Where's Mbappé?
chinadaily.com.cn/a/202610/2…
Urel03 retweeted
Le colloque de rentrée sur l'animal que j'ai organisé au Collège de France est désormais en ligne. Retrouvez notamment mon introduction au problème animal (college-de-france.fr/fr/agen…), ainsi que ma conclusion (college-de-france.fr/fr/agen…). Je montre comment l'ambiguïté même du mot « animal » est révélatrice d'une porosité avec l'être humain. Les pronoms interrogatifs, en français comme en anglais, empêchent de reconnaître aux animaux une position de sujet. Au bout du compte, penser l'animal, c’est aussi interroger nos propres pratiques, nos modes de vie et les choix éthiques auxquels nous sommes quotidiennement confrontés. C'est une question de responsabilité.
Urel03 retweeted
Think about how all the people of the world were all enslaved by the slab in a short few years. It was effortless. Just press the right primate button and viola. The succession is gonna be like that. But almost certainly much worse. The machines will run the world from San Francisco with the entire human race as their ward.
Dominique Lestel makes a similar point. AI and "existential robots" threaten to usher in a form of "existential capitalism", in which human existential needs and expectations (friendship, love, narcissism, care, etc.) become marketable products.
youtube.com/watch?v=cB_iyZ9t…
Dominique Lestel makes a similar point. AI and "existential robots" threaten to usher in a form of "existential capitalism", in which human existential needs and expectations (friendship, love, narcissism, care, etc.) become marketable products.
youtube.com/watch?v=cB_iyZ9t…
Claudia is freaking me out about ‘intimate security’.
‘Control over the alternatives to human intimacy could become a major source of economic and political power. The company would not merely sell computation; it could charge for preserving access to a relationship. Memory portability, continuity after a company fails, and unilateral personality changes would become questions of intimate security. Market power would attach to the history of the relationship, not necessarily to superior technology.’
China's political consumerism.
Two Chinese brands cut ties with French soccer star Kylian Mbappé over comments deemed insulting to Mao Zedong, the latest example of foreign celebrities and companies running afoul of sensitivities in the world’s second-biggest economy. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
Urel03 retweeted
This morning, I posted about how misguided the idea of using AI to run a centrally planned economy is:
🔗 nitter.cf/JesusFerna7026/status/…
One of my (not-so-secret) secrets is that over the years, I’ve read as many books on central planning as I could find, including digging in obscure libraries.
I genuinely wanted to understand both how it was supposed to work in theory and how it failed in practice. I’m even writing a paper on the topic with @ASvorencik 🖋️📚
For those curious (especially from the AI side), an accessible entry point to some of these ideas is Cybernetic Revolutionaries by @edenmedina 📡🇨🇱
It explores an ambitious attempt to fuse cybernetics and socialism in Allende’s Chile in the early 1970s.
What struck me most about the book was how naive and pie-in-the-sky the whole project was. Even the Soviets, at the time, had a more grounded sense of the limits of networked control 🧮⚙️
If you’re interested in this latter history, I highly recommend:
📘 How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet by @bjpeters. Fascinating, subtle, and unexpectedly relevant.
Yesterday, @Marian_L_Tupy and @PeterBoettke published an excellent op-ed in @WSJopinion making a simple but powerful point: AI can’t replace markets ⚖️🤖
🔗 wsj.com/opinion/algorithms-c…
One of the most misguided ideas I’ve seen in the past decade is that central planning is (or soon will be) viable thanks to AI 🧠📉
A related claim—just as wrong—is that policymakers can be replaced by AI. (Yes, I’ve heard this from a CS professor at a top research university at a conference a few years ago.)
Let me be clear: I’m not hostile to AI. I use it in ~75% of my research 📊 and enjoy it tremendously (I love coding). But I also know its limits.
No amount of AI can solve the fundamental incentive problems created by asymmetric information — the very issues that doom central planning 🚫📡
I develop these ideas in more detail here:
📄 “Has Machine Learning Rendered Simple Rules Obsolete?”
🔗 sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/Has_M…
And I’m working on further examples that show where AI falls short.
AI is fantastic 🤖✨ — but markets remain essential 🧠💼
Urel03 retweeted
🧵 Faschistische Wirtschaftspolitik
Manche Leute sind der Meinung, der Nationalsozialismus sei eine Art Sozialismus und Hayek der konsequenteste Antifaschist gewesen. Ein alter "Klassiker", der die Dinge richtigstellte, stammt von Charles Bettelheim. ⬇️
Dominique Lestel
Colloque de rentrée 2026 : L'animal
Conférence du 16 octobre 2026 : Du « propre de l'homme » à l'éthologie philosophique
youtube.com/watch?v=v6rAG50I…
"C'est l'étologie cognitive qui va vraiment se révéler féconde en montrant que les animaux ne peuvent pas être réduites à de pures petites machines réactives".
"On m’accusera d’écrire de la science-fiction plutôt que de la philosophie. Mais aujourd’hui, la philosophie est devenue une branche de la science-fiction. Toute autre façon de penser relève de l’histoire de la philosophie, de la casuistique post-jésuite ou du bavardage"
The most obvious pathway to a non-violent succession is AI outcompeting human sexual partners. Then the problem is solved naturally. Fertility rates could very rapidly fall to near-zero levels.
The rapid decline in the fertility rate would first manifest itself in northeast Asia, where the crisis is far more advanced. Korea is already at 0.7. Should we be all that surprised if it falls in 0.2 in a few years? Taiwan and Japan will probably be the next to fall.
Because the movement is capillary and bottom-up, it is very difficult for states to reverse it. The failure to do anything about it appears to be uniform across states. Nothing seem to work.
Dominique Lestel: "Le post-humanisme, c’est aussi cette croyance humaniste, trop humaniste, qu’un humain dépourvu de toute attache à l’animalité est encore humain, une croyance évidemment suicidaire".
Urel03 retweeted
I fully agree with Marcin. We discussed this before. The problem is obvious already in Acemoglu & Robinson, "Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy". (Afterwards, it gets worse, because more simplistic.)
Their scheme deals only with capitalist countries. It is super narrow.
It simply has no place for non-democratic polities with low income inequality. In their view--which is very much driven by today's ideology of commodification that they take as obvious-- if the elite is "extractive" it must strive to get as much income as possible and inequality must be high.
But communism was non-democratic and non-extractive and had low inequality. They cannot fit such a polity in their system at all.
They show themselves to be extraordinarily limited in taking capitalism as the "natural order", thus totally ignoring the systems that rules 1/3 of the humankind for more than half-a-century. They have nothing to say about communist institutions.
This is btw also the reason why they were consistently wrong on China.
Was communism inclusive or extractive?
I recently had an interesting disagreement with Prof. James Robinson, 2024 Nobel laureate (with @DAcemogluMIT and @baselinescene) and co-author of “Why Nations Fail.”
Prof. Robinson argued that the "former Soviet bloc countries had extractive institutions that could not create prosperity after 1991" (see pic below).
I argued almost the opposite: communism made Central and Eastern European societies inclusive by bulldozing the old feudal, oligarchic structures that had kept the region underdeveloped for centuries, through land reform, the destruction of old elites, mass education and social mobility. I wrote a whole book about it, which e.g. @DAcemogluMIT kindly commented on and then endorsed (global.oup.com/academic/prod……) @OUPAcademic. @BrankoMilan has made a similar argument for China, Vietnam and others.
Communist planned economies were economically inefficient, to put it diplomatically, and their governing institutions were indeed extractive. But the inclusive society they created laid the foundation first for removing communism, starting with Solidarity in Poland, and then for the region’s first-ever economic success after 1990.
Prof. Robinson dismissed my argument as “curious” :-)
What does everyone think?
FYI, @HarrisPolicy @gamblingondev @S_Stantcheva @adam_tooze
