Dégringolade

  source:  Nonsite.org BY   SAM GINDIN OCTOBER 20, 2023 There’s something happening here / But what it is ain’t exactly clear. —  “For What It’s Worth,” Buffalo Springfield The other crisis The go-to crises of the socialist left have been “American declinism” and “inter-imperial rivalry.” These crises have not only been predicted by the left but often  wished for , the left seeing them as doing much of the heavy lifting it cannot do on its own. This is both bad analysis and worse politics. It overstates declinism, wrongly projects the (very real) tensions between the U.S. and China into a contest over who will lead global capitalism, and assumes that things getting worse inherently advances progressive politics. The U.S. is not—apart from China—facing any definitive decline relative to its main economic competitors. Nor is it facing a profit squeeze; corporate profits have been running at their  highest ever share of GDP  (see chart below), and non-financial profits per unit of real ou

author:     VN Alexander source :  Off-guardian 2023 was the year that an artificial intelligence (AI) known as ChatGPT-4 spectacularly passed the Turing Test. For a hundred million users, interacting with the Chat bot was indistinguishable from interacting with a human being. The bot appeared to be able to understand questions and reason out competent answers.  Although its replies were sometimes vapid and sophomoric, that may have made them seem even more convincingly human. ChatGPT is capable of processing text inputs (prompts and commands) and outputting text whose patterns have a high statistical probability of occurring after such prompts. Its apparent intelligence is a kind of magic trick insofar as the product seems similar to human reason, but it is really high-speed, brute force statistical pattern matching of words in specific contexts. (How human reason works differently will be the subject of a future essay.) Nevertheless, the impressive performance stoked fears that AI is