US Fears AI, Uses It Anyway

  

A recent report in National Review summarized opinion polls about what U. S. residents think of artificial intelligence (AI) and how much they are using it.  Paradoxically, the more people use AI, the more they fear it.

 

A poll by NBC News showed that 46% of those queried had a negative opinion of AI versus only 26% positive.  Other polls show that citizens expect mostly or entirely negative effects on society from the widespread use of AI, and believe it will lead to serious job losses.  Over half the Americans polled by Democratic research firm Blue Rose feared that AI will lose them their job or a relative's job. 

 

At the same time, polls asking about AI use show that most people queried have used an AI tool in the past month, and a fourth say they use it every day.  So the old saying "familiarity breeds contempt" may be a guiding principle in how AI is viewed by the general public.

 

In a way, none of this matters.  If a new technology gets widely used and the companies providing it make money, who cares what people think about it?  Another technology that spread rapidly in only a few years, and also had profound effects on society, was television.  In 1950, only 9% of households had a TV, but by 1955 over half did.  And while there may have been a few voices raised in opposition to its growth, I think it's fair to say that the only groups that looked on the spread of TV with disfavor were industries threatened by it:  Hollywood, for instance.  And Hollywood has long ago made peace with the advent of television.  Your average person in the early 1950s was just waiting to see when TV sets got affordable enough to buy, and any negative consequences of TV use were not noted much in public before the 1960s.

 

One difference between the advent of TV and the advent of AI is that TV didn't threaten jobs like AI does.  And one job sector that is already seeing big effects from AI is computer science and computer programming.  The thing about public perception, regardless of whether it's accurate or not, is that it can easily become reality.  I work at a university, and I have heard in the last week that enrollment in computer-science programs is dropping across the board, after years of steady growth.  The reasons for this are not entirely clear, but one factor may well be that students fear spending four or more years getting a degree and then finding that all the entry-level positions are now being done by a few senior people writing AI prompts. 

 

On the other hand, one of the most enthusiastic proponents of AI I know is an 80-plus professor of biology who has been using ChatGPT in his research for the last year or two.  He says it helps him write papers more clearly and to organize his thoughts, and claims it's the greatest thing that's happened to him research-wise in a long time. 

 

Many of the polls mentioned were commissioned by political interests with a view toward forming policies about AI.  Currently, the Trump administration favors few if any regulations on the technology, and wants to keep states from enacting a patchwork of legislation that would encumber the field.  Historically, this approach has worked well for computer- and network-intensive industries themselves, allowing them to create vast new economies and profit mightily therefrom.  But it has also led to a number of real and lasting problems, ranging from the maleficent effects on politics of social media and the quantified and well-known harms to children and teenagers whose lives are distorted by the use of smartphones. 

 

The crystal ball of predicting how technologies will affect society is always more or less cloudy, and I will not venture to say what the future effects of AI's negative polling will be.  Even if AI were universally detested, it's not clear that Washington could get its act together enough to pass meaningful regulatory legislation, especially when Big Tech and the federal government sometimes seem to blur into each other.  On the state level, if the feds don't stop them, some states may pass laws attempting to regulate AI, but it's a little bit like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.  When the thing you are trying to regulate is so protean and shape-changing, it's hard to decide what regulations to pass, let alone to figure out if they've been violated.

 

Some of the anxiety the public feels about AI is simply due to the breathtaking speed with which it has advanced and improved.  Arthur C. Clarke's principle that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic applies here.  Real magic is scary if it happens, and I still feel a kind of queasiness when I type commands into a chat box and the program comes back with "I did this and that."  It's understandable that millions of teenagers use AI chatbots as a substitute friend, and it's also very creepy.

 

Going to extremes, a few people believe AI will engender the end of civilization as we know it.  Other hyper-tech-optimists such as Ray Kurzweil look forward to being uploaded to an eternal cloud and think it will be heaven on earth.  The truth probably lies somewhere in between.  What we can do as individuals is to keep reminding ourselves that AI systems are not human beings, and that human beings are not machines.  But both of those truths may become harder to keep in mind as time goes on. 

 

Sources:  The National Review website carried James Lynch's article "The More Americans Use AI, the More They Fear It" on Mar. 25, 2026 at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/the-more-americans-use-ai-the-more-they-fear-it/. 

Microcosm of Technological Culture: A Foundry Closes in San Jose

Every now and then, something happens that epitomizes an era.  When the first railroad to cross the North American continent was completed with a gold spike, that single event symbolized not only a success for the railroad industry, but opened a new chapter in American history.  So many meanings are packed into today’s subject that I won’t have space to explore them all, but I’ll try.

In 1919, a metals foundry called the Kearney Pattern Works began operations in what was then the small town of San Jose, California.  Back then, the state was largely agricultural, and the castings the foundry made were used by farm-product manufacturers, canneries, and the water and power utility industries.  During and after World War II, Kearney no doubt participated in the huge defense-plant buildup that transformed a sleepy agricultural economy into one of the nation’s economic powerhouses.  Corporations such as IBM and Hewlett-Packard (now HP) became clients.  In my own career as an RF and microwave engineer, I became familiar with some of HP’s products that used heavy aluminum castings for electrical stability, and it is entirely possible that those castings were poured in the shops of Kearney Pattern Works.

Metal casting is an ancient art mentioned in the Bible.  My university is one of the few in the U. S. that has an active foundry-education program, complete with a small working foundry, where once or twice a semester you can see the soul-stirring pouring of nearly white-hot glowing iron into molds.  For many people who grew up in the middle or latter part of the twentieth century, foundries symbolized the essence of industry.

We still have foundries, but increasingly, at least in my branch of engineering, the word means silicon foundry—a place where silicon chips are fabricated.  And even those are mostly offshore now.  After a century of operation, the Kearney Pattern Works is shutting down and the land will be sold to Google, which is planning a 245-acre complex employing 20,000 people in downtown San Jose.  I know nothing about the details of Google’s plans for their complex, but I’d be willing to bet any reasonable amount of money that if you walk in and observe what most of those people will be doing once the facility is up and running, they will be in clean, well-lit, air-conditioned offices sitting at computer monitors. 

Is that a bad thing?  The city of San Jose doesn’t think so.  Jim Wagner, 71, is the principle owner of the foundry and grandson of the founder Al Kearney.  He says the city has been pressuring him and other heavy-industry firms to leave the downtown area, but the expenses of moving would have been prohibitive.  So the alternative is simply to close the doors and sell the property to Google, which is probably one of the few private entities in the world that can afford to buy more than 200 acres of prime real estate at the southern end of Silicon Valley.

Foundry work is hot, dirty, and dangerous.  But foundry workers didn’t need a college education, or even much high school learning, at least at the lower levels of the firm.  During the Great Migration of blacks from the rural south to the industrial north, many found work in foundries and other muscle-intensive industries, which often paid well and allowed even uneducated people to afford decent housing and living standards for their families.  The hollowing out of these industries over the last four or five decades has contributed to the deterioration of many Northern cities and the inner-city areas of many other parts of the country as well.

If this were Cuba, the foundry would still be operating, because the government wouldn’t let it fail.  Socialism tends to freeze industries at a given moment and make them independent of actual economic conditions in the rest of the world.  But the bad result of this is that state-controlled industries tend to make stuff that nobody wants, and can’t make stuff that people do want.  The free-enterprise approach of letting innovation, success, and failure happen more or less as the market demands seems to keep companies on their toes to change with the technological and social environments they must operate in. 

It was Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950) who came up with the phrase “creative destruction” to characterize the way technological innovation makes whole industries obsolete when new ones come along.  If everyone just accepts this process as a price of a free economy, progress continues.  But inevitably, companies that decide to do only one kind of thing end up taking the risk that some day, no one will want that kind of thing anymore.  And something like this has happened to Kearney.

When the timing of a firm’s demise coincides with the end of one’s career, as it has in Jim Wagner’s case, creative destruction isn’t so bad.  But the reporter who wrote the story didn’t mention any younger employees who will have to find work elsewhere.  Maybe there weren’t a lot of younger workers—even at its peak, Kearney employed only about 35 people, and many of those left years ago.

There are many contrasts between what Kearney has done at their location for the last century and what Google plans to do there for the next century, but another contrast is size.  Kearney was a small, privately-owned firm.  Google is—well, Google:  a nearly ubiquitous but oddly anonymous presence in the lives of people all around the world, whose doings are often opaque, secretive, and hugely influential.  In a foundry, what you saw was what you got:  the molds, the sand used in the molds, the hot metal, the smoke, the finished product.  What Google is doing at this moment, how they make their billions, and what goes on inside their shadowy corporate universe is known largely only to Google employees.

Modern industrial societies have accepted disruptive technological changes as the cost of enjoying the benefits of those same changes.  And while almost nobody will miss the smoke or mess or dirt of the Kearney foundry, it’s possible that some of its employees will wish it was still in business.  And maybe some of their children and grandchildren will get jobs at Google.  But they will probably have to spend a good part of their lives in school first, and even then, they might not make the grade.

Sources:  The article “Foundry’s departure ahead of downtown San Jose Google village project ends century of work” by George Avalos appeared on Oct. 12 on the website of the San Jose Mercury News at https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/10/12/foundrys-departure-ahead-of-downtown-san-jose-google-village-project-marks-end-of-era/.

Can Artificial Intelligence Make Art?

In February's Scientific American, technology columnist David Pogue wonders if human artists and composers should start worrying about a new development in artificial intelligence (AI):  the automated composition of music and production of paintings.  Computer scientist Ahmed Elgammal's Art and Artificial Intelligence Lab at Rutgers University is developing algorithms that start with well-known famous works of real art and abstract elements of style and composition from them.  Then the machine can either be set to do imitations in the same style, or else he turns on a "style ambiguity signal" that forces the digital Rembrandt to deviate from the style it's learned. 

I have viewed some of these products on the lab's website, and while I make no claims to be an art critic, my impression is that Rembrandt doesn't have much to worry about.  In fairness to Elgammal, he doesn't claim that what his system is doing is just as good as human-created art.  Rather, he sees himself as exploring theories of art creation using AI to see what happens if style rules are either slavishly followed or intentionally broken.

When he mixed the products of his AI "artist" with works by actual humans in a couple of different sets—abstract expressionism and contemporary art from a recent European art show—he found that people who viewed the artworks without knowing which was by a human and which was by a computer, often picked the computer-generated ones as more "intentional, visually structured, communicative, and inspiring" than those made by unaided humans.  He was surprised by this outcome, but he shouldn't have been.

Most people will agree that much visual art that is bought and sold for millions of dollars today doesn't look much like the artworks that were painted, say, a hundred and fifty years ago. Elgammal has happened to come along with his AI artist at a time when the so-called standards for what constitutes art are all but nonexistent.  Last year The New Yorker carried a story about a young man named Jean-Michel Basquiat who mainly wanted to be famous.  He tried music as a path to fame first, but was discouraged by the fact that it takes years of practice to become even an adequate musician.  So he switched to art.  Starting with graffiti, he attracted the attention of the art world, rocketed to international fame, and died of a heroin overdose at the age of 27.  The magazine's art critic Peter Schjeldahl thinks that his art is worth looking at, but probably not worth paying $110 million for, as a Japanese business man did last May for a Basquiat work from 1982.  Schjeldahl himself described it as a "medium-sized, slapdash-looking painting of a grimacing skull."  Judging by the photograph in the article, that's a pretty accurate description.

My point is that what passes for art these days is a departure from what has passed for art in the past, well, several thousand years.  Up until the nineteenth century, artistic works represented both recognizable objects, and also the higher operations of the human mind and spirit, operations that distinguish human beings from the lower animals.  G. K. Chesterton regards the production of art as one of the primary distinctions between people and other animals, and points to the cave paintings such as those in Lascaux, France, as being evidence that those who painted them were humans like us. 

One chronic concern that arises as AI advances into more areas of endeavor formerly regarded as exclusively human, is that when AI starts to do a certain kind of thing better and cheaper than people, what will happen to the people who earn their living doing it now?  So far, humanity has survived the replacement of telephone operators by automatic dialing, elevator operators by pushbutton elevators (everywhere except at the United Nations building, I'm told!), and more recently, the advance of AI into the professions of engineering, medicine, and even law.  Right now, the unemployment rate in the U. S. is at a historic low, but that is due mainly to an economy that is close to overheating, and doesn't take into account the millions of people who neither look for work or are particularly troubled that they're not working.  And here is where we find the real matter to be concerned about.

The issue isn't whether AI will send some artists to the unemployment line.  The real issue is how we regard art and how we regard humanity.

When Chesterton wrote in 1925 that "Art is the signature of man," he didn't mean just any random scrawl.  He had a particular thing in mind, namely, that the portrayal of nature as interpreted by the human spirit is unique to man.  Certainly no other animal produces anything that is generally regarded as a work of art.  I am aware of the bowerbirds of Australia and New Guinea which construct large elaborate arches of sticks and decorate them with blue objects and sometimes even paint the walls.  But this is simply instinctive behavior directed at attracting a mate.  No one has seen bowerbirds exchanging worms for a particularly fine bower and signing bills of sale. 

If people today can't seem to tell the difference between computer-generated art and human-generated art, the reason isn't that the computer is now as artistic as a human artist.  The problem is that artists have degraded their craft to the level of a machine-made product, and taught the general public that yes, that is indeed art even if I tied brushes to two turtles and let them crawl across the canvas.  When Marcel Duchamp tried to exhibit an ordinary urinal as art in a 1917 New York art show, the show's committee rejected it, but photographer Alfred Stieglitz allowed him to put it up in his studio.  In 2004, 500 "renowned artists and historians" reportedly selected this work, called simply "Fountain," as the most influential artwork of the twentieth century.  And it was made by a machine.

Sources:  David Pogue's column "The Robotic Artist Problem" appeared on p. 23 of the February 2018 issue of Scientific American.  Some creations of Prof. Elgammal's AI artist can be viewed at https://sites.google.com/site/digihumanlab/home.  (The ones with "style ambiguity" turned off, at https://medium.com/@ahmed_elgammal/generating-art-by-learning-about-styles-and-deviating-from-style-norms-8037a13ae027, are truly creepy.) A brief introduction to Jean-Michel Basquiat can be found on the New Yorker website at https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/lets-pause-to-appreciate-basquiats-hundred-million-dollar-painting.  Chesterton's comments about cave paintings are from pp. 30-34 The Everlasting Man, reprinted in 2008 by Ignatius Press (originally published 1925).  And I also referred to Wikipedia articles on Marcel Duchamp and Fountain. 

Clifford Furnas and the Clouded Crystal Ball

In 1936, during the depths of the Great Depression, a professor of physical chemistry at Yale named Clifford C. Furnas published a book in which he tried to anticipate the next great advances in science and engineering during the following century.  His book was inspired by a visit he made to the Chicago World's Fair in 1933, otherwise known as the "Century of Progress Exposition," which marked the 100-year anniversary of the founding of Chicago.  A lot of the technical exhibits that were designed to show how the world of tomorrow would be better than the depression of today didn't work properly, and so he went home and surveyed the state of science, engineering, and technology and made his best guesses as to how things would be by 2033, appropriately entitling it The Next Hundred Years.

My interest isn't so much in the accuracy of his technical predictions as in his expectations for what the trend of automation would yield for the economy and the working life of the average citizen.  It was already obvious by 1933 that a lot of jobs formerly done partly or wholly by hand up to then would be performed by machines or even robots in the future.  But what Furnas missed, along with nearly every other prognosticator up to the end of World War II, was the rise of the electronic computer, computer networking, and the growth in Internet-based economic activity.  And without the computer, modern robotics would be impossible, because without digital control systems (now including artificial intelligence), a robot can't do anything much more than act as a power-assist to a human being.

What we're talking about is the rise in what economists call productivity:  the economic output of a nation divided by the number of hours worked.  One person using a small lathe and a few hand tools can build a watch in maybe a few dozen hours, depending on what they start with.  But one person at the controls of an otherwise fully automated watch factory can make hundreds or thousands of watches per hour.  And Furnas was right in his prediction that advances in automation would (a) greatly increase the productivity of the average worker, and (b) render obsolete entire classes of jobs that previously employed millions of people. 

Where he went wrong was his prediction about what the result of these changes would be.

In Furnas's view, the average man (he barely discussed women at all), when faced with a choice of working 40 or 50 hours a week for ever-increasing pay, or else getting paid the same wages for less and less work, would choose to work less and get paid the same amount for it.  Consequently, the great challenge he foresaw for the future was to find things for people to do with all their spare time, now that their jobs could be done in as little as one or two hours a day.  He summarized the difficulty thus:  "Our problem will be to keep the citizenry on even keel while they have a wealth of time on their hands, for certainly a society steeped in mere idleness will soon lose its moral fiber, its material possessions and its reasons for existence." 

Why didn't things turn out that way?  Why isn't the U. S. a peaceful country full of debating societies, painting groups, and volunteer choirs, instead of harboring an increasingly divided populace in which some better-educated folks live a life of relative freedom and interesting work, while most people without advanced degrees work longer and longer hours in uncertain dead-end jobs (sometimes two or three jobs at once) and feel they can barely get by?  And don't forget the growing class of working-age men who have simply resigned from the workforce altogether and spend their days playing video games and in other forms of, in Furnas's words, "mere idleness."

A complete answer to these questions would require a book, or several books by a group of experts with talents that I lack.  But in my 300 words or so remaining, I'll hazard a few guesses.

One answer will sound paradoxical:  the rise in the standard of living.  The phrase "keeping up with the Joneses" captures some of this idea.  For Furnas's vision of the leisure class to come to pass, it wouldn't do for just a few people to choose shorter working hours over more pay—most of the country would have to do it.  And in the hyper-competitive international economic arena, a country in which most of its working people work only two hours a day would lag behind countries where 40 or 50 hours a week was the norm. 

Another answer is that people are, frankly, greedy.  And greed, at least of the mildly acquisitive type, is the engine that fuels advertising and consumer economies such as in the U. S. and most other industrialized nations these days.  There are a few people who choose to live on next to nothing and cut themselves off from the grid, but most of us regard them as eccentrics at best and dangerous at worst. 

A third factor is what I call "building-code creep."  If you attempted to build a house today in the way a modestly-priced house was built in 1930, you would be violating nearly every building code in the book.  Where's the third wire for grounding the outlets?  Where's your insulation, air conditioning, smoke alarms?  What's all this lead paint doing here?  That gas water heater has no automatic flameout-protection valve.  In thousands of  ways that have made life safer and more convenient, we have changed the rules of material life so that it costs a great deal more to live simply than it used to.  In certain rural parts of the country, most if not all of these things can be skipped, but at the price of living dangerously.

For a variety of reasons, we seem to be entering a period in which increasing numbers of people in the U. S. choose to live without jobs.  But most of them don't seem to be happy about it, and I think Furnas was on to something when he expressed concern about the deteriorating moral fiber of a nation where idleness becomes a way of life for many people.  The key, if there is one, lies in the phrase "reasons for existence," but that is a topic for another blog.

Sources:  Clifford C. Furnas's The Next Hundred Years was published in 1936 by Reynal & Hitchcock, New York.  The quotation about keeping citizens on an even keel is from p. 367.  I previously referred to this book in my blog on Sept. 23, 2013, "Engineers and Technological Unemployment:  What Are People For?"

Life In the Robotic Economy: Two Views and One Conclusion

Worries about machines or robots taking the place of humans go back at least as far as 1932, when Jean Harlow famously mentioned it in the film Dinner at Eight, from which the clip was taken.  While the post-World-War II boom ended the Great Depression and allayed such concerns for a while, they have returned recently with a vengeance.

When a guy with dreadlocks who plays obscure Egyptian musical instruments writes a book warning of a future economic disaster as technological unemployment spreads, you can be excused for thinking he's just one voice in the wilderness.  But when a clean-cut British high-tech entrepreneur comes along saying close to the same thing, maybe you'd better listen.  What are both of these gentlemen talking about?  Both of them are worried that as computer and network technology improves, not just many but most jobs in advanced economies will be done better, cheaper, and faster by machines.  And then what will all the displaced workers do?

The clean-cut Brit is Martin Ford, who founded a Silicon Valley software firm and wrote Rise of the Robots:  Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future.  While I haven't read the book, in a recent interview published in the San Jose Mercury-News Ford echoes the concern posed in his book's title.  He foresees a bleak future not only for semi-manual laborers such as truck drivers, but for many white-collar workers such as radiologists, journalists, and even lawyers.  The problem is a two-edged sword.  Not only will lots of people be unable to get good-paying jobs, but the supply side will suffer as well.  If nobody can earn any money, it's going to be hard for the smart non-robotic elite who own all the means of producing goods and services, to sell those goods and services.  Already, Ford says, high-volume goods firms such as Wal-Mart are having trouble selling all their stuff, because their customers are having trouble earning enough money to buy it.

The dreadlocked musician is Jaron Lanier, who I mentioned briefly in this space a few weeks ago.  He wrote the book Who Owns the Future? in which he makes essentially the same point.  Suppose virtually all the service jobs end up being performed by networked robots that are owned and operated by only a few big privileged companies, which is typically the way this kind of thing ends up.  Then, Lanier says, "When only certain privileged players can own capital, while everyone else can only buy services, the market will eventually consume itself and evolve into a nonmarket."  What will the vast unemployed majority buy those services with?  Credit cards? 

Lanier and Ford have moderately different answers to the problem, though neither one thinks solving it will be simple, easy, or fast. 

Ford advocates a guaranteed income, citing for support no less an authority than the economist Friedrich Hayek, who is usually viewed as favoring a conservative free-market approach.  While it is true that Hayek accepted the notion of a guaranteed minimum income, it's unlikely that he envisioned an economy in which a few super-rich people and firms would provide nearly all goods and services, and the rest of us poor slobs would take our government checks and go buy whatever the super-rich people wanted to sell to us.  Instead, Hayek viewed a minimum income as a small-scale safety net intended for the few who either could not work by reason of disability or were temporarily thrown out of work, not as a way of running the whole show.

Lanier's solution is more complicated.  He thinks that we should transition to an economy in which average people are paid for their teeny incremental contributions to giant databases.  If, say, you write a review of a book that you bought on Amazon, you ought to get paid, not only for writing the review, but every time somebody reads it online, or copies it and uses it for something else, for a good long while.  His ruling principle would be that anything useful or valuable that anyone does online should have that person's name attached to it.  And nobody should be able to use it for any purpose without paying something to the person who originated it. 

No crystal ball is perfect, and so just because two different high-tech gurus foresee the same looming problem doesn't mean it's as inevitable as death and taxes.  In my own mostly white-collar profession of engineering, I have seen something like what Lanier and Ford are talking about take place over the years.  When I started out in this business in the 1980s, the typical electrical engineer spent most of his (yes, his, rarely her) time with his fingers in circuit boards or with a soldering iron in his hand, building and testing prototype circuits.  It was both a craft and an intellectual activity, but craftsmanship was a good part of it.  Contrast that with a fairly typical senior design project I'm helping to oversee this year.  The students took some raw signal data from the sponsoring company, are developing some software using advanced commercial software tools to process it, and will finish with a presentation of their software package to the sponsor. 

It's all typing on a computer, as so much of engineering has become.  And while the human brain is still involved in the process, it's moving toward a situation where all it will take is one person (probably in sales) looking up the solution to a customer's problem on a proprietary database, tweaking a few options, and selling it.  All the engineering either has been done already, or is being done by software operating on more software.  Yes, somewhere somebody has to write the software, but as software engineering gets more efficient and people quit reinventing the wheel all the time and swap known algorithms around, you need fewer and fewer people to get the same job done.

Will it all end up like Ford fears, 99% of us sitting around on the dole playing computer games all day in our subsidized housing, while the 1% live their fabled lives in Aruba or Cote d'Azur?  Or like Lanier prefers, where the middle class resurges with value in the form of money coming back to them as they create value in the form of data, data that is currently being sucked into the Googles and Facebooks with nothing spendable being given in return?  Or like something else that neither Ford nor Lanier foresees, except in patches?

My money is on the third option.  It won't necessarily be better than the other two.  But I think these two gentlemen are on to something that technologists and everyone else ought to be aware of.  Whether we can do something about the problem before it gets much worse is another question entirely.  And if Jean Harlow were here today, she might have to deal with a virtual-reality replacement for her—unless she had a good robotic lawyer.

Sources:  The interview with Martin Ford by Matt O'Brien was published in the online version of the San Jose (California) Mercury-News on June 12, 2015 at http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_28301217/q-martin-ford-robots-coming-your-job.  Jaron Lanier wrote Who Owns the Future? (Simon & Schuster, 2015), from which I quoted p. 356.  I blogged about Lanier last on May 11, 2015.  I also referred to the Wikipedia article on Friedrich Hayek.