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.)

Mishmash

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In a WSJ article about the Great AI Freakout, centered on fears of a supposedly coming AI apocalypse, there was this bit, which illustrates the press’ involvement in potentiating the freakout, all gathered up in one mishmash of…error.

Opposition to the widespread network of Flock Safety AI-enabled surveillance cameras in the US took hold this summer, just as details about OpenAI’s autonomous hacking of the company Hugging Face became public. In the background was a drumbeat of pushback against data centers and worries that the technology could result in widespread job loss.

Laying all of these at the feet of AI is the article’s news writers’ disinformation (and they’re not alone in perpetrating this).

Opposition to Flock Safety’s cameras has very little to do with AI and very much to do with opposition to widespread and spreading government surveillance of us ordinary Americans.

Opposition to data centers has very little to do with AI and very much to do with the data centers’ need for water and electricity at the expense of rising water and electricity costs to us ordinary Americans and to the potential for polluting potable water. (As an aside, while those concerns were, early on, largely justified, data center designers’ and builders’ increasing emphasis on recycling the water they use and including their own power plants in the construction designs largely eliminates the basis for those concerns.)

Buildout of the data centers, further, creates a myriad of construction and ancillary jobs, and the operation of the centers still leads to increases in employment, if only modest ones.

Even the autonomous AI hacking of Hugging Face is overblown. The hacking capability itself is a legitimate concern, but the escape of the AI hackers wasn’t executed by AI so much as it was allowed by the human AI developers’ negligence in maintaining an air gap between their development facilities and the Internet.

At bottom, AI is like any other tool: highly useful when used properly, highly dangerous when used carelessly or misused deliberately.

We’re not all going to die in 10 years, as a colleague of the disgruntled, or panicky, ex-Anthropic employee howled. Far more likely, we’re going to prosper once we grunt through the transition, just as we have done during and after all our prior technology leaps.

Regulate without Interfering with Innovation

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Congress is looking at ways to regulate artificial-intelligence models that have stepped up their capabilities. Leave aside the manufactured hysteria over the end of humanity within 10 years, as one disgruntled ex-Anthropic employee is pushing. We have, instead,

dozens of lawmakers are now touting new proposals to regulate artificial-intelligence models that have stepped up their capabilities.

Vermont’s socialist and nominally independent Senator Bernie Sanders (I, VT) piped up:

There is no question that Congress is far behind where we should be in addressing the impacts of this rapidly evolving and dangerous technology[.]

“Far behind where we should be:” what Sanders means is that government hasn’t taken regulatory control of the technology sufficient to suit his Big Government socialism. His regulatory regime—to be sure the regulatory regimes of either party—have no natural limits on how far to extend government’s regulatory control here, or in any other venue. The only limit government recognizes is the absolute natural limit of total control.

In the particular case, though, we get this from the increasingly far left Congressman Ro Khanna (D, CA). He’s pushing for

kill switches that could shut down AI systems when they behave dangerously.

Dangerously to whom, though? A kill switch would let an enemy nation hack in and shut down our AI as soon as that nation decides our AI is too dangerous to its ambition. Or to severely hinder our AI development in a close and existential race. Or just to cause massive trouble for us.

That’s the kind of idiocy that argues definitively against government regulation.

On the other hand, can we get regulatory guard rails on AI releases that would allow innovation to proceed apace prior to release? What would be the conditions for release? How would AI developers, much less innovators, fund their innovation programs without those releases occurring freely? What would be the natural limit to those release regulations? On that last, a hint: see above regarding regulations and natural limits.

An Iranian Ultimatum

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Ebrahim Azizi, Iranian Parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Commission Chairman:

No negotiations.
Until Iran’s terms are met, talks are futile.

Works for me. Let the bombing resume, fully, and add in broad-spectrum cyber attacks, both without letup until Iran is completely disarmed, its weapons production and nuclear weapons development facilities completely erased, and the terrorists running Iran are all dead.

Or the terrorists can send decision-makers to the negotiation site. They can be granted free passage to the site while the dismantlement continues apace. No letup until Iran’s government persons agree in writing to our terms.

Why Cryptocurrencies Are No Panacea

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In his piece concerning cryptocurrency scams and the difficulty victims have getting their money back even after the government has recovered the money from the scammers, the news writer had this statement.

[FBI] Agents have learned to painstakingly trace digital currencies, hop by hop, across blockchains—the decentralized ledgers stored on computers around the world that provide a public record of transactions between digital wallets.

This is why I won’t do anything with blockchain if I can avoid it. The very purpose of blockchain, proving permanently (at least until blockchain itself gets compromised) the provenance of transactions, makes it too easy for government to track what us ordinary Americans are doing.

Government doesn’t need to surveil me just because it wants to.