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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 23, 2026

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Hatzius is one of the few economists marked out for his successful predictions and is actually worth listening to; and I agree with his statements about AI.

AI is mostly a solution in search of a problem. At best it may be a somewhat useful assistant when it comes to automating various tasks in the same way critics think of LLM's as little more than a fancy autocomplete but are fairly worthless when measured up against the claims people make about them. At worst the consumer models feel like having a fucking vagrant living in your basement, with as much as they get shoved deeply into the OS are increasingly pushed into integrations that people are forced to adopt, it feels like your system is harassing and nagging the fuck out of you to use it.

I kind of agree, though I’ll add that things like electricity, printing presses, the steam engine (which was a Greek toy in the classical era). Its future will depend on whether or not someone figures out what to do with it, and there are millions trying.