Lawless

Quid ex Machina, Preamble for Act II Scene 3. Theme song by The Bootleggers and Nick Cave

New essay of the series Quid ex Machina, about the under-explored and Unseen impact of AI on humans and our societies. See here for the rest of the series.

Today’s theme song is the sound track of the movie Lawless by The Bootleggers and Nick Cave.

---

Congratulations to all U.S. taxpayers, on surviving April 18^th 2023 the Tax Day! And Canadians can also breathe with some relief, while Canada Revenue Agency employees are on strike.

In other news: with this preamble, we are riding into the 2^nd half of the series Quid ex Machina, and at this point you already know: when I start talking about taxes, the essay is not going to end up being only about taxes.

Anyhow, here’s my 100^th dentist opinion: I like doing my taxes. Hunting for qualified deductions? Sign me up. Excel waterfall? So cool! Seeing the line 7431 show a refund? My wallet sings an Ode to Joy! It is an oddly satisfying trip every April: I maneuvered my way out of this maze of administrative procedures, what an accomplishment!

Administrative procedures. These very words inspire dread, cringe, and conjure a nightmare of triviality – rightfully so. They are the nitty-gritty, the nuts-and-bolts of all laws; they seep through the pores of paperwork and drip on us like sweat. They are petty and insignificant. They are nothing like their glam cousins — the constitutions, the commandments, the high laws — that are engraved into granite tablets and worshiped by the people.

But here’s a strange phenomenon: in our lives, these petty administrative procedures mess with us the most. They make or break our days, even lives. The rule books at our favorite DMV office probably give us more headache than all of interstate commerce laws combined. And when was the last time we called up those suited-up ex-lawyers on Capitol Hill or National Assembly or Provincial Senate to plea or complain? A lot more often, it’s our local petty bureaucrats whom we had to obey, convince, or wrestle.

I’m not denying the importance of the high laws. I am saying that, laws come from many places, not just the top of a mountain or parliamentary seats. Many people from ranks high and low act as law-givers, and make up grand and trivial laws all the time. These law-givers may be highly conspicuous or entirely invisible to us, but the laws they make — especially the trivial ones — dominate our lives, no matter we like it or not.

The legendary law-giver, Lycurgus of Sparta, as imagined by Jean-Jacques Le Barbier, 1862. Public domain.

Those invisible law-givers intrigue me the most. In history, we’ve had lots of them. More recently, I observed the rapid rise of a new class of invisible law-givers, carried by the tidal wave of software and AI. No, I’m not talking about God-mode GPT or that robot with a paper-clip-production fetish. Those law-givers are ordinary humans just like us, only that they wield considerably more power, yet without being aware of it most of the time.

This is the hardest intro section I’ve ever written, but I think I finally found a way to provoke and challenge, without being divisive in the new major essay — that’s what we will start diving into next week.

---

Thank you for reading Earthly Fortunes! Like it? Please share it! 😄 Subscribe for more earthly fortunes: time, geography, music, medieval farming, and the Unseen.

I’d love to hear your thoughts! Comment below, DM me on Twitter or Instagram, or reply to the email! I read everything you send me 😄