By Andy Valencia
I was writing an article about some undeveloped parcels of Vashon land that are on the market. In case you don’t know, building on Vashon has a history of being expensive and fraught with regulatory delays and other surprises. People might be thinking about building, and an article on the subject could be helpful. Perhaps things have improved in recent years?
I knew there had been recent outreach from the county, seeking to hear what would-be developers found most challenging. This is where my article went sideways. Who gathered this information? Where did it go?
The King County Council folk I asked hadn’t heard of it. Neither duck.com, nor startpage.com, nor even the paid search engine kagi.com did any better. In a previous article, I wondered if Big Tech was dumbing down their search engines to force AI usage. Here was a perfect test of my theory:
"Did the King County Council ever reach out to developers, seeking feedback on challenges in permitting?"
"Yes, the King County Council has sought feedback from developers on permitting challenges. In December 2024, the Council approved legislation to streamline the permitting process, reducing review times from 119 days to 65 days, sponsored by Councilmember Sarah Perry. This followed collaboration with the Department of Local Services, indicating engagement with stakeholders, including developers, to address long-standing permitting concerns. Additionally, the Permitting Division has a proposed development code open for public comment until July 9, 2025, which includes input from developers and other stakeholders."Notice that it gave me not just an answer, but enough context to verify its accuracy. It included URLs, which I didn’t bother pasting here. One URL was expired, but archive.org resurrected the content. This AI-generated answer is factual.
Also notice how, without guidance, it made the connection between legislation, collaboration, and stakeholders. It connected the council (legislative branch) with the permitting folks (executive branch). It found the most recent relevant activity, including one proposal currently in development. It winnowed it to just things in our county.
AI has a long history of fraud, including 1700’s “Mechanical Turk,” which had a chess-playing human hidden inside the “machine.” But there is no reasonable collection of humans who could have been used to generate this answer, much less in the 10 seconds Grok took. We are living with things that can create answers based on not just information, but meaningful associations. The result is a clear, pithy, well-formed paragraph with literate sentences. And it’s accurate.
Is this an article about Andy becoming an “AI believer?”
When I visit family, many of these households have a TV on all the time. Our house never has media on, except while we’re sitting and watching a movie. I’m distanced from what passes for “normal” in mainstream media, and I find myself staggered when, lacking the incremental desensitization, I’m expected to participate in human conversation while a howl of attention-grabbing madness spews “modern programming.”
And so, never having used AI, I can look at it with no previous experience coloring my perceptions. I asked it a difficult question, and it answered with superhuman competence. I, personally, hope to never use AI again. But I’m an outlying data point. For purposes of information, nobody needs to talk to anybody else ever again. Just ask your AI buddy.
This has consequences.
We can expect that people will be less and less interested in knowing things. If nobody asks you anything, and you never get answers when you ask your fellow human – what’s the point? I predict AI’s presence will hollow out the notion of humans being a source of information.
In fact, I now realize that this is already happening. A corollary is that people will seek to not be reachable, and will generally deflect e-mailed questions rather than answer them. Again, something that is already all around us.
We can look a little further out and see the impact on our economy. We were all supposed to become “information workers” when we off-shored our industry. The mother of all information workers has now arrived, and the job pool of human information workers will bifurcate. In things like government, there will still be employment – but of people who will avoid you until you give up and ask AI. A sinecure.
In private industry, the number of employees will shrink in wave after wave. After being gaslit for years, the news is finally announcing the withering of jobs for younger generations. Just four years ago, Joe Biden told pipeline workers to learn how to program – dead advice with the advent of AI’s “vibe coding.” What happens to a culture when it tells almost all of its military-age youth that they’re not needed?
That would be a policy question. There is no reason to assume that the AI which can assemble and correlate information will be good at high-level problem solving – at forming wise, humane policy. Perhaps you think we could still look to humans for societal policy, which is then handed to AI for implementation?
The best policy-makers start with a massive body of knowledge, assembled as they worked their way up through successively more important jobs. Knowledge is the basis of understanding, which is then used by one’s intelligence to make wise decisions. Without knowledge, there’s no understanding, and nothing for intelligence to apply. The chain is broken.
Running with my hypothesis that government jobs would still exist, we’d expect to still see people with credentials and grand titles. With neither knowledge nor understanding nor wisdom, they would seek to avoid responsibility. When forced to make decisions, they would usually make poor ones, with disastrous consequences. All signs are that this is already happening. It makes me wonder, how long has AI been available within the government?
What I believe about AI is that we’re at a point where it’s hurting people. A libertarian by default, I have no problem with fentanyl laws, nor with sexual discrimination and harassment laws. When the powerful are in the process of laying waste to the lives of vast numbers of people, it’s time for hard questions to be asked, and hard answers to be enforced. Nobody’s liberties entitle them to topple the civil order, and that really might be what’s unfolding.
