With the explosion in newsletters, I could easily spend all day just reading the latest outpourings. One I particularly like is the innovatively named Paul Kugman by Paul Krugman. As wikipedia explains he was a columnist for The New York Times from 2000 to 2024.^[7] In 2008, Krugman was the sole winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to new trade theory and new economic geography. It seems he left the New York Times in a dispute over content - he wanted to write a series about trade tariffs which the didn't think was interesting!

Anyway. in today's newsletter he turns his attention to AI. "As far as I can tell", he says, "large language models — which we are, misleadingly, calling artificial intelligence — are still, essentially, a souped-up version of autocorrect. On the other hand, there are a lot of jobs, some of them highly paid, that could also be described as souped-up autocorrect, so AI may have large economic impacts."

He goes on to talk about current USA Vice President J.D. Vance's recent claim that AI is "fundamentally a left-leaning or a communist technology." LLMs, Krugman says. " don’t reveal reality. On issues like climate or economic policy, however, they usually do a pretty good job of summarizing expert, informed views about reality. Since Republicans have staked out positions on these issues that run completely counter to informed views, they consider the answers AI gives on such issues left-wing."

He concludes that "MAGA really does have a problem with AI, because LLMs too often give answers the movement doesn’t want to hear. And there’s no good fix for this problem, because the fault lies not in the models but in the movement. As far as we can tell, there isn’t any way to make an AI MAGA-friendly without also making it vile and insane."

About the Image

This image illustrates digital transformation gone wrong, where AI becomes a tool for intensified extraction. Workers operate sewing machines endlessly producing streams of spreadsheets and reports. Instead of liberating labour, AI automation can lock workers into more exhausting cycles of output, without increasing agency or rewards.The image is hand-drawn in ProCreate. This image was selected as a winner in the Digital Dialogues Art Competition, which was run in partnership with the ESRC Centre for Digital Futures at Work Research Centre (Digit) and supported by the UKRI ESRC.