Welcome to Hyperdimensional
A newsletter focused on emerging technology, public policy, and economic progress.
Welcome to Hyperdimensional. Who am I, what is this, and why am I doing it?
What this is
Hyperdimensional is a newsletter about emerging technology, public policy, and the future of governance. It is an experiment, and its format will vary over time. Right now, I imagine it will include deep dives into the intersection of technology and policy, book reviews, and news roundups. My main technological focus will be AI, but this will evolve with time. You’re receiving this because I think you will enjoy it, but also because I want your feedback. My goal is for this newsletter to be useful to you in understanding the technological change happening all around us. What follows in this post is a description of the broad questions I hope to explore. In some sense I have been exploring them for my entire adult life.
This is a passion project, so at least for now, all posts on this newsletter will be available for free. I expect to publish roughly once per week. The subscription options are there in case you wish to support this work. Your support is appreciated, but it is by no means necessary. The best thing you can do to support me is to share this newsletter with others.
Some my main goals include:
Presenting an informed case for techno-optimism;
Educating readers about the scientific and technical realities of AI;
Using lessons from the history of earlier general-purpose technologies to inform our perspective today;
Describing the risks and challenges of AI in a scientifically and empirically grounded manner;
Proposing ways that government functions can be enhanced using AI;
Developing a vision for the future of governance in light of technological change, including questions such as:
How should personal data, which will become both increasingly broad and precise over the coming years, be treated legally?
How and to what extent should software code be incorporated into First Amendment jurisprudence?
To what extent are individuals responsible for their own misuse of technology versus the creators of that technology? Is a software product the personal property of its user or of its creator?
How will key social services such as education be changed by AI, and what are the implications for government?
How should regulatory approval processes for technologies like new drugs evolve in an era where novel therapies are faster to develop and more personalized to each patient?
How will we create a new infrastructure for validating identity when videos, photos, recordings, and the like are trivially easy to fake?
How can law enforcement take advantage of new, AI-enabled crimefighting techniques while preserving civil liberties?
I write from a classical liberal and un-apologetically pro-progress perspective. This does not mean that I am a blind techno-optimist, nor does it mean that I see no role for government. What it does mean, however, is that I am skeptical of an expansive government role in the economy. I believe that government’s primary functions are to ensure the security of its citizens, uphold the rule of law, and protect property rights.
I am skeptical of the ability of the state to do things like, for example, ensure that the societal diffusion of a general-purpose technology like AI is wholly “beneficial,” because I do not think that it—or anyone else—knows what “beneficial” concretely means in this context. I believe these are questions that we will answer collectively and over substantial periods of time. Our answers will be imperfect, but they will be ours, rather than an imposition from the top.
By pro-progress, I mean that I believe technological progress is, empirically, the only way we have found to durably improve our material well-being. Furthermore, because of the natural tendency of all things to decay over time, I believe that technological progress is a necessity even to sustain current standards of living.
Why you should care
Technology drives history. Sometimes, it is the main character. Other times, it is a kind of magma, moving the tectonic plates of history in non-obvious ways. Improvements in metallurgy in during the Renaissance enabled the creation of increasingly precise mechanisms, eventually leading to weight-driven clocks, far more accurate and reliable than the water clocks that came earlier. The ability to objectively measure time enabled Isaac Newton to conduct many of his experiments, leading not only to new insights about our world but to the Newtonian worldview that would come to define several centuries of philosophical, political, economic, and scientific thought. This capability also enabled industry to objectively measure productivity—output over time (see Joel Mokyr’s The Lever of Riches for more).
Technology defines the capabilities of every human and human institution. Thus it should be no surprise that technology indelibly shapes our structures of government. The small and fragmented polities of early modern Europe were overwhelmed by the forces of state centralization, themselves both made necessary and enabled by technological progress. Better shipbuilding enabled global exploration and ultimately global commerce. This necessitated universal standards of measure for crops and other goods, and centralized record keeping to maintain order. This enabled the early stages of globalization and laid the basis for the prosperity we enjoy today. Yet many communities, many ways of life, and many people were lost during that transition. The most transformative technologies in this regard are what Joel Mokyr calls “macroinventions,” inventions with applicability to many, if not most, areas of life.
I believe that we are in the early stages of the diffusion of at least one, and probably several, macroinventions. AI is chief among them, and at least for now it will be the primary focus of this newsletter. But progress other areas of the hard sciences has been proceeding rapidly as well; advances in AI and advances in the sciences will increasingly catalyze one another. Indeed, this is already happening.
We know from history that transformative technological progress can upend social, economic, and governmental orders that once seemed unshakeable. We have no reason to think that this wave of progress will be any different from the previous waves.
What’s more, this is happening before our society has fully digested the last wave of transformative technology: computers and the Internet. As Martin Gurri writes, these technologies alone have called into question the fundamental assumptions of the 20th century administrative state. All institutional arrangements are experiments. The 20th century’s was inspired by the New Deal, World War II, and grand projects like the Apollo Project—the idealized government that can, with sufficient resources, do anything, that sits atop society and the economy and determines what is desirable and undesirable, safe or dangerous, good or evil. Despite important successes, I believe that experiment has largely failed.
Government today suffers from a bloated cost structure, widespread public dissatisfaction with its performance, and unsustainable debt. The public once held government institutions, if not necessarily government leaders, in high regard. No longer. The New Deal era ideal of a hypercompetent state probably never truly existed, but for a few decades it was a plausible mirage. No one is fooled now.
This is partially because of the ways in which the state has atrophied, but it is also because the private sector has grown up. The best-funded startups today don’t build computers in garages like they did in the 1970s, nor do they simply build enterprise software-as-a-service; they strive to extend human lifespans, industrialize space, colonize Mars, replicate the mechanisms of the Sun on Earth, and create artificial superintelligence.
Firms today harness industrial and human capital that would make Stalin and the rest of the 20th century’s foremost central planners blush. A handful of leading large technology firms built a cloud infrastructure so robust that it could handle the transformation of nearly all white collar labor into remote work overnight during the pandemic. They did so with no government help, oversight, or planning. It is not just that these firms are outstanding—it is also that the system in which they operate—the system of capitalism—has itself become stronger and more capable.
The US government hence finds itself as an actor within a larger and less manageable world than that of the 20th century. It is harder, in such a world, to maintain the illusion of infallibility. The reality is instead apparent to anyone paying attention: government is not omniscient and it cannot will the future into existence—in fact it is not even uniformly competent at carrying out its basic duties. It is the task of policy analysts to plot a path forward based on these empirical observations, not on assumptions from ideology or remembrances of an idealized past.
Technological progress can only be slowed so much, the diffusion of knowledge cannot ultimately be stopped, and we cannot through sheer force of regulatory will invent a general-purpose technology that is impossible to abuse. Transformational change is a near certainty; the question is whether it will be for good or for ill.
This newsletter will describe those transformational changes. It will argue that we should embrace many of them, tolerate some of them, and combat others. By and large, it will accept those changes as inevitable facts. Yet my work will be conservative at its core. America has reached this point of profound technological potential because of freedom of thought and speech and action, because of private property and free enterprise, because of limited and republican government. Indeed, I believe that we require these things to reach a positive outcome. I will argue for the restoration of these qualities in the many cases where they have begun to atrophy. No matter how much about our society and our government must change in the coming decades, we must work diligently to preserve the things that matter most. That is our central challenge, and it will be the primary concern of my writing.
Who I am
I’m Dean Ball; I’ve spent most of my career in think tanks and other intellectually oriented non-profits. I’ve devoted the first decade of my career educating policymakers, young Americans, and the general public about public policy, political theory, and economics. I’ve played a role in the conception of policies that have been implemented in cities and states across America, learning crucial lessons along the way about success in the marketplace of ideas. America’s cities and states have long been described as its “laboratories of democracy.” I’ve had the unique opportunity to study those laboratories, and sometimes even to don a lab coat myself. I’ve seen a lot of different approaches to governance—many failed policies, many false starts, and more than a few successes.
Since I was young, I have been passionate about the ability of technology to enrich the human experience. I learned to program and write technical documentation at a young age and have been a keen observer of emerging technologies ever since.
I have written about numerous policy topics, including public-sector pensions, prisoner re-entry, infrastructure, and technology policy. My writing has been published by the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, the Hoover Institution, National Review, and National Affairs. I wrote “Ideas of Another Order: Oakeshott and Confucius in Conversation,” an essay in comparative political theory published in Collingwood and British Idealism Studies, as well as “Neither Harbour nor Floor: Contemplating the Singularity with Michael Oakeshott,” an essay about society and technology to be published in a forthcoming volume on Michael Oakeshott.
I currently work on state and local policy at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and serve on the Boards of Directors of the Scala Foundation and the Alexander Hamilton Institute. Prior to that, I was Executive Director of the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation. I spent the first six years of my career at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research in New York City.