing the rules of the game will have enormous consequences, many of them likely dangerous. > You claim that shouting must happen because there's a conflict: the idea of individual self-respect (in one's economic value or merit) is eroding while liberal democratic institutions are incapable of dealing with change. This seems deeply contradictory. I claim the shouting will happen because shouting is a natural human reaction to having one's sense of self-worth upended. And modern liberal democratic institutions are not likely to be able to handle this, yes, because they are sclerotic and polarized. This is not contradictory; this is 2023. And yes, a Leviathan moment is precisely what I fear might be coming: a liberal democratic capitalist order that fails over into some form of autocracy or another. I hope I'm wrong.