Nate Soares may be right that we lose control. He may be wrong about what we’re losing control of.
Nate Soares thinks artificial intelligence could kill everyone.
Not disrupt the economy.
Not eliminate a bunch of white-collar jobs.
Not make elections weird.
Kill everyone.
On January 20, 1981, Ronald Reagan took the oath of office on the west front of the Capitol.
Minutes later, half a world away, an airplane lifted off from Tehran carrying fifty-two Americans who had been prisoners for 444 days.
The timing was perfect. Almost too perfect.
I have worked with ISO 9001 quality systems since 1997.
That matters, because I am not an ISO skeptic.
Quite the opposite.
I have worked through ISO 9001:1994, 2000, 2008 and 2015, and for most of that time I watched the standard get better.
The 1994 version was cumbersome and documentation-heavy. Too much energy could be spent proving that you had documented a process rather than determining whether the process actually worked.
ISO 9001:2000 was a major improvement. It pushed organizations toward the process approach. The 2008 revision refined that framework. Then 2015 incorporated risk-based thinking throughout the system rather than treating preventive action as a separate exercise.
You are not an activist.
At least you have never thought of yourself as one.
You have a job. A mortgage. Kids. A lawn that needs mowed. You complain about grocery prices more than you complain about politics.
Then somebody announces that an enormous AI data center is going to be built three miles from your house.
What exactly did the West think it was getting?
That was the question I left you with last week, and it turns out to be harder than the question of what happened to Mohammad Mosaddegh.
For 1953 we have a plan. Names. Money. Propaganda. Intelligence services. Political and military assets. A numbered CIA document whose first assumption is “Mossadeq must go.”
DoorDash, the stupidity tax, and how a decade of subsidized convenience rewired what we’re willing to pay for
When I was a kid, people used to call the lottery a “stupidity tax.”
The idea was simple enough. You worked hard for your money, then handed some of it back to the state in exchange for a piece of paper carrying astronomically bad odds of making you rich.
Fair enough.
But after watching the rise of DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub, I owe the lottery an apology.
The coup had failed.
That was the situation in Tehran on the morning of August 16, 1953.
The Iranian officer sent to remove Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh had been arrested. The Shah had fled the country. Mosaddegh was still in power.
Months of covert planning had collapsed in a single night.
I have decided that, with very few exceptions, I am only buying cars made before 1993.
Why 1993?
Because I need a rule.
You have seen the footage.
A crowd somewhere in Tehran. Fists in the air. American flags burning. A cleric at a microphone. Thousands of people shouting three words that require no translation:
Death to America.
The footage needs very little narration.
Iran hates us.
Iran is irrational.
Iran is run by religious fanatics.
Iran wants to kill Americans.
And if you are an American of roughly my generation, Iran has existed in your political consciousness almost entirely in that form. The Ayatollah. The hostages. Hezbollah. Nuclear enrichment. That chant.
There was a time when I could walk into a grocery store, see that something was on sale, put it in my cart, and pay the sale price.
Apparently, that was too simple.
Now when I walk into Kroger and see a product advertised at a lower price, I first need to “clip” a digital coupon. That means pulling out my phone, opening an app, signing into an account and digitally clipping something that does not physically exist so that a computer will permit me to pay the advertised price. Kroger currently promotes entire categories of “Weekly Digital Deals” built around precisely this process.
Why does buying cheese need a user account?