Technology

its icetown all over again!

The overall goal is to cut the agency’s budget by fifty percent. Shedd suggested using AI to analyze contracts for redundancies, root out fraud, and facilitate a reduction in the federal workforce by automating much of their work.

I am bullish on AI in the long run.

I am skeptical that given the state of affairs in 2025, you can reasonably automate half of the federal government, via AI or any other means.

I also don't think that the way to do this is to lay off half of the federal workforce and then, after the fact, see what can be automated. If you look at the private sector automating things, it tends to hedge its bets. Take self-service point-of-sale kiosks. We didn't just see companies simply lay off all cashiers. Instead, we saw them brought in as an option, then had the company look at what worked and what didn't work -- and some of those were really bad at first -- and then increase the rate of deployment once it had confidence in the solution and a handle on the issues that came with them.

You generally won't understand another person (and adversary especially) if you don't see how their actions perfectly make sense for them, and without conspiracies.

So - there is one matching variant, that Musk sincerely hates bureaucratic kinds of power, but not proprietary kinds of power. Replacing a bureaucrat with (some imagined good) AI in another assumption would be replacing a mediocre human with inherent lust for power with an unreliable automaton, but without lust for power. The good part here is that humans are unreliable too and working bureaucracies compensate for that.

The bad part is that for every failure a person should be responsible proportionally to their input. I'm not sure they'll do that, or I'm sure they won't.