Correspondent Simon Chase insightfully sums up this dynamic: privatize the profits, socialize the costs.

My post Five Dynamics That Make Sense of an Increasingly Chaotic World is #3. Distribution of risk, costs and consequences across a wider population, concentrating losses in internal/owners’ pockets:

Those who want to minimize their private risks and maximize their private benefits try to concentrate the benefits of the control structure and spread the risks and costs among others. Pull the strings that spread the costs and risks over a large population and concentrate the benefits in the hands of insiders who manage a control structure, usually some form of monopoly, either public or private, or a combination of public-private rackets.

So corporations face fewer risks while the rewards are more attractive. This spread of risk and concentration of potential benefits creates perverse incentives to grow extractive, exploitative, well-disguised rackets that impoverish and impoverish many, but in small enough quantities to avoid triggering pushback.

In a system that concentrates benefits and spreads risk, the “rational actor” seeks to maximize rackets that distribute poverty and helplessness among the many. Small amounts over time that attract little attention and are not emotionally significant enough to trigger powerful resistance.

Correspondent Simon Chase (x.com/slchase and Selflet.ai) Insightfully summed up this dynamic: privatize profits, socialize costs. Here is Simon’s explanation:

“Junk food is a kind of leveraged recapitalization — the privatization of short-term benefits, the long-term costs being socialized as dire health consequences: pay less now and a shorter, sicker life later. Dan Munro encapsulates this framing in his Forbes piece on the nearly one trillion dollars spent annually on U.S. health care. (forbes.com, 2013) has a mechanism: privatize profit, once you see it you will see it everywhere.

The receipt is real – Credit Suisse puts 30%-40% of excess US healthcare spending on sugar, and a 2012 Global Burden of Disease report found obesity to be a bigger global threat than hunger. This last fact is a whole thesis in one line, and I recently put it on X: Obesity is a form of hunger — understand it, and you understand the American economy:

Abundance, not scarcity, is now the opposite. The economy has already paid the bill: The top employers in most states switched from manufacturing to health care in a single generation. We stopped making things and started billing the disease. The loss became GDP.

Debt is what drives the entire economy – today’s abundance privatized, tomorrow’s cost socialized on a future that didn’t vote. And the most important project of my life has been a foreign policy operation: loans taken against what we could not pay at home, expenses charged to people far off the ledger, every chapter sold as aid.

AI is just the latest example, and the most intimate. Now cheap, fluid, frictionless perception; Later homogenization bill. Engagement is privatized; The flattening of culture is socialized on all of us–and exactly as you say, no one sees the damage because no one knows how to look for it.

Thank you, Simmons, for this light.

Regarding the future of AI, my criticisms and concerns can be found in my articles on AI. Simons proposes a more productive future than Big Tech, AI is becoming a technology of individual agency that is fundamentally decentralized in a corporate-state control structure, rather than the Big Tech model of centralized AI. Simons’ vision of the future of AI is:

Where I differ from the pessimism is only on the treatment, not the diagnosis. Average is fixed, not destiny. The answer is the same at every level: more nutrients than processed, especially more than average, administered. I think the future of AI is tribal and designed by humans: many special intelligences, not a centralized utility that privatizes profit and socializes mediocrity. What I am making is a small argument for this. I just hope it has the freedom to deploy — and not ‘we’re here to help’.

Thank you, Simmons, for this alternative lens. My vision of a positive future for AI starts with radical decentralization to improve individual agency and then scale up to “truly intelligent” AI that refuses to waste resources on make-work waste: development: