Some remarks on goals

Various commenters are remarking that the Republican handling of Puerto Rico will surely cost them -- be an own goal -- when hundreds of thousands of them wind up living in Florida and voting Democrat.

I cannot imagine why anyone  thinks large numbers of people will be allowed to leave the island.  It's very easy to take longer insisting on proof of citizenship from someone who has lost all their possessions than it takes someone to starve to death[1]; it's even easier to insist on port control and to sharply limit who gets to leave because the facilities are absolutely required for the relief effort.  I'd expect both.

The Neocon -- and do remember that's "Neo-Confederate" as easily as "Neo-Conservative" -- response to the demographic shift has been to disenfranchise (gerrymander, onerous laws, shut polling places, outright lie about when the vote is) but also to deport and to kill; to suppress the vote through terror.  These are people who vehemently disagree with the entirety of the Reconstruction Amendments, the 19th amendment, and the 16th.  They're not going to allow non-whites to vote if they can possibly help it, and this is a case where they can easily help it.

[1] The EMT rule of three; three minutes without air, three hours with no clothes, three days with no water, three weeks with no food.  Against the water and the probable cholera and the food, we're at week one.  There's absolutely no sign of the size of logistical operation required to get the required food delivered; another week of stalling and that's about it.

It's important to remember what kind of nonsense AI is

There's a lot of productive work going on with AI.  Whether or not it's enough to justify the cash being shovelled at the problem in economic terms is dubious, but let's stop for a moment.

AI as implemented has the same signal-processing, dendritic, layers-of-habit mechanisms brains do; it won't think better and it may well not think faster in any sort of general case.  (It will handle volume.)  It is absolutely heir to the precise same habitual delusions our brains get into in terms of expecting things to be like what we've already experienced because that's the limit of our imagination of the world.

So it's not actually good for solving problems.  You have to very carefully define the problem you want solved, and a whole lot of human effort has to go into detecting whether or not that's what you've created your monomaniacal savant to accomplish.  This is (relatively) easy with chess; it's pretty hopeless with anything less formalized.  (Inventing a statistical measure of your unconscious expectations is exceeding difficult.)

So why all that cash?

AI supports the delusion of useful control.

There's all sorts of essential control mechanisms in terms of feedback, but the delusion of control is that people in large numbers can be compelled to construct their desires to serve the goals of a small number of exalted persons.  This breaks down at the exalted persons; they can't do it.  AI gives them another reasons to believe they should keep trying.

(It's rather the same with politicians viewing democratic processes as a problem; democracy is a solvent for control.  Given the sharp dichotomy between success and control -- one, or the other, never both, and often neither -- solvents for control are good things.)

Let's take selection seriously

Things have to get copies of themselves into the future to persist.

So how do harmful things persist?

"People are idiots" lacks explanatory power; individuals are frequently idiots, large groups of people over generational time are not.

White supremacy -- the loot-apportioning system for loot that ran out a century ago -- and hierarchical racism persist even when the people doing the persisting are paying a high economic cost to do it.  This makes absolutely no economic sense, and people have been saying so for a very long time with increasingly strong empirical support.  Doesn't make a dent.

Then two things collided in my head.  One is that the moral-supremacy faction of rationalists makes a big deal about being "less wrong".  This is, well, silly; everybody is constantly wrong, often unaware.  The utility of rationalism isn't that it makes you less wrong, it that it gives you a systemic approach to apply to your circumstances.  You might be able to figure out why you are wrong.  Why the strong emphasis on not being wrong?

Two is that the Prosperity Gospel is directly descended from the assertion that chattel slavery was a positive good and a Christian duty.  I mean, it's also a scam, but an effective, lasting scam has to tap into things people would prefer were factual.  What are people getting out of the idea that they deserve to be rich?  It's not making them rich.

And here we get to something I've been wrong about; I have thought of authoritarian structures as supporting basic primate status, so that the higher in the structure you are, the closer you are to being able to hit who you want.  But it's not; that's a special case of whatever I want is correct.  Language means the contrapositive of whatever I want is correct becomes I never have to admit error.

Authority doesn't derive from never admitting you're wrong; never admitting you're wrong signals your authority.  The thing all these diverse scams of former glories are selling (besides the impunity to assault or kill those people in fulfilment of primate status desires) is for there to be a class of people to whom you never have to admit you're wrong.  And inside the narrative habit, never having to admit you're wrong means you have authority; you have significance, and you matter.

Actively terrible insecurity management, in that it swaps the mutable psychological for the immutable material?  Absolutely.  But equally obviously a hard habit to break, and where the online troll and the anti-Clinton misogynist running a newspaper alike get their maniacal insistence on admit you are bad.  If you admit you are bad, you are admitting error, and you lose your right to authority.  Facts aren't even secondary to this process; facts are near enough irrelevant.  (The utility of confession and the very strong feelings about it during the Reformation and Counter-reformation also become obvious.  As does the utter loathing of methodological naturalism, which asserts there is no utility in authority.)

So one fix is obviously "different stories, with different constructions of legitimacy"; maybe the exercise of social power doesn't properly derive from authoritas.  A stopgap is having the structures of authority assert that whatever you want isn't correct, but that's got failure modes.

A quick enough fix?  Much trickier.