I recently bought a thrift store copy of Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler’s classic record, Ballads of the Green Berets. My young boys love it, and have been listening to it over and over, singing the lyrics as they walk around the house.

I love it too, but one thing in particular struck me about the way this Vietnam war era album praises the great men of the Green Beret in its title track, Ballad of the Green Berets, written by SSgt Sadler. The song weaves a series of descriptive phrases in honor of the Green Berets into a brief story about a soldier whose dying wish is that his son, too, may one day wear the Green Beret. The song begins:

Fighting soldiers from the sky
Fearless men who jump and die
Men who mean just what they say
The brave men of the Green Beret

Silver wings upon their chest
These are men, America’s best
One hundred men, will test today
But only three win the Green Beret

Fearless. Brave. Competitively selected. America’s best. But at the highpoint in the gradually ascending melody, in the very first verse: “Men who mean just what they say.”

SSgt Sadler wrote these words over 50 years ago now, and a lot has changed since then. At first blush, the modern ear might almost be inclined to pass over this line, to ignore its prominent placing in the song. It seems almost a little innocuous, a little gentlemanly, a little highbrow, for the nation’s most potent, the killers at the frontlines, the deadliest greatest manliest men alive.

What is our highest praise of man now? We love brawn, and we love brain. Everyone knows of the grueling BUD/S and the incredible feats of strength and endurance achieved by the unit that has arguably replaced the Green Berets in the popular mind today, the Navy SEALs. Meanwhile, high IQ hardcore engineers and entrepreneurs are the darlings of Silicon Valley and consequently of much of the world, collecting million and even billion dollar salaries. Brawn and brain, willpower and insight, and perhaps the courage which enables one to really reach the peak with these things, are the virtues of popular admiration today. But drop-dead honesty? Not as much. No doubt many of the men we admire are in fact deeply honest, but this doesn’t seem to be the feature which captures the public imagination.

My last two years launching a startup, though, have led me to think that maybe SSgt Sadler wasn’t so far off. Maybe being among the men who mean just what they say is in fact the surest mark of a man, and the hardest to achieve.

I was blessed with parents who taught me the importance of honesty from an early age. It was never OK to lie in our house growing up, for any reason, even what some might consider “good” reasons. So I knew that I should avoid lying, and fancied myself a pretty honest person. Business, though (and marriage too, for that matter) has shone a harsh light on just how far that honesty really extended.

That pitch where you told an optimistic story and omitted just a couple of rather important details. That timeline you gave a client that you hoped you could make but when push comes to shove was still quite optimistic, and in point of fact slipped by several weeks. That hard conversation that you let slide for a while, leaving the other guy thinking he was in different standing than he actually was as you continued to engage in the usual pleasantries. That business arrangement that you knew you were leaving just a little foggy, thinking that “we’ll figure it out” not because of real unknowns but actually because of difficult issues you weren’t sure you were ready to face.

Startups are tricky, because you are straining, pushing to bring something about that didn’t exist before, striving to do more than you’ve hitherto been able to do. There is risk inherent here, even for those who do business with a startup, to say nothing of those actually running it. So you have to convince people to believe in you, to take a risk with you, to trust in your convictions and your instincts and your grit and goodwill. But the temptation is omnipresent to downplay this just a little, to let people think they are taking just a little less risk than they actually are, to just “fake it till you make it” as the popular saying goes.

When things go wrong, too, when others fall short or are even perhaps outright malicious, there is always the temptation to just cover it over, to not rock the boat, to keep it always first and foremost, “amicable”.

But a man who means just what he says does none of these things. He delivers what he promised, come hell or high water. If he says he will finish something, he will, or die trying, whether that something is coming to save you from a swarm of enemies or coming to kill you unless you get off of his or his ally’s land. He is a comfort and a source of peace to his friends, and a terror and a motivation to righteousness for his enemies. He can be counted on, because nothing, and nobody, is going to stand between him and the honor of his word. In business, he need not be checked up on or prodded along or feared on account of some unknown gripe. If he’s made a promise, he will keep it, and if he has a problem, he will say it, not pretend it doesn’t exist. This is not to say that he has no tact, or that he simply blurts out every thought on his mind, but rather that he will never ever purposefully mislead, even in small ways.

Perhaps it is also a testament to our incredibly deeply social nature that the highest praise of a man might in fact not be his prowess and ability to survive on an animal level, his ability to kill or run or calculate, but rather his ability to speak, and to do so in a way which accurately reflects the disposition of his soul, even if doing so risks the alienation of the person he speaks to or incurs obligations on himself which might be difficult to fulfill1. One might think of talking and the social life as weak and easy, not as much of a test as enduring physical pain or understanding obscure things.

Today many men in particular (I suspect) routinely feel intense levels of anxiety in social situations, and then perhaps think on some subconscious level that to be afraid as a man is dishonorable enough, but to be afraid of what might be said is even worse. Women of course suffer the same thing, but I’m not sure that the feeling of insult to themselves at experiencing this fear is quite as high2. After all, they are not expected to be physically dominant, at least certainly not of men, and so to feel threatened in a social situation might even be reasonable in some cases. But for a man to feel threatened by what he might have to say or what another might say to him has, for me at least, almost always felt profoundly emasculating. Why am I so afraid if I am not even physically in danger at all?

Here too, I wonder if the brave men of the Green Berets have a lesson for us. It is hard, the province of less than five in one hundred men, to be a man truly unafraid enough to mean just what you say. And if you can do it, you are great, deserving of one of the praises bestowed on America’s very best.

And so, while I cannot say that I have perfectly attained this mark of honor, or that I am even close to it in some ways, I am striving for it, and by the grace of God and the opportunity of the continual challenges one encounters in business, getting a little better day by day3.

Perhaps you will join me in striving to become among the men who mean just what they say. And spare a prayer in gratitude and admiration for SSgt Barry Sadler and all the other brave men of the Green Berets.

In a spirit of pushing the envelope in a countercultural direction, my wife and I recently decided to host a “listening party” with some good friends here in our little town of Colwich, KS. The plan is to share some dessert together with our families and then go down into the basement where the stereo is and listen together to a recording of Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez on vinyl record. (An amazing piece of music if you haven’t heard it.)

Beforehand, I’ve sketched out a little talk, introducing the piece and giving some background about it and its composer, helping to identify the sound of the various orchestral instruments, explaining exactly what a concierto is, etc, in order to better enjoy the music together. I also plan to talk a little bit about taste: what it is when applied to things other than food, why it is worth cultivating, how it can be cultivated, and some thoughts about why sapientia, the Latin word for wisdom, originally referred to it.

Fundamentally, the idea is that to be wise is to be capable of discernment and judgement, aware of what is present, accurately sensing and feeling even on the most basic bodily level what is good and bad. This requires a certain degree of refinement. The discernible strain of poison (literally in food, metaphorically and morally in music) is sometimes subtle; on the other hand without refinement what is truly fine and good can often be lost to the senses as well.

What exactly is refinement, and how does it come about? One could think of it as a kind of purity, a habit of attunement to what is fine, subtle, and delicate, an ability to look past what is predominant, obtuse, chaotic, and seemingly overwhelming. One of the truly remarkable things about classical music is that the immense amount of structure inherent in it – sometimes as many as 100 musicians told exactly what notes to play, when, and for how long, even where to sit – which might seem to stifle and prevent true human freedom and artistic expression, seems somehow on the contrary to actually provide occasion for deeply human existence. Within the regimentation, regularity, and predictability of the classical scale, rhythm, harmonies, and musical forms, the possibility for significance of small and subtle things arises. A passage taken a little faster, a note played a little louder, the tone of the strings a little sharper than usual, these things can all have significance, and because there is relatively little chaos and unpredictability in classical music as compared to, say, a style in which the musicians might even be improvising in real time, this significance can actually be heard by an attentive listener and not just ascribed to chance. In a word, classical music is refined.

As an exercise in cultivating refinement for our party, I intend to present our guests not only with what I consider to be a truly great piece of classical music, but also with a slight dilemma as well; shall we listen to the recording of the Concierto with Pepe Romero as the soloist, an early recording endorsed by none other than the composer himself, or shall we listen to a later recording with John Williams (the guitarist, not the writer of the Star Wars soundtrack) as the soloist, a guitarist who I think perhaps slightly edges out Romero in terms of pure skill and talent? My hope is that the very slight pain of this decision serves to drive home to our guests the point above – even between two recordings of the same exact piece of music, both of them truly excellent (let alone between various pieces, composers, or eras of classical music) there are differences which can be heard (with practice) and really felt in their meaning.

And this brings me to the title of this article: why generative AI will never create truly great music. It is no doubt risky to make a statement like this, as AI has proven capable of many things (including the rendering of “original” music at all) which had at one time seemed absolutely out of reach for machines. As computers have, like something of a tidal wave, gradually overcome barrier after barrier which they were formerly predicted to never wash over, why would great music stand as a final stopping point? We already have “pretty good” AI music, isn’t it safe to assume we’ll get all the way to truly great music pretty soon?

In order to explain why the answer is no, we’ll need a brief acquaintance with what AI is and how it works. Without needing to go over all the technical details, one can think of generative AI as essentially an averaging machine. This is actually not a new concept at all. One reference to it I love is from the 1950’s post-apocalyptic novel A Canticle for Leibowitz:

Why is Brother Sarl able to complete these works? The reason is because language, and in fact nearly all that can be known, possesses a certain degree of structure. One word tends to follow another, at least in a given context. Of course it does take considerable arithmetic, which is why there is now an estimated three trillion dollar graphics card buildout happening. Three trillion dollars gets you the chips to do an absolutely ludicrously large amount of arithmetic, and now we can complete whole books like this in seconds.

And that’s really all our generative AI is doing. Lots of arithmetic to determine what “fits” in a given context. And this is just as true for AI generated music as it is for AI generated text. This is nothing to be scoffed at, by the way, and I am a huge believer that gaining insight into this underlying structure of the world this way will enable things we can only yet begin to imagine. But the point, for the present discussion, is that AI does not yield what falls outside of the pattern, it yields what falls within it.

At this point you’re likely starting to put together the argument for my opening claim, that generative AI will never create truly great music.

Truly great as opposed to merely decent music is distinguished from the rest precisely by how it diverges from the pattern, from what is expected, what is statistically likely given the existing body of work. Not necessarily because it is shocking or gaudy or out of order. It might be a passage that is played so very evenly, or perfectly in tune. It might be the utter ferocity of an opening note. It might be the absolutely un-reproduced softness of an oboe solo, the clarity of a clarinet, the brashness of a trombone. More than likely, a truly great recording contains all of the above. But what is truly great stands out, it is not the same as the rest nor is it simply an echo or a repeat of some past thing. As the great composer Nikolaus Harnoncourt puts it, regarding the historical understanding of great music:

Music brought about changes in people, in listeners as well as in musicians. It had to be continually recreated, just as human beings had to keep on building new homes, in keeping with new patterns of living, new intellectual climates.

Great music must be in a way new, and it must be set apart, and finally, the truly great recordings are almost all great in different ways, ways which may be opposed to each other. You can’t take the average of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion and Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto and wind up with something equally amazing, or likely even amazing at all. The average destroys both. You can’t even take the average of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and his Moonlight Sonata, again, you’d destroy both. To return to our example, I don’t think what you’d get halfway between Pepe Romero and John Williams would sound all that great either, as great as either one is. You simply can’t do it. In order to have great music, you’d have to either copy one or the other (and then you’re just flat out copying) or you’d have to bring something which I really do think is intangible and fundamentally human, something which we talk about with words like artistry or taste or wisdom.

Something which machines will never possess.

We can speculate about why exactly machines do not have this. They may vaguely echo a human who had it, but they do not themselves. My claim would be that this has to do with the fact that humans are moral creatures with immortal souls, and the most profound wisdom is not about matters of fact, but matters of moral judgement, matters whose perception depends on the fundamental character of the person judging. Human choices, even sometimes those about seemingly trivial things, ring with an infinite significance. As Robert Frost put it:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth; Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same, And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back. I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Can machines take the road less traveled, and can it make all the difference? In a way, certainly, a machine can be programmed to do so. But if, as it is in our example of music, the road less traveled actually means “the statistically less likely thing in a given context at a given hierarchical level” then no, machines, at least as they are set up with modern generative AI, cannot do it without simply descending into chaos. In any event all the difference will ultimately be made, not by a machine’s deterministic programming, but by the free choices of a human person, the person who set the machine in motion in the first place, the person made with only one life to live, and with something to lose, others to inspire, and heaven to win.

And so, while I have little doubt that AI, much like the guitar and the violin before it, will be one day used in some capacity as an instrument in the creation truly great music, it will be by the human care and attention to the particular piece written or played, the choices made, the honor risked, the beauty seen and pursued, the love lived, that the machine which matches patterns will be made to deviate into true greatness.

If it is true that AI will never create truly great music, one is led to wonder - how many other distinctively human things are there, and what are they, and will AI, far from overshadowing human beings, actually in its inability to reach these human things finally accentuate their greatness? On the other hand, what things are there which until very recently seemed strictly the province of human beings, like the ability to construct and carry out a relevant and helpful chain of logical reasoning, but which is in fact eminently doable by machines?

It is an exciting time to be a person, as developments with our sophisticated bits of silicon lead to a profound re-examination of what exactly, and who exactly, we are. And we can create truly great music while we do it.

If music be the food of love, play on!

Axioms, of course, are articulated principles, the truth of which can be perceived and discussed but not proven, from which conclusions of interest can be logically derived. The following are perhaps not all true axioms in the strictest sense, nonetheless, they and a brief discussion of them are offered as a starting point which in itself ought to be discussed, and from which one might argue to the wisdom (or lack thereof) in various current and future technological trends and developments.

Axioms.

0. Technology is a human creation.

Therefore certain statements about humans must be made in order to understand technology and think about how best to develop it.

Starting with this one:

Axiom 1: Conversion is possible.

That is to say, it is possible to turn, by an act of the will, towards righteous goodness, and conversely also to turn away from it. Or, to put it another way, human beings are free. Free not only with regards to peripheral or unimportant decisions, but fundamentally free with regard to the shaping of their own destiny, for good or ill.

Moreover, conversion is not the same as intellectual enlightenment. It is possible to see reality with deep insight, and to be readily capable of complex logical reasoning, and yet to continue to be a liar or a thief, or vain, or manipulative... Although these and other vices do in fact tend to lead towards illogical behavior and a clouding of perception, they in themselves are not necessarily strictly speaking illogical; to be evil and to be in possession of extremely shrewd insights are in no way mutually exclusive.

Conversely, it is possible to be simple, not in possession of deep knowledge, nor capable of very abstract thought, nor even possessing of any particular facility with straightforward logic, and yet to be honest, generous, humble, forthright, kind, merciful, a faithful friend...

One might say that about the fundamental things, such as the importance of kindness, all agree in theory; some merely fail in practice, and therefore that intellectual enlightenment has in fact led to unity on these things, but that we just fail to live out our hard earned conclusions. However, the practical result is the same; there are differing degrees of commitment to kindness, different weighting of its value relative to other sometimes conflicting ideals, like, for example, honesty or competitiveness, in actions which speak louder than words.

But there are intellectual disagreements which seem immune to solution by enlightenment as well. One man says to value health even above business. Another says it was necessary to divorce his wife to pursue his career. Yet another says that he does all for God. A fourth says that what is important is for all three of the above to do what they feel is right, that they are serving the common good by their earnestness. But in so doing he in turn is offering a different account of what really matters than the other three, who are (let's say) in fact living with health, career, and God, respectively, as their highest values, not individual earnestness. These four men are living contradictory lives. They cannot all be right, and there may not be any effective intellectual arbitration to be had between them. Thus we live out differing takes on what the fullness of a human life is, what it is to thrive and be great, holding to differing ordering principles and contradictory highest goods.

Conversion, unlike intellectual enlightenment, can in fact lead to unity, but being the fruit of freedom, it is a double-edged sword, because almost all reject it to one degree or another (and of course there are competing things one could convert to) leaving us to at least some degree disunified.

Axiom 2: Human life is not an emergent property of mechanical systems.

The human body, with its muscles and sinews, bones and synapses, is without question a magnificent mechanical system. But life transcends mere mechanics. It is not simply the sum of its parts, nor does it arise solely from the intricate interplay of physical components. We human beings are not, as some would have us believe, simply advanced electronic neural networks connected to actuators and an energy supply. One argument for this is in light of Axiom 1 — free beings are indeterminate and intrinsically unpredictable, and there is no attaining indeterminacy from a determinate system like a computational neural network, which by definition only yields calculable results. Chaotic and widely varied and sometimes out of line with our intuition, yes, but truly novel, incalculable, and free, no.

Needless to say the above argument applies to human life but not necessarily to, say, plant life, although I think it is axiomatic and intuitively obvious that plants and animals are not mere machines either. But let’s limit ourselves to the easier claim that human beings are more than machines for now. This is one of the reasons that we are so fond of watching sports, why everyone loves the story of the underdog. There is nothing more exciting, more renewing of the human spirit, than witnessing someone “beat the odds” that is to say watching the operation of freedom as a person chooses the less likely, the glorious but painful, chooses to vanquish rather than be vanquished, come what may.

Axiom 3: Technology should serve human thriving.

Machines are to serve man, and not vice versa. But what is it to serve man? Some things seem fairly obvious: premature death is bad, being unable to see or communicate with one's loved ones is bad, being able to eat plentiful food and not suffer starvation is good, etc... but to really answer the question of what human thriving is, one finally must have an answer to the question of what human purpose is. And this is where things get very very difficult, precisely because of the possibility of conversion as laid out above! If our first axiom holds, then it follows that no statement of human purpose, regardless of how well thought out and well articulated, will have any great likelihood of being adopted by all living people; some will simply turn willfully away.

This problem is the fundamental problem of 21st century western civilization. It is at the root of almost all current political and cultural conflict. We have lost a great deal of the foundational agreement about human purpose upon which our civilization was built, and have thus far failed to find sturdy ground, a shared purpose, upon which to refound our society. More discussion of this to follow, but what is axiomatic is that technology is for the sake of human thriving, and can only succeed to the degree that it is an embodiment of a shared vision of this thriving.

Axiom 4: Technology cannot be all things to all people.

Despite the possibility of a vast number of important individual choices, we human beings do in fact live as social animals in one common world. This means that many things must simply go one way, or the other. It is not possible for instance to simultaneously live in a world in which smartphones do and do not exist. The fact that I can personally choose not to have a smartphone does little to change this. The world is radically different when every single person is carrying an internet connected computer in his pocket, and the experience of being the one person without such a device is very different from the experience of being simply another person in a world where such devices do not exist.

One can argue of course that the world is far better with smartphones, which may very well be the case but the point is that there is no individual freedom with regard to this question, society must decide to go one way or the other. One could also argue that such motions are simply inevitable and there is really no decision to be made, but this is not true; there have absolutely been cases of societally rejected technology, for example human cloning, which became possible but was broadly criticized as unethical and has remained unattained. Again the point here is not to debate whether or not this should have happened, but simply to point out that with regard to individual adoption of technology a libertarian policy in which every individual is allowed to do as he chooses may very well be the right one, but with regard to technological development itself, the question of what world we want to live in, there is in fact no libertarian solution, and there will necessarily be some mechanism by which the human course is plotted and dissenting wills either moved or forced to acquiesce.

Axiom 5: Technology is not morally neutral.

There is a certain contingent of people (who are often vaguely anti-technology but prefer to cast themselves as pro-technology) who love to repeat statements like the following: “technology isn’t good or bad, it’s just a tool, and like all tools is as good as the way it’s used and the cause it’s used for.” This is wrong. It’s wrong about tools and it’s wrong about all technology.

Of course, there is no arguing with the fact that pretty much any artifact can be used for good or evil. One can commit a murder with something innocuous like a crowbar, and build a wonderful nuclear reactor with the uranium from an A-Bomb. But, once again, this merely addresses individual use and fails to actually address questions about the societal development of technology. There are absolutely some technologies which we have a moral imperative to at least take reasonable means to develop, and others which we have a moral imperative not to develop.

Furthermore, the development of technology itself is a part of human history, a history which is not static and in which real change takes place. Technological development plays a role in societal history which bears at least some analogy to moral development in the individual human life. Done rightly, it makes man stronger, better, capable of knowing and doing more. Done badly, the opposite of all of these things. As in the moral life, the statement “if you’re not moving forwards you’re moving backwards” applies here. We have no choice but to get it right.

Axiom 6: Technological systems cannot take responsibility.

To many, this claim is simply self-evident. Others, however, reject our second axiom, holding that human life itself is an emergent property of material things, in which case there is no fundamental difference between a human life and technology, and as a result no reason not to believe that technology could in principle take responsibility for things.

One brief argument against this is the following: there is no evidence at all that there has been or ever will be an unrepeatable technological system. If atoms can be arranged a particular way once, in principal they can be again. On the other hand, there is no evidence at all that there has been or ever will be a repeatable human life. And in fact this is part of the wonder of the human person, the reason that every person deserves love and respect: each and every person is a singular event, a unique character, a life never seen before and never to be seen on earth again.

One thing that follows from this is that humans can be effectively punished, while machines cannot. Take the most severe punishment of all, the death penalty. To condemn a human who has done wrong to death is to deliver the ultimate blow, to put an end to that person and their unique life and everything they stood for. While it is still possible of course that another person might be inspired to similar acts, say by the memory of the deceased, that second person will act as a separate person with their own will, their own perspective, and their own chance to turn away from the bad towards the good.

Let's say analogously that a neural network is trained in such a way that it winds up murdering innocent people. What would be the analog of the death penalty in this case? One could shut off the power, destroy the data center, shut down the mines that made the silicon that went into the chips, and yet there is still no theoretical reason at all the weights of the neural network might not have been saved somewhere and stored away, the materials to make the hardware sitting on a ship offshore, and the entire data center ready to be reconstructed exactly as it was. There is no true and final termination of an idea or of the possibility of the physical instantiation of that idea. As a result there is no way to truly inflict consequences on a technology. This is perhaps in some ways a trivial argument, but it seems to me difficult to dispute.

We humans must take the blame where necessary, acknowledge that we have power, and use that power for good.

Conclusion:

The goal here was to lay out axioms to guide the development of technology. These axioms should be more certain and fundamental than the conclusions drawn from them, so we’ll keep any extensive statement of their consequences separate, perhaps for a future article.

For the time being let us simply restate the axioms all together along with the briefest possible sketch of what they all might mean:

Technology is a human creation. To guide it well involves getting certain things straight about humanity. The first of these is that humans are capable of conversion. The second (which follows from the first) is that humans are not mere machines. Having said these things, and noting something of the complexity and subtlety of serving a being which is free and therefore in some sense indeterminate, one is in a position to state that machines ought to serve humans, albeit with the acknowledgement that the great task remaining will be determining what really constitutes this service. Note that the difficulty and immensity of this task is generally understated or ignored completely in our current milieu.

Axiom 4 then heads off the commonly (if generally implicitly) proposed solution, which is the proposal that technology can simply serve all of our disparate ends at once, perhaps as mediated by a free market. This is not possible, and it does not really take tremendously deep thinking to see the impossibility.

Having then thoroughly established the difficulty, Axiom 5 adds an element of urgency and moral duty to the problem.

Finally axiom 6 places the ball squarely in our own court. There is no other earthly being, including our much vaunted technology itself, coming to solve this for us.

The shaping of history, of which technological development is a significant part, is our responsibility. It is urgent, inescapable, and cannot be resolved solely through intellectual effort. We must engage our full being—heart and mind—invoking the inspiring power of our lives and the persuasive power of our tongues to build a community freely aimed, in action and artifice, at what is ultimately good.

The internet is an abstract and artificial creation, which makes it very difficult to comprehend without the use of analogies: "buttons", "chats", "storefronts", etc. Like all analogies, these are used because they are helpful for human understanding, but they are also imperfect, and in certain ways misleading. They give us a place to start discussing these virtual creations of ours, a way rooted in things with which we are already familiar, which is very helpful. But occasionally, it's worthwhile, perhaps even critical, to step back and examine the inaccuracies of these analogies in order to identify ways in which they may have misled us.

Of all the analogies we use to describe the internet, one of the most ubiquitous is the foundational "webpage" or just "page". And it is this object (or should I say "object") at which I'd like to take a closer look.

So, a little review - what exactly is a webpage? Well, painting with broad strokes, a webpage is a collection of stuff, historically text and links, then later images and videos and a whole bunch of other stuff, put together to be viewed as one coherent whole and traditionally viewed within the context of a larger web “site” or domain, which is composed of pages in much the same manner as a book or a newspaper is composed of pages.

How is this accomplished? Well, people have a sort of tool (really it's just a program they run on their own computers) which they use to interact with the network of computers we call the internet; this user tool is called a browser. Using their browser they "request" a given webpage, and this request is routed through some internet wizardry to another computer which has the contents of the requested page stored on it and which is running a program called a "server" which sends said contents back to the user's browser to be displayed visually to the user.

To get a little more into the details, typically servers send back three things: “HTML”, “CSS”, and “Javascript”. (All my less techie readers, stay with me, I’ll get back to reality shortly!) The HTML is basically the content of the page, the CSS is some rules about how to display it (colors, sizings, etc), and the Javascript is sort of like the machinery of the page, allowing it to move and respond to user interaction. The browser actually does a tremendous amount of work to "interpret" all of this stuff, such that a bunch of text code can become the amazing, engaging, powerful website experiences we are used to having.

But here's where the page analogy really breaks down: a physical page in a book or newspaper has a definite kind of integrity, a wholeness or unity. In fact although there are ways to carefully divide pages which leave something of value, like newspaper clipping, more often the division of a page (i.e. ripping, like by my two year old son) actually destroys the page. The page of a book is one single thing, and generally speaking it is in the interest of everyone to keep it one thing. A webpage, though, is a very different matter!

Is a webpage really one thing at all? As we've already seen, it has at least three components. But even these are composed of many different components. Some of them may not even come from the same server! A typical modern webpage has a bunch of links at the top of its source code which (without any knowledge of the user) pull parts of the page from other websites, i.e. other servers. That’s right — your computer actually has to send off for information to a bunch of different computers scattered across the country (or world) in order to then actively weave their responses together into a single page. The ensuing page has parts which load right away and other parts which don't. It may have parts which are “embedded” from other pages. And of course it is composed of "elements" like paragraphs and images and videos, some of which may also be showing up on different pages in different contexts, different sizes, hidden altogether on small screens, etc. And all of this is (usually) smoothly handled by the browser, so that what is really on some level a massive collection of disparate things appears as one seamless whole to the user.

How different browsers do this also varies from browser to browser. There are some standards and patterns that tend to be followed so that users see something coherent, but every browser is a little different, and all of them are continually being changed and upgraded, and all of them are configurable to various extents. There are the different screen sizes. Some people are colorblind. Some want to hear sound, others don't. Some are on slower connections and don't want to see video because it slows down their page too much. In other words, there is a lot of interplay between the browser on the user's end, and the server(s) on the end of the person I'm calling the domain owner, to determine what actually gets presented to the user for a given webpage request.

Much of the time the user and the website owner have the same goals and are working in harmony. If I request YouTube.com, I want to see a bunch of videos. YouTube wants to show me a bunch of videos. I want them to fit cleanly and evenly on my screen. So does YouTube. I want videos to be displayed which I'm interested in, and so does YouTube, etc.

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In some cases however, our goals are at odds. For example I don't really want to see ads, but YouTube wants me to see them in order to get paid by advertisers. I don't necessarily want to see politically motivated content labels, but perhaps YouTube wants me to see them. I want to spend really worthwhile time on the computer, but perhaps YouTube is optimized to just keep me engaged, etc. What typically happens, then, is that the user comes to a given webpage in order to see some element or set of elements on it which they are interested in, for example a video on YouTube or some items they searched for on amazon, but then the user is additionally subjected to other elements of the same page which they are not interested in. So one problem is that webpages collect elements which are undesirable to users together with elements which are desirable, treating them as if they were inextricably bound together when in reality they are absolutely not.

Of course, there are some elements which really are bound together, for example a response to a comment on Twitter often doesn’t make much sense without reference to the original comment. There are many cases like this, large and small, where communal dynamics develop. This, tangentially, is why the libertarian approach to the internet, where everyone gets their own experience of it perfectly tailored to them, finally won’t work. The internet, like any community, is and will always be necessarily to some extent governed. Regardless, the point stands that much of what is currently collected together on webpages has no actual unity.

But the second problem which is perhaps even larger is that a user often doesn't actually have any desire to see a webpage, as such, at all! Perhaps I want to watch a video. I don't care about YouTube.com, I just want to see videos! Or perhaps I want to buy an item. I don't care about Amazon, I just think of of the Amazon website as a whole as the best "place" to find the thing I'm looking for. In other words we generally pursue activities or types of information when we go on the internet, but we have habituated ourselves to conflating these various pursuits with the faux places where these things tend to be. The result is that when a website establishes itself as the best “place” for a given activity, it has a certain de facto monopoly, because nobody really wants to go to ten different places looking for videos or shopping for products. That’s a lot of work, going from place to place! So YouTube is the place for videos, and consequently has a ton of power over videos. They can determine which videos will be seen and which won’t, how many ads people will be forced to watch in order to see them, which subjects will be emphasized and which banned, which creators will be allowed, etc, because they control the place where everyone goes for videos.

But all of this is based on a mistake, because YouTube.com is not in fact a place at all, any more than YouTube’s home page is a true page! If a user’s browser can pull content and stitch it together and put everything on the page to YouTube’s liking, why not instead do so to the user’s liking? It is, after all, the user’s browser!

To put it another way, what if, instead of thinking of the internet as a series of places containing pages which must appear as the owners of the places desire, we instead thought of the internet as thousands and thousands of sources of media, all of which could be fetched and stitched together in a way tailored to the aims of the person viewing them? And this is, in fact, exactly what chatGPT and the like have largely succeeded in doing, albeit thus far in a way that is largely limited to text. The issue with chatGPT as of now at least is that it requires a lot of upfront “training” ie processing of the internet to be able to work. This enables it to operate at a level below the superficial content, mechanically extracting (albeit not perfectly) the underlying meaning from multiple sources and weaving it back together into “new” text. But this requires some significant resources to do. So we’re out of the frying pan and into the fire, because now everyone is just going to the website of a company that has these resources, namely chat.openai.com, to access the entire internet, in their cleverly pre-digested form. Which is even worse from a monopoly busting perspective than having a site for shopping, a site for email, a site for videos, etc.

What if we were to break away from this monopolistic paradigm altogether though, and users had their own configurable browsers which responded to their desires, going out and fetching the content they wanted without needing to be beholden to any huge “.com” company at all? Needless to say, such a browser would require a certain amount of technical work to create, so the average user would still have to rely on someone else’s work for such a tool. But these could very easily be developed as open source tools, with complete transparency to the user. They could also be purchased by users in many different varieties. The upsides for pretty much everyone except for the mega-corps would be tremendous.

I’m not particularly inclined, generally, to narratives of oppressor and oppressed. Nonetheless, there really are some David and Goliath struggles in the world, and when one sees a true such struggle it is hard to want anything more than for David to win. And of all such struggles which are absolutely staring us in the face in 2024, one would be hard pressed to name one more obvious than that of the little guy against big tech.

Big tech, almost by its very nature, oppresses everyone. That is why these companies are the most profitable companies in the history of the world. Once a given company has established itself as the “place” for a given activity, it can force almost all of not only the consumers but also the producers of this activity to operate on its terms. YouTube remains an obvious example. Do some people make money on YouTube? Of course. Does it present an amazing opportunity to creators? Absolutely. Does YouTube provide some real service in hosting and curating content? Certainly. Does it exercise despotic control and keep far far more of the money which it “earns” from the value of the content people post on it than it doles out, ultimately dampening rather than amplifying the incredible opportunity posed by the utterly brilliant developments in communication which have occurred in the last 60 years or so? Sadly, the answer is also a resounding yes. The same, of course, is true of Amazon, Facebook, LinkedIn, and the rest.

Imagine a world in which everyone was running a browser that had a button labeled “videos”. Behind the scenes, they could select sources for these videos, tweak the algorithm that displayed them, etc. So say I want to see videos from Vimeo, YouTube, X, Rumble, my own personal cloud drive, and an assortment of little no name websites owned by single individuals who share my interests, all on the same screen together. I want to see them in such and such proportion (say mostly from YouTube, with a few videos from the other sources sprinkled in). Or I just want my computer to do its very best to take all those sources and show me what I’m likely to find interesting. Or maybe I want my computer to be biased for a while towards me learning physics or philosophy! No problem, I control my own algorithm. And perhaps my browser is networked with other people who I trust, and all of us collaborate to rank content for each other behind the scenes, much the same way that “friend” or follower networks do now on social media, but without all the information we create in the process being owned by one big social media company for its own profit.

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Of course, building these user-centric browsers would likely become big business as well, but because they exist on the consumer rather than supplier side of the information flow, they would be much harder to monopolize. If a better browser comes along, there is nothing to stop people from using it. A better video platform, on the other hand, is very difficult to start because of so called network effects: many platforms are only as good as the number of users networked through them, making it very hard to start one from scratch which is competitive with existing giants.

But what’s really amazing about the situation in which everyone is using a browser to actively fetch the content they are interested in rather than relying on a giant platform to feed it to them is that suddenly, all an up and coming platform like Rumble has to do to start getting seen is to get people to click a checkbox that makes their browser videos screen include a few videos from Rumble. Checkboxes are easy to click; habits are hard to change. Most of the reason that sites like Facebook and YouTube can get away with serving so many ads as to dilute the experience almost to the point of no longer being worthwhile is because of habit. From a context in which people only want to visit a few sites regularly, they have gotten themselves numbered among those privileged few and created the habit in us of returning to them over and over, and they are now cashing in, at our expense. But creators don’t really want to move to Rumble because it doesn’t have enough viewers, and viewers don’t want to go because there is not enough content. So we have a sort of societal habit, in addition to personal habits, which are strong enough already. We’re stuck. We need to be able to transition away, smoothly, and without superhuman levels of coordination and effort. And a user oriented browser which left websites behind would make this happen almost inevitably. I can’t see a better stone for David’s sling.

Objections.

Having established that webpages aren’t really pages (one more sure sign of this is that anything which encourages the dreaded infinite “doomscrolling” almost certainly has no integral unity), and that websites aren’t actually places, and that we are already used to having our own computers actively assemble the content we view on the internet, but have simply acquiesced without thinking about it to allowing our computers to do it in the way that maximally profits the big companies which own the big domains, at our own expense and leading to our own distraction, and finally that the shift away from doing so would be one of the great victories of the little guy in our times, perhaps now is the time to answer a few objections due to which some might believe that this can’t actually be done.

Objection 1. Is this even legal? Don’t the big websites have copyright on all the material people upload, and the subsequent right to control how and under what circumstances this material is consumed?

Well, basically, no, they don’t! And if they did that would be a messed up situation which we should actively work to change, because these websites aren’t legally treated as publishers, and don’t create or even edit any of the content which gets posted on them. Even if they did own copyright though, I don’t see any reason this couldn’t be worked around, for example by putting some kind of attribution to the original source of each piece of media on it somehow. And besides, if chatGPT is allowed to read the entire internet and represent it as its own (which it has been and will be, there's too much money in it for it not to) how could what we propose possibly be disallowed? We’re not even talking about a third party acting as if it owns the internet, we’re just talking about giving users a tool to get the content they want, and not the content they don’t.

Objection 2. Even if it’s legal isn’t this going to be against terms of service?

Possibly. But done right it would also be very hard to stop. So one is left with an ethical question - should the terms of service be honored if one has the ability to circumvent them in this manner? I say the answer here, in most cases at least, is no. I don’t need to see every obnoxious ad or every ridiculous “expert” content label YouTube wants to force me to see, just because they’ve managed to monopolise online video and then made me check a box. And I think it’s entirely righteous for me to want a viewer that combines different media sources relatively seamlessly so that I can conveniently fetch content from the source of my choosing.

Objection 3. Are you so sure it will actually be hard to stop — aren’t the tech companies going to stop this at any cost given we’re talking billions of dollars of potential lost ad revenue here?

I expect that if this were to ever really go anywhere, there would in fact be a massive power struggle. We’re talking about nothing less than the toppling of the most giant companies in history. But yes, I think it can be done. With the advent of AI it is going to be very very hard to distinguish a human reader of the internet from a machine reader. And the key here is that a user centric browser would act on behalf of the individual user so even the standard approach currently employed to block bots, namely putting things behind a (potentially paid) user login, would not work here because these aren't bots, they are tools in the hand of users, who could simply log in to each source of information they were interested in and then browse with the tool instead of manually.

Objection 4. What about the content creators — isn’t this going to upset the entire current internet economy, meaning no ad money for YouTubers and other creators?

Yes, and this is actually a serious concern in my opinion. And for that matter it isn’t just the content creators - the entire pipeline: content creators, content hosts, network infrastructure, end user devices and programs, content curation, etc, all need to somehow be paid for. This is one of the reasons that the big platforms like YouTube have succeeded while other things (like RSS readers for example) have failed; it’s hard to make and promote something really well if you aren’t getting paid for it. So that’s a problem which would have to be solved. But at the end of the day, nobody likes ads, so it’s a problem which really needs to be solved anyway. And solutions will be found.

This is going to have to involve a much broader awareness that things on the internet are not free. For example (h/t my partner at Human Centered Tech, Thomas Doylend, for the following quick analysis) according to Statista the average user spends 28 hours/month on the YouTube app. YouTube tries to show an ad roll about every 5 minutes or so, and those reels either consist of a 15-second unskippable ad or two that are skippable after 5 seconds; so, let's say ~10 seconds per roll. Therefore 3.33% of the user's time, or 0.94 hours/month, is spent watching ads. Since YT premium costs $14/month, the average person therefore values their time watching YouTube ads at about $15/hour. Perhaps this seems less significant because the little ad reels are so short. But I would argue that this actually makes them more costly rather than less, because distraction has a cost. So most of us are essentially working a relatively low wage and highly invasive job for about an hour a month in order to see YouTube. It’s not free. Maybe we ought to start thinking about better ways to pay for a better internet experience.

In Conclusion.

My particular goal in this article was to make the case that we ought to have more control over how we consume internet content. An internet of the people, by the people, and for the people, in contrast to the internet of semi-benevolent dictators which we currently inhabit. I argued that one significant and eminently possible step in that direction would be the creation of a browser which displays internet content according to the desires of the user rather than the domain owners. If there’s enough interest, I’d be happy to build such a thing myself! If we did nothing more than create something which displayed people’s YouTube homepage with a few of the best videos from Rumble mixed in, we’d be moving significantly in the right direction. Having done that successfully, one could go on much further.

But more broadly than any particular proposal, my goal is to stimulate thought about how to make technology more human. Much technology, especially the internet, is young, and much less of a set thing than we tend to imagine it being. The analogies we use to describe it are just that, analogies, and this means that there might be better ways to think about it, and subsequently better ways to use and build it.

How do you think that we could reimagine the internet for the promotion of what is really true, good, and beautiful?

Fundamentally, I think the sticking point was this: all of those most excited about AI seemed to be excited based on a false premise, namely a materialist view of mind (and reality) which views mind and intelligence as an emergent phenomenon, arising when some threshold of logical complexity is reached in a purely deterministic machine. According to this view, you and I are both just machines, albeit complex and well developed ones. Taken to its full logical extreme, this view must posit that any ideas we might hold of spirituality, eternal life, free will and moral heroism, love, perhaps even consciousness and ideas themselves — all these are mere illusions, machinations of a system predetermined by its initial conditions, “developments” in a ruthless zero sum game of survival of the fittest as little gears and circuits strive to hold on to that thing they have found expedient to call “life”.

The funny thing is, though, that even the most extreme materialists still manage to find some (sometimes quite high) level of joy and wonder in life. So there’s a sort of sleight of hand at play: reduce all life to the level of a machine in a way that seems to fly right in the face of our own experience of our lives and freedoms, while simultaneously holding it elevated at the level of desirability and goodness with which we experience it. And the biggest winner following this little trick? So called artificial intelligence! If everything we know of our own lives is in fact mechanical, then it can at least theoretically be copied, reproduced in the workings of machines of our own making. And if, simultaneously, life and mind continue to have the value which we place on them under the assumption that they are not mere mechanically determined processes, then, voila! it follows that the pursuit of artificial intelligence is the pursuit of a machine capable of doing and encapsulating all the most wonderful things we can be or experience.

People are motivated in all kinds of different ways. The strongest, best, and most sustainable way, I think, is motivation in the true pursuit of a lasting and deep good. This motivation is good both because it is lasting and not temporary, and also because what it leads towards is worthwhile and not warped or evil. But illusion can also, at least temporarily, be deeply motivating. Think of the addicted gambler who faithfully buys a lottery ticket time after time, convinced that the very next one is going to be that lucky one which unlocks an entirely new life for him. Or, perhaps a closer analogy for the biggest AI enthusiasts might be the alchemists or astrologers of old. The interesting point with the alchemists, for example, is that while they were incredibly motivated by false hopes, like the hope of turning base metals into gold, they also wound up doing a lot of fruitful work, laying down the initial foundations of chemistry. Similarly, the early astrologers attributed a causality to the motions of the stars which did not in fact exist, but they did also manage to get a pretty good understanding of the motions of the stars, beginning what we now call astronomy. And so in the same way, in my opinion, are the current AI enthusiasts led by a false hope of recreating in a machine the full goodness of human life, but nonetheless led headlong into the pursuit of what could, in fact, be a truly incredible and positive innovation.

What’s important, though, is that at some point the immature pursuit of the illusion hands over the fruits of its labors to a more mature pursuit of what is good and worthwhile, based on true reality. And this is the juncture we are rapidly reaching with AI. Needless to say, the motivations of AI researchers have always been mixed, and some very level headed people have been involved throughout. But a tremendous amount of energy continues to be focused around materialist premises. From promises of complete replacement of the entire human workforce to fears of rogue terminator robots, the loudest voices are still almost all thinking of AI as a force which is the same in kind as human beings.

And this is where you, my sane and wise reader, come into the story. What we need now with regard to AI are people — smart, wise, and many of them, who understand AI, appreciate it, and will help shape and build it while maintaining a clear sighted grasp of its proper role and limitations. Deep, soulful, courageous men and women, possessing of something close to the fullness of humanity in themselves, people with a heart as well as a mind, who are able to see the power of AI and to situate it properly as a tool to further genuine human thriving.

Doing so will not be simple or easy. AI is in fact almost insanely powerful, capable of truly incredible and surprising things. It likely will be the most powerful artifact created thus far in human history. And it genuinely has proven itself capable of doing things which were hitherto thought strictly the province of human minds, things like generating art, or winning chess games, or speaking like a human, or offering practical advice. The conclusion one ought to draw from these things, however, is not that humans were in fact mere machines all along, but rather that what makes us human is deeper, subtler, and even more valuable than hitherto thought.

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This last fact, that AI casts into high relief what it truly is to be human, is well worth exploring, so much so that it will have to be its own post at some point in the future. But in the meantime, if we are to really understand how we humans ought to use and shape AI, and what really makes it worth caring about in its own right as well as in its contrast to the even more worthwhile fully human life, we are going to have to delve a little deeper into what exactly this thing is. And that too deserves a post in itself, and so will have to be part two of this series. However, a few things we can say now by way of summary of this post and anticipation of the next:

AI will not be human. It won’t even be in the same category as human beings. Human beings are living, loving beings with both body and spirit, capable of comprehension, wisdom, free choice, love, virtue and (though you need not agree with me about this to get the point of this post) eternal life and divine worship.

Computers, and computer programs, including so called “artificial intelligence,” are machines, made by humans. Like all machines, they are inanimate, physically determined, non-conscious, amoral, controllable but unpunishable, intrinsically unaccountable and a-responsible, finite, and subject to degradation under the 2nd law of thermodynamics — which is to say, neither possessing nor capable of any of the above things.

The idea of AI appeals the most (naturally) to people who overrate it, which happens in this case to be materialists who can’t see the above two points. As a result, materialists are significantly overrated amongst the ranks of AI pioneers, which can lead others to be turned off by the entire project.

Despite this, and as we will see in more detail in part two, AI’s are (or at the very least soon will be) the most perfect machines thus far created by man. As such, they are also the most powerful artifacts yet known. AI, while not capable of itself having a will, certainly is going to be capable (as all artifacts are, though none to the degree that AI will be) not only of carrying out the wills of real people, but also of having causal effects on the wills of people. Moreover, being extremely new and powerful, AI will have (and already has had) unforeseen effects of the first order. One might think of architecting a city as a close analogy here. An ugly city does less than no good for the hearts of those who come into contact with it. A good and beautiful city, on the other hand, is a truly wonderful thing, ennobling and uplifting the spirit in a way that is hard to overstate! And in either case the city will likely have statues, likenesses of people, both indicative and formative of the aspirations of the city’s inhabitants.

In a way that is partly like giant digital statues, and partly like the entire city itself, this incredibly powerful machine which goes by the name of AI will indeed bear the image and likeness of its creators, operating vaguely according to their wills, and furthering their view of the world, far more than it does the wills and views of its proximate operators, and certainly more than it does the wills and views of the average citizen. This is true especially now, as we have almost no mechanisms of any kind of deep shared governance of this technology, nor even the common level of understanding of it which would be required to truly democratize it.

In closing:

While not human, AI will be made in the image of certain aspects of humanity, and it will be a nearly perfect machine, which, as we will see in the next post, is a lever of power and attention by which the power and caring attention of those who control it will be vastly, vastly multiplied. Which image, exactly, shall we choose to recreate, and whose care and attention shall we multiply? The stakes could hardly be higher. The choice, ultimately, is in our hands. But the caring attention must be paid. The adventure of building this new tool and context for human beings, much like the city building and frontier settling of past ages, is full of possibilities for both good and ill, and beckons to the bold.

Proportional censorship has to do with ease of access to materials. Something can be censored by making it hard to get without making it illegal. If bookstores refuse to stock your book, even if it is legal to buy, that will make it harder for people to find your book. This will reduce your readership relative to what it would be if bookstores stocked the book.

However, bookstores refusing to carry books they don’t like isn’t always evil; and this principle of censorship is a fuzzy one because, at the ultimate level, even a bad review could be called “censorship” because it dissuades people from looking at something. If a bookstore only sells books the owner likes, is it “censorship” if they fail to include your book, even though doing so might reach other readers? Probably not.

Nevertheless, making something difficult to access can be used as a tool to shut down opponents in a debate. We should therefore take a careful look whenever a large organization with wide reach has the power to make it difficult for many people to access something. At present, this is the situation with the SSL/TLS trust chain used as the basis for security on the modern web. This essay examines that problem and points in the direction of some potential solutions.

Not so long ago banking and government websites used to tell people to check for the “green lock” in the upper-left corner of the browser. If you were visiting a website without the green lock, you’d get a warning if you tried to input a password or other sensitive information, but other than that there’d be no issue.

This situation is slowly changing. In 2018, Chrome began marking those sites “Not Secure” in the corner of the browser; other browsers also did so. Google also penalizes webpages that are not served with HTTPS, i.e. those pages without the “green lock”. And the lock is no longer green, it is black; because now, using it is normal and not using it is a dangerous exception.

This isn’t exactly a bad thing. The lock means that your browser was able to establish two guarantees:

1. No one is spying on what you send and receive. They can know who you’re connected to, but not what you’re saying.

2. The person you’ve connected to is who they say they are, and not a malicious actor impersonating them.

Both guarantees are important for secure communication. Establishing them, however, can be quite tricky. The first problem is partially solved by using an encryption suite called asymmetric encryption, which ensures that no one is listening. However, an attacker could do the following:

1. Pretend to be the website, to you.

2. Pretend to be you, to the website.

3. Pass messages from you to the website, and back again, reading them as it does.

All the attacker has to do is fool you into thinking you’re talking to the website, and it can eavesdrop on your communication. In other words, Guarantee 1 (no eavesdropping) is dependent on Guarantee 2 (no imposters). To completely satisfy Guarantee 1, we need to satisfy Guarantee 2.

As usual, this bears an analogy to real life. If you meet someone for the first time, your trust of them will be low (assuming you are reasonably cautious) until you get to know them better. However, if an old friend of yours introduces someone and says “he’s trustworthy”, then your initial level of trust will be higher (assuming you trust the friend).

Formally, this means that trust is transitive. If A trusts B, and B trusts C, then A can trust C.

Suppose your trusted friend has a very distinctive signature. If someone brings you a letter with that signature affixed saying “you can trust the bearer of this letter”, then you should be able to trust the letter-bearer assuming he didn’t gain access to the signature by force or guile. Such a letter would be a certificate of authenticity; it guarantees to you that the holder knows your friend and can be trusted.

Now, consider a slightly more complicated situation:

1. A person comes up to you and hands you a sealed envelope.

2. Breaking the seal and opening the envelope, you discover two letters. One is a certificate of authenticity from your old friend. But instead of saying, “You can trust the bearer,” it instead reads: “You can trust whatever is written on the other letter.”

3. The other letter reads “You can trust the bearer of this envelope” and is signed by someone you’ve never heard of.

Should you trust the envelope bearer?

Let’s review the situation. Your old friend has endorsed a third party, unknown to you, who has in turn endorsed the person standing in front of you. How sturdy is the trust chain, exactly? If trust is completely transitive, this shouldn’t be an issue, since:

A (you) trusts B (your old friend) trusts C (the unknown third party) trusts D (the man before you)

Therefore, argues the mathematical logic, A trusts D.

Is this true?

This is closely similar to how it works on the Web. When you connect to a website, the website presents your browser with a certificate of authenticity signed by someone the browser trusts (called a certificate authority, or CA for short). You trust the browser; the browser trusts the author of the certificate; the author of the certificate trusts the website. Therefore the website is trustworthy, and Guarantee 2 is satisfied.

A (you) trusts B (your browser) trusts C (the certificate authority) trusts D (the website)

(In fact, certificate authorities can issue certificates for one another, making the chain even longer.)

The browser (together with the operating system) maintains a list of trustworthy certificate authorities called the trust store. Anyone in the trust store is implicitly trusted by you, since you trust the browser.

If the browser or OS manufacturer decides they don’t like a certificate authority, they can revoke their authority by removing them from the trust store. Then, websites certified by that authority will no longer be trusted: no more green lock!

This gives browser and OS manufacturers power over the CAs. They could order a CA to revoke their certificate for a website by threatening the CA with removal from the trust store if they don’t comply.

This has happened in the past. The browser companies have revoked certificates for various companies, usually over concerns about spyware in both the US and China. Presumably this is to the advantage of the customer; however, it is concerning that the customer is usually ignorant of this entire part of the chain.

Whole companies are dedicated to the business of certifying websites. Because most users are unaware of the trust chain, these companies operate more or less without oversight; nor are there laws which govern their operation (and any attempt to make some would be staunchly opposed by those who point out the government’s inability to make good laws about the Internet).

The push for HTTPS is ongoing; it is all but inevitable that Google, Firefox, and the other browser manufacturers will make it harder and harder to access non-certified websites. This makes us dependent on the good word of the certificate authorities, who themselves are dependent on the goodwill of the browser manufacturers. This presents a problem if one of those browser manufacturers decides to use their power to implement censorship.

Censorship is about relative difficulty of access. If a browser company revokes a website’s certificate, they could argue that they are not censoring the website because the website is still there; the browser is just showing a warning. Some people will click through the warning, yes, but some, who would have seen the website’s content otherwise, will not. Again, the website has lost some percentage of viewers and is being proportionally censored. It will also be penalized in Google Search because it is no longer certified, enhancing the effect of the censorship.

What do we do about this? For starters, users should be more educated about the hidden processes behind their technology. In today’s world, if you are ignorant of the workings of your belongings you run a significant risk of being abused by those who are in the know: overcharged for car repairs, forced to buy a new PC every few years, addicted to a smartphone, and so on. Knowledge is power.

With more informed users it would be possible to change the dynamics of trust on the web to a more community-oriented or federated structure. For example, towns could act as certificate authorities for businesses within their walls; and you could accept a certificate from a trusted friend as proof that their social-media website is authentic. Presently neither the software nor the motivation for this exists; but the time is ripe.

2. The term "AI safety" is even worse than "AI". Do you think people talked about "printing press safety" or "cotton gin safety"? Maybe to the extent that these things were in fact physically dangerous. But outside of the literal safe physical operation of the machines, there were greater concerns having to do with the disruptiveness of these technologies which (I think, though I'm no master historian) to the extent that they were seen at the time, would rightly have been seen for what they are: political questions. So yes we should be thinking about how to correctly orient this powerful new technology to human thriving, but the question of how to do so is a question of politics, statesmanship, perhaps even philosophy, but almost entirely NOT a question of safety! (And as a sidenote, talking about safety regarding a matter which is not in fact a matter of safety makes a man sound weak, so don't do that!)

3. The basic paradigm of software development has not really shifted for over 20 years, and it is a terrible waste of human time and talent. It's overdue for replacement. There are two parts to development: one is imaginatively creating new types of entities and instances of these types (i.e. windows, programs, files, emails, etc) with which humans can interact. The other is getting these things to actually exist in some meaningful and effective way in the computer hardware. There is some overlap between the two, but for the most part the first part requires real human creativity and understanding of human needs, the second part is largely uninteresting and boring except as a means. However, development of computers has been stuck in a state in which the only people who could do the former were people who had a certain specialized knowledge of how to do the latter. This led to tremendous inefficiency, both in time wasted attempting to communicate needs to nerds, and in the nerds' (often actually very smart and ideally better used on higher things) time spent fighting computers. Both these inefficiencies are largely removed by chatGPT and the like, which will rapidly lead to tremendous change in our use of computers.

4. Most notably, I think we will very soon cease to think of "software development" as a self contained field, and will see the rise of the "user developer" or perhaps just "user" as people begin to be able to simply tell a computer what they want, and then correct it when it goes wrong.

5. This prompting of computers and correction when they go wrong will (especially initially) occur very frequently and creatively, and the collection of such prompts and corrections will be tremendously valuable, as they will effectively replace the entire multi-trillion dollar software industry. Very soon it will grow difficult to use so called "AIs" which are not fed by a large pool of such feedback in an ongoing fashion.

6. This brings us back to the politics question. While I would somewhat like to believe that there will be a sort of libertarian "people's AI" which is somehow owned by nobody, this ain't gonna happen. And while I am in favor of distributed AI's running locally offline, I highly suspect that the repeated effort necessary to shape all of these separately will make it hard to resist using big nets of AIs except in relatively specific cases. Furthermore, pattern recognition is fine when the most repeated pattern is in fact the best, but in many questions of value this is not at all the case, even when one looks beyond the superficial patterns to the deeper ones. Sometimes (but not always, or even terribly often) the man who stands alone is the hero! So the big networks must be shaped to step back from patterns at the correct times; who will rule them? These things are going to be more powerful than most nation states. US Congress has less than a snowball's chance in heck of figuring this out correctly and acting on it in anything better than a decade behind and completely hamfisted manner. Who shall be the statesman of AI, and what Gods shall they serve?

My mind is quite made up about the shot and I don’t share his fears. Nonetheless, he has expressed these concerns in good faith and it seemed to me the least I could do to attempt, in a non-argumentative way, to share my perspective for the sake of better mutual understanding even if disagreement ultimately remains. What follows is a slightly abridged version of what I wrote.

If we are to have a chance at continued cohesion as one nation, it will be due at least in part to personal bonds leading people to attempt to explain themselves to each other across divisions like this. Maybe sharing the following can be helpful in a few other such conversations.

Letter following…

=============================================================

Dear [],

First of all, let me just reaffirm that I know everything you are saying is out of concern and love for me and Rose and the boys! I feel like in response I owe it to you to tell you where we're coming from. We may or may not agree at the end of the day but at least we’ll have made an effort to understand each other!

To some extent (and this really is a sad thing actually) my trust in the conventional medical system has been eroded by this whole thing. The brazenness with which Fauci and some of the other big organizations have lied, not to mention the high likelihood that they actually funded the creation of this plague in the first place, makes me hesitant to accept the opinion of members of the medical community (even truly good ones like [your doctor friend]) without much more careful scrutiny than I would have given them 5 or 10 years ago. Have you seen the exchanges between Rand Paul and Fauci in congress? I think it's pretty clear that Fauci lied under oath and very likely that he did so because he's trying to cover up his own responsibility for this mess. 

What's more there is real division even in the medical community itself; there are tons and tons of good and earnest doctors who have voiced serious concerns (for example his 25 year veteran Air Force doctor who overseas the health of 4,000 airmen and says that the shot is a higher risk for her airmen than the virus, or Dr. Robert Malone, pioneer of the very mRNA technology used in the shot, or the two local Southern CA doctors who went viral in mid 2020, or many many more…). The point is not that all of the claims made by these individuals are correct, but simply that “the medical community” is not nearly the monolith of established wisdom which some would have us believe. As with any important issue, there are real disagreements, including (or even particularly) amongst experts. Moreover, those who speak out against the “official” account almost always do so in the face of brutal censorship and at serious risk to their own careers (note that the Bakersfield doctors’ video can no longer even be accessed without some purposeful digging for it) which leads me to assume that there are probably far more than we know who share the same or similar opinions.

I also think the entire phenomenon of “Covid-19” as we have experienced it is very overblown. The majority of Democrats (51%, along with 22% of Republicans) surveyed by Gallup polling thought that the chances of hospitalization for unvaccinated people from covid were 50% or higher. The real number is... wait for it...  approximately 2 percent!!! Average people are vastly over-hyping this thing. 

Not that it isn't a potentially truly deadly virus, it certainly is, but the risk for healthy people of my and Rose's age (let alone kids) is very low. Did you know that according to official CDC and Police data, more kids have been shot to death in Chicago than have died of Covid altogether? In that context the push to vaccinate kids with a very rapidly tested vaccine makes absolutely zero sense to me. And according to what seems to be the most reputable paper on infection fatality rates, published in Nature (which to my understanding is nearly the gold standard for peer reviewed journals), 30-35 year olds have between 1 and 3 hundredths of a percent of a chance of dying if we get sick. And the vast majority of those deaths involve comorbidities, which Rose and I don't have (except maybe for pregnancy). So let's say our risk is a quarter the average risk for our age range (I actually think it's more like 10% or even lower given our lack of comorbidities) but let's say 25%. Our likelihood of dying is now down to approx. 0.005%. And that is assuming 100% chance we get sick! 

Let’s take for comparison the time I rode my motorcycle to a wedding in Dallas. A 700 mile round trip. I decided to do it on my bike pretty much on a whim, the day of the wedding, without any particularly serious consideration. Odds of dying on a motorcycle are about 24 per 100,000,000 miles. So my likelihood of dying on that trip was 700 x 24 / 100,000,000 or 0.0168%... roughly three times my odds of dying from Covid infection! Similarly, with about 1 death per 100,000,000 miles of car travel, our 4,000 mile round trip from here to visit in the midwest yields probability of mortality of 0.004%, just less than Covid infection. But the amount of concern people have about me or Rose getting Covid is substantial, involving research and podcasts and articles and hours of conversation, etc, while absolutely nobody is going to say much more than a brief “be safe!” or “say a travel prayer!” when it comes to a long drive with essentially the same risk. The point here is of course not that we should stop taking trips, or that travel prayers are a waste of time, but rather that somehow Covid has gotten a hold of our collective imagination so strongly as to lead us to manage risk in a way totally inconsistent with what we had hitherto accepted as normal. I do think about the risk in all these cases but to some extent the whole thing is kind of a red herring.

OK, but just because it's a minor risk for people our age, almost not even worth spending any real time thinking about, why not get the shot anyway, just in case? For me the shot would become worthwhile if I was reasonably certain that the likelihood of negative effects from it was substantially less than the decrease brought about by the shot in odds of negative consequences from Covid. I have absolutely not been convinced of that at this point. Taking the risk number above, already a very small number, the shot decreases but does not totally remove that risk. Moreover even the LA Times has now admitted that the effectiveness declines rapidly over time, something like 50% every six months. If I'm signing up for boosters every 6-12 months then I'm even less interested.

Did you know that more people died in the Pfizer clinical trial than in the placebo group? Moreover there's weird stuff going on in the VAERS (Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System) data. I'm no expert to really process that data in detail, but things like whatever is going on at the far right of figures like below at least make me nervous:

(All deaths reported to VAERS, presented at https://openvaers.com/covid-data)

Also did you know that roughly 70% of Covid deaths in Great Britain at this point are fully vaccinated people? (See table 4 on page 15 of this paper, the most recent Official British Government Vaccine Surveillance report.) Nobody knows this, we all assume that “barely anyone” who is vaccinated will get really sick! Anyway, back to the math. Let's take that 0.005% chance of dying from Covid above, and let's say that the shot reduces it effectively down to zero, for as long as the shot is really effective, say (being generous to the shot) 1 year, at which point I probably need a booster whose risks we'd have to evaluate on their own. Leaving that aside let's say that during next year my chances of actually getting Covid (I think I'm bound to get it eventually, but maybe not in the next year) are 50%. OK, so 50% of 0.005% is 0.0025% chance of mortality, reduced by the shot to zero. What risks am I taking on for that? Well, per Science magazine's coverage of an Israeli study this summer, at the very least I'm probably looking at about a 0.01-0.02% chance of myocarditis in my age range - in other words, I'm roughly 10x more likely to get myocarditis because I had the shot than die because of not having the shot. Obviously death is worse than myocarditis, but is it worth removing a tiny tiny risk of mortality while undergoing ten times that risk of a seriously life altering injury? I'm not so sure.

Of course there is some risk of myocarditis from Covid too, but as best I can tell it is much much lower than the myocarditis risk from the shot. And none of this is even considering the actual risk of death from the shot, which can happen as well, not to mention many other possible side effects. And none of that is even yet bringing up unknown long term effects which we can't possibly be sure about until we've had enough time to do long term trials!

This last point really bears repeating. Many of us now don’t trust the the big establishment medicine, we have never trusted big pharma, we don’t trust the politicians pushing this, and we know that this shot is using new (mRNA) technology, and has (of course) not been through long term trials, which means claims about its long term effects are of necessity educated guesses. Even if all the math above checked out for the shot this last risk would still make me think twice, or more. Two things I know as an engineer: projecting into the future based on current patterns is absolutely helpful and necessary, and you can and eventually will screw it up, no matter how careful you are. So to me that future risk from the shot is a partially unquantifiable risk. Do I want to voluntarily take that risk based on pressure and reassurances from people I don’t trust?

All these risks are still small, and of course I know lots of people who have gotten Covid and/or the shot and apparently came out the other side just fine and dandy. But if we are going to make an informed decision based on accurate information, this is the best I've been able to come to, and it doesn't really seem to favor the shot at my age.

We also still haven't gotten to birth defect risk, fertility risk, etc, for Rose. Again, I realize there's risk on either side of the equation but as far as we are concerned the burden of proof is on the party pushing the intervention, not vice versa, and that proof has not been apparent... not even close.

Anyway... maybe that at least gives some insight into how we are seeing it, even if we don't totally agree! In the above figuring I've tried to use reputable sources and to round all the numbers in the direction not in my favor. I'm just an aero engineer, admittedly not a doctor, but I think it's often valuable for people to do a little "back of the envelope" calculating like the above when they want to look into something. There have been too many instances to count in history of the “official” account having something a little weird going on, and to me there are signs all over this thing that there is corruption and profit seeking and other perverse incentives becoming very major impediments to the truth. In such a situation one can no longer simply “trust the experts,” one is forced to think at least a bit for oneself, and the more I do so, the more I am inclined against this shot, at least until we have much more long term data about it. For a really good (and as far as I can tell very factual) coverage this is a great podcast: 

Obviously all these calculations change based on age, and I am simply talking about whether the shot makes sense for me and Rose. I would certainly have to think it through again if I were suddenly thirty years older.

Also everything I have said so far has been about the merits of the shot for its recipient (me or Rose); we have not yet addressed the whole question of spreading the disease to others, ending the pandemic by mass vaccination, etc. Suffice it to say for now that I have also not seen convincing evidence that the shot substantially decreases viral transmission, at least not for more than a few months. Israel got to tremendously high vaccination numbers and still had infection numbers entirely comparable to everywhere else. And at this point the pandemic is pretty clearly endemic, with animal reservoirs and parts of the world which will never fully be vaccinated, and eradicating it is, unfortunately, not going to happen. So I feel no motivation at all to take the shot “for the common good”. 

If there was real convincing evidence that the collective benefit was so great and so certain as to outweigh the individual risk, I would absolutely be the first to sign up. This is what courageous and good people do - IF the evidence is present and clear. 

Classical just war theory is a great analogical case - a nation can go to war, and brave young warriors can be deeply honorable, even duty bound, to answer the call, risk their lives, and cause destruction, if (and only if!) there is near absolute proof that the war meets rigid conditions, including it being necessary as a last resort, and also - having a reasonable chance of success. A young band of warriors (or a major nation state) which risks life and limb in a brash and unwinnable or avoidable conflict may very well have had courageous intentions, but is nonetheless finally more foolish than heroic. 

In the case of the vaccine, I have seen many people run off like young rash warriors, ready to "take the hit" as necessary for the sake of the greater good, without ever seeming to take a real pause to ensure that our approach is well thought out, and that it has reasonable chance of success. Those who do take such a pause are often yelled and jeered at as “evil” and yet at this point not only is success in terms of actual eradication of the virus by vaccination not possible, there is even some possible evidence that vaccination is driving virus mutation, making for worse and more immune resistant strains. As would be the case in a foolish war, the blame here rests much more squarely on the shoulders of our leaders than it does on those well intentioned people who were merely trying to do their part as it was presented to them; the latter might very well be worthy of real honor for their efforts, especially if they were in a situation where they had no alternative or couldn't know the whole situation. Nevertheless, I have no inclination to voluntarily become part of either unjust wars or ill conceived medical campaigns if I can avoid it, and so lacking much better evidence than I have yet seen or really expect to see that vaccination is somehow a true global good I won't be jumping in to make any sacrifices which don't make sense for me and my own family, all of Fauci's incredibly condescending and tyrannical claims that “you'd only refuse the vaccine if you're just thinking of yourself” notwithstanding. 

Apart from whatever effects the vaccine has in protecting the vaccinated individual, the only thing vaccination does absolutely for sure is make big drug companies money!

One more aspect of this which we have yet to talk about is the whole issue of rightful authority vs. tyranny. In my opinion Covid has been the excuse for absolutely egregious government and private tyrannical overreach, from shutting down worship while leaving casino's open, to massive and over the top social media censorship of “misinformation” much of which did in fact later turn out to be entirely true. In my opinion threatening someone's job on account of vaccination status, for example, is in this situation both entirely immoral and in many cases actually illegal. Anyway, that's a whole other thing but there are certainly cases of tyranny happening (and I am NOT referring to you here by the way, you have been kind and gentle throughout). If forced to stand with the group with tyrants in it or the group with tyrannized in it, I'd rather choose the latter. It really just doesn't pass the BS meter that if this thing is so great they also have to push it so hard.

At the end of the day my opinion is that a lot of what is driving this in the popular mind is a world in which people no longer truly believe in life after death, and must therefore fight off death with every possible means, to a point bordering on irrationality. On the flip side though, for those of us blessed to believe that we are really only getting prepared for eternal happiness in Heaven, all this need not be so desperate! To paraphrase the Navy SEAL Jonny Kim, "the moment that you accept that you could die any moment in battle is the moment that you actually become the safest." Too much fear and worry actually makes us much less safe, even here on earth!

I think it is good for us to be able to talk about these things even if we draw different conclusions, and as I said I take any effort you put into the subject as an act of love for all of us, and hope you will do the same for me!

All the best,

Liam

But nothing stands out more than Bezos’s unrelenting conviction that what his company must do, the thing about which its success and failure will hinge, towards which every fibre of its being must be oriented by whatever means necessary, this absolute key and north star is the service of its customers. When the interviewer brings up the concern that some of its investors might not like Amazon’s divergence from “a pure internet play” as it begins to build physical distribution centers, Bezos responds with absolute confidence that “in the long term there is never any misalignment between shareholder interests and customer interests.”

With the benefit of 20+ years of hindsight and a spectacular stock chart showing more than 50x return from 1999, it seems that Bezos was absolutely correct on that last point, at least in the particular case of his company.

So, clearly his was a winning strategy economically, at least given his particular time and place. But thinking a little more deeply, and perhaps even more long term, is it also a winning strategy spiritually, culturally, and and for the person? What is fundamentally right, or wrong, about this attitude?

At first glance the idea of serving one’s customers seems a lot like a nearly universal idea of what it means to be a good person, re-articulated on a corporate scale. Insofar as a corporation (a word which literally means something like “made into one body”) can be thought of as analogous to a single person, a phrase like “do everything for the customer” could be taken as the corporate version of “Love your neighbor as yourself” or perhaps even more dramatically, “no man has greater to love this, to lay down his life for his friends.” Which would seem to make service of customer a sort of universally righteous way to run a company, perhaps even the corporate fulfillment of our culture’s inherited Judeo-Christian value system, to the extent that service of customers involves the figurative “laying down the life” of the company, thus conforming to Jesus’s Biblical call which actually exceeds merely meeting the golden rule of treating others as you would be treated.

The almost reckless commitment Bezos shows to his customers even further appears to exhibit something like a kind of reliance on Providence, a magnanimity, a setting aside of oneself, a confidence that in pouring one’s own existence out in the service of others, all earthly means will be given in their due time.

All this seems very good, almost transcendent. If there is truly never any misalignment between stockholder interest and customer interest, it seems that free market capitalism really is deeply open to what we all feel in our bones to be righteous morality, a type of morality which puts selflessness ahead of corporate profit seeking, doing so in an almost childlike faith that “all other things will be given to you besides.” Right?

Not so fast. Something here is wrong, or at least missing. If your mind hasn’t already been screaming that, the delivery workers who have been forced to pee in bottles, or the “disposable” warehouse level workers at Amazon will readily do all they can to change your mind. Must generosity be miserable for the generous, or should these workers complaints be dismissed in order to hold to the belief that “customer first” culture truly is a righteous way to run a company, with the success of Amazon as proof? We’ll look into this in the next article.

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