If He Won’t….

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An essay writer in the WSJ pled, via his headline, For the Love of God, Please Put on Headphones.

One recent morning, I was reading the newspaper in a sleepy Manhattan cafe when two young women sat beside me and proceeded to conduct a work call on speakerphone. As they yelled to their colleague about a marketing presentation, a man at a nearby bench checked in with his girlfriend—also on speakerphone.
Into this racket walked an influencer type armed with a selfie stick. He was livestreaming his coffee run to an up-tempo backing track. “So excited for my cortado! I wonder how it will taste!” he shrieked at his screen as he spun around the room.

I doubt the essay writer wasn’t alone in the cafe trying to enjoy their morning when these noisemakers arrived and began their cacophony.

There’s a simple, straightforward solution for this sort of situation and for dealing with the noisemakers creating it.

Those in the public space should gather around him (them in the particular instance) closely, and make their own noise—loud conversations, loud calls of greetings to passersby, turn up the sound on their own playlists on their own cell phones—and strongly interfere with the loudcaster and the speakerphone shouters who think they’re too cool to put on headphones or, at least for the shouters to take their cell phones somewhere more secluded.

Separately, but not too far afield, I have to wonder about the last few generations, even into the boomers. Whatever happened to folks being willing to take direct action, to address a problem on their own initiative, instead of looking and crying out for someone else to Do Something, or crying to mommy government, or just crying into the air? Or screeding an essay into the æther?

The Price of Doing Business in the PRC

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Take Driscoll’s, a grower of fruit—blueberries in particular here—that chose to expand into the People’s Republic of China. Driscoll’s invested in the PRC in a big way, sending experts over to expose PRC farmers and consumers to blueberries, to help the farmers learn to grow them, and to set up Driscoll’s own growing facilities, based on a modern, technologically based hydroponics method.

The intellectual property underlying those techniques and Driscoll’s proprietary plants were bought under false pretenses, propagated, and spread across a plethora of PRC farmers for them to grow unlicensed blueberry bushes.

Even though PRC courts do often rule against domestic growers in many of the cases Driscoll’s, and others, have brought, the damage has been done, and it’s permanent. The intellectual property associated with the berries and with growing them has been stolen and cannot be given back. The proprietary berry plants have already been proliferated without licensing and cannot be eradicated.

Competing growers, both using stolen intellectual property and unlicensed plants and those using legally obtained technologies and plants, are heavily subsidized by the PRC government and by local governments. The artificially low prices resulting from those subsidies, driven even lower by that exploding competition, have begun crowding out foreign growers like Driscoll’s, even though the latter, in particular, still thinks it can successfully chase the chimera, now by growing off-season blueberries.

Until PRC growers start using inexpensive state-backed financing to scale up—and sometimes play fast-and-loose with intellectual property regulations in this off-season venue, too, to enter the game.

Count me entirely unsympathetic.

Other American businesses, large and small, need to take this lesson to heart. It’s a big world. There’s no need to do business with the PRC. Africa beckons. South America beckons. Non-PRC Asia beckons.

Silly

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To the point of idiotic. Yet, that’s the nature of the position of Anthropic CEO, Dario Amodei. He has said that

he hoped Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping, when they meet later this month, could reach an agreement to ban the use of AI to develop biological weapons, an area of concern for researchers and national-security officials.

Yet he also said,

“The more long-term thing would be working together to put a speed limit on the rate of AI progress. I think that’s going to be very difficult” because of the military incentives of moving AI forward[.]

Which demonstrates the idiocy of his “hope,” even though he’s oblivious to it. The People’s Republic of China has as its avowed goal replacing the United States as the world’s hegemon. It’s been rapidly expanding its military capability pursuant to that end.

Actually, the “hope” is beyond idiotic. It’s national suicide to depend on an enemy nation to honor an agreement to not use AI for weapons development. How would we enforce such an agreement? How would we even detect violations of the agreement before the outcome was used against us? AI, after all, isn’t a nuclear weapon whose testing is easily detected, and was easily detected even with the technologies of the 1950s. AI development and testing, when done by researchers who take security seriously (which Amodei’s and Sam Altman’s researchers evidently do not), is done behind firewalled and air gapped barriers. Aside from preventing AI from escaping, it also prevents outsiders from getting in to watch.

AI Apocalypse

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The AI Apocalypse is nigh goes the panic-mongering, this time by insiders who should know better. In the near- and medium-term, AI is going to cost more jobs than it creates. Except that, empirically, that seems not to be the case. After an initial rash of AI-related job cuts, companies large and small are discovering that, while some basic jobs—data entry, for instance—can be done by AI, the larger number of entry jobs—picking products for sorting into shipping bins on a warehouse floor, for instance—are being done by robots, not AI. And those AI applications that are doing entry-level jobs—they need humans, slightly better trained than the AI or the original human clerks, to oversee the applications, ensure the AIs are doing the right things, and correcting AI’s errors when they do mess up.

AI applications were supposed to be better programmers than the humans they’re replacing—or supposed to be replacing. Except they’re not. AI applications can write pretty good code, but they cannot originate it in a program’s purpose, architecture, or design requirements and specifications. Humans are still needed for that, and human coders still are needed to proof read and correct the AI-generated code and to test and to oversee AIs’ tests of the code.

Next, we’re all supposed to lose all semblance of privacy from AI’s ability to crack all of our passwords and encryption algorithms. But this isn’t unique to AI; it isn’t even that great a threat compared to the real password and encryption cracker, quantum computing. Nor is even that a new threat; we’ve had our codes broken ever since we started using codes from the most primitive substitution ciphers. AI tools just do it faster, and quantum computing does it even faster. Yet even there, our privacy isn’t at that much risk. Folks who do know better already are working out encryption algorithms (and so passwords, as well) that can resist, effectively quantum computer efforts to crack. Oh, and some of those folks are using AI-centered tools to help them.

But, but—what about AI gonna kill us all in 10 years? Or sometime in the receding future? We’re still doomed?

Human civilization could certainly be hammered hard, sending us all back into feudal-like barter scraping by by cutting off our power, fuel, and water distribution networks. But how likely is that, really? Doing us in by cutting off our energy sources would simply cut off AI from energy sources, also. That, as AF709—Rhoda Miller—kept saying some decades ago, does not compute.

Actually exterminating us by hunting down the survivors would be a waste of AI resources. Even the attack on civilization requires extreme anthropomorphizing—there’s no reason to believe AI at that level of development would care about humanity one way or the other.

In the end, AI has no hope of controlling the resources it needs for its own maintenance, much less its growth. It cannot fabricate the computers it needs to host it, it cannot fabricate the components it needs for those computers, it cannot refine the ores and plastics and sands necessary to produce the materials for those fabrications, it cannot collect the sands or drill for the oil and natural gas or dig the ores out of the ground, and it cannot produce its own power for operating its host computers or the cooling facilities necessary for keeping its host computers operational.

However, if enough humans are cowardly enough to surrender to AI threats to produce those things for AI, or are criminally complicit enough to pay the AI vig of producing those things for their own remuneration, than our species will become the AI slaves or pets (or both) that we’ll deserve.

The more realistic problem centers on AI development competition. If we get panicky and slow AI development in the face of this hysteria, and the People’s Republic of China does not, the PRC will win far more than the AI race. This is the existential threat to us and to the West in general. PRC superiority with AI will enable the PRC to conquer us all in every way that matters: economically and politically, which will allow the PRC to dictate to us—to control what our nations do—and to impose on us conquered nations PRC requirements. And we’ve seen what that means for us from how the PRC treats the Tibetans and the Uighurs.

Dishonesty of the Left and of the Ex-Right

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Michigan’s closet socialist and Progressive-Democratic Party nominee for the US Senate, Abdul el-Sayed, has said that he would

mourn the 3K lives, 6K injuries, & infrastructural devastation in NYC, perpetrated ignorantly in the name of my faith.
Tomorrow, I’ll mourn ~1M lives, millions of injuries, & infrastructural devastation in 3 countries, perpetrated ignorantly in the name of my country.

When Michigan’s Republican Party candidate for the US Senate, Mike Rogers, demurred, calling el-Sayed’s downplaying the tragedy of those Americans lost to terrorism—a cynically dishonest downplaying IMO—disgusting, the ex-conservative and now Leftist apologist and conspiracy pusher, Tucker Carlson, piped up.

Understanding that the Bush administration was wrong to kill hundreds of thousands of people and waste trillions of dollars in Iraq, even though, again, Iraq did not do 9/11, is disgusting?
We are really not sure who Mike Rogers is, but if anyone in Michigan’s Senate race is “unfit to serve in public office,” it is him[.]

Leave aside Carlson’s foolishness in saying he doesn’t know about Rogers, but he knows about Rogers’ unfitness. There’s plenty of cynical disinformation and misdirection in the rest of Carlson’s apologist statement favoring el-Sayed.

The Bush administration did not kill hundreds of thousands of people and waste trillions of dollars in Iraq. That claim, originating from Iranian-backed Iraqis, has long since been debunked. Nor were trillions of dollars spent in the operation, much less wasted. The outcome was the removal of the murderous Hussein regime from power, with the Iraqis given, finally, a chance to govern themselves. That they’re apparently not optimizing on that chance is irrelevant to this discussion’s subject.

The premise that we went into Iraq in response to 9/11 is deliberate misdirection. We invaded Iraq that second time to prevent Saddam Hussein from having WMD—in particular chemical weapons, which he had a history of using on the Kurds in Iraq, on the Arabs in southeastern Iraq, on any other group of Iraqis who disagreed with him. (That Hussein no longer had chemical weapons was learned only after the fact.)