Robotics/AI

IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO OVERSTATE DEFLATIONARY PRESSURES:

Coupert: smart shopping extensions are changing the way people save money online (Jon Stojan, November 3, 2025, Digital Journal)

The core advantage is automation. Instead of copying and pasting codes from coupon sites, smart tools like Coupert apply discounts instantly. Cashback rewards are layered in, and price history helps users identify better deals.

Honey: Applies automatic coupons but lacks integrated cashback features.
Rakuten: Provides strong cashback rates but requires manual activation and no coupon testing.
Capital One Shopping: Useful for price tracking, weaker in coupon coverage.
Ibotta: Well-known in groceries, but its receipt-based model is less efficient for online shopping.
RetailMeNot: Popular coupon site, but prone to expired and unverified codes.


Coupert integrates all of these features. Users save an average of $180.12 annually on coupons, $86.92 through cashback, and $333.74 via price tracking.

INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREE:


The end of the rip-off economy: From finance and medicine to used cars, artificial intelligence is radically improving market efficiency (The Econmist, 10/27/25)

IF YOU KNOW how to use artificial intelligence, it can save you a lot of time and money. Leasing a new car? Be sure to upload a photograph of the contract to ChatGPT first. Need help with a leaky tap? AI often understands the issue—and at a lower cost than a handyman. Parents with a fussy baby can now use chatbots to answer questions in seconds, rather than waiting for a doctor’s appointment. Giving Claude a PDF of a wine list is a great way to find the best-value bottles.

These examples add up to something bigger. As AI goes mainstream, it will remove one of the most enduring distortions in modern capitalism: the information advantages that sellers, service providers and intermediaries enjoy over consumers. When everyone has a genius in their pocket, they will be less vulnerable to mis-selling—benefiting them and improving overall economic efficiency. The “rip-off economy”, in which firms profit from opacity, confusion or inertia, is meeting its match.

Information advantages have existed for as long as markets themselves. In medieval England grocers used fake scales to dupe customers; pub landlords put salt in beer to make patrons thirstier. Such squalid practices are not just annoying. In a paper published in 1970, George Akerlof, a Nobel-prizewinning economist, discussed the market for used cars. It is hard for a buyer to know if such a car works properly or is a “lemon” with hidden problems. Buyers thus assume the worst. As a result, honest brokers, worried about being suspected of exploitative behaviour, stay away. The quality of service declines. Fewer consumers fulfil their needs.

The internet has made it harder to screw over customers. With Carfax and other providers of vehicle data, customers can check the history of a vehicle, overcoming some of the problems identified by Mr Akerlof. Taxi drivers now struggle to take people on circuitous but profitable routes, since apps such as Lyft and Uber tell them exactly where to go. Tripadvisor, a reviews website, sends tourists to restaurants that will provide a decent meal. In the early 2000s there were more than 20 branches of Angus and Aberdeen Steak Houses, a notorious tourist trap, in London. Today there are four, and the ones that remain are better than before.

Efficiency is deflationary.

HOLD THE SABOTS!:

AI Pessimism Fades as Reality Takes Hold (Brent Orrell, 10/30/25, AEIdeas)

In a large-scale Harvard Business School survey of 2,357 adults evaluating AI usage in 940 occupations, they found that reactions depend on how AI’s role is described. When AI was presented as a tool that augments rather than replaces human labor, a majority of Americans supported its use in 94 percent of occupations. Even when AI was described as fully automating core job tasks, respondents favored its use in 58 percent of occupations if it could outperform humans at a lower cost.

The key is specificity. When AI’s potential benefits are explained concretely—faster diagnoses, fewer repetitive tasks and injuries, better scheduling—attitudes shift from fear to interest. In the abstract, AI feels threatening; in context, it often looks like a gift.

IT’LL NEVER FLY, ORVILLE:

Q&A: How speciality retailers are winning the holiday season with agility and AI (yDr. Tim Sandle, October 28, 2025, Digital Journal)

Stern: Independent retailers plan for the holidays with precision, not prediction. They don’t have the purchasing power or storage space typically needed to pre-purchase on a large scale before the holidays. Their budgets are tighter, which forces smarter buying: every order has to earn its place on the shelf, and business owners have to be flexible to find the right product at the right price.

What’s changed in the past few years is how technology makes that kind of precision possible. AI tools can now surface insights that used to take hours of manual tracking: showing which products are trending, how pricing shifts might affect demand, or when to reorder based on sell-through velocity. For a specialty retailer, that kind of intelligence helps them compete with enterprise retailers that have dedicated analytics teams. This technology gives small retailers the same visibility into market trends and customer behavior that big chains have, but with the speed and context that fits how they actually operate.

ONE APOCALYPSE AFTER ANOTHER:

dive bar ai slop! decline of the novel! david copperfield! (Tara Isabella Burton, Aug 29, 2025, The Lost Word)

Here’s what I’ve been wrestling with. Whenever I want to smash a subway screen displaying advertisements for full-body deodorant, I remember that the invention of writing, the invention of the printing press, the invention of any technology that allows for the faster dissemination of information from one person’s brain to another, must also have felt apocalyptic. How can I defend myself as a novelist, as any kind of writer – how can I understand the purpose of what I love – while simultaneously decrying the creative potential of a different epoch-shift. How can I devote my life to one form of imaginative technology while worrying that another will erode our fundamental humanness?

If humanness even can be eroded. Even the most apocalyptic concerns about technology seem to me predicated that there are elements of our fundamental humanness that technology can take away from us, that there is a point beyond which the beings that we become no longer count as meaningfully human in the same way, and thus that we need a new theological anthropology to account for it. At which technological horizon does history end and the eschaton begin?

This means something for me as a Christian, too. My entire theological worldview, after all, is predicated on this idea that the word made flesh is a foundationally true way of understanding God’s existence in the world. The incarnate Christ is also a paradigm of the relationship between human language – and with it, human technological expansion of our imaginations – and the reality it either represents, or alters. We are, after all, in the imago dei, and that seems to mean something about our creative capacities. To say anything about God, from a Christian perspective, is also to say something about human language and, yes, technology. And if we grant that we are on the cusp of, if we have not already surpassed, an era-defining shift (be it the Internet, more broadly; smartphones more specifically; generative AI more specifically), we do, I think, need to ask ourselves what all this means vis a vis the wider cosmic story.

IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO OVERSTATE DEFLATIONARY PRESSURES:

AI Is Radically Democratizing Legal Services (Jack Nicastro and Samuel Crombie, 8/05/25, Fusion)


Artificial intelligence (AI) promises to leave no corner of American society unaltered, and the legal system is no exception. Dr. Bateman believes AI will birth an inequitable and disorderly justice system. On the contrary, we believe AI is positioned to be an ultimate equalizer of justice.

AI is cheap and fast intelligence; intelligence facilitates truth-seeking, and it is truth-seeking that is the primary function of our courts. Bateman fears that AI adoption will be an ultimatum for the rule of law, or an epistemic weapon of mass destruction. We believe it is functionally identical to previous technologies adopted by courts to improve the truth-seeking process.

AI is a broad term for a broad set of technologies. U.S. courts are similarly decentralized in structure and diverse in function. Through his piece, Bateman conflates distinct parts of the justice system (impact statements, evidence rules, representation) and distinct AI technologies (chatbots, deepfakes, audio cloning) with one another. In our response, we clarify the different forms of courtroom AI and consider the unique operating procedures and rules of different parts of the legal system.

In explaining how AI could be used and in what contexts, we challenge his assertions that it will weaken the foundations of our justice system. Bateman envisages a world where legal criterion and judicial precedent evaporates, while agents of the court cease to operate rationally. Through the examples he offers, Bateman fundamentally misinterprets the court’s present frustrations, e.g., a victim impact statement made with prejudice, an unlicensed attorney practicing law, the introduction of falsified evidence, &c., as essential to AI. They are not. 

We confront his conclusion that AI is outpacing prudence and reach the conclusion that it is luddism that is imprudent. AI is nothing more than a tool. An auditable, increasingly interpretable, unprecedentedly powerful tool for ascertaining and evaluating the truth. Judges, juries, public defenders, court clerks, self-representing defendants, expert witnesses, and mediators all stand to benefit from AI. 

EXCEPT THAT GAMES HAVE RULES AND WE KNOW THE RULE OF THIS GAME…:

The God that Glitched: Matthew Gasda on why the simulation theory is the religion of our time. (Matthew Gasda, Jun 06, 2025, Wisdom of Crowds)

[T]his is where I think critical engagement with ST really gets interesting. I hypothesize that SA has been disseminated as ST because we can no longer imagine a God in our own image, and have instead reworked the idea of God into a computer. Ontologically, Bostrom’s depiction of Godlike simulators (and Godlike simulators simulating Godlike simulators … simulators nested inside of simulators) bears so much resemblance to religion that it’s functionally indistinguishable from religion. It is basically an ultra-reductionist, ultra-scientistic vision of how God or Gods or higher or lower levels of reality could exist (like in Buddhism). In pragmatic terms, I’m not really sure what the point of thinking about SA is. The only point in engaging with either SA or ST is that you want to: the theory allows you to experience less experiential friction; you don’t have to worry so much; you don’t have to try to puzzle out why you’re on earth anymore, or what it’s all for. You aren’t really here.

Stated thusly, simulation theory and God ultimately are versions of the same thesis with different names and points of emphasis; simulation theory is a blend of monotheism and Buddhism without any duties, demands, or standard practices. Moreover, the trope of simulation theory better fits our current understanding of ourselves, and the direction of our technological civilization; it projects an astonishingly anthropomorphic idea of the divine: simulational theory is a narcissistic new projection of a God who resembles what we’ve become. We live more and more on and through screens; so God must too.

…”Love one another.”

CAIN WINS:

The Nostalgia for Dark Satanic Mills (Aidan Grogan, 5/26/25, Law & Liberty)

The dark, satanic mills were engines of economic progress, but wistful longing for manual labor in factories overlooks how these economic conditions undermined traditional social structures and uprooted men and women from an environment conducive to child-rearing. For whatever growing pains the American heartland must suffer during the transition from manufacturing to services, the emergent “knowledge economy” offers tremendous opportunities to restore the bonds of kith and kin stifled by the industrial and sexual revolutions.

By emphasizing automation, education, and expanded telework, the industrial economy may at last complete a full circle and empower men and women to remain where they are—in the home, the nucleus of pre-industrial economic life. The twenty-first century’s digital economy may ironically enable a true “return to tradition” that conservatives, in particular, should welcome.

But such an epochal transformation necessitates the cultivation of a new post-populist elite—one with a more refined, conservative outlook, a renewed embrace of free markets, and a willingness to set and maintain a high moral standard.

BEAUTY IS OBJECTIVE/SUBJECTIVE IS UGLY:

AI of the beholder: Instead of destroying the arts, artificial intelligence will redeem them (Rina Furano, 11 May, 2025, The Critic)

This hysteria, while common, is by no means universal; some find this social flurry amusing, even exhilarating. Among musical conservatives and the younger generation of composers — groups with considerable overlap — hope is stirring. For decades, many have fruitlessly lamented the state of the classical music business in Europe: politically entrenched institutions, forced adhesion to atonality as the only accepted language of contemporary composition, cronyism, promotion of mediocre-but-concordant talent, systemic suppression of dissent and innovation. It seemed as if no human could ever change this; now it appears that technology will.

To those with traditional leanings, it is sweetly paradoxical that the modern anguish is most palpable in those who, for years, pretended to be the avant-garde: composers who forwent their own humanity by producing serial, aleatoric or fully electronic music. They are now the first in line to be automated away — by an artificial consciousness much more proficient in the creation of such soundscapes than they could ever hope to become. But they are not the only ones for the chop: All composers, living or dead, are up for a reckoning, and many will likely be rationalised away. Contrary to the ubiquitous doomsday predictions, this is good news — especially for aesthetic conservatives.

THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS QUALITY:

Want to go viral? Here are 8 tips from the creator of ‘BBL Drizzy’ (Thomas Macaulay, May 9, 2025, The Next Web)

The song emerged during the feud between Kendrick Lamar and Drake. As the rappers traded disses, a New York-based comedian named Willonius Hatcher — aka King Willonious — brought his own track to the beef.

Inspired by a dubious claim that Drake had a Brazilian butt lift, “BBL Drizzy” blended AI, comedy, pop culture, and music. The song swiftly went viral. It was later sampled in a beat by star producer Metro Boomin, which also went viral, and got rapped over by Drake himself.

“BBL Drizzy” became a cultural touchstone. The Washington Post called it “a real breakthrough for AI art,” while Wired described it as “the beginning of the future of AI music.” Time magazine named Willionius one of the 100 most influential people in AI.