Posts Tagged ‘AI’
“I tend to think that most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism”*…
Further to Wednesday‘s and yesterday‘s posts (on to other topics again after this, I promise), a powerful piece from Patrick Tanguay (in his always-illuminating Sentiers newsletter).
He begins with a consideration of Peter Wolfendale’s “Geist in the machine“
… Wolfendale argues that the current AI debate recapitulates an 18th-century conflict between mechanism and romanticism. On one side, naive rationalists (Yudkowsky, Bostrom, much of Silicon Valley) assume intelligence is ultimately reducible to calculation; throw enough computing power at the problem and the gap between human and machine closes. On the other, popular romantics (Bender, Noë, many artists) insist that something about human cognition, whether it’s embodiment, meaning, or consciousness, can never be mechanised. Wolfendale finds both positions insufficient. The rationalists reduce difficult choices to optimisation problems, while the romantics bundle distinct capacities into a single vague essence.
His alternative draws on Kant and Hegel. He separates what we loosely call the “soul” into three capacities: wisdom (the metacognitive ability to reformulate problems, not just solve them), creativity (the ability to invent new rules rather than search through existing ones), and autonomy (the capacity to question and revise our own motivations). Current AI systems show glimmers of the first two but lack the third entirely. Wolfendale treats autonomy as the defining feature of personhood: not a hidden essence steering action, but the ongoing process of asking who we want to be and revising our commitments accordingly. Following Hegel he calls this Geist, spirit as self-reflective freedom.
Wolfendale doesn’t ask whether machines can have souls; he argues we should build them, and that the greater risk lies in not doing so. Machines that handle all our meaningful choices without possessing genuine autonomy would sever us from the communities of mutual recognition through which we pursue truth, beauty, and justice. A perfectly optimised servant that satisfies our preferences while leaving us unchanged is, in his phrase, “a slave so abject it masters us.” Most philosophical treatments of AI consciousness end with a verdict on possibility. Wolfendale ends with an ethical imperative: freedom is best preserved by extending it.
I can’t say I agree, unless “we”… end up with a completely different relationship to our technology and capital. However, his argument all the way before then is a worthy reflection, and pairs well with the one below and another from issue No.387. I’m talking about Anil Seth’s The mythology of conscious AI, where he argues that consciousness probably requires biological life and that silicon-based AI is unlikely to achieve it. Seth maps the biological terrain that makes consciousness hard to replicate; Wolfendale maps the philosophical terrain that makes personhood worth pursuing anyway, on entirely different grounds. Seth ends where the interesting problem begins for Wolfendale: even if machines can’t be conscious, the question of whether they can be autonomous persons, capable of self-reflective revision, remains open:
Though GenAI systems can’t usually compete with human creatives on their own, they are increasingly being used as imaginative prosthetics. This symbiosis reveals that what distinguishes human creativity is not the precise range of heuristics embedded in our perceptual systems, but our metacognitive capacity to modulate and combine them in pursuit of novelty. What makes our imaginative processes conscious is our ability to self-consciously intervene in them, deliberately making unusual choices or drawing analogies between disparate tasks. And yet metacognition is nothing on its own. If reason demands revision, new rules must come from somewhere. […]
[Hubert Dreyfus] argues that the comparative robustness of human intelligence lies in our ability to navigate the relationships between factors and determine what matters in any practical situation. He claims that this wouldn’t be possible were it not for our bodies, which shape the range of actions we can perform, and our needs, which unify our various goals and projects into a structured framework. Dreyfus argues that, without bodies and needs, machines will never match us. […]
This is the basic link between self-determination and self-justification. For Hegel, to be free isn’t simply to be oneself – it isn’t enough to play by one’s own rules. We must also be responsive to error, ensuring not just that inconsistencies in our principles and practices are resolved, but that we build frameworks to hold one another mutually accountable. […]
Delegating all our choices to mere automatons risks alienating us from our sources of meaning. If we consume only media optimised for our personal preferences, generated by AIs with no preferences of their own, then we will cease to belong to aesthetic communities in which tastes are assessed, challenged and deepened. We will no longer see ourselves and one another as even passively involved in the pursuit of beauty. Without mutual recognition in science and civic life, we might as easily be estranged from truth and right – told how to think and act by anonymous machines rather than experts we hold to account…
Tanguay then turns to “The Prospect of Butlerian Jihad” by Liam Mullally, in which Mullally uses…
… Herbert’s Dune and the Butlerian Jihad [here] as a lens for what he sees as a growing anti-tech “structure of feeling” (Raymond Williams’s term): the diffuse public unease about AI, enshittification, surveillance, and tech oligarchs that has not yet solidified into coherent politics. The closest thing to a political expression so far is neo-Luddism, which Mullally credits for drawing attention to technological exploitation but finds insufficient. His concern is that the impulse to reject technology wholesale smuggles in essentialist assumptions about human nature, a romantic defence of “pure” humanity against the corruption of machines. He traces this logic back to Samuel Butler’s 1863 essay Darwin Among the Machines, which framed the human-technology relationship as a zero-sum contest for supremacy, and notes that Butler’s framing was “explicitly supremacist,” written from within colonial New Zealand and structured by the same logic of domination it claimed to resist.
The alternative Mullally proposes draws on Bernard Stiegler’s concept of “originary technicity”: the idea that human subjectivity has always been constituted in part by its tools, that there is no pre-technological human to defend. [see here] If that’s right, then opposing technology as such is an “ontological confusion,” a fight against something that is already part of what we are. The real problem is not machines but the economic logic that shapes their development and deployment. Mullally is clear-eyed about this: capital does not have total command over its technologies, and understanding how they work is a precondition for contesting them. He closes by arguing that the anti-tech structure of feeling is “there for the taking,” but only if it can be redirected. The fights ahead are between capital and whatever coalition can form against it, not between humanity and machines. Technology is a terrain in that conflict; abandoning it means losing before the contest begins.
Wolfendale’s Geist in the Machine above arrived at a parallel conclusion from a different direction: where Mullally argues that rejecting technology means defending a false vision of the human, Wolfendale argues that refusing to extend autonomy to machines risks severing us from the self-reflective freedom that makes us persons in the first place. Both reject the romantic position, but for different reasons:
To the extent that neo-Luddites bring critical attention to technology, they are doing useful work. But this anti-tech sentiment frequently cohabitates with something uneasy: the treatment of technology as some abstract and impenetrable evil, and the retreat, against this, into essentialist views of the human. […]
If “humanity” is not a thing-in-itself, but historically, socially and technically mutable, then the sphere of possibility of the human and of our world becomes much broader. Our relationship to the non-human — to technology or to nature — does not need to be one of control, domination and exploitation. […]
As calls for a fight back against technology grow, the left needs to carefully consider what it is advocating for. Are we fighting the exploitation of workers, the hollowing out of culture and the destruction of the earth via technology, or are we rallying in defence of false visions of pure, a-technical humanity? […]
The anti-tech structure of feeling is there for the taking. But if it is to lead anywhere, it must be taken carefully: a fightback against technological exploitation will be found not in the complete rejection of technology, but in the short-circuiting of one kind of technology and the development of another.
As Max Read (scroll down) observes:
… if we understand A.I. as a product of the systems that precede it, I think it’s fair to say ubiquitous A.I.-generated text is “inevitable” in the same way that high-volume blogs were “inevitable” or Facebook fake news pages were “inevitable”: Not because of some “natural” superiority or excellence, but because they follow so directly from the logic of the system out of which they emerge. In this sense A.I. is “inevitable” precisely because it’s not revolutionary…
The question isn’t if we want a relationship with technology; it’s what kind of relationship we want. We’ve always (at least since we’ve been a conscious species) co-existed with, and been shaped by, tools; we’ve always suffered the “friction” of technological transition as we innovate new tools. As yesterday’s post suggested (in its defense of the open web in the face on a voracious attack from powerful LLM companies), “what matters is power“… power to shape the relationship(s) we have with the technologies we use. That power is currently in the hands of a relatively few companies, all concerned above all else with harvesting as much money as they can from “uses” they design to amplify that engagement and ease that monetization. It doesn’t, of course, have to be this way.
We’ve lived under modern capitalism for only a few hundred years, and under the hyper-global, hyper-extractive regime we currently inhabit for only a century-and-a-half or so, during which time, in fits and starts, it has grown ever more rapcious. George Monbiot observed that “like coal, capitalism has brought many benefits. But, like coal, it now causes more harm than good.” And Ursula Le Guin, that “we live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.” In many countries, “divine right” monarchy has been replaced by “constitutional monarchy.” Perhaps it’s time for more of the world to consider “constitutional capitalism.” We could start by learning from the successes and failures of Scandinavia and Europe.
Social media, AI, quantum computing– on being clear as to the real issue: “Geist in the machine & The prospect of Butlerian Jihad,” from @inevernu.bsky.social.
(All this said, David Chalmers argues that there’s one possibility that might change everything: “Could a Large Language Model be Conscious?” On the other hand, the ARC Prize Foundation suggests, we have some time: a test they devised for benchmarking agentic intelligence recently found that “humans can solve 100% of the environments, in contrast to frontier AI systems which, as of March 2026, score below 1%”… :)
* Ted Chiang (gift article; see also here and here and here)
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As we keep our eyes on the prize, we might spare a thought for a man who wrestled with a version of these same issues in the last century, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin; he died on this date in 1955. A Jesuit theologian, philosopher, geologist, and paleontologist, he conceived the idea of the Omega Point (a maximum level of complexity and consciousness towards which he believed the universe was evolving) and developed Vladimir Vernadsky‘s concept of noosphere. Teilhard took part in the discovery of Peking Man, and wrote on the reconciliation of faith and evolutionary theory. His thinking on both these fronts was censored during his lifetime by the Catholic Church (in particular for its implications for “original sin”); but in 2009, they lifted their ban.
“The original idea of the web was that it should be a collaborative space where you can communicate through sharing information”*…
From yesterday’s post on the possible (and promising, but also potentially painful) future of computing to a pressing predicament we face today. The estimable Anil Dash on the threats to the open web…
You must imagine Sam Altman holding a knife to Tim Berners-Lee’s throat.
It’s not a pleasant image. Sir Tim is, rightly, revered as the genial father of the World Wide Web. But, all the signs are pointing to the fact that we might be in endgame for “open” as we’ve known it on the Internet over the last few decades.
The open web is something extraordinary: anybody can use whatever tools they have, to create content following publicly documented specifications, published using completely free and open platforms, and then share that work with anyone, anywhere in the world, without asking for permission from anyone. Think about how radical that is.
Now, from content to code, communities to culture, we can see example after example of that open web under attack. Every single aspect of the radical architecture I just described is threatened, by those who have profited most from that exact system.
Today, the good people who act as thoughtful stewards of the web infrastructure are still showing the same generosity of spirit that has created opportunity for billions of people and connected society in ways too vast to count while —not incidentally— also creating trillions of dollars of value and countless jobs around the world. But the increasingly-extremist tycoons of Big Tech have decided that that’s not good enough.
Now, the hectobillionaires have begun their final assault on the last, best parts of what’s still open, and likely won’t rest until they’ve either brought all of the independent and noncommercial parts of the Internet under their control, or destroyed them. Whether or not they succeed is going to be decided by decisions that we all make as a community in the coming months. Even though there have always been threats to openness on the web, the stakes have never been higher than they are this time.
Right now, too many of the players in the open ecosystem are still carrying on with business as usual, even though those tactics have been failing to stop big tech for years. I don’t say this lightly: it looks to me like 2026 is the year that decides whether the open web as we know it will survive at all, and we have to fight like the threat is existential. Because it is…
[Dash details the treats– largely, but not entirely driven by AI and its purveyors. He concludes…]
… The threat to the open web is far more profound than just some platforms that are under siege. The most egregious harm is the way that the generosity and grace of the people who keep the web open is being abused and exploited. Those people who maintain open source software? They’re hardly getting rich — that’s thankless, costly work, which they often choose instead of cashing in at some startup. Similarly, volunteering for Wikipedia is hardly profitable. Defining super-technical open standards takes time and patience, sometimes over a period of years, and there’s no fortune or fame in it.
Creators who fight hard to stay independent are often choosing to make less money, to go without winning awards or the other trappings of big media, just in order to maintain control and authority over their content, and because they think it’s the right way to connect with an audience. Publishers who’ve survived through year after year of attacks from tech platforms get rewarded by… getting to do it again the next year. Tim Berners-Lee is no billionaire, but none of those guys with the hundreds of billions of dollars would have all of their riches without him. And the thanks he gets from them is that they’re trying to kill the beautiful gift that he gave to the world, and replace it with a tedious, extortive slop mall.
So, we’re in endgame now. They see their chance to run the playbook again, and do to Wikipedians what Uber did to cab drivers, to get users addicted to closed apps like they are to social media, to force podcasters to chase an algorithm like kids on TikTok. If everyone across the open internet can gather together, and see that we’re all in one fight together, and push back with the same ferocity with which we’re being attacked, then we do have a shot at stopping them.
At one time, it was considered impossibly unlikely that anybody would ever create open technologies that would ever succeed in being useful for people, let alone that they would become a daily part of enabling billions of people to connect and communicate and make their lives better. So I don’t think it’s any more unlikely that the same communities can summon that kind of spirit again, and beat back the wealthiest people in the world, to ensure that the next generation gets to have these same amazing resources to rely on for decades to come.
Alright, if it’s not hopeless, what are the concrete things we can do? The first thing is to directly support organizations in the fight. Either those that are at risk, or those that are protecting those at risk. You can give directly to support the Internet Archive, or volunteer to help them out. Wikipedia welcomes your donation or your community participation. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is fighting for better policy and to defend your rights on virtually all of these issues, and could use your support or provides a list of ways to volunteer or take action. The Mozilla Foundation can also use your donations and is driving change. (And full disclosure — I’m involved in pretty much all of these organizations in some capacity, ranging from volunteer to advisor to board member.) That’s because I’m trying to make sure my deeds match my words! These are the people whom I’ve seen, with my own eyes, stay the hand of those who would hold the knife to the necks of the open web’s defenders. [Further full disclosure: so is your correpondent, and so have I.]
Beyond just what these organizations do, though, we can remember how much the open web matters. I know from my time on the board of Stack Overflow that we got to see the rise of an incredibly generous community built around sharing information openly, under open licenses. There are very few platforms in history that helped more people have more economic mobility than the number of people who got good-paying jobs as coders as a result of the information on that site. And then we got to see the toll that extractive LLMs had when they took advantage of that community without any consideration for the impact it would have when they trained models on the generosity of that site’s members without reciprocating in kind.
The good of the web only exists because of the openness of the web. They can’t just keep on taking and taking without expecting people to finally draw a line and saying “enough”. And interestingly, opportunities might exist where the tycoons least expect it. I saw Mike Masnick’s recent piece where he argued that one of the things that might enable a resurgence of the open web might be… AI. It would seem counterintuitive to anyone who’s read everything I’ve shared here to imagine that anything good could come of these same technologies that have caused so much harm.
But ultimately what matters is power. It is precisely because technologies like LLMs have powers that the authoritarians have rushed to try to take them over and wield them as effectively as they can. I don’t think that platforms owned and operated by those bad actors can be the tools that disrupt their agenda. I do think it might be possible that the creative communities that built the web in the first place could use their same innovative spirit to build what could be, for lack of a better term, called “good AI“. It’s going to take better policy, which may be impossible in the short term at the federal level in the U.S., but can certainly happen at more local levels and in the rest of the world. Though I’m skeptical about putting too much of the burden on individual users, we can certainly change culture and educate people so that more people feel empowered and motivated to choose alternatives to the big tech and big AI platforms that got us into this situation. And we can encourage harm reduction approaches for the people and institutions that are already locked into using these tools, because as we’ve seen, even small individual actions can get institutions to change course.
Ultimately I think, if given the choice, people will pick home-cooked, locally-grown, heart-felt digital meals over factory-farmed fast food technology every time…
Unless we act, it’s “Endgame for the Open Web,” from @anildash.com. Eminently worth reading in full.
* Tim Berners-Lee… who should know.
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As we protect what’s precious, we might send carefully-calculated birthday greetings to a man whose work helped lay the foundation for both the promise and the peril unpacked in the article linked above above: J. Presper Eckert; he was born on this day in 1919. An electrical engineer, he co-designed (with John Mauchly) the first general purpose computer, the ENIAC (see here and here) for the U.S. Army’s Ballistic Research Laboratory. He and Mauchy went on to found the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation, at which they designed and built the first commercial computer in the U.S., the UNIVAC.
“It is not the fact of liberty but the way in which liberty is exercised that ultimately determines whether liberty itself survives”*…
As the U.S. curdles and Ukraine twists in the wind, a look back.
In the summer of 1941, World War II has been raging for almost two years; still, of course, the U.S.– while it had emerged as the “armory” of the Allies– was a non-combatant. A majority of Americans favored continuing to “to help Britain, even at the risk of getting into the war.” But stoked by isolationists and Nazi sympathizers (like Henry Ford and Father Coughlin), a third of Americans were opposed.
Into this gamy situation, Dorothy Thompson, the first American journalist to be expelled from Nazi Germany, back in 1934, released a powerful– and ultimately very influential– essay in Harpers…
It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi. By now, I think I know. I have gone through the experience many times—in Germany, in Austria, and in France. I have come to know the types: the born Nazis, the Nazis whom democracy itself has created, the certain-to-be fellow-travelers. And I also know those who never, under any conceivable circumstances, would become Nazis.
It is preposterous to think that they are divided by any racial characteristics. Germans may be more susceptible to Nazism than most people, but I doubt it. Jews are barred out, but it is an arbitrary ruling. I know lots of Jews who are born Nazis and many others who would heil Hitler tomorrow morning if given a chance. There are Jews who have repudiated their own ancestors in order to become “Honorary Aryans and Nazis”; there are full-blooded Jews who have enthusiastically entered Hitler’s secret service. Nazism has nothing to do with race and nationality. It appeals to a certain type of mind.
It is also, to an immense extent, the disease of a generation—the generation which was either young or unborn at the end of the last war. This is as true of Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Americans as of Germans. It is the disease of the so-called “lost generation.”
Sometimes I think there are direct biological factors at work—a type of education, feeding, and physical training which has produced a new kind of human being with an imbalance in his nature. He has been fed vitamins and filled with energies that are beyond the capacity of his intellect to discipline. He has been treated to forms of education which have released him from inhibitions. His body is vigorous. His mind is childish. His soul has been almost completely neglected.
At any rate, let us look round the room…
[And so, in a way both enlightening and entertaining, she does, concluding…]
It’s fun—a macabre sort of fun—this parlor game of “Who Goes Nazi?” And it simplifies things—asking the question in regard to specific personalities.
Kind, good, happy, gentlemanly, secure people never go Nazi. They may be the gentle philosopher whose name is in the Blue Book, or Bill from City College to whom democracy gave a chance to design airplanes—you’ll never make Nazis out of them. But the frustrated and humiliated intellectual, the rich and scared speculator, the spoiled son, the labor tyrant, the fellow who has achieved success by smelling out the wind of success—they would all go Nazi in a crisis.
Believe me, nice people don’t go Nazi. Their race, color, creed, or social condition is not the criterion. It is something in them.
Those who haven’t anything in them to tell them what they like and what they don’t—whether it is breeding, or happiness, or wisdom, or a code, however old-fashioned or however modern, go Nazi. It’s an amusing game. Try it at the next big party you go to.
Eminently worth reading in full: “Who Goes Nazi?” from @harpers.bsky.social.
(And in a very effective testament to Thompson’s technique, Rusty Foster– who anchored a recent (R)D— asks “Who Goes AI?“)
See also: “The MAGA Theory of Art,” from Art in America, which reviews the roles that arts and design played in Nazi Germany, then compares them to what’s transpiring today. Also eminently worth reading in full; a sample:
There is a fable that persists in even themost respectable quarters, perhaps because it has retained its power to shock for more than half a century. Get any card-carrying liberal into a sufficiently confessional mood and she will tell you, sotto voce, that there was one domain in which the Nazis were perversely and chillingly formidable: the domain of the aesthetic…
… It is tempting, then, to take one look at the shambolic flailing of the Trump administration—the ham-handed takeover of the Kennedy Center, the tawdry gilding of the Oval Office, the AI slop, the women with too much filler, the men on too many steroids who boast about eating too much meat, the tweets with their erratic capitalization, the general air of carnival grotesquerie—and conclude, as Karl Marx did, that history repeats itself “first as tragedy, then as farce.”
Of course, there are obvious continuities between MAGA and its antecedent on the Rhine. “Fascism is theater,” Jean Genet wrote of the Nazis, and it is hard to think of a politician with more theatrical flair than Trump, who adores Andrew Lloyd Webber and once harbored ambitions of becoming a Broadway producer. If Hitler fostered “the modern era’s first full-blown media culture,” as the film scholar Eric Rentschler claims, then Trump is surely responsible for the postmodern era’s first full-blown social media bonanza. He has the Führer’s instinct for pageantry, the Führer’s gift for glister and grandiosity.
Trump’s resentments, too, recall those of his forbears. In his study of Nazi art policy, the historian Jonathan Petropoulos writes that art collecting was important to top brass in the party because it served “as a means of assimilation into the traditional elite.” Much to their chagrin, their political ascendency had failed to confer the cultural capital they craved; now they had to seize prestige by other means. The MAGA gentry is more resigned; Trump and his lackeys more or less accept their status as philistines and content themselves with exacting revenge on the gatekeepers, yet their air of wounded arrivism is all too familiar.
Here it may seem that the similarities come to an end… While Trump has hosted motley rallies, and even made one deflating attempt at a military parade, he has yet to produce any of the disciplined displays that so effectively reduced the bodies of their participants to raw geometries.
Above all, MAGA lacks the aesthetes who are dutifully trotted out as evidence of fascism’s scandalous refinement. Who is the MAGA Hugo Boss, the MAGA Leni Riefenstahl, the MAGA Knut Hamsun, the MAGA Gabriele D’Annunzio, the MAGA Ezra Pound? Mar-a-Lago has more in common with any suburban Cheesecake Factory than it does with the monumental austerities of Albert Speer…
(Image above: source)
* Dorothy Thompson
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As we cast our eyes around, we might recall that it was on this date in 1917 that the U.S. entered World War I, formally declaring war against Germany and entering the conflict in Europe, which had been raging since the summer of 1914. It ended in November of 1918– one of the deadliest conflicts in history, resulting in an estimated 15 to 22 million military and civilian casualties and genocide (and via the movement of large numbers of people, a major factor in the catastrophic Spanish flu pandemic that followed).
The Paris Peace Conference of 1919–1920 imposed settlements on the defeated powers. Under the Treaty of Versailles, Germany lost significant territories, was disarmed, and was required to pay large war reparations to the Allies. The dissolution of the Russian, German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires led to new national boundaries and the creation of new independent states including Poland, Finland, the Baltic states, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia.
The League of Nations was established to maintain world peace, but failed to manage instability during the interwar period, contributing to the outbreak of World War II in 1939. Indeed, those unresolved tensions in the aftermath of World War I created the conditions for the rise of fascism in Europe (and militarism in Japan).
“Where grows?–where grows it not? If vain our toil, / We ought to blame the culture, not the soil.”*…
Even as agricultural land is becoming a coveted investment (as manifest in the purchases of billionaires like Stan Kroenke, Bill Gates, and Jeff Bezos, and by institutions like Nuveen and the Canadian Pension Investment Board and by publicly-traded REITs like Farmland Partners and Gladstone Land Corp), there’s another class of investor– with a very different use case– on the hunt. Joy Shin and Ryan Duffy report…
Last year, a datacenter developer started working the phones along Green Hill Road in Silver Spring Township, PA, outside Harrisburg. Mervin Raudabaugh got the call: a mystery buyer wanted to buy his 261 acres of farmland. The developer offered him $60,000 an acre for the land the 86-year-old had farmed for six decades. Mervin turned it down, selling to Lancaster Farmland Trust for <$2M instead, thereby locking the soil into agricultural use. “I was not interested in destroying my farms,” he told a local Fox affiliate.
Two things about this story might have been unthinkable a generation ago: that anyone would offer a farmer nearly $16M for that land, and that it’d be worth more dead (paved over) than alive (producing food).
The Supermarket of the World
For the better part of a century, that’s what America was. From 1959 through 2018, the country ran an agricultural trade surplus every single year, peaking near $27B in 1981, when soybeans, corn, wheat, and rice flowed out of the heartland in volumes that functioned as soft power and hard trade leverage. (When the Soviet harvest failed in 1963, Khrushchev had to buy American wheat through private US grain companies: at market rate, without credit, shipped on American vessels, which was a humiliation leveraged by his enemies to oust him the following year.)
Then, in 2019, the curves crossed. The U.S. has since run a deficit in four of the last six fiscal years. Last year, we imported $43.7B more in agricultural products than we sold.
Washington has started saying the right words. Last month, the USDA and Department of War signed a memorandum designating agriculture as a national security priority. Multiple bills linking food security to national security percolated through the last Congress. If you talk to the right folks in Washington, you’ll hear agriculture now being discussed the way semiconductors were in 2021 — as a sovereign capacity that a serious country cannot offshore.
All of which sounds right, none of which changes what is happening on the ground. Because the ground is the problem.
In real estate, you think in square feet, in proximity, in comps. Farmland trades in acreage, water tables, growing seasons, and soil composition. And right now, profitably farming that acre is just about the hardest it’s ever been.
Since 2020, seed costs have climbed 18%, fertilizer 37%, fuel 32%, and interest on operating loans 73%. Labor is up 50%. These costs never came back down after the 2021-22 supply chain shock, but crop prices did, creating a double squeeze on farmers. Farmland has appreciated nearly four-fold from ~$1,090/acre in 2000 to $4,170 in 2024.
Some 40% of U.S. farmers are over 65. The American Farmland Trust estimates nearly 300M acres will change hands through inheritance in the next two decades. When it does, the math facing each heir will look a lot like Mervin’s. What would you do: keep farming a business with collapsing margins, or if one was offered, take the check?
A Collision of Old & New Economies
Datacenters, chip fabs, and other megaprojects need what farms need: flat land, abundant water, reliable power, and access to transport.
In Loudoun County, VA, ground zero of America’s datacenter buildout, farmland already lists at $55,000–$79,000/acre, a significant premium over the statewide average because markets are pricing in the possibility the land will convert from farmland to computerland.
Conversions are large and getting larger. Meta’s $10B compute cluster in Richland Parish, Louisiana, sits on 2,250 acres of former soybean fields. Samsung’s new $17B fab occupies 1,200 acres outside Taylor, Texas, a town that once called itself the largest inland cotton market in the world. Micron’s $100B megafab is going up on 1,400 acres of former agricultural land and wetlands in Clay, New York. These are some of the largest private investments in American history, and among the most economically and strategically consequential bets we’re making as a country. You can’t help but notice the symbolism of it all: each is being built on rural land that was growing something one or two generations ago.
Datacenter developers, who already need some PR help, have seen local opposition to these projects emerge as a real planning risk, with farming families showing up at county meetings to argue that once the land converts, it will never come back.
Nobody should pretend this is irrational. A fab generates more economic value per acre than any soybean field ever will, the jobs pay better, and the strategic logic of onshoring chips is sound. But the math that makes each individual conversion obvious is the same math that, in the aggregate, leaves you structurally short on food. The country is losing about 2,000 acres a day, with 18M more projected to convert by 2040.
The Flow of Capital
As Washington works to subsidize the farming, to the tune of $10–$15B in federal support each year, Wall Street is betting on the land underneath it leaving farming.
Nuveen Natural Capital, a subsidiary of TIAA, manages $13.1B in farmland across 3M acres globally and recently launched a REIT targeting $3B in new capital. Those holdings have appreciated far beyond what crop income would justify, because it follows the pattern of a conversion optionality play: buy well-located agricultural land at agricultural tax rates and wait for rezoning.
Nearly 95% of American farms are still family-run, but most are modest operations. The 6% of farms generating $1M+ in sales produce 78% of everything, up from 69% just five years ago. Farming has developed the power-law distribution of a winner-take-most industry, except the winners don’t get to set their own prices. The family farm persists in name, but the economics (and economies of scale) increasingly push it to operate like a corporation or exit.
And institutional investors have some strange bedfellows on their side of the orderbook. Foreign investors held an interest in nearly 46M acres as of 2023 – 3.6% of all privately held farmland – up 85% since 2010. Canada alone holds 15M acres. China, which cannot feed its population from its own soil, built COFCO International into a state-backed grain trader that does $38.5B a year and accumulated millions of acres globally. Saudi Arabia was pumping Arizona’s groundwater through Fondomonte, a state-linked operation growing alfalfa for export, until Arizona killed the leases in 2023. Those countries treat productive soil as something worth a sovereign premium, and something you want to physically control…
[The authors recount the history of “Agro-Doomerism” and consider the (largely technological) potential solutions to the conundrum: “This is a hard problem, but it is a solvable one, as shown by the long history of technological revolutions in agriculture. Today, a set of technologies that were each too expensive or immature a decade ago have converged to the point where the raw inputs for a farm, ex land, can get radically cheaper, all at once.” They enumerate some of those potential saviors, and conclude…}
… The long arc of agro-doomerism and technological revolutions say there’s reasons for optimism. Many times before, the “math” said we’d run out of food; many times before, new science, systems, and processes came along that changed the denominator and proved the doomers wrong. Hoping and praying for AGI or another Norman Borlaug [the father of the Green Revolution] to save our bacon is not a strategy, but abundance-oriented technology stacks that don’t force a zero-sum choice between preservation and productivity might be. We should look at systems that help unfallow and uplift acres, making farmland competitive enough that we don’t pave over too much and one day realize we want the topsoil back – or our ag trade deficit erased.
The bet worth making is 1) to never bet against America, of course, and 2) that something similar will happen here: that productivity, not preservation alone, will close the gap. This is a generational opportunity, a category deeply in the national interest, and a sector wanting more capital, technology, engineers, and founders to show up. Those who get there first will be serving a gigantic market, and attacking a problem that Washington has acknowledged is existential but has no idea how to productively solve.
The supermarket of the world was built on cheap land and cheap water. Neither are cheap anymore, and both are being bid up by us – via population growth – as well as the industrial renaissance that we care so deeply about. But that doesn’t mean we can forget foundational inputs – literally – to our way of life…
Farming vs. fabs (and data centers)… American agriculture is caught in a collision between old and new economies: “The Supermarket of the World.”
* Alexander Pope
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As we contemplate cultivation, we might note that this, the third week in March, is National Agriculture Week.
“Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in this world for ugly mathematics”*…
Is mathematical beauty real? Or is it just a subjective, human ‘wow’ that is becoming redundant in an AI age? Rita Ahmadi explores…
It is a hot July day in London and I take the bus to Bloomsbury. I often come here for the British Library, the British Museum or the London Review Bookshop. More than a location, Bloomsbury feels like stepping into a work of art – maybe one of Virginia Woolf’s stories, or Duncan Grant’s paintings.
This time, I am here for mathematics: the Hardy Lecture at the London Mathematical Society (LMS), named after G H Hardy, a professor of mathematics at the University of Cambridge, a member of the Bloomsbury Group, and a president of the LMS. You may know him from the film The Man Who Knew Infinity (2015), in which he’s played by Jeremy Irons.
The 2025 lecture is by Emily Riehl of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, who is talking about a complex mathematical ‘language’ known as infinity category theory: could we teach it to computers so that they could understand it? If successful, computer programs could verify proofs and construct complex structures in this area.
A few seats to my left, I recognise Kevin Buzzard, wearing the multi-coloured, patterned trousers he’s known for among mathematicians. Based at Imperial College London, Buzzard is working on a computer proof assistant called Lean. His interest is personal: after long disputes with a colleague over a flawed proof, he lost trust, as he often puts it, in ‘human mathematicians’. His mission now is to convince all mathematicians to write their proofs in Lean. In the Q&A after one of his talks, he said of the debate between truth and beauty in mathematics: ‘I reject beauty, I want rigour’ – though his vibrant sense of fashion suggests otherwise.
Interest in an AI-driven approach to mathematics has been exponential, and many mathematicians have left traditional academic research to explore its potential. Recently, one group of distinguished mathematicians designed 10 active, research-level questions for AI to tackle. At the time of writing, various AI companies and researchers had claimed to find solutions, which were under evaluation by the community.
Sitting in the room in Bloomsbury, I stared at the Hardy plaque and wondered: would Hardy find proofs generated by AI beautiful? I wasn’t sure. He believed there should be a strong aesthetic judgment in mathematics, drawing parallels with poetry, and argued that beauty is the first test of good mathematics. He went as far as to say that there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics.
If asked, many mathematicians today still talk about the aesthetic appeal of one approach over another.
Yet we live in a different century to Hardy and his Bloomsbury peers, with different technologies and techniques, so perhaps we need a clearer definition of what mathematical beauty actually is. Over the history of mathematics, we can find examples where both rigour and the pursuit of beauty have shaped mathematics itself. So, if we’re completely replacing this with a computer-assisted quest for truth and rigour, we ought to know what we’d be abandoning, if anything. Is mathematical beauty like the beauty in literature and art – or is it something else?…
[Ahmadi explores the idea of “beauty,” generally and in mathematics; traces the rise of AI as a tool, and concludes…]
… my own definition of beauty in mathematics would be as follows:
“Asimplemathematical structure that surprises even the most experienced mathematicians and transfers a sense of vitality.”
But is an AI-assisted proof simple or surprising? How do we define vitality in a machine? On these questions, the jury is out. Myself, I am torn. Maybe models just need more training to match our creativity. But I also wonder whether our limbic system is required. Can we write proofs without emotional kicks? I am also unsure if perfectly efficient brains can come up with novel revolutionary ideas.
Ultimately, this debate is about more than aesthetics; it is closely tied to the development of AI-assisted mathematics. If AI models can produce novel mathematical structures, how should we direct them? Is it a search for beautiful or truthful structures? A question that possibly guides the years to come.
Some mathematicians say they prefer the ‘truth’ and only the ‘truth’. However, my recent discussions with mathematicians showed me that most immediately recognise, enjoy, and even wholeheartedly smile at a beautiful piece of maths. In fact, they spend their whole lives in search of one…
Fascinating: “The eye of the mathematician,” from @ritaahmadi.bsky.social in @aeon.co.
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As we embrace elegance, we might send garcefully-calculated birthday greetings to Eduard Heine; he was born on this date in 1821. A mathematician, he is best remembered for his introduction of the concept of uniform continuity, for the Mehler–Heine formula, and for the Heine–Cantor theorem… all of them, quite beautiful.
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