Category Archives: ethics

Quitters?

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American AI developers are all up in arms over the successes of People’s Republic of China AI models, especially those that are being released as open source. The American executives’ beef centers on how good those models are and how cheaply produced they are.

OpenAI and Anthropic executives are sounding the alarm about the rise of cheap AI, particularly powerful new models produced in China, suggesting they will lead to a “dystopian” AI future and present unacceptable security risks without regulation.

And

The emergence of highly capable, open autonomous AI systems—including Moonshot AI‘s Kimi K3 model and Alibaba’s Qwen 3.8 Max, which were released in recent days and viewed favorably by investors and users—has turned the AI race on its head once again. Kimi K3 also was competitive with US models on some benchmarks.
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“One probable outcome of an open-weight-model-dominant world is full AI communism, which is precisely what China proposes: rather than a market product, AI is a ‘public good’ which will ultimately be provided by the state as a kind of ‘digital public infrastructure,'” Dean Ball, OpenAI’s head of strategic futures, said in an X post Friday.

The general thrust of these bleats and cries to Mommy Government is that these personages think that the PRC’s scientists and programmers are smarter than American scientists and programmers, and they want to cower inside a truly dystopian regulatory moat that would stifle American innovation in AI altogether.

That’s as unacceptable as it is despicable. AI development—American AI development, especially—enormously benefits from open competition. Competition is what drives at an accelerating rate the quality of any product class, and especially AI. Especially AI, too, is a competition we must win—where winning isn’t across the finish line first, since with all product development, there is no finish line. Winning here means maintaining a significant (not just by a nose) lead.

Thus, American AI development must proceed apace, without regulatory restriction. We have enough laws on the books to handle its misuse, just as we have for any tool. American execs need to stop bleating and get competitive, on quality, on price, on rate of improvement.

The sole exception to largely unfettered competition should be AI models from companies domiciled in, or associated with companies domiciled in, the People’s Republic of China.

That exception, though, has nothing to do with those models’ costs or capabilities or open source availability or nearly anything else. This exception is driven solely by the national and corporate security threat those companies and their models represent. Those companies, via the PRC’s 2017 intelligence law, are entirely beholden to the PRC intelligence community for conducting espionage on any subject, in any venue, and against any potential source that the intelligence arm of the PRC government wishes. These companies should be barred from the US, and other nations wishing to remain free from PRC…influence…should do the same.

And this central truth: American scientists and programmers are every bit as good as, if not better than, PRC scientists and programmers. As are the scientists and programmers of other nations wishing to remain free.

“Harassment of the Press”

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In their house editorial, the worthies of The Wall Street Journal let loose this remark regarding the leak of President Donald Trump’s (R) decision, on the advice of his Secret Service, to change his Air Force One ride out of Turkey to Great Britain:

Notably, the Justice Department has subpoenaed New York Times writers who reported the story to disclose their sources. That’s harassment against the press that won’t make the US safer.

This is the self-serving preciousness of our routinely mendacious press. The information the NYT‘s news writers received for their story was illegally transferred by a leaker who leaked classified information to those writers.

It isn’t harassment of the press to demand that pressmen reveal the sources of their illegally transferred and illegally received by them goods. Anyone but a pressman convicted of receiving stolen goods would be jailed for the felony. The august press guildsmen cannot even be charged under current practice.

Aside from that, there is nothing in our Constitution, especially in our First Amendment, that contains any reference, any hint, of journalist-source confidentiality. The journalist is not a doctor or a priest, neither is the source a patient or supplicant.

At bottom, whether a journalist should or should not be put on trial for receiving stolen goods, there is no threat to press freedom from requiring a journalist to provide the name of his source when that source has potentially committed a crime by an illegal transfer.

It’s Time

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When an enemy nation comes for another nation’s children, it’s long past time for honorable nations and honorable politicians to respond.

The People’s Republic of China now is targeting the Republic of China’s children in the former’s effort to isolate and suffocate the RoC into abject submission.

Last month, organizers of an August global choral music symposium in the Chinese territory of Macau blocked the National Taiwan Hakka Children’s Choir from performing under its name, objecting to the suggestion that Taiwan was a separate nation.
Organizers of the World Latte Art Championship in San Diego similarly changed the winner’s home affiliation from “Taiwan” to “Chinese Taipei,” adopting Beijing’s preferred nomenclature for the democratic self-governing island of Taiwan.

It’s time for participants in the next World Latte Art Championship contest and future such contests to decline further participation in response to the WLAC organizers’ cowardice and complicity in the PRC’s attack on those youths.

It’s time for the United States government and especially our Secretaries of State, Defense, and Homeland Security to start referring to the RoC by its correct name: the Republic of China. It’s time, also, for nations and their politicians wanting to be friends or allies to do the same.

Those words, that appellation, is important in itself, but it’s insufficient. That step needs to be followed in short order by formal recognition of the Republic of China and an exchange of Embassies with it.

It’s Broader than That

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Dominic Green, in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal‘s Free Expression, wrote of the German government’s attempt to censor—to bar from public viewing—a movie that was, by most accounts, badly done schlock (Green’s term). The rationale was that the movie depicted unrepentant and graphic violence by German vigilantes against Germany’s “immigrants,” the illegal aliens present in that nation.

German regulators’ problem with Citizen Vigilante wasn’t its depiction of unspeakable acts, but their unmentionable perpetrators. For years, European governments did their best to deny that mass immigration, notably from majority-Muslim societies, correlated to documented rises in the number of sexual crimes, especially gang rape.

Green closed his piece with this:

We like to think of the arts as our conscience, pushing social problems to our attention. If Europeans must rely on cinéastes of Mr Boll’s caliber to depict Europe’s current problems, it’s because no one else wants to admit their nature and extent.
Mr Boll has illuminated the crisis of political legitimacy and social order that is rapidly unraveling Europe’s peace. His film was censored to keep the peace. That shows the severity of the continent’s crisis, and the fragility of Europe’s peace.

It’s broader in scope than that, though. Government censorship, of nearly anything in any milieu, is a clear and dispositive sign of the intellectual bankruptcy, arrogance of Knowing Better, of cowardice of the politicians and bureaucrats who inflict it. Even the (legitimate) censor of slander is after the fact, not preemptive.

If the citizenry cannot speak freely, they cannot be free. It’s on those citizens in their aggregate—We the People as we put it in the opening phrase of our Constitution—not just individual makers of bad movies or one-off rich idealists, to change out those politicians who would limit our speech.

Who Can Afford Obamacare?

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The lede:

Rates for many Affordable Care Act plans rose by double digits this year. Insurers want to do the same next year.

It’s especially bad in Progressive-Democrat-run States. For instance:

In Washington state, Centene is asking for a 28% hike, after boosting rates by 35% in 2026. Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Illinois wants 15%—on top of a 28% increase this year.

Who can afford Obamacare? Nobody. Not the individual, not the nation at large. That’s what those unconscionable Federal subsidies, only recently cut back, kept hidden for so long, at the Progressive-Democratic Party government dependency pushers’ behest. Dependency is votes, as they’ve long known.

It’s time the Republican Party stopped dithering and cowering. The party needs to get rid of Obamacare and replace it with an interstate commerce-centric, lightly regulated (which would entail rescinding a double potful of regulations) free market for health insurance, one in which insurers could offer plans that customers actually want, and at competition-driven prices and deductibles, and coverages. Especially that last would drive costs down. Plans that don’t try to cover everything, unless that’s what enough customers want to make a market, plans that cover only a few things, that cover only catastrophic medical events, and every coverage level in between—whatever the customers want in sufficient aggregate to make a market.