Academia

It’s a truism that every child should be wanted. While there are plenty of exceptions, the birth of an unwanted child often turns out badly for both mother and child (and father, if they are present). Sometimes, once a child is born, the fact that they were initially unwanted fades into irrelevance, and the bond between parents and child is as strong as with a planned birth. But this isn’t true on average: children born after their mother was denied an abortion (due to time limits) experience, on average, more poverty and poorer maternal bonding The extreme case is that of Ceausescu’s Romania, where abortions were banned, and the resuling unwanted children received miserable upbringings in orphanages.

The birth of an unwanted child can be an economic as well as a personal catastrophe. This is crucial to understand when we are assessing claims that “the economy” would benefit if families had more children than they currently choose.

Raising a child from birth to adulthood requires huge inputs of labour, time and money. In the context of a loving family, these parental inputs are more than offset by the joy of having children. Because this context is assumed, most estimates of the costs of raising children typically focus on the financial costs incurred by their parents. That’s been estimated at 13 per cent of a family’s disposable income on the first child and a further ten percentage points for each child after that. For median couples, that amounts to about $300,000 over 18 years for the first child. Subsequent children would be about $230,000 each.

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She told me she’d be ten minutes late, which was fine. But when it was nearly twenty minutes I messaged – where are you? Shall I walk towards you?

My daughter sent a picture of a bit of the state library she was in, people at desks etc. We’re here, is this where you are?

I am outside, I said. But I walked inside anyway. I compared the picture to what I saw. It kinda looked the same. But the floor in the picture was parquetry. Mine wasn’t. I started to wander to find the right room, calling my daughter on the phone as I did so.

Where are you?

Near the cafe. I walked to the cafe. No daughter there.

More descriptions followed. And then something clicked.

Wait, I said. Are you in MELBOURNE?

Hang on, she replied. Are you in SYDNEY?

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About thirty years ago, a Stanford educated philosopher, Paul Humphreys (1950-2022), realized that when connectionist models started to be developed within AI, that a set of questions and debates about Monte Carlo simulations might be salient.* In particular, the fact that connectionist networks might be very complex, inscrutable matrices need not be an objection to their epistemic usefulness. This inscrutability of AI is known as ‘the Black Box problem’ in recent scholarship. After all, some Monte Carlo simulations were in practice also inscrutable, but this didn’t prevent physicists from using them. (There is a nice, accessible discussion by Eric Winsberg of the significance of Humphreys’ work in the philosophy of simulation here.)

In the course of his many papers on related topics, Humphreys coined a term, ‘epistemic opacity’ or Humphreys opacity, that characterizes one of the key aspects of such inscrutability.  (See also here; or here). Such epistemic opacity — and now I paraphrase Humphreys — involves the inability to surveil the steps of a process from a known input to a known and desirable (or truthful, useful, beautiful, etc.) output in a timely manner to the decision-maker or responsible agent. I put it like that to make clear that this ignorance is pragmatic in character and could be modelled in terms of trade-offs between the quality or benefit of the output and the cost of surveillance. (Of course, it’s possible the opacity is not pragmatic, but ontological in character.) In addition, I use the ambiguous language of ‘surveillance’ because the process can be computational, social, or natural in character.

I make no claim that epistemic opacity is unique to AI. Often human minds are opaque to each other in this very sense. And in other cases such opacity is characteristic of our self-knowledge. Even if one wishes to keep one’s distance from Freud and his school, it is uncontroversial that there are lots of brain processes that are inaccessible to ourselves even though we can track the input and output to them.

In fact, epistemic opacity in Humphreys’ sense has been long recognized in the study of natural, psychological, and social processes. For example, for a very long time ‘sympathy’ was the term used to describe (a/the) cosmic and psychological mechanism(s) in which the process was invisible, even though the start and end of the process were visible. My interest below is not in this particular example, but I will suggest that the history of social awareness of the significance of epistemically opaque mechanisms may illuminate our discussion of the unfolding impact of AI.

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It has been like this for weeks and weeks. And not just in the UK, but across much of Western Europe.

Not long after Trump took office, I observed that the status of the US as the “indispensable nation” could not be sustained. A year later, the US, considered strictly as a state actor, is already dispensable and has, in fact, been largely dispensed with, by Europe in particular. The standing ovation given to Rubio in Munich recently (made almost unavoidable when his retinue jumped to their feet in Stalinesque fashion) should not obscure the fact that almost no one interpreted it as anything more than a politer restatement of Vance’s tirade a year ago. At that time, Europe needed to keep Trump on-side to prevent a sudden collapse in support for Ukraine and to avoid an all-out trade war.

None of that is particularly relevant now. Europe (include Ukraine) has held Russia to a standstill for a year despite the complete cessation of US military aid. The US is still relevant as an arms exporter and as a patchy supporter of sanctions against Russia, but that’s about it. Trump has turned his attention to his desire to rule the Americas from Nunavut to Tierra del Fuego, as well as returning to the forever wars of the Middle East.
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I’m not a Rawlsian, though I would admit to certain affinities, and, indeed, I’ve used the device associated with Rawls (though not invented by him) of the veil of ignorance in my own work. But when I disagree with Rawls, I hope I at least take the trouble to get him right. Sadly, one can’t say the same of the former Cambridge academic, political theorist and professional podcaster David Runciman. To be fair to him, Runciman’s podcasts are usually informative and entertaining and I’ve discovered things through them that I wouldn’t otherwise have come across. He also often has some really good guests. That’s usually enough to make up for the annoying tics that litter his output, most notably his habit of telling us that “X was rather like Y, but also the complete opposite of Y”, as a way of introducing some thinker or other.

My patience has been somewhat tested, though, by his latest series on What is Wrong with Political Philosophy?, a series of conversations with the King’s London political theorist and historian of political thought Paul Sagar on Aristotle, Adam Smith, Max Weber, Bernard Williams and Judith Shklar (I’ve not yet listened to the one dealing with the last two). Now I don’t have much complaint about the positive exposition of these figures by Runciman and Sagar, and that’s a useful public service. Nor do I much mind, even though I disagree, with their view that political philosophy ought to be about something like giving useful guidance to those engaged in politics. But this view, and its associated claim that politicians need to draw more on history and psychology to develop their practical wisdom is set up via an opposition to a caricature of normative political philosophy.
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Which jobs will be replaced by AI? Here is a modest proposal.* Replace higher management by AI. Not “management” in the sense of the teamleader who works alongside their colleagues with a bit more responsibility to make decisions and mediate conflicts, maybe not even the HR person who does performance evaluations, but the C suite.

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… to reader and commenter Doctor Memory. We noticed recently that old posts weren’t displaying properly, apparently because we’d used a markup language (Textile) that our current setup doesn’t support. We put out an appeal on Bluesky, and Dr M was one of several people who volunteered to clean up the database for us. After backing everything up and doing the necessary editing, he’s just advise me the job is done.

There are still more problems to work on, including the display of curly quotes in comments. And, if you notice anything else, please mention it in comments.

But for the moment, we just want to thank Doctor Memory for helping to keep this blog (nearly 25 years old now) in working condition.

Ever since it became evident that Trump was likely to be re-elected, I’ve been among the most pessimistic of commentators on the likely course of US politics (most recently here for example). I’ve also been nowhere near pessimistic enough. I assumed that Trump would follow the course of dictators like Putin and Orban, gradually eroding freedom and making his own power permanent. Instead, he’s gone most of the way inside a year.

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