Move Fast and Don’t Look Back: Thoughts on Abundance, Art, and What We Want from Society
Breaking the promise I made to myself that I wouldn't just write about stuff I saw online.
Last week, X (formerly Twitter) was ablaze with activity after a recent OpenAI update allowed for ChatGPT to take existing images and recreate them in any art style, and as of last week that meant every image on the internet got Ghibli-fied. During this, I was in the process of reading Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book, Abundance and I keep thinking about this line in the opening section of the book where Klein and Thompson lay out a day in the life of their utopian vision.
“Your micro-earpiece pings: a voice text from a friend and his family, on their way to the airport for another weekend vacation. Across the economy, the combination of artificial intelligence, labor rights, and economic reforms have reduced poverty and shortened the workweek. Thanks to higher productivity from Al, most people can complete what used to be a full week of work in a few days, which has expanded the number of holidays, long weekends, and vacations. Less work has not meant less pay. Al is built on the collective knowledge of humanity, and so its profits are shared.”
If you haven’t yet seen the Ghibli recreations, they’re pretty good. Honestly, from a technical perspective, they’re terrifyingly impressive. In contrast to a lot of AI art, they keep the details of the original and thus lose a lot of the uncanniness that makes most AI slop so deeply unnerving. The Ghibli style also helps to add a layer of charm, and its soft color palettes and generally sparse design make them easy to look at. I’m a serious AI skeptic and while I still believe that there are fundamental limitations to this technology, these demos convinced me that a future where a great deal of commercial media is generated by AI is possible. Not the best stuff, maybe not even most stuff. But there is a chance that a decent amount of future media, especially online content, will be this type of recycled content slurry.
If this comes to pass I cannot help but think that this outcome will be a great tragedy for art. While I had initially believed the rise of AI slop would result in a great outcry for personal, challenging, and interesting art, I am increasingly disinclined to such thinking. It seems more likely that in the future people will gradually become numb to this type of content and will take it in passively with the rest of their feed. According to a report by 404 Media, the ease of creating mass AI generated videos has already led to a limited version of this future, as platforms like Instagram and Facebook that have become overrun with low quality AI slop . While it’s certainly not inexpensive to produce this material (OpenAI famously lost $5 billion last year despite charging for its higher end models), it is likely far cheaper than paying animators, storyboard artists, actors, and writers for a given project.
Once this happens, it will likely be harder than ever to work as a professional artist. The demand for high quality art has never been big, and it’s showing no signs of getting any bigger despite the rise of generated content. Thus as low to medium quality art becomes increasingly generated, it is likely that this will significantly reduce the overall supply of art and artists in the world, and significantly limit the overall diversity of voices we are able to hear.
This future and its grim possibilities made Klein and Thompson’s magical thinking on AI seem especially jarring. In some sense, Klein and Thompson can be forgiven for hand waving away the problems of AI in the opening chapter of their book. Successfully tackling the intricacies of AI and its usage within society is a hard question, and another book all together. Yet, this brief handwave of our future with AI illustrates the ideological hole at the center of Abundance, and how its failure to meaningfully engage with its premise, and its limitations, inherently limits its ability as a serious political project.
In the case of AI art, a solution based on a legal framework for royalties for AI is difficult to manage. The essential nature of AI being a black box makes it difficult, maybe impossible, to draw a direct connection between the original reference and the work being generated. It’s the rare combination of a tough technical and philosophical question that makes it extremely hard, if not impossible for the American court system to arrive at a satisfactory conclusion to. To achieve a just outcome in the case of AI requires policymakers making a decision on what to do with AI art and copyright, and that decision is necessarily grounded in a normative view of how society should operate. Put simply, you need to be able to answer not just what you want the world to look like, but why.
My key takeaway from Abundance is that Klein and Thompson lay out a strong vision of what at the expense of the why. Essentially, they’ve created a vision of a utopia that lacks a fundamental, first principles vision for what society should be for people, and the values that underlie the decisions they want to make. Klein has dismissed these sorts of “grand theories” before, a postmodernist streak typical of most journalists and editorial writers, and the book reads like it. At its worst, Abundance argues for an ad-hoc assemblage of “common sense” good ideas, based primarily on the idea of growth and surplus being self-evidently good. At its best, it’s a flawed, but useful piece of analysis on the need to radically re envision how new development happens in the United States, that is in desperate need of a more reflective analysis. This is not to suggest that Abundance begins with a lengthy introduction to human nature and the origin of desire, but rather that the principles that guide the value judgments that underlie the decisions that guide the policy are laid bare.
Admittedly, the AI example is a bit beyond the scope of what the book covers. For a better understanding of how Abundance fails to engage with this question seriously, let’s consider an example from around halfway in the book. Nearly halfway through the book, Klein and Thompson describe a scenario in which the California Employment Development Department’s unemployment insurance system was overwhelmed by a mass influx of applications due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The system had not been designed for this strain and thus was overwhelmed, with multiple features of its application process resulting in significant bottlenecks. Moreover, a state legislator had recently passed a bill that would require the EDD to be accessible in 12 different languages. Eventually, they stopped taking applications all together, ignored the new law (continuing the EDD’s years of already ignoring federal law), and worked on closing the bottleneck. The point of the story was to show that despite legislators’ good ideas on improving systems and making them more equitable, sometimes leaders just need to be empowered to make quick decisions that result in real progress.
The solution here seems pretty straightforward: it’s better to have something that works and is flawed, than nothing at all. But herein lies the essential problem, who does it work for? Now we arrive at value judgments. Well, if we just get the system running and don’t comply with adding additional languages, then sure English speakers will predominantly receive benefits first, but this way the system will be finished faster. This certainly works great if you speak English, less so if you don’t.
One of Abundance’s key tenants is that in the name of building things quickly, judgements need to be made by experts outside the realm of the typical democratic process, even if it comes at the expense of others. Those in the remainder will eventually get theirs, and likely even faster once it’s done. But who exactly gets left behind is a thorny issue, one that Abundance spends remarkably little time addressing. In the case of the EDD bill, a fully accessible website was only available 3 years after the initial bill was passed into law.
In an earlier example, Klein and Thompson describe the dual review process for accessibility for new buildings under San Francisco’s housing requirements code. Despite new buildings supposedly needing to comply with ADA requirements, this secondary review process occasionally finds details like thresholds being too small and thus shutting down the project for weeks to fix it. Again, a silly consideration, unless you have a wheelchair and live in an area where ADA compliance is often ignored in new buildings (see most major US cities). This type of “move fast and break things” mentality may work well for most, but can leave behind serious consequences for those in communities where things break, something that Abundance spends little time considering.
Perhaps the most jarring omission in Abundance is its uncritical support of the development of the Interstate Highway System, a remarkable feat of engineering and social progress, but also one that split apart African American inner cities communities and led to rises in health issues among city residents located near the highways. Perhaps Klein and Thompson consider the overall benefit to society as outweighing these considerations, yet in some cases the development of the Interstate Highway system was directly responsible for the very regulations that Klein and Thompson lament. During the development of the Interstate Highway system in San Francisco, protests over the building of these freeways, also known as the “Freeway Revolts”, led to increased regulation, and increased community involvement toward these kinds of projects, the very thing that Klein and Thompson spend much of the book arguing against.
In another chapter, Klein and Thompson make the strong claim that technological innovation has fueled human progress and liberal development. I would argue that the development of scientific reasoning and innovation are very much an outgrowth of this political process, and the innovations we are so fortunate to have today are very much a product of our society collaborating to meet the needs of humanity at large. Our impulse to help the world is a philosophical position that would be wholly alien to many before the Enlightenment and the age of reason. By this same token, we cannot make the assertion that technology and innovation is free from morality and value judgement. Rather, these considerations guide how we can achieve these feats, and how they will be implemented. The choice of funding cancer research at the expense of nuclear warheads is indeed a political and philosophical issue, just as the decision to regulate AI art or leave it be is as well.
I want to be clear that I’m deeply sympathetic toward the arguments put forth in the book, and in many cases I’m in favor of major efforts to augment zoning reform. But in order to make these judgments, in order to make these choices, you need to be upfront about ethical values, and what your goal for society is in general. Rather than a laundry list of neat gizmos and sensible ideas, these ideas need to be grounded in a fundamental logic that demonstrates a core commitment to some form of human thriving and be able to reconcile with their past failures. While I absolutely believe that this framework is possible, it is unfortunately absent from the book, and much of the following discussions surrounding it.
There is a tendency among a certain type of urban, policy-focused liberals to view expansionary or expert driven policy as “common sense”, and therefore value neutral. This is fundamentally mistaken. All decisions on what to build and where, come with implicit assumptions on what is acceptable, and what is expendable, even when decided by experts. The last 40 years of “expert-driven” neoliberal policies that have led to mass inequality and decimated the working class, have demonstrated this reality to millions of Americans and have left a bad taste in their mouths. It is not as if most Americans are uncomfortable with policymakers making value judgments and making big decisions. On the contrary, the last 20 years of American politics from the election of Barack Obama to the reelection of Trump has demonstrated a mass desire for change at the expense of maintaining the status quo.
In the conclusion of the book, Klein and Thompson ambitiously describe Abundance as a lens in which to view the world, rather than a list of policy prescriptions. The questions of “who decides,” and “what does democracy look like,” are brought up, yet go unanswered. By not seriously engaging in the frameworks that guide these decisions, and failing to adequately consider what they leave behind, this lens obscures as much as it reveals. While this book is certainly not the final say in this necessary conversation, Klein and Thompson ultimately diminish their work by perpetuating in the same blasé attitude toward those left behind that helped lead to the regulations they want to demolish, and thus limit its capacity to be the foundation of a more serious political project of our time.