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For the last several years, and with no particular purpose other than a desire to meander through reflection, I have taken the period between Christmas and New Years Eve to produce a summary of the slice of the year to which I paid attention through epigrams and aphorisms. It follows an end-of-year tradition I started in 2016 (for those see here), 2017 (for these see here), 2018 (for those see here), 2019 (for those see here); 2020 (for those see here); 2022 (for those see here); 2023 (for those see here), and 2024 (here).
If 2023 was the year in which belief matured into conflict, 2024 saw that conflict escalate and move decisively toward its end games. The year 2025 proves to be one of realization--realization of the triumphs and failures of the end-games that had been gathering speed and moving toward decisive phases between 2019- 2024. At the start of this year I noted, in passing on the Annual Oracle of the Ifa practitioners of Cuba, that this was to be the year of Eleggua/Oya (The Orishas Speak: The 2025 Letter of the Year of the Yoruba Association of Cuba (Letra del Año para el 2025 de la Asociación Yoruba de Cuba) and My Preliminary Interpretation).
The 2025 Letter of the Year is interesting especially after several years of oracular suggestions (2019-2024) of turmoil, explosion, and transformation traveling along pathways that are both conduit and are disrupted and reshaped. It is the year of finalization of the great cycle the unavoidable period of ending of which was introduced by disease (2019) and will end with the establishment of new structures (good and evil) toward which all will be expected to bed the knee. The Letter of the Year (the official version and that of the independistas; Miguel Febres Padron (below) and my own) point to the emergence of emperors and the corruption of order, of liars and of the return of defeated enemies to which victors had shown mercy. This is the year of the sacrifices required for new ordering; and the sacrifices will be painful.
Welcome to the 2025 disco scene after-party. And 2025 did not disappoint as to venue or tunes. Those who emerged from the explosions that had erupted between 2022 and 2024 began the process, often quite ruthless, of reshaping the world in the wake of their triumphs. There were transformations everywhere--violent transformations, ongoing transformations, upending of power-relations, the transformations that are the end product of vendetta, and the transformations of one set of ideologies for another. Transformation became substantially transactional as well. But transformation into what? That is the question for 2026.
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The first set focuses on the serendipity of the post-transformation order. The ordering of the after-party of transformation produces its own burlesque of blood--for what better way to appease higher forces that shape collectives than by caricature, comedy and sacrifice, that is by investing the jest with a sort of divinity meaningful enough to hold a community of meaning makers/receivers together.
The second set focuses on the regulation of generative intelligence as the jest that keeps on giving. The trajectory of the etymology of the term in English nicely describes the transformation of its subject in 2025--from a narrative of exploits (the Old French geste, now also a gesture) to speaking (verb) or the the tale itself (noun) of something trifling, something meant to amuse (someone). But, of course, the joke is on the jokester, whose tale becomes both comedy and at best a "beau geste" a pretty gesture to the past. All of that can veer towards the banal. Perhaps one understand the trajectories of AI regulation in 2025 the way one understands the drollery--a small decorative image on the margins of an illuminated manuscript. That, perhaps, is what AI regulation has been reduced to in 2025--a small serendipitous, or sometimes naughty, illuminated marginalia on a manuscript that is is going in a different direction.
The third set focuses on the lebenswelt of generative AI and tech driven societal transformation. It considers the contradictions that 2025 exposed: the instrumentalization of AI, the reconstruction of virtual spaces as the simulacra of the ideological spaces within which society can transform itself first in the idea of itself and then export that outward, that non-sequential nature of A.I. dominance races around a self-referencing course, the triumph of the mimetic overseen by the guiding hand of anti-mimesis, on the instrumentalization of tech that then turns the human into its own instrument, and so on. |
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Links to the 2025 Year End Ruminations here:
Part 1: The Serendipity of the Post-Transformation Order;
Part 2: The Drollery that is AI Regulation
Part 3: Virtual Society's Ideological Simulacra
1. To engage in a race is to order a world in which it is possible to race
in ways that a human collective invested in racing have all embraced. By
the time one gets to the actual movement that constitutes the running,
the most important part of the race has already been run--the
construction of the race routes and the rules for its running.
"Winning the Race: America's AI Action Plan" (July 2025). The AI Action Plan is divided into three Pillars. Pillar 1 (Accelerating Innovation) focuses on technology innovation through markets. Thus, the regulatory architecture of the present system offers a rich target (see, e.g., Accelerating Federal Permitting of Data Center Infrastructure). However, in the style of the beginning of the 2nd quarter of the 21st century, markets must be managed by and through the benign hand of the State--even under an ideology which is grounded in the power of individual autonomy and iterative risk based transactions that together evolves direction. Markets, then, even those driven by iterative aggregated individual (legal and natural person) activity must be guided. That is the essence of the race--the State must construct the routes on which the race is to be undertaken. It is, in this sense, that the actual race, run by market actors, assumes a consequential, rather than the generative, place in the scheme of "the" (or really "any") * * * Pillar 2 (AI Infrastructures) focuses on the development of the physical and virtual structures of the race course itself. Just as there is a sub-race built around innovation, so there is another around infrastructure. In this case that involves both physical and virtual infrastructure that is now to be given priority over competing national obsessions--climate action, ecological impacts, human rights and the like.* * * Pillar 3 (International AI Diplomacy and Security) then focuses on the outward projection of inward development (see, e.g., Fact Sheet: President Donald J. Trump Promotes the Export of American AI Technologies). In this sub-race the course is built to very closely resemble that built by the Chinese in the construction of their Belt & Road Initiative. These hub and spoke models permit outward projections from a central core along lines and routes that are integrated into and help support the core objectives of the center (see, eg., Promoting The Export of the American AI Technology Stack). That shapes the course--not as a circle or a line, but as a routed platform drawn around a center with flexible sub-routines within its shape. ("Winning the Race: America's AI Action Plan" (July 2025)--A Reverie on Building and Racing on A.I.'s Structural "Fury Road")
2. The generative intelligence (AI) revolution points to the triumph of the mimetic--the power of an endless cycle of iterative repetitions, of change in a mimicry that is never quite accurate and always different enough that over time it becomes something quite itself.
"The Goldern Age of American Innovation--Remarks by Director Kratsios at the Endless Frontiers Retreat." The remarks are worth reading for what they are--an expression of the aspirational operational coding of his function within the bureaucracy. Nonetheless, the remarks may be of far greater interest for the foundational structural premises and worldview on which they are based. The following reflections on Mr. Kratsios speech is divided into 8 parts: 1. The Mimetic Character of the Marching Orders (The interesting thing here, among others, is the sort of liberal democratic Leninism that also marked Mr. Trump's golden age as engineered by the democratic Party, its leadership and its "brain trust" in the 1930s-40s: state leadership of strategic economic development towards specific ends for which the market will served as both incubator (and risk bearer) and operational level apparatus for the realization of state policy. At its edges, it is hard to distinguish this from the fundamental premises of Chinese 3rd Plenum articulations of socialist modernization); 2. The Mimetic Narrative of Objective, Mimicry as a Return to a Golden Age ( The resonance between the Chinese and American political elites at least in this respect is unavoidable. Both speak in terms of recovering past glory and returning both states to the proper pathway toward the realization of national perfection. The only difference, and it is a big one, appears to be the path toward perfection--the Chinese socialist path and the American path toward its golden age do not appear to converge at any point (at least as theory) though their objects in terms of national welfare are similar. Renewal is as strong a discursive element of the Trump Administration as it appears to be under the leadership of Xi Jinping.); 3. Renewal through innovation-modernization (Mr. Kratsios has nicely deployed the central elements of the American imaginary and pointed it toward quite specific ends which, given his reading, are unavoidable and inevitable if the U.S. is to realize its promise. But. . . .and this is a big but and the focus of the rest of the remarks--to those ends the masses must be organized ("only possible if we choose it)" within the parameters for such mass management compatible with the American political-economic model); 4. Protecting the Productive Masses Along the American Path Against the Corruption of Left Error (Most interesting, perhaps, is the recognition that in a political-economic system driven by markets (understood as the aggregation over time of the individual choices and decisions of autonomous individuals with collective and political-social consequences) some sort of guidance is needed; and that guidance must come, in some form and with whatever level of accommodation is can tolerate, of the core of leadership of the political order. That is, that the operating system must be coded, and that this operating system, grounded in the choices that give it form, direction, and analytical power (what is preferred over what is to be avoided) is inherently both collective and political); 5. The First American Sutra: We are Capable of So Much More (Mr. Kratsios very briefly suggests the outlines of operational innovation--the forms that new or high quality productivity will both produce on on which it will move the U.S. to the next stage of its historical development. "Our technologies permit us to manipulate time and space. They leave distance annihilated, cause things to grow, and improve productivity." (Remarks by Director Kratsios)); 6. The Structures of American Modernization (Here the political goal is to shape the market, and the direction of individual or private, activities within it, toward a metrics accessible (assuming agreement on the principles on which the metrics are based and the forms of measurement) goal--(1) preeminence, in (2) critical and emerging, (3) tech, (4) built around, (5)industries of the future, (6) through a national political strategy , (7) of promotion and protection, of (8) the critical factors of its production. It is in this objective that the failures of "left error" become most apparent ); 7. The borders of the Golden Age State Must be Protected ( That this new golden age is not meant to be globally hegemonic is made clear by the focus, a critically important one for the Trump Administration, of borders and sovereignty. That focus, in turn, is grounded in a cognitive order that sees adverse interests among peer states, and opportunity among the rest. ); and 8. The Second American Sutra: There is No Substitute for Victory (Mr. Kratsios ends by bringing this tech based project back to its place within the broader elements of the Basic Line of the Trump Administration. First it requires rectification of the errors of the Obama-Biden error to restore the nation to its march along the American path to the realization and perfection of its political-economic system. That realization is measured, in turn by the strength of its ability to protect the nation and to make the lives of its masses better while perfecting the political-economic system within which, with political guidance, that is made possible). (Liberal Democratic Leninism in the Era of Artificial Intelligence and Tech Driven Social Progress: Remarks by Director Kratsios at the Endless Frontiers Retreat and "The Golden Age of American Innovation")
3. With tech based revolution one can go backwards by going forward; with generative intelligence one can choose whatever variation of the idealized past to bring forward into the future golden age.
SUNDAY SHOWS: The Golden Age of America Is Here. "This morning, President Donald J. Trump and his administration were on the airwaves in force as they explained how, in just seven weeks, the Golden Age of America is here." On pausing tariffs on certain imports: “I wanted to help the American car makers — until April 2nd. April 2nd, it becomes all reciprocal — what they charge us, we charge them.” On Democrats’ disgusting behavior during his joint address: “There’s something wrong with them. I can’t even believe it … They were talking about men playing in women’s sports … Republicans were going wild and the Democrats were having their little signs up — their little signs, their little, tiny signs … It’s unbelievable. They don’t get it.” On resurrecting American shipbuilding: “What we’re doing is we’re building a tremendous foundation for the future … You just saw one of the biggest shipbuilders in the world in the Oval Office … He’s announcing a $20 billion investment in the United States.” On Ukrainian President Zelensky: “He took money out of this country, under Biden, like candy from a baby … I just don’t think he’s grateful.” On Russia: “Nobody has been tougher on Russia than Donald Trump … The biggest job they’ve ever done was the pipeline, Nord Stream 2… They were going to supply Germany and everybody else all over Europe. And what did I do? I stopped it.” On the Panama Canal: “The Carter administration gave the Panama Canal, for $1, gave the Panama Canal to Panama for no reason … We’re taking the Panama Canal back.” On protecting Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security: “I’m not going to touch Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid. Now, we’re going to get fraud out of there … Everybody wants us to get the fraud out, and therefore you’ll make it better.” On DOGE: “What [Elon Musk] has done is unbelievable … He has found hundreds of billions of dollars worth of fake contracts.” On education: “We want to bring the schools back to the states because we have, literally, we have the worst education department and education in the world."4. To build a new collective cognitive cage, it is necessary to encode individuals with its operating system; to those ends generative intelligence can produce the perfect bacillus, unless of course, it encodes itself into its human objects.
Director Kratsios, "'Accelerating American AI Exports': Remarks by Director Kratsios at the APEC Digital and AI Ministerial Meeting. Most of these efforts, as is to be expected, add layers of meaning on a core of desire/objectives, wrapped around a way of looking at the world that is then encoded into the action-operationalization systems put in place to move from the recognition/articulation of desire to its realization. That is both fair and necessary; intensely so in the face of competing efforts to code Lebenswelt premises (collective and self-evident or given premises shared by collectives around which meaning and reality is ordered) onto the architecture of the cognitive cages within which social collectives will contain (if they can) tech enhanced generative intelligence systems and especially their control of engagements with it. As is appropriate to the project of constructing reality from its simulacra--the dialectics of facticity and its physical mirror mediated through mutual analytic simulation as a sort of phenomenology of reality--this Lebenswelt project (among all the others) is built an imaginary of fact/data. This facticity is itself a micro encoding on belief and supposition on the basic units (humans) around which a collective Lebenswelt can be built, and thus built made as invisible as the coding of the programming of generative analytics furthered by this project, one in which Jacob von Uexküll's notion of ‘Umwelt’ provides a useful analytical doorway. And its building depends as much on unlearning as it does on learning. Encoding bias is the essence of both tech enhanced human activity as it is central to the constitution of the normative cages within which socially acceptable expectations can be plugged into systems for the management of humans and their systems. None of this, of course, can or ought to make the slightest difference to Director Kratsios. He is in the cage; he is not designing it or ought to be particularly interested in its composition, materials, structures, resilience, etc. Indeed, spending too much time on these meta-cognitive issues would prove both distracting and a threat to the objective--to take a vision of cognitive reality already shaped through its collective given and self evident premises, and to impose it on targeted collectives in ways that achieve desired objectives. It is only in this--from the bottom up conceptually, that Director Kratsios stands in any relation to the larger issues. He represents, in this sense an active Umwelt the actions of which contribute to and shape--solely by their iterative and aggregating action--the Lebenswelt in which it necessarily operates--both in its physical and simulated (virtual) aspects. (Reflections on "'Accelerating American Exports'--Remarks by Director Kratsios at the APEC Digital and AI Ministerial Meeting")
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5. The tech revolution aligns itself with the iterative cognitive impulse of the transactional where the norm is consequence rather than roadmap.
Metaphysics and historical analogy will sort themselves out well enough through a phenomenology of transaction-a way of approaching the organization of reality that is action oriented and determined to wrest meaning from the accumulation of action rather than wresting action as a function of the application of meaning. One focuses on the individual but one manages the individual within a predetermined deal space constructed out of expectations about the role of individuals, of markets, and of the state, especially where the state represents collective activity to their peers. * * * The State avoids regulation of the factors of production of AI; it oversees the process of transactions in AI of whatever it is that is built or offered for sale. Whatever it is, it will be based on US tech, and that, itself, provides a powerful (trans)actional attachment between American producers and (foreign) consumers of tech.* * * (Reflections on "'Accelerating American Exports'--Remarks by Director Kratsios at the APEC Digital and AI Ministerial Meeting")
6. Legality is merely a data input for generative intelligence and virtual systems of operational reality.
Ciro Sbailò, Grammatica quantistica del potere nell’era dei sistemi instabili [Quantum Grammar of Power in the Age of Unstable Systems] In this new context, the role of jurists, strategists, and decision-makers must also change. They must, in effect, become the coders of the quantum--they are perhaps not the architects or designers, but rather the engineers of systems in constant states of dynamic change. In one sense, then, one can understand this as the transformation of traditional normative elites from that of "white collar" to "blue collar" roles. They make things happen. But perhaps they are less essential to its conceptualization. Who or what, then, is the architect? Perhaps it is its object itself. Power may serve not just as its own object, but as the essence of its own positive signification; and thus signified, the master of its own interpretation. "This faculty is already active. It is exercised by algorithmic platforms, opaque legal systems, adaptive regimes. A truth is not imposed: environments are constructed in which alternatives become impracticable. The new authoritarianism does not prohibit—it dictates. Invisible, operational, performative." [Questa facoltà è già attiva. La esercitano piattaforme algoritmiche, sistemi giuridici opachi, regimi adattivi. Non si impone una verità: si costruiscono ambienti in cui le alternative diventano impraticabili. Il nuovo autoritarismo non vieta – dispone. Invisibile, operativo, performante.] (Grammatica quantistica del potere nell’era dei sistemi instabili ).* * *For that effort person/objects are needed to transpose the abstractness of cognitive systems into the realities of action in simulated and physical space. That is the work of jurists, strategists, and decision-makers. This power is objecti-fiable--through the aggregation of its mimetic iterative actions, actions which are controlled by and reflect the "flow", the "stream" rather than serving to make either. As Nietzsche might have suggested--this is a time in which an embedded priestly class may find itself unemployed, or relegated to the margins of the new structural basis of reality and the ways of its care and feeding. It is in this sense, perhaps, that quantum grammar becomes far more interesting. Professor Sbailò suggests the power of a democratic turn, both as an active agent of quantum grammar of power and as its salvation from automation and its transposition from the physical world to that of the simulacra. (Brief Reflections on Ciro Sbailò, Grammatica quantistica del potere nell’era dei sistemi instabili [Quantum Grammar of Power in the Age of Unstable Systems])
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7. Artificial Intelligence, like the printing press before it (like other technological pivots in human history), has proven to be both irresistibly useful and unimaginably terrifying--depending on the moment, the person, and more particularly the interests advanced or negatively impacted.
Popular News Reporting from the Washington Post: "Doge reportedly using AI tool to create ‘delete list’ of federal regulations" (The Guardian UK Version). But the story, which is far more interesting than the proposal explained in the PowerPoint from the Washington Post) and follows below) suggests the use of A.I. within a human centered effort to consider, review and reduce the footprint of regulations. One can quibble with the objectives, one cam argue that the parameters are wrong, and the like--but the idea of reviewing a body of regulation for the purpose of trimming unnecessary regulation is neither new nor untried by political administrations of virtually every political leaning. What is new is the scope of the endeavor--now made possible by technology, and the use of artificial intelligence (whatever that means in this case) to aid in the operation. That IS worth talking about, as are the basic analytics coded into the search and categorization parameters, the assumptions about costs and savings, the amount of time necessary for appropriate human centering and the actual tasks and oversight of the process left to humans, and the like. All of this, in any case, will take time; but time may not be what Doge has. That and the rest of it is just--well--politics.
8. When technology moves from accelerating human to engaging in automated decision-making, the nature of the dialectics of knowledge and the shaping of the cognitive structures within which it is possible to rationalize and manage that dialectic shifts from the human to encoded humanity.
中共中央办公厅国务院办公厅关于健全社会信用体系的意见 [Opinions of the General Office of the CPC Central Committee and the General Office of the State Council on Improving the Social Credit System]. The core of the Opinions, considered as a whole, is deeply attached to developing elaborations of Chinese Marxist-Leninism in its new era. First, social credit must adhere to and express the ideological political-economic framework within which it is an instrument and an expression. [General Requirements [总体要求]] Within that framework, social credit will be undertaken comprehensively in all of the key areas of Chinese collective and individual organization.[Build a social credit system covering all types of entities [构建覆盖各类主体的社会信用体系] That system is, in turn, grounded in data, whose production, protection, and deployment must be coordinated through the state under the guidance of the Party and within the specifications of law created for that purpose.[Consolidate the data foundation of the social credit system [夯实社会信用体系数据基础]] All of this effort elaborates the still fundamental starting point for the elaboration of a social credit based system(s), the notion of trust, now understood in its political, economic, social, and cultural dimensions, though elaborated principally through the lens of socialist modernization (but again understanding that within socialist modernization is the principle that everything is a productive force).[Improve the trustworthiness incentive and dishonesty punishment mechanism [健全守信激励和失信惩戒机制] ] These measures directed toward those ends will fail in the absence of strong quality control measures.[Improve the supervision and governance mechanism based on credit [健全以信用为基础的监管和治理机制] ] And social credit serves no useful purpose if it is not intimately integrated into the improvement and deployment of productive forces in every sphere of social relations, but, given the imperatives of the contemporary general contradiction, which must be focused on economics and social behaviors.[Improve the marketization and socialization level of the social credit system [提高社会信用体系市场化社会化水平]] Thus understood and directed, social credit becomes useful when appropriately utilized and implemented.[Strengthen organization and implementation [加强组织实施] ] Put in this way, one might perhaps note the way in which the social credit regimes discussed will serve as template for every aspect of organized life whether within the state, private, or social sectors, and with equal application to domestic and international engagement. The challenge, of course, will be to transpose these theoretical engagements into something operational. And it is to those ends that much of the detail in the Opinion is devoted. ( Reflections on 中共中央办公厅国务院办公厅关于健全社会信用体系的意见)
9. The object of the regulation of generative intelligence and other systems of automated decision making is to advantageously manage how they are to be consumed, who is to be consumed by them, what is to consumed, and who (or what) is to manage platforms for that consumption and production.
UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), Technology and Innovation Report 2025 With Links and Brief Reflections: A.I. as a Public Productive Force. The focus on AI as a productive force has some quite interesting semiotic dimensions that then bleed into the way in which production, productive forces and their management is realized. None of this suggests a criticism or a judgment about its "goodness" or "badness": these actors are already all too far along beyond good and evil. Instead, they are deeply embedded in the semiotics of production. That, in turn, enables one to view the efforts in terms of its objects (the semiotic "firstness"--or "thingness" into which meaning is injected, or perhaps better projected). The signification of those objects (the semiotic "secondness" of character as a sign imposing a cognitive referent through, for example, names, characteristics and relational understanding of a thing with other things) within a framework in which their signified linkages are possible. The object of all of this effort (and the fancy conceptual framework) is is centered on interpretation, and therefore on the person or human collective (this is a very human interaction) who cognitive cage makes it possible to identify and signify a thing and then bring that thing into the conceptual universe of the person to which object and signification relate (the semiotic "thirdness"). In this case, the object (AI) is signified as an instrument of human production (its value and the point of its development) which is then ordered within the larger framework of human productivity and its managerial manifestations--its politics, economics, and sociology with reference to the human. * * * That is both the promise and the tragedy of the UN apparatus' engagement with and exploitation of AI. A.I. is both an object and a productive force. It's "thingness" is valuable to the extent it is related to its significance--development, which is also its thirdness, its interpretive context in which the object and its significance become relevant. The Rpoert sketches the cognitive cage in which AI is understood, and instrumentalized.
10. In a world in which auto-managed simulacra is reality, its dialectics must be coordinated by those who would feel its effects in both worlds.
Economic Dialectics Must be Coordinated! Brief Reflections on 习近平, 经济工作必须统筹好几对重要关系 [Xi Jinping, "Economic work must coordinate several important relationships"] and Marxist-Leninist Phenomenology in Socialist Modernization. And thus the coordination of dialectical materialism in socialist modernization as a phenomenology of economic activity with a goal that is itself the means of reaching that goal. These dialectics also serve as a template for CPC leadership and guidance (coordination) well beyond the traditionally economic—in social, cultural, and political spheres. The coordination between (1) individual production and collective management; (2) what is desired and what can be provided; (3) what exists and what must be cultivated; (4) evolution of conditions and their transformation; and (5) quality and volume. Applied elsewhere they provide a basis for guidance systems—whether they are managed through generative and predictive analytics, so-called social credit or “smart” systems, or by more traditional human centered means. These describe the core rationalizations of action categories that define the core of the scope of the CPC as the platform within and through which Marxist-Leninist dialectical phenomenology may be undertaken. It ought to be noted that there is at some level a measure of coordination between what emerges as contemporary phenomenological Marxist-Leninist phenomenology with what is emerging as phenomenological liberal-democracy as it is now perhaps emerging in the United States, a vanguard (leading) force of liberal democracy (The Phenomenology of America First and its New World Ordering of Merchants in this New Era of Global Historical Development: President Trump's Address to Congress--Text and Brief Reflections). In both cases an action-dialectics: acts expressing theory, which then is applied to acts that express theory.
11. What is the purpose of language for the human when the human is incapable of understanding the languages of its automated decision making systems.
The Performative Qualities of Language: Mr Trump Signs Executive Order--"Designating English as the Official Language of The United States". At a discursive level, the Executive Order is meant to try to change the narratives of language and to provide a strong signal of at least language assimilation among non English speaking communities. It might even spark debate, and direct it, in some of the states in our federal union. It will certainly spark debate among people who invest this action with all sorts of meaning. In this sense, the Executive Order is both a publicity stunt (at its least effective), and a strong signalling about the importance of a common language as a means of political solidarity, the practices of which must be exemplified in the conduct of the state itself (the tone at the top model). At a practical level, it appears to require federal agencies to "speak" only in English. It does not necessarily require that they also refuse to "hear" or "listen to" people speaking another language. And it does not prohibit people to employ other means of English language communication should the agency neither speak nor hear a language other than English. Lastly, it has no effect on state or local governments who in this area at least can do as they please (with the exception--and an important one--where as a condition of receiving federal grants to run local programs the state must bind itself to an English language only communication). Thus two immediate nudging consequences: (1) people who must speak with the federal government must master English at least in their dealing with those organs; (2) people may speak English to the state through others. Who are these others?--relatives and friends certainly, but for many communities also organized non-state actors offering communication services for a fee or free (the State ought to be indifferent as long as the communication is undertaken by both sides in English). And one longer range nudging consequence--nudging technological innovation in translation, some of which is already easily available, from AI and LLM fueled online translators of text, to audio translation, and now visual translation in real time. At the end of the day it may be that the tech sector will be the group that finds the most (economic) joy in these debates and the actions it produces at the federal level.
12. If automated decision making generative tech is a means of production, a productive force, which is itself an object of transactions producing wealth, then the object of automated decision making, like other means of production ought to be the generation of transactions and only consequentially the production of wealth.
Vice President JD Vance's Jack Ma Moment?: AI and the EU, Text of Remarks Delivered at the AI Summit, Paris France 11 February 2025. The Vice President of the United States serves a purpose; the difficulty normally is figuring out what that is. Mr. Vance has approached that challenge with gusto. That gusto seems directed, for the moment, at trying to describe, in his own way, what distinguishes the American liberal democratic path from that of Europe. None of what he articulates, in his own way, is startling, or new, or unknown by those in the business of understanding those things. It is now virtually common knowledge that the U.S. and Europe have moved noticeably apart on the matter of the theory about the optimum relationship between the State and the masses. The Europeans have come to more assertively embrace the idea that the masses require guidance and that this guidance is best managed through the State. Tied to that is the notion, also embraced with increasing vigor, the this guidance ought to be undertaken in ways that more clearly align private actions to State policy, increasingly through compliance oriented regulatory structures overseen by techno-bureaucracies that interlink public and private collectives. The Americans, and especially those currently holding high elective office, have taken a different view. They have become more impassioned about the value of markets driven behavior and the need for the State to manage markets but not people. The masses, according to this view, require protections against systemic corruption, but not protection against their own choices. What separates the two systems, beyond the levels of trust or distrust in the constitution and operation of large compliance driven techno-bureaucracies, is the fundamental attitude toward risk and personal autonomy. The Europeans have increasingly embraced fundamental principles of de-risking grounded in avoidance of actions that cause negative impacts as a function of policy goals. The Americans tend to cultivates greater tolerance for risk. Though these gross generalizations viel a tremendous amount of disagreement within each of these systems, and do not justice to the spectrum of variation in approaches within each of these systems, it is useful as a crude and grossly simplified way of thinking about what appears to divide European from American cognitive cages.
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