Category Archives: regulation

A Clear Statement

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The Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on protecting women’s sports from male participation by gender identity last Wednesday. Progressive-Democratic Party committee members boycotted the hearing a’fter the committee’s Ranking Member Dick Durbin (D, IL) pooh-poohed the risk of boys and men playing against girls in girls’ sports, calling the hearing a vendetta against trans athletes.

This is Party’s overt, clear statement in favor of boys and men playing in what used to be girls’ sports, denying those girls the privacy of their own bathrooms and locker rooms, denying those girls the self-confidence that comes from competing against other girls and winning or otherwise doing well rather than being dominated by the boys and men against whom they’re competing—to use that term very loosely in this context. It denies girls access to the accolades, scholarships, and money that would otherwise accrue to them from success.

This is the Progressive-Democratic Party. It proudly adds misogyny to their platform.

Another Brief Thought on Responsibility

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A WSJ Letters letter writer representing Share our Strength wrote to protest the paring back of Federal outlays to State SNAP programs. He had this early in his missive, and he was right:

We can agree that states should ensure eligible families get the proper benefits.

In the very next sentence, though, he had this contradiction:

But penalizing states without providing the resources to improve administration leaves more children hungry by pushing more parents away from SNAP.

The latter part of that may be true, but it’s not the Federal government’s responsibility to improve any State’s SNAP administration, nor is it the Federal government’s responsibility to provide resources for that improvement. Both of those requirements lie strictly and solely with the State involved.

And, using New York as his example, he offered this naked excusal for States’ failure to perform:

Honest mistakes can happen when overworked caseworkers using outdated technology to calculate benefits have to factor in a gig worker’s fluctuating income or a parent picking up occasional extra shifts.

If [New York] truly were serious about those error rates, it would satisfy its own (not the Federal government’s) responsibility and hire more (well-trained) caseworkers and upgrade the technology those caseworkers must use.

At bottom here is a State’s own decision regarding its own spending allocations. Nothing is stopping any State from changing what it chooses to fund and what set of Federal dollars it chooses to try to freeload off of.

All the Federal government can do, all it should do in our federal republic, is provide incentives to States to carry out their own responsibilities. Withholding financial transfers from States that choose to shirk their own responsibilities is a perfectly fine incentive, and one the Federal government should apply more broadly regarding money transfers to States.

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.

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.

Illegal Aliens and CDLs

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The Federal government is finally cracking down on illegal aliens with commercial driver licenses and the schools that “train” them. The latter cavalierly ignore the grave danger to life and property—to say nothing of the businesses’ cargo that those illegal aliens are hauling around.

It’s good that the Federal government is finally moving seriously to reduce the number of illegal alien CDL holders and the risks to us Americans and our businesses that those illegals represent.

It’s not enough, though. Government isn’t the only player here, nor should it be the primary. Businesses that engage shipping companies to move their goods from port, factory, farm, retailer to stores, factories, assemblers, and end users have their own part to play in this. They should require those shipping companies, as a condition of doing business with them, to certify that they have no illegal alien CDLs on their payroll.

The Left and many of their Progressive-Democratic Party politicians like to talk about noblesse oblige in the context of rationalizing their drumbeat of imposing punishing taxes on the Evil Rich. A broader and far more legitimate onus is characterized by patriotisme oblige. It’s time for businessmen who are Americans to act like it, and to act on it.