Yesterday, The Conversation’s newsletter included an article about what doesn’t work to prtect people from mosquitos – and what does – and if so, how long. If you live where there are mosquitos (and, thanks to climate change, every year there are more places which do) you might want to give it a look.
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The Daily Beast – GOP Lawmaker Banned From Wikipedia After Self-Editing Spree-
Quote – According to open source Wikipedia records, the edits were all made in 2021, while Lawler was serving as a New York assemblyman. Beyond authoring his self-made jump to his alma mater’s notable alumni, he made several more straightforward changes to his Wikipedia page. Lawler added electoral statistics from his victory in 2020 over a Democratic assembly incumbent, buffed up his resume to note that he “serves as the Ranker of the Government Operations Committee and as a member of the Aging, Banks, Education, and Housing Committees,” and changed his name on the page in one instance from “Mike Lawler” to “Michael V. Lawler.” The “V,” of course, is for Vincent. Click through for details. I try to donate to Wikipedia yearly, since I use it so much. I think I’ll send them a little extra. Policing isn’t free.
The New Yorker – Reinventing the E.R. for America’s Mental-Health Crisis
Quote – It’s hard to imagine a less therapeutic environment for a person in crisis than an emergency department: crowded and windowless rooms; harsh fluorescent lights; the ceaseless ping of alarms; this patient retching, that one screaming. And yet, for every eight patients who present at an emergency department, one is there for a behavioral crisis such as psychosis, suicidality, mania, aggression, or substance use. Often these conditions have a years-long history and can’t be treated quickly or straightforwardly, in the way that a broken bone or a knife wound might be. In some cases, showing up at an E.R. can make things worse; patients who pose a danger to themselves or others may be sedated or kept in isolation, even tethered to bedside rails so that they cannot move…. The mental-health unit where Mitlyng works is one of only a few dozen Empath units, short for Emergency Psychiatry Assessment, Treatment, and Healing. Such units, which were invented about a decade ago, vary in size, staffing, and design, but the core concept is that, instead of leaving patients to languish in an emergency room, caregivers offer them a calm communal environment where they can receive a comprehensive evaluation, start therapy, and, if needed, receive medication. Click through for article. It’s jaw-dropping how simple the concept is… and also how badly it is needed everywhere. The author has hospital ER experience themself, incidentally.
Yesterday, two legal things happened with Trump**, and both Heather Cox Richardson and Joyce Vance addressed both. The first was Trump**’s motion to postpone the documents case trial indefinitely. This is both very Trump** and very ridiculaous (not that there’s much difference), and Glenn (and other legiti,ate attorneys) will tear it to shreds, though it won’t be in today’s Thread. Secondly – for background, the DOJ defended Trump** in E Jean Carroll’s original defamation case – it did so because he was President when he made the original defamatory remarks, and there might have been just the remotest chance that he was acting as President when he made them. But the new defamatory remarks he made last year – he wasn’t, thank God, President then, so no defense from DOJ. He’ll have to get his own lawyers, Honestly, I don’t know whether having DOJ defense the first time around even helped. I think if I had been on the jury, every time I looked at the defense table, those DOJ lawyers would have reminded me that our nation hadd been so misfortunate as to have this lunatic as President – which would not have inclined me to show him an atom of mercy.
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PolitiZoom – Why The Democrats Are Already More Strongly Positioned Than The GOP For 2024
Quote – In 2018, 2020, and 2022, non professional Democratic House candidates out fundraised deeply entrenched GOP incumbents by 4-5 to 1. Mostly by talking in living rooms and kitchens, grocery stores and Starbucks, and holding town halls where they actually listened to constituent concerns, and answered not in political bullsh*t, but in real life solutions. Little wonder they rocked like Bob Seger with Hollywood Nights. And the Democrats, not only the upstart contenders, but even the DNC seem to have gotten the memo. Click through for opinion. Let me remind you that Murfster has vision issues (I can’t remember now whether it’s glaucoma, cataracts, both, or something else) and really is not able to prrofread to his own satisfaction, let alone anyone else’s. He’s still intelligent, though, and I hope he’s correct here.
The Daily Beast – GOP Board Whipped Up Homeless Hate. Then a Man Was Murdered
Quote – In January, the Board of Commissioners in Flathead County, Montana, proclaimed that the homeless had become a big problem in the little town of Kalispell due to charitable efforts to shelter and feed them. “Providing homeless infrastructure has the predictable consequence of attracting more homeless individuals,” read a preposterous letter signed by the three members, all Republicans. “When a low-barrier shelter opened in our community, we saw a dramatic increase.” The letter progressed from icy hearted to paranoid. Click through for story. But that’s not how they’d tell it. After all, we are the violent ones coming to get them. Yeah. Right.
Yesterday, I managed to solve the New Yorker’s “Name Drop” on the first clue without even an opera being involved. Succeed or fail, when you get to the answer, the quiz will say something snarky, which today for me was “The world needs more trivia heroes like you.” It got a chuckle out of me. I do have some trivia knwledge, but it’s very specialized, and I am absolutely no “trivia hero.” ALso yesterday I learned – and I’m sorry – from Beau that “Captain Kori”‘s pirate ship has left the dock. If that means nothing to you, you should probably ignore it. But if you do recognize the name and want more information, here it is. I won’t be putting it in the video thread.
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Raw Story (via Archive Today) – Opinion | Neuroscientist sounds the alarm on the right wing, the GOP and the ‘contagious sociopaths’ who live among us
Quote – One cannot talk about contagious sociopathy without considering righteousness – a term describing the phenomenon by which malicious acts – including harming and killing others – are justified as long as the bad actor can consider the ‘victims’ to be an enemy. This is a bedrock of the Trump and MAGA attacks on the Left and any that criticize or oppose them. I have written and said it before and I will do so again: The contagious spread of sociopathy has provided us with potential and actual leaders who embody the worst that humanity has to offer according to moral, legal, religious/spiritual, and societal norms…and they continue to run on this platform. Click through for full opinion. If you thought thatBandy Lee and Mary L. Trump were sounding “Fire!” at the three-alrm level … how many alarms is this!
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution – Grand jurors who will consider Trump charges to be selected Tuesday
Quote – Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney, who oversaw the special purpose grand jury, will preside over Tuesday’s selection of the two grand juries for this term of court. Each panel will have 23 grand jurors, plus three alternates. One panel will meet Mondays and Tuesdays, the other Thursdays and Fridays. Both will work in secret and are expected to decide whether to hand up indictments in hundreds of cases. It is unclear which one will consider the much-anticipated election-meddling case. Click through for details including procedural details. I appreciate those, since knowing them helps make sense of the process for us on the outside of it.
Yesterday, our Mitch had a photo of a sunset over Tampa Bay picked up by Axios and used in their local newsletter. Congratulatons, Mitch! While we’re speaking of Florida, I think my favoride nickname for her Governor is still Ron DeSaster, but Steve Schmidt just came up with a grest contender – “The Tallahassee Mussolini.” Also, I learned that Wonkette is moving to Substack.
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Salon – Ecosystem collapse could occur “surprisingly quickly,” study finds
Quote – Yet humanity may not need to wait until the late 21st Century for climate change to bring about real-world apocalyptic conditions. This will especially be so if ecosystems undergo abrupt changes after too many extreme weather events occur, one after another after another. According to a new study in the scientific journal Nature Sustainability, that scenario might indeed occur sooner rather than later…. “We show that the combination of additional stresses and/or the inclusion of noise [such as variables like El Niño] brings ecosystem collapses substantially closer to today by ~38–81%,” Willcock explained. “We also show that, if you were focused on just one stress – because it was easier to measure, for example – the ecosystem collapse may occur at stress levels you thought were safe (i.e. due to the pressure of the stresses you are not observing).” Click through for more information. I won’t say what I’m thinking, lest it sound like a sick joke.
Letters from an American – July 8, 2023
Quote – Reacting to that nomination, Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) recognized the importance of the Fourteenth Amendment to equality: “Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is—and is often the only—protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy….” Click through for the letter, Heather puts it all together – from the Dred Scott decision , the 3th and 14th amendments, through originalism, and Ted Kennedy being prescient about Rbert Bork. (Does anyone besides me find it very expressive that “borked” now means broken, non-functioning, messed up?)
Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”
We’ve talked a lot here about Articficial Intelligence (AI), in connection with things like facial recognition errors and deep-fake videos. But reading thisarticle, I realized we have barely scratched the surface. You’ll see what I mean as this article talks about – I want to say morality, but we can also call it priorities. Imagine, for instance, as the author does, an AI app behaving like Chris Christie during Bridgegate (over a reservation at a restaurant).
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AI is an existential threat – just not the way you think
The rise of ChatGPT and similar artificial intelligence systems has been accompanied by a sharp increase in anxiety about AI. For the past few months, executives and AI safety researchers have been offering predictions, dubbed “P(doom),” about the probability that AI will bring about a large-scale catastrophe.
Worries peaked in May 2023 when the nonprofit research and advocacy organization Center for AI Safety released a one-sentence statement: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from A.I. should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks, such as pandemics and nuclear war.” The statement was signed by many key players in the field, including the leaders of OpenAI, Google and Anthropic, as well as two of the so-called “godfathers” of AI: Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio.
You might ask how such existential fears are supposed to play out. One famous scenario is the “paper clip maximizer” thought experiment articulated by Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom. The idea is that an AI system tasked with producing as many paper clips as possible might go to extraordinary lengths to find raw materials, like destroying factories and causing car accidents.
A less resource-intensive variation has an AI tasked with procuring a reservation to a popular restaurant shutting down cellular networks and traffic lights in order to prevent other patrons from getting a table.
Office supplies or dinner, the basic idea is the same: AI is fast becoming an alien intelligence, good at accomplishing goals but dangerous because it won’t necessarily align with the moral values of its creators. And, in its most extreme version, this argument morphs into explicit anxieties about AIs enslaving or destroying the human race.
A paper clip-making AI runs amok is one variant of the AI apocalypse scenario.
Actual harm
In the past few years, my colleagues and I at UMass Boston’s Applied Ethics Center have been studying the impact of engagement with AI on people’s understanding of themselves, and I believe these catastrophic anxieties are overblown and misdirected.
Yes, AI’s ability to create convincing deep-fake video and audio is frightening, and it can be abused by people with bad intent. In fact, that is already happening: Russian operatives likely attempted to embarrass Kremlin critic Bill Browder by ensnaring him in a conversation with an avatar for former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. Cybercriminals have been using AI voice cloning for a variety of crimes – from high-tech heists to ordinary scams.
AI decision-making systems that offer loan approval and hiring recommendations carry the risk of algorithmic bias, since the training data and decision models they run on reflect long-standing social prejudices.
These are big problems, and they require the attention of policymakers. But they have been around for a while, and they are hardly cataclysmic.
Not in the same league
The statement from the Center for AI Safety lumped AI in with pandemics and nuclear weapons as a major risk to civilization. There are problems with that comparison. COVID-19 resulted in almost 7 million deaths worldwide, brought on a massive and continuing mental health crisis and created economic challenges, including chronic supply chain shortages and runaway inflation.
Nuclear weapons probably killed more than 200,000 people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, claimed many more lives from cancer in the years that followed, generated decades of profound anxiety during the Cold War and brought the world to the brink of annihilation during the Cuban Missile crisis in 1962. They have also changed the calculations of national leaders on how to respond to international aggression, as currently playing out with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
AI is simply nowhere near gaining the ability to do this kind of damage. The paper clip scenario and others like it are science fiction. Existing AI applications execute specific tasks rather than making broad judgments. The technology is far from being able to decide on and then plan out the goals and subordinate goals necessary for shutting down traffic in order to get you a seat in a restaurant, or blowing up a car factory in order to satisfy your itch for paper clips.
Not only does the technology lack the complicated capacity for multilayer judgment that’s involved in these scenarios, it also does not have autonomous access to sufficient parts of our critical infrastructure to start causing that kind of damage.
What it means to be human
Actually, there is an existential danger inherent in using AI, but that risk is existential in the philosophical rather than apocalyptic sense. AI in its current form can alter the way people view themselves. It can degrade abilities and experiences that people consider essential to being human.
As algorithms take over many decisions, such as hiring, people could gradually lose the capacity to make them. AndreyPopov/iStock via Getty Images
For example, humans are judgment-making creatures. People rationally weigh particulars and make daily judgment calls at work and during leisure time about whom to hire, who should get a loan, what to watch and so on. But more and more of these judgments are being automated and farmed out to algorithms. As that happens, the world won’t end. But people will gradually lose the capacity to make these judgments themselves. The fewer of them people make, the worse they are likely to become at making them.
Or consider the role of chance in people’s lives. Humans value serendipitous encounters: coming across a place, person or activity by accident, being drawn into it and retrospectively appreciating the role accident played in these meaningful finds. But the role of algorithmic recommendation engines is to reduce that kind of serendipity and replace it with planning and prediction.
Finally, consider ChatGPT’s writing capabilities. The technology is in the process of eliminating the role of writing assignments in higher education. If it does, educators will lose a key tool for teaching students how to think critically.
Not dead but diminished
So, no, AI won’t blow up the world. But the increasingly uncritical embrace of it, in a variety of narrow contexts, means the gradual erosion of some of humans’ most important skills. Algorithms are already undermining people’s capacity to make judgments, enjoy serendipitous encounters and hone critical thinking.
The human species will survive such losses. But our way of existing will be impoverished in the process. The fantastic anxieties around the coming AI cataclysm, singularity, Skynet, or however you might think of it, obscure these more subtle costs. Recall T.S. Eliot’s famous closing lines of “The Hollow Men”: “This is the way the world ends,” he wrote, “not with a bang but a whimper.”
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AMT, I’m pretty sure that it’s possible to program solid priorites into AI, but I’m a lot less sure that it’s possible to make those prorities resemble any kind of what I for one would call morals. This has me thinking about the art form known as “tragedy.” We call it a tragedy today when, for instance, there is a mass shooting. But an incident such as that would never pass the literary smell test. A tragedy demands a tragic hero (or heroine) who is not just a good person, but a great person, who however has a “tragic flaw” which leads him or her to create massive chaos and destruction. The classic example is MacBeth, who was a great and patriotic general (not that we ever see that MacBeth, but we do see a little evidence of it in the promotion he receives) who however had the tragic flaw of ambition, and look what happened.
This article causes me to fear that any given AI app could turn out to be a tragic hero, unless the makers consider that up front and work to prevent it. And, even then, mistakes happen.
