What ChatGPT told me about Trump’s tariffs… – The Milpitas Beat
I was talking to my good friend ChatGPT when I decided to ask it about Trump’s tariffs…
It was resolute in its position that the tariffs are a bad idea. They’ll drive up prices. They’ll press consumer spending. They’ll spur international retaliation. They’ll potentially ignite a global recession.
But I figured the chatbot was just being a gladhandler (since it is one) and servicing my own biases (since it does that). I’d never discussed politics with it before, but then again it knows all kinds of things about me, and can very easily, in a microsecond, read my posts and my op-eds, so it can easily deduce where I stand.
And I wanted, despite myself, to know if there was “another side” — a reason why the tariffs are a good idea, possessed of some vague merit, even if unpopular or lacking in intellectual or institutional support. And in wishing for this alternative perspective, I kind of sadly sensed that the whole human ritual of seeking “another side,” however seemingly natural, has become somehow played out or corrupted in the social media age, where there’s so many voices chattering all at once that perhaps we’re all too eager to divide everything into simplistic, comprehensible binaries. In other words, it seems like we’re about a week and a half away from a large segment of the population beginning to willfully smash itself in the face with hammers, a phenomenon which, despite how shocking it was, would inevitably fuel a widespread “debate” over whether or not people should in fact smash themselves in the face with hammers, with surprisingly high numbers of our friends and neighbors nodding and saying that they’re open to it.
Regardless, I didn’t want AI, in the form of ChatGPT, which is fundamentally if not entirely constructed of language, issuing me some precooked partisan take. So I asked it if it was just servicing my biases. It said no. Then I asked it if it could furnish a rational argument in favor of the tariffs.
It said it could not.
And then I got to thinking about power, and where it’s concentrated, and how hard it is to battle against when one doesn’t have it, and how powerful AI is, and how powerful Trump is, and how the two topics are like a twin collective obsession, leading our species to walk around going, “But Trump…But…but…AI. But, also — Trump! And what about AI?!”
Marveling at power. Unable to manage it. Waiting on its next move. Fearing the worst. Hoping (somehow) for the best.
What is this time we’re living in? What is this level of the game? Trump and AI. AI and Trump. They have nothing in common save for sheer, unbridled momentum, and the fact that we can’t stop thinking and talking about them. Beyond that:
One is all brain and no personality.
The other is all personality and no brain.
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