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The confidential counselor in the 21st century

by trpliquidation
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The Confidence-Man in the 21st century

I recently read Herman Melville’s novel entitled “The Confidence-Man”. (At least I assumed it was a novel when I picked it up, though it often seemed more like a series of anecdotes. I’ll have to reread it again.) In the story, Melville portrays a series of con artists (or is it just one ) ?), posing as a doctor, philanthropist, pharmacist, philosopher, psychologist, investment advisor, etc.

One of Melville’s characters notes that it is virtually impossible for the economy to function without trust:

Trust is the indispensable basis of all types of business transactions. Without this, trade between man and man, as between country and country, would diminish like a watch and come to a standstill.

Unfortunately, evolution gives an advantage to those who take advantage of others. Fortunately, an equilibrium is reached where only a small portion of the population consists of sociopaths. Here’s Melville:

“Pray, which do you think are the most: scoundrels or fools?”

“Having met few or none of them, I hardly think I am qualified to answer.”

‘I will answer for you. Fools are the most.”

“What makes you think that?”

“For the same reason I think oats are numerically more numerous than horses. Don’t scoundrels eat fools as horses eat oats?’

One character claims that only machines can be trusted:

‘I’m on my way now to have some kind of machine made that can do my job. Machines for me. My cider mill, does it ever steal my cider? My mower, does it ever lie in bed in the morning? My corn husk, does that ever cause me insolence? No: Cider mill, reaper, corn husker – they are all faithfully going about their business. Also disinterested; no management, no wages; yet they do good all their lives; wonderful examples that virtue is its own reward – the only practical Christians I know.”

“Oh dear, dear, dear, dear!”

And he anticipates the day when machines will replace all workers:

“Hence these thousand new inventions – carding machines, horseshoe machines, tunnel boring machines, harvesting machines, apple peeling machines, boot blackening machines, sewing machines, shearing machines, common machines, dumb machines. , and the only-lord-knows-what machines; all of which herald the age when that unruly animal, the working or serving man, will be a buried, a bygone, an obsolete fossil.”

Melville wrote this in 1857, relatively early in the new industrial economy. In some ways, the issue of “trust” is probably much more central to today’s economy than it was in the economy of the 1850s, when most Americans were farmers and lived in small villages where people knew each other. The following is from a 2021 paper psychopathology:

In this direction, it has been proposed that it might be possible to find higher levels of psychopathic traits in certain professions (e.g. entrepreneurs, managers, politicians, investors, salespeople, surgeons, lawyers, telemarketing workers). The reason behind this could be that it is precisely these qualities that can stimulate the tasks involved in those professions or professions and even promote success in them (Haas, 2003b; Dutton, 2012; Babiak and Hare, 2019; Fritzon et al., 2020). . . .

In this regard Dutton (2012)after applying the Levenson Self-Report Psychopathy Scale (LSRP; Levenson et al., 1995) surveyed 5,400 people online and asked about their occupations, found that in the UK the 10 occupations with the highest levels of psychopathic traits were company CEOs, lawyers, radio or television characters, salespeople, surgeons, journalists, priests and police officers were, chefs and civil servants.

There is a lot of debate about what AI will or will not be able to do in the future. I see less discussion about how AI will tackle the problem to trust. Who would you trust more: a human selling herbal medicine, or an AI giving advice on herbal medicine? A human real estate agent or an AI that provides information about houses for sale? A human investment advisor or an AI that provides investment advice?

If Melville is right, then the most important thing AIs can do for them is that people trust machines more than other people. Consider how Uber largely solved the problem of taxi regulation. Perhaps AIs will solve the principal-agent problem.

P.S. This is a link based on Melville’s novel. Chapter 7 offers a fun look at effective altruism (especially the section from page 53 to page 58).

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