The BIS gets it wrong on AI/LLM and feminism & reproduction

The BIS has a Bulletin out on the usefulness of AI and large language models. They’re not terribly impressed.

When posed with a logical puzzle that demands reasoning about the knowledge of others and about counterfactuals, large language models (LLMs) display a distinctive and revealing pattern of failure. 

The LLM performs flawlessly when presented with the original wording of the puzzle available on the internet but performs poorly when incidental details are changed, suggestive of a lack of true understanding of the underlying logic. 

Our findings do not detract from the considerable progress in central bank applications of machine learning to data management, macro analysis and regulation/supervision. They do, however, suggest that caution should be exercised in deploying LLMs in contexts that demand rigorous reasoning in economic analysis.

I am sure the BIS is right that the present generation of LLM does poorly in the kind of logic brain twisters they expose GPT 4.0 to in their test. That said, to judge the significance of AI and LLM—and in particular ChatGPT 4.0—by its ability to avoid being tricked into logical mistakes completely misses the point of what GPT 4.0 brings to the table. To summarise, Open AI’s GPT 4.0 allows for users to train their own GPTs—think of this as a kind of app—with their own information, which can be text, data, images or a combination of the three. GPT 4.0 can interact with and analyse user-generated data and content. GPT 4.0 can via its direct access to the internet and the ability run user-generated API actions produce GPTs that allow users to interact with live data and information in an LLM user-face context.

I think the combination of these three capabilities, and the inevitable improvement of them over time, is profound. Once these capabilities scale sufficiently—this is to say, once they’re imbued with enough computing power to run seamlessly and without interruption—a new generation of virtual assistants will emerge, greatly improving productivity in a whole hosts of industries and sectors. For an example of how to leverage the ability of GPT 4.0 to analyse user-generated data in economics and finance, take a look at the three finance and economics GPTs that I have trained, and which I am still training.

The natural birth movement

The demographic cultural wars are hotting up. Specifically, the debate between those who see falling birth rates as a problem, and those who believe falling fertility to be a natural—even desirable—outcome of modernity is raging. I will have something more in depth to say about this debate in due course, but in the meantime, a recent article from the Nation pitting the natural birth movement against a more modern feminist position on reproduction is a good example of some of the conflicting discourses this debate kicks up. The article’s author, Moira Donegan, reviews a number of new contributions on the role of births and reproduction in society, starting with Allison Yarrow's book "Birth Control: The Insidious Power of Men Over Motherhood," which aims to address misconceptions about childbirth and critiques the medicalization of birth. Yarrow's work is a manifesto for natural childbirth, and in taking on this mantle, it is also a proponent for elevating the institution of childbirth, and women’s role in it. By extension, it is a critique of feminist forces that attempt to re-define women’s roles in modern society broader than as mothers and as vessels for the reproduction of society as a whole, however important this role is, in practice as well as in a cultural sense.

Moira’s article outlines the almost intractable dichotomies that the modern debate on fertility and reproduction can get caught in, on this occasion from a feminist perspective. The article lays bare the clash between feminist positions emphasizing motherhood's role and those advocating for women's freedom to choose. Both are true, both are relevant but what is their relative importance?

The natural childbirth movement, influenced by figures like Grantly Dick-Read and Ina May Gaskin, see childbirth as a natural and powerful moment, a fulfilment of women's biological destiny, a perspective that can border on romanticizing motherhood. A key issue with this perspective, treated in detail by Moira, is that it suggests how childbirth pain is largely psychosomatic or a result of medical interventions. This is a position which seem offensively naive and out of touch with medical and lived reality of women today. A more fundamental question raised by the romantication of motherhood, however, is the clash between such sentiment and women’s desire and opportunity for self-fulfilment and economic independence, both of which invariably clash with the desire to be mothers and reproduction in a modern capitalist society.

Moira’s final two paragraphs are worth contemplating in their totality;

Women are not “designed” objects; they are not mere vessels for the reproduction of humanity or animals marching toward their natural destiny. They are people—thinking, feeling, and intelligent human beings, even while they give birth. The natural childbirth movement is responding to a real concern: the justified distrust of the medical establishment by women and their reasonable discomfort with many of the ways that labor and delivery are—and historically have been—mismanaged and misunderstood. But practitioners like Dick-Read and Gaskin do not alleviate the suffering of women in labor. They simply deny it, burying it under layers of romanticizing naturalization, like so many paisley scarves.

None of this really helps the people it intends to help; it only adds yet another unreasonable expectation that women will fail to live up to. It is Yarrow’s great virtue that she feels immense loyalty to women in labor. She has been as vulnerable as they are—scared and uncertain, navigating disrespect from doctors and the morass of postpartum life; her empathy for them, her desire to protect them, is searingly evident on the page. She wants to save laboring mothers, to show them a better way. But the natural childbirth movement, with its embrace of regressive myths about women and its insistence on the nonreality of their pain, is not the better way Yarrow seeks. Women—mothers—deserve better than its patronizing sentimentalization of their physical pain. They deserve competent medical attention. They deserve sensitivity and respect. And they deserve the good drugs.