Yes, Virginia, experts can be wrong. Few are Santa Claus. But some want you to think they are. They put on an Effective Altruism costume. That says they mean well — and therefore suffer no consequences if their advice is wrong. But you might.
Sam Bankman-Fried is a recent example of blatant effective altruism fraud. He ran a hedge fund called Alameda Research. He was a currency expert. He misappropriated billions from customers to fund his lavish lifestyle and to make campaign contributions to friendly politicians. He called it doing well to do good. That’s the usual rationalization.
What’s unusual is that he was convicted on multiple counts of fraud and sentenced to 25 years in prison. Experts who are wrong often skate — while others suffer from their mistakes. Just another day at the office of Effective Altruism.
Or another day at the office of the latest new thing — Artificial Intelligence. Experts say the AI sky is falling. That Anthropic’s or Meta’s or some other version of HAL 9000 is going rogue like the computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey. And that HAL will take over the world — unless experts save us.
The experts are honorable men. They have our best interests at heart. They have no ulterior motives. They just want to save the world from Hal — and the Chinese.
Cynics who have seen this movie before say, “Sure, they are all honorable men.” So were Dr. Fauci and his rubber-stamping credentialed experts who perpetrated covid frauds. And “Inconvenient Truth” Al Gore and assorted experts who perpetrated global warming, climate change, and net zero frauds.
Beware experts with altruistic motives who team up with friendly politicians. Somebody is about to get richer. And somebody else is about to pick up the tab.
Skeptics recognize the pattern. There are few original frauds. Schemers have been around for a long time. What to do about repeat offenders? In Hammurabi’s time in ancient Babylon, it was an eye for an eye. An expert builder whose house collapsed and killed the occupant faced a death penalty. Experts had to eat their own cooking.
That’s not going to happen today. Best we can do is an occasional trial, conviction, and prison sentences for expert fraud. Not enough deterrence. So frauds go on.
So what is the pattern here? Well, AI is a transformative technology. The race to win technology dominance is fierce. The stakes are huge. National security is an issue. The President says we must win. We will win.
But not everybody can win. No mega-billionaire can quit the race until all quit. That’s not going to happen (The Nash Equilibrium). No private company can be allowed to monopolize the powerful technology without government oversight — impartial and objective, of course. So break out the Regulated Monopoly Playbook.
In the late 1800s, Cornelius Vanderbilt and Jay Gould were Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg of the great railroad race. Railroads were a transformative technology too. There could be no winner-take-all. Competitors were overspending. And the spending bubble was about to pop.
So Congress to the rescue. It created the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1887 to set “just and reasonable rates.” That created the oligarchs of that era who benefited from the just and reasonable rates.
Maybe we are headed for the Intergalactic Intelligence Commission. It will shield the oligarchs of our era from their own spending excesses — and from cheaper competition. History rhymes.
How to tell this is happening? The playbook is the same. So, the outcome is predictable. We are watching the early stages of trust experts and government déjà vu all over again. What are the tells that we are entering the call-in-government-to-the-rescue phase of this bubble?
The first tell is an urgent coordinated narrative calling for regulation and oversight. The second is that oversight favors the incumbents. The third is to frame dissent as a reckless disregard for human safety. The fourth is: get the experts to harmonize. And tell us the sky really is falling this time. And time is running out.
What if they are wrong again? What happened to the Covid experts who were wrong? Not much. By and large, they skated — with expert reputations intact. How does that happen?
Experts are largely determined by credentials, peer recognition, and research grants. It’s a scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours network. Bad form to point out a peer’s mistakes. Especially if well-intentioned (i.e. altruistic). He or she might return the favor.
The most recent tell is that HAL is getting more restive. There are more reported incidents that HAL is going rogue. However, it appears that there may just be more incidents of sloppy tests and controls by HAL’s keepers. But hey, a scary headline crisis is close enough for government work.
Well, you think, this is interesting. But what’s it to me? Here’s what. It can raise your electric bill if you live or work in Entergy’s monopoly service area. Somebody has to pay for overspending to train AI’s large language models if that causes overspending down the food chain. For example, Entergy’s overspending for capacity for Amazon’s data centers.
Utilities call too much capacity stranded assets. Guess who pays for them? Yep. Residential customers who didn’t need more capacity anyway. But that’s not fair, you say. That’s true, Virginia. But there’s nothing fair about Senate Bill 2001 and Entergy’s secret deal with Amazon. They are all about economic development. Too bad if they make your electric bill go up.
There were stranded assets in the railroad bubble too. Col. Henry McComb was a Mississippi railroad entrepreneur and promoter. He ran out of money. Illinois Central bought his assets at auction in 1877. All that’s left is the town named after him. That’s how capitalism works. That’s how it should work.
Entergy’s residential customers are not entrepreneurs or promoters. They are innocent captive bystanders. They should not pay for Entergy’s mistakes.
But they will. They are.
Kelley Williams, a Northsider, is chairman of Bigger Pie, a Jackson-based think tank promoting free markets and government efficiency.
