AI Destroys Institutions

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5870623

by sean_the_geek • 6 months ago

91 154 6 months ago

papers.ssrn.com

sean_the_geek• 6 months ago

A thought provoking essay on impact of AI systems civic institutions.

chrisjj11• 6 months ago

Dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46622870

embedding-shape3• 6 months ago

Not really a dupe if no one really discussed it. And I'm glad, didn't see it that previous time :)

emsign• 6 months ago

The affordances of AI systems have the effect of eroding expertise, short-circuiting decision-making, and isolating people from each other.

This affordability is HEAVILY subsidized by billionaires who want to destroy institutions for selfish and ideological reasons.

DarkNova62• 6 months ago

This is literally corporate textbook 101. Subsidize your product, become market leader, cause lock-in and make your customers dependant.

Every large enough corporate wants to become the new Oracle.

ahartmetz2• 6 months ago

Given how nobody properly understands LLMs, I doubt that they are intentionally designed like that. But the effect... yeah. I can see that happening.

(By the way, are you confusing affordance, the UX concept, with affordability?)

esperent• 6 months ago

Nobody properly understands dog brains either and yet you can still train a dog to sit.

tyingq• 6 months ago

You can intentionally market the use cases without knowing exactly how they work, though. So it's intentional investment and use case targeting, rather than directly designing for purpose. Though, the market also drives the measures...so they iteratively get better at things you pour money into.

wesammikhail• 6 months ago

The institutions have been doing a fine job of destroying all their credibility and utility all on their own for far longer than this new AI hype cycle.

ZIRP, Covid, Anti-nuclear power, immigration crisis across the west, debt enslavement of future generations to buy votes, socializing losses and privatizing gains... Nancy is a better investor than Warren.

I am not defending billionaires, the vast majority of them are grifting scum. But to put this at their feet is not the right level of analysis when the institutions themselves are actively working to undermine the populace for the benefit of those that are supposed to be stewards of said institutions.

layer82• 6 months ago

I think you have misread the word “affordances”. It’s not about affordability [0]. The main text also explains what it means.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance

rfv67233• 6 months ago

This dire warning against AI echoes the anxieties of a much earlier elite: the late-medieval clergy facing the invention of the printing press. For centuries, they held a privileged monopoly on knowledge, controlling its interpretation and dissemination. The printing press threatened to shatter that authority by democratizing access to information and empowering individuals.

Similarly, today's critics, often from within the very institutions they defend, frame AI as a threat to "expertise" and "civic life" when in reality, they fear it as a threat to their own status as the sole arbiters of truth. Their resistance is less a principled defense of democracy and more a desperate attempt to protect a crumbling monopoly on knowledge.

embedding-shape3• 6 months ago

If what you say was true, why are people from not within those institutions also try to warn others about the potential downfall of "expertise" and "civic life"? Are they just misinformed? Paid by these "institutional defenders" or what is your hypothesis?

rfv67233• 6 months ago

The alarm isn't coming from outside the institutions; it's coming from a wider, more modern clergy. The new priestly class isn't defined by a specific building, but by a shared claim to the mastery of complex symbolic knowledge.

The linguists who call AI a "stochastic parrot" are the perfect example. Their panic isn't for the public good; it's the existential terror of seeing a machine master language without needing their decades of grammatical theory. They are watching their entire intellectual paradigm—their very claim to authority—be rendered obsolete.

This isn't a grassroots movement. It's an immune response from the cognitive elite, desperately trying to delegitimize a technology that threatens to trivialize their expertise. They aren't defending society; they're defending their status.

raincole3• 6 months ago

Are they just misinformed?

Not all of them, but given the same questionable or outright false assumptions (e.g. AI companies are doing interference at a loss, the exaggerated water consumption number, etc) keeping getting repeated on YouTube, Reddit and even HN where the user base is far more tech-savvy than the population, I think misinformation is the primary reason.

terminalshort22• 6 months ago

In most cases those people are members of the upper class who hold credentials issued by those institutions, and often are in professions protected by state enforced cartels where the ticket for entry is one of said credentials.

phoe-krk• 6 months ago

a desperate attempt to protect a crumbling monopoly on knowledge

More like a war on the traditional, human-based knowledge, leveraged by people who believe that via coveting the world's supply of RAM, SSDs, GPUs, and what not, can achieve their own monopoly on knowledge under the pretense of liberating it. Note that running your own LLM becomes impossible if you can no longer afford the hardware to run it on.

wartywhoa23• 6 months ago

Surely we'll all beat monopolies by running our own local LLMs, storing whole blockchains on our local storage, building our own atomic power plants, flying our own airlines and launching our own satellites via our own rocket fleets. And producing our own trillion-transistor silicon in our own fabs.

We just have to start printing our own money and buying us some pocket armies and puppet politicians first.

hojofpodge• 6 months ago

The current bubble's effect on hardware is alarming but if they think they are going to create a permanent economic manipulation they are deluded. The US' hold on controls is eroding at a faster rate and China will be making good enough all the faster if its price/spec ratio is absurdly high.

Crypto currency makers can have artificial limits but no amount of limiting gpt-next access is cutting access to good enough.

terminalshort22• 6 months ago

Better that I'm forced to rent an LLM from a tech monopolist for a few dollars than be forced to hire a member of the lawyers cartel for $500 an hour.

DarkNova62• 6 months ago

An institution is worth nothing without the spirit, humanity and exchange of knowledge among the humanity behind it. The fostering of real expertise is difficult, but without this expertise you are doomed to believe whatever your Corporate AI is telling you.

So is the AI better?

No. It's quicker, easier, more seductive.

archievillain• 6 months ago

This is a good analogy, but you made it backwards. The "Clergy" fears the "Printing Press", as it acts as a tool of decentralized information spreading. But LLMs are not decentralized and thus are not the "Printing Press". LLMs are what the "Clergy" (say, for example, all the AI companies led by billionaires in cahoots with the west's most powerful government) uses to suppress the real "Printing Press" (the decentralized, open internet, where everybody can host and be reached).

dgb232• 6 months ago

It was the same clergy (or rather parts of it) that used the printing press to great success.

Martin Luther used it to spread his influence extremely quickly for example. Similarly, the clergy used new innovations in book layout and writing to spread Christianity across Europe a thousand years before that.

What is weird about LLMs though, is that it isn't a simple catalyst of human labor. The printing press or the internet can be used to spread information quickly that you have previously compiled or created. These technologies both have a democratizing effect and have objectively created new opportunities.

But LLMs are to some degree parasitical to human labor. I feel like their centralizing effect is stronger than their democratizing one.

bugglebeetle• 6 months ago

Everyone who tells the story of the reformation leaves out that Martin Luther also used this new technology to widely disseminate his deranged anti-Semitic lies and conspiracies, leading to pogroms against Jews, a hundred years of war across Europe, and providing the ideological basis for the rise of Nazism.

terminalshort22• 6 months ago

Martin Luther was clergy, but he was absolutely not "the same clergy."

energy123• 6 months ago

This is a criticism of the author's backgrounds rather than the content of the article.

gabaix• 6 months ago

True. I myself try to read articles without looking up the authors.

It is hard though. When someone makes an extraordinary claim I feel the urge to look them up. It is a shortcut to some legitimacy to that claim.

NoboruWataya• 6 months ago

Most of the comments here are. HN hates lawyers.

terminalshort22• 6 months ago

"Oxycodone is Not Addictive" by employee of Perdue Pharma.

It absolutely makes sense to criticize the author's background.

__loam4• 6 months ago

It's so ridiculous to make this argument when the people who stand to benefit the most from this technology are the massive corporations that can subsidize the compute and capital costs of this technology. Is it democratization when Google pulls something your wrote on your website then runs it through an LLM so they can serve it directly to a user? You say people see this as a threat to their status but the reality is this is a massive consolidation of the information economy of the internet in the hands of a few corporate interests.

terminalshort22• 6 months ago

The people who stand to benefit are you. If I have to pay a lawyer $1000 to review a contract, or spend $10 in tokens, I win. OpenAI may make $9 off of those tokens, or they may make $1. But that doesn't matter at all to me. I care about the $1000 vs $10, not the $9 vs $1.

mawadev• 6 months ago

I think this could be applied to most fields where LLMs move in. Let's take the field we are probably most familiar with.

Currently companies start to shift from enhancing productivity of their employees with giving them access to LLMs, they start to offshore to lower cost countries and give the cheap labor LLMs to bypass language and quality barriers. The position isn't lost, it's just moving somewhere else.

In the field of software development this won't be a an anxiety of an elite or threat to expertise or status, but rather a direct consequence to livelihood when people won't be hired and lose access to the economy until they retrain for a different field. So a layer on top of that you can argue with authority and control, but it rather has economic factors to it that produce the anxiety.

In that sense, doesn't any knowledge work have a monopoly on knowledge? It is the entire point to have experts in fields that know the details and have the experience, so that things can be done as expected, since not many have the time nor the capabilities to get into the critical details.

If you believe there is any good will when you can centralize that knowledge to the hands of even less people, you produce the same pattern you are complaining about, especially when it comes to how businesses are tweaking their margins. It really is a force multiplier and equalizer, but a tool, that can be used in good ways or bad ways depending on how you look at it.

ruraljuror• 6 months ago

Is that what happened? In Nexus, Harari looks at this exact same situation: the invention of the printing press, and shows how clergy used it to stoke witch hunts (ahem, misinformation) for decades--if not centuries. It was not for hundreds of years until after the invention of the printing press that we had The Enlightenment. What gave rise to The Enlightenment? Harari argues it is modern institutions.

It's not so simple that we can say "printing press good, nobody speak ill of the printing press."

anonymous908213• 6 months ago

It is funny watching people debate at length with your LLM word-vomit. I'm not sure whether you yourself are convinced that the soup you've copypasted across multiple replies means anything, but apparently some people are convinced enough to argue with it, so this is pretty great satire in one way or another.

b65e8bee43c2ed0• 6 months ago

it feels good to watch the aforementioned clergy kvetch about AI while multiple multi-trillion dollar corporations backed by a friendly administration continue to run their bulldozers :)

fatherwavelet• 6 months ago

The printing press was also used to print witch hunting books and caused 200 years of mass hysteria around witches and witch trials.

Before the printing press, only the clergy could "identity" witches but the printing press "democratized knowledge" of witch identification at larger scale.

The algorithmic version of "It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so" is going to cause huge trouble in the short and medium term.

toofy2• 6 months ago

this is much much closer to going in reverse back to when the church were the deciders rather than liberating knowledge the way the printing press did.

the church did the thinking for the peasants. the church decided what the peasants heard, etc… this is moving absolutely in that direction.

the models now do the thinking for us, the ai companies decide what we get to see, these companies decide how much we pay to access it. this is the future.

7952• 6 months ago

Isn't that just an ad-hominem against the writers? A threat to the status quo is still a threat to people and could have negative consequences.

paganel2• 6 months ago

free press

Stopped reading here, as these people still believe in that fairytale of theirs.

tlb• 6 months ago

The American press isn't perfectly free, but you should see what a state-controlled press is like.

paganel2• 6 months ago

Bezos, whatever the heck this is [1], you people are delusional.

Later edit: For good measure, Zuckerberg, too [2]

[1] https://x.com/AdameMedia/status/2011935282912731453

[2] https://x.com/infolibnews/status/2011196769363697684

terminalshort22• 6 months ago

This is nothing but speculation written by lawyers in the format of a scientific paper to feign legitimacy. Of course those $500 an hour nitpickers are terrified of AI because it threatens the exorbitant income of their cartel protected profession.

__loam4• 6 months ago

Enough people have gotten owned for using these things in court that I think the more likely response is laughing at the ignorance then feeling threatened.

terminalshort22• 6 months ago

1. Get owned in court because you used an LLM that made a poor legal argument.

2. Get owned out of court because you couldn't afford the $100K (minimum) that you have to pay to the lawyer's cartel to even be able to make your argument in front of a judge.

I'll take number 1. At least you have a fighting chance. And it's only going to get better. LLMs today are the worst they will ever be, whereas the lawyer's cartel rarely gets better and never cuts its prices.

DannyBee5• 6 months ago

Care to actually engage with the text instead of deciding to paint the entire profession with a crappy brush?

I guess i'll start with calling two well known law professors "$500 an hour nitpickers" when they don't earn 500 an hour and have been professors for 15+ years (20+ in Jessica's case), so aren't earning anything close to 500 an hour, is not a great start?

I don't know if they are nitpickers, i've never taken their classes :)

Also, this is an op-ed, not a science paper. Which you'd know if you had bothered to read it at all.

You say elsewhere you didn't bother to read anything other than the abstract, because "you didn't need to", so besides being a totally uninformed opinion, complaining about something else being speculation when you are literally speculating on the contents of the paper is pretty ironic.

I also find it amazingly humorous given that Jessica's previous papers on IP has been celebrated by HN, in part because she roughly believes copyright/patents as they currently exist are all glorified BS that doesn't help anything, and has written many papers as to why :)

terminalshort22• 6 months ago

I dismiss the paper for 3 reasons:

1. It is entirely based on speculation of what is going to happen in the future.

2. The authors have a clear financial (and status based) interest in the outcome.

3. I have a negative opinion of lawyers and universities due to personal experience. (This is, of course, the weakest point by far.)

Speculation on future outcomes is not by itself a bad thing, but when that speculation is formatted like a scientific paper describing an experimental result I immediately feel I am being manipulated by appeal to authority. And the conflict of interest of the authors is about as irrelevant as pointing out that a paper on why Oxycodone is not addictive is paid for by Perdue Pharma. Perhaps Jessica's papers on IP are respected because they do not suffer from these obvious flaws? I owe the author no deference for the quality of her previous writing nor for her status as a professor.

__0x01• 6 months ago

This is nothing but speculation

Did you read the paper?

terminalshort22• 6 months ago

It's written in the future tense, so I can safely call it speculation. I've read the abstract which is all I need to decide the full text is not worth my time.

well_ackshually• 6 months ago

Please go to court using only ChatGPT as legal defense, I'd love to see it, it's going to make for great entertainment. The judge a little bit less so.

You can criticise the hourly cost of lawyers all you like, and it should be a beautiful demonstration to people like you that no, "high costs means more people go into the profession and lower the costs" is not and has never been a reality. But to think that any AI could ever be efficient in a system such common law, the most batshit insane, inefficient, "rethoric matters more than logic" system is delusional.

rpdillon10• 6 months ago

Yeah, unfortunately, it's the lawyers that are using ChatGPT.

boelboel3• 6 months ago

Tech workers know it all, no way a non-tech job could be worth anything more than 20 dollars an hour.

Yizahi• 6 months ago

On one hand you're right that people tend to dismiss complexities of the jobs they are unfamiliar with, including IT crowd.

On the other hand when countries feel the need to legislate a new law enforcing writing documents in the human understandable language, one doesn't need to be an expert to suspect there was a systemic rot in those industries. It is totally valid to cry foul when even a parliament is concerned about about reading texts they produce for 500$/h.

https://www.congress.gov/bill/111th-congress/house-bill/946

https://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/2022/0054/latest/...

chrisjj11• 6 months ago

Threatens income? It promises to reduce costs, which will lift profit.

contrarian12342• 6 months ago

Just from reading the abstract, it feels like the authors didn't even attempt at trying to be objective. It hard to take what they're saying seriously when the language is so loaded and full of judgments. The kind of language you'd expect in an Op-Ed and not a research paper

DannyBee5• 6 months ago

I think you may be confused. This is not a research paper, it's an op-ed in a law journal.

SSRN is where most draft law review/journal articles are published, which may be the source of confusion.

For most other fields, it is a source of draft/published science papers, but for law, it's pretty much any kind of article that is going to show up in a law review/journal.

chilmers• 6 months ago

It is literally called “ Boston Univ. School of Law Research Paper No. 5870623”

contrarian12342• 6 months ago

Ah okay, thanks for explaining it! Just based on the name, journal and metadata it seemed like a research paper.. and I was honestly a bit surprised. But I obviously don't publish law research :))

From what you're saying it seems that for an insider this is clear. I guess that makes more sense then

jugoetz• 6 months ago

It's an essay. Being opinionated is a feature.

charcircuit• 6 months ago

None of these paper's arguments are AI specific. The IRS doesn't need AI to make mistakes and be unable to tell you why it did so. You can find stories of that happening to people already.

toofy2• 6 months ago

i think when most people bring up mistakes that these models make, much of their concern is that little can be done.

when one of the juniors makes a mistake, i can talk to them about it and help them understand where they went wrong, if they continue to make mistakes we can change their position to something more suited for them. we can always let them go if they have too much hubris to learn.

who do we hold to account when a model makes a mistake? we’re already beginning to see, after major fuckups, companies blackhole nullrouting accountability into “not our fault, don’t look at us, ai was wrong”

the other thing is, if you have done a good job selecting your team, you’ll have people who understand their limits, who understand when to ask for help, who understand when they don’t know something. a major problem with current models is that it will always just guess or stretch toward random rather than halt.

so yes, people will make mistakes, but at least you can count on being able to mitigate for those after.

chrisjj11• 6 months ago

who do we hold to account when a model makes a mistake?

First we stop anthromorphising the program as capable of making a "mistake". We recognise it merely as machine providing incorrect output, so we see the only mistake was made by the human who chose to rely upon it.

The courts so far agree. Judges are punishing the gulled lawyers rather than their faux-intelligent tools.

terminalshort22• 6 months ago

Who was held to account when the IRS made a mistake and sent me a demand letter for over $100K of "unpaid taxes" I didn't owe? Who compensated me for the hours I spent on hold and the money I had to pay an accountant to deal with it?

qsera2• 6 months ago

We should be more worried what AI will due to the ability of an average human to think.

Not that I think there is a lot of thinking going on now anyway, thanks to our beloved smartphones.

But just think about a time when human ability to reason has atrophied globally. AI might even give us true Idiocracy!

fennecbutt• 6 months ago

I mean we were seeing this even before AI. It's the same type of person. To slop is human.

It's like for some reason we thought that like some good percentage of us aren't just tribal worker drones who fundamentally just want fats, sugars, salts, dopamine and seratonin. People actively vote against things like UBI, higher corporate taxes, making utilities public. People actively choose to believe misinformation because it suits their own personal tribal narratives.

t0bia_s6• 6 months ago

Similar rhetoric was allways there with new technologies. Calculators, radio, cameras, phones, computers, smartphones, social networks...

Regulations do more harm than learning process from mistakes.

getnewmaterial• 6 months ago

Yes we have this before and everytime it was correct.

hoherd• 6 months ago

We should be more worried what AI will due to the ability of an average human to think.

I had a wake up call on this yesterday. After a recent HN thread about Zed editor, I decided to give it another try, so I loaded it up, disabled AI, and tried writing some code from scratch. No AI completion, no intellisence. Two things came to mind. First, my editor seems so much more peaceful without being told what to do. Second, it was a bit scary how lost I felt. It was obvious that my own ability to communicate through code had declined a bit since I began using AI coding assistants. It turns out that as expected, coding assistants really are competitive cognitive artifacts. After that experience, I've decided that I am going to do at least part of my coding with all completions turned off. Unfortunately at work you are paid to produce quickly, so I think my AI free editor will have to be reserved for personal projects.

Further related to your statement about thought, the hallucinations persist, and even last night I got a response about 80's pop culture that was over 50% bullshit. Just imagine what intentional persuasion through LLM models will do to society. Independent thought has never been more important.

chrisjj11• 6 months ago

This is the way "AI" will deliver on the promise to become more intelligent than humans. Or at least than humans who believe in it.

theirbrbeu7474• 6 months ago

You think smartphones are the cause of atrophy ?

No sir, there was nothing there to begin with - if you read recent history, you'll see that it's full of stupidity, and a few rabble rousers leaving entire nations by the nose.

With the mollification off the smartphone, we've merely taken off the edge of this killing machine.

juggle-anyhow• 6 months ago

Who do institutions serve? To me AI democratises information. Allows access to information that would normally be gatekept. AI reduces barriers, and they don't like that because those barriers gave them authority.

magpi3• 6 months ago

Purpose-driven institutions built around transparency, cooperation, and accountability empower individuals to take intellectual risks and challenge the status quo.

I am not sure if I am off-topic, but I am having a lot of trouble with this statement. Institutions are often opaque, and I have never belonged to an institution that empowered me to "take intellectual risks and challenge the status quo." Quite the contrary.

popalchemist• 6 months ago

"purpose-driven" is the relevant qualifier here.

intended3• 6 months ago

I fear the title of this article is going drive most of the conversation.

I haven’t read through the whole thing yet, but so far the parts of the argument I can pull out are about how Institutions actually work, as in a collection of humans. AI, as it currently stands, interacts with humans themselves in ways that hollow out the kind of behavior we want from institutions.

“ Perhaps if human nature were a little less vulnerable to the siren’s call of shortcuts, then AI could achieve the potential its creators envisioned for it. But that is not the world we live in. Short-term political and financial incentives amplify the worst aspects of AI systems, including domination of human will, abrogation of accountability, delegation of responsibility, and obfuscation of knowledge and control”

An analogy that I find increasingly useful is that of someone using a forklift to lift weights at gym. There is an observable tendency when using LLMs, to cede agency entirely to the machine.

chrisjj11• 6 months ago

Perhaps if human nature were a little less vulnerable to the siren’s call of shortcuts, then AI could achieve the potential its creators envisioned for it.

I can't see how, given that potential is 99% shorcuts.

layer82• 6 months ago

I was amused at how they quote War Games.

incomingpain• 6 months ago

Civic institutions—the rule of law, universities, and a free press—are the backbone of democratic life. They are the mechanisms through which complex societies encourage cooperation and stability, while also adapting to changing circumstances.

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/12/04/public-trust...

In the 1960s, trust in institutions was around 70%.

In 2025 it's about 17%.

This is not something like we had 70% until 2023 and then AI dropped our trust suddenly. If anything, AI doesnt even register on the graph.

So correlation here is practically non-existent. Gallup and Pew have the similar trends for journalists and universities.

You dont get to blame AI for this.

Interesting bump and question. How did clinton improve reputation and then bush destroy it? Or is that a false hump?

terminalshort22• 6 months ago

It's not a false hump, but why do you assume the president caused it just because it happened at the same time?

cornholio• 6 months ago

I would summarize the central claim of the paper as: the widespread use of AI to mediate human interaction will rob people of agency, understanding and skill development, as well as destroying the social links necessary to maintain and improve institutions, while at the same time allowing powerful unaccountable actors (AI cabal) to interject into those relations and impose their institutional goals; by "institution" we mean a shared set of beneficial social rules, not merely an organization tasked with promoting them, "justice" vs. "US justice system".

The authors then break down the mechanisms by which AI achieves these outcomes (that seem quite reductive and dated compared to the frontier, for example they take it as granted that AI cannot be creative, that it can only work prospectively and can't react to new situations and events etc.), as well as exemplifying those mechanism already at work in a few areas like journalism and academia.

palmotea• 6 months ago

And I think that's about right. Despite the marketing, I think AI (especially if the hyped capabilities arrive) will be one of the most destructive technologies ever invented. It only looks good to blinkered and deluded technocrats.

_DeadFred_• 6 months ago

AI is by it's nature an entropy machine.

reaperducer• 6 months ago

AI Destroys Institutions

Working as intended. WONTFIX.

roxolotl• 6 months ago

This articles claims are also interesting to me in terms of large scale software systems. They authors say:

They (AI systems) delegitimization knowledge, inhibit cognitive development, short-circuit long term thinking processes, and isolate humans by displacing or degrading long term human connection.

This is a pretty good summary of the worry I’ve seen expressed about extensive use to build large pieces of software. Large pieces of software aren’t just the code that describes them. They exist in some sense in their authors as well.

Effective projects seek to expand understanding of software systems across the organization so that relevant decisions can be made about their future. By relegating much of the decision making around structure of the software to AI you lose the systemic knowledge shared across the organization.

TYPE_FASTER• 6 months ago

The affordances of AI systems have the effect of eroding expertise

Recently, it so happened that I spent an hour reverse engineering and documenting a piece of a system. A co-worker asked a LLM to do the same. It generated some really nice documentation.

The difference is, I (as a team member) now have the understanding. Generating the documentation does not increase the understanding of the team.

ChrisArchitect• 6 months ago

How Generative AI is destroying society https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/how-generative-ai-is-destr... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46616713)

mapotofu• 6 months ago

I think the argument makes a central mistake in putting too much trust into institutions. I don’t disagree with the conclusions, but the premise around blindly trusting institutions simply because they’ve been around for a long time lost me from taking most of their arguments seriously, despite opening the article thinking I would agree.

notanastronaut• 6 months ago

"Abundance of books makes men less studious" - 15th-century Venetian editor, Hieronimo Squarciafico

tim333• 6 months ago

The arguments that "AI Destroys Institutions" seem pretty iffy. I scrolled down to see what institutions had been destroyed it went on about Elon Musk's Doge destroying stuff but their closing say USAID I think had zero to do with AI.

I'm in the UK and I don't think any institutions have been destroyed or even noticeably harmed by AI. In the US there is general chaos under Trump so it may be hard to differentiate.

i-blis• 6 months ago

Civic institutions—the rule of law, universities, and a free press—are the backbone of democratic life.

I disagree. The backbone of democratic life are the rule of law and freedom of speech, which makes a big difference. The press has historically been a counter-power inquiring into privileges and breaches of the rule of the law and thus promoted freedom of speech but almost only inasmuch it served the interest of the emerging merchant bourgeoisie . And we are long past that. Universities never have been liberal forces: they backed the Church and refused paradigm shifts. They still are very conservative even though in a peculiar sense, as leftist conservatives.

AI Destroys Institutions

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