A few days back, I got an email from TPM Reader JL asking me not to give in to the Luddite or reflexively anti-AI tendency he sensed I might have. It was a very interesting note and led to an interesting exchange, because JL is far from an AI maximalist or promoter and our views ended up not being that far apart. I explained at greater length that my general skepticism toward AI is based on four interrelated points.

The first is that even very positive technological revolutions (say, the Industrial Revolution) end up hurting a lot of people. Second, this revolution is coming to us under the guidance and ownership of tech billionaires who are increasingly wedded to and driven by predatory and illiberal ideologies. Both those facts make me think that we should approach every new AI development from a posture of skepticism, even if some or most may end up being positive. Trust but verify and all that. Point three is closely related to point two: AI is being built, even more than most of us realize, by consuming everyone else’s creative work with no compensation. It’s less “thought” than more and more refined statistical associations between different words and word patterns. And that’s to build products that will be privately owned and sold back to us. Again, predatory and illiberal … in important ways likely illegal.

I’ve been observing the ongoing debates about which of the several “reckonings” Democrats need to have to improve their fortunes with what I can only describe as a mounting frustration and disgust. There’s the one over Joe Biden being old. There’s the one about Democrats becoming too “woke” and speech police-y. There’s the one about having betrayed or fallen short about this or that left-leaning cause. On the merits I agree with some of these more than others. Some I think are genuinely important. But as things Democrats should be focusing on now, taking accountability for, repositioning, whatever(!) they all, taking together, strike me as different sorts of pathetic, out-of-touch and myopic distractions.

Parties succeed and gain traction by doing far more than by self-analyzing. And my own theory of the case is that core driver and cause of the low standing of the Democratic Party right now is not wokeness or immigration or Joe Biden’s age but the fact that Democrats are simply not effective at advancing the policies they claim to support or protecting the constituencies they claim to defend. Put simply, they are some mix of unable and unwilling to wield power to achieve specific ends.

We’re in the midst of a storm of articles — variously encomiums, valedictories, friendly morality tales — about Elon Musk’s purported departure from service in the federal government. I’m going to note a couple quite unflattering pieces in a moment. But for now, I want to focus on the bulk of them, which tend to portray Musk as someone who tried to tame government spending but was simply over-matched by “Washington’s ways” and finally failed. You get the image of a guy who is chastened, heading back to his regular life, no match for Sodom any more than most of us would be.