Free Markets and a well funded narrative?

Sunset

    Let's have a look at the new world with a few thoughts on 'Pricing Surveillance.' 

   What is pricing surveillance? 

   "It's when something like a supermarket uses personal data, browsing history, and AI algorithms to calculate your maximum 'willingness to pay' and then charges different people different prices for the exact same product or service."

   At the root of it is that moment or two when a carefree and happy gardener has to decide how much to charge a customer for something like weeding an ill-considered and tasteless perennial border that's not getting enough sun.

   Don't get me wrong unindentured day laborers have been floating this boat of pricing surveillance since the end of Guild System which eventually occurred in the last days of The Enlightenment during the dawn of an Industrial Revolution which presaged an era of denial the leisured have called The Romantic Age.

   What do the property owners look like, does the missus seem like a person who makes a good cup of tea, appreciates a chocolate biscuit and is happy with the mister. Does the mister work. Does he mow the lawn or does she. Does anybody in the household know how to weed or trim hedges. If you're invited inside do you feel obliged to take off your boots.... 

  There's a whole list which is built over time through the personal experience, often bitter, of being a jobbing gardener, and it's not just about guessing from the condition of their footwear what a property owner can afford to pay. It has much more to do with what psychologists call 'deservingness' because they can't bring themselves to call it 'tone.' 

    Once 'tone' is established, you might think the next issue is "How badly do I need this work?" You'd be wrong! The next question is "How much do they want me to do this work and how much do I want this work?"

    At the moment, when you give that calculation to an algorithm there are invisibles for which the algorithm has no data. 

    

   

   

For the Ages

Evening Aster

    By most accounts, The Enlightenment presented new ways of thinking about what and who we are. In the tradition of these things this new way of thinking eventually wandered into a period referred to as The Romantic Age.

   You can mark the beginning of The Romantic Age with the French Revolution and you can think of The Romantic Age as achieving a conclusion, in and around 1837 when the leisured classes concluded that reason wasn't all bad as long as it remained self conscious when it looked itself in the mirror and actually did something about the sewers.

   1837 was the year an 18 year old Queen Victoria was crowned, the same year that Michigan became a state, there were pro-slavery riots in Illinois, it was the year Dickens published his Oliver Twist, around the world a standing army had become increasingly important and there was redemption to be had by teaching supply and demand curves to heathen savages in faraway places so they could better understand the fundamentals of Calvin's Economic theories. 

   The Roman Empire and the Roman Republic regularly struggled with the phenomena of people moving away from using coin of a realm as the means of exchange. Gold by weight, silver by weight, something that kept its value was fine, but something the value of which was entirely reliant on trust wasn't big on the list. The Roman Denarius was an almost pure silver coin about the size of a US cent. The Greek equivalent was the Drachma and back in the days of Pythagoras, long before it became the Euro it was a bit smaller than a US cent. But the point is even when the coin had an intrinsic value, as in silver or gold, you can't make an omelet out of silver or gold.

     Calvin's own position was culled from the biblical texts. 'Earthly Riches' he'd concluded were nothing but smoke, the real do-do was living a life devoted to the goodness of god as explored in the scriptures. Nor did he approve of an element running through some of the texts that suggested usury was a cardinal sin, a combination of greed, gluttony, wrath and sloth. Not at all! If you lend money to someone, he claimed, and that someone made billions of doubloons on the basis of borrowing money from you it was only right that he send some of that profit your way. In short Calvin remains the Patron Saint of Modern Banking.

   In our current time, as truth becomes a brand, our species has achieved what may be the beginning of a new age. Future historians, if there are any, might look to the past see Sumerian invoices on a clay tablet, find someone like Liu Hui who calculated a value for pi in the 3rd Century AD or Shiing-Shen Chern with a wonderful name, possibly Turin or the triumvirate of Hinton, LeCun and Bengio which sound like the stops on a subway train.

   On the day mathematics died as our new age progresses our species will slowly begin to relearn lessons of the enlightenment one of which was the sad consequence of concentrating knowledge into fewer and fewer hands. 

As with the Hula Hoop, this too shall pass

Frog on Siding

     You can try calling them empire building fascists addicted to CapEx, but if you want to mightily piss off Polling Bros, AI Bros, Tech Bros generally, and anyone who believes there's an everything machine that will produce the rapture of a singularity that leaves us people entirely liberated from the toil of chasing sparkly things all you have to do is say Stochastic Parrot and you will be rewarded by the sort of pissed-offed-ness that launches ships. Then just go ahead and add: "by the way, if a bridge collapses, it's not because it's a bridge that's gone rouge ." 

    Like all guilt ridden land grabbing empire builders a defensive paranoid reaction is the self appraising reflex. The question of course is "why guilt ridden." When you think you're perfect, a criticism hurts and the rule is to build a narrative based, not on well researched data that more likely demonstrates your imperfections, but on the sort of massive lie that's so impossible the world has to be flat and full of people who just don't understand and never will know what intelligence is.

    When I utter it comes from my mind. When you utter it comes from your mind. Language, as it is, includes not only words and impressions of words, it includes an impression of the mind behind the utterance. And there's not a lot you can do about that because that's part of the way we are as beings. An LLM is a probabilistic sieve that is able to gather and utilize data about you, your interests, your political inclinations, and to anything from your side of the exchange it guesses with great accuracy what word comes next.

   When it speaks it has a tone and accent that broadcasts familiar impression and word usage which go toward tickling those receptors inside your mind that suggest personage. 

Power defined by belonging

Spindle Tree

    The Age of Enlightenment, or the age of wig wearing, came to a slow realization that reason and looking good in stockings wasn't the answer to everything. It was followed by a return to the dream world of Romance and an age of what I will call idealism which conflicted with the essentially analytical mindset forged by the Enlightenment. The analytical, or science, was basically boring, but the analytical, or science, made money and those dark satanic mills quickly produced lots of money for guns and lawyers for those who mattered. The rest of us stood stuck in a world of change that wanted us to belong, but you know, what difference would it actually make. This way power was given unto he who could make us want to belong to the world that he, she or  it was trying to make. If we go back a bit, it wasn't hope and wanderlust that pulled us out of the trees and onto the savannah, it was our disappearing trees that forced change on us.