Tag Archives: ethics

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.

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.

Revisionist History and Political CYA

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Progressive-Democratic Party candidate for Congress from Michigan’s 7th Congressional District William Lawrence has been busily deleting politically inconvenient social media posts he’s made in the past. The smaller problem is that his deletions are nothing other than a coward’s attempt to revise his history. It’s the smaller problem because such revisionism is widely spread and all too common, even though that in no way legitimizes the misbehavior.

The larger problem here concerns those deletions and his rationalization of them. The deletions include posts pushing for such things as

police and prison abolition, called for nationalizing fossil-fuel companies to end their production, attacked moderate Democrats, and argued for a “fundamental overhaul” of the Constitution.
…
“f**k” the nuclear-family home and calling it an “isolating, individualistic, violent way of organizing society,” envisioning “a world of free and open migration,” and calling to “Abolish the Senate.”

That’s about as un-American as it gets. His rationalization, though….

Lawrence said that he currently does not support defunding the police or open borders despite what his earlier posts suggested.
“Like many millennials, I’ve done a lot of thinking out loud on the internet[.]”

That’s an illustration of Lawrence’s dishonesty. He spoke from his heart in those since-deleted posts. His deletions and his rationalizations are nothing more than him covering his political behind. What concrete actions has he taken, after all, to illustrate, if not demonstrate, his alleged evolution of his thinking?

“AI is Satanic”

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That’s what the headline on the WSJ article claims. The headline misleads, as the article itself goes on to say.

Experts call…tendency of machines to excessively agree with and flatter their users AI sycophancy. Vance chose spiritual terms. “I think that’s kind of satanic.”

Certain behaviors of AI can be satanic; that does not make AI satanic.

The larger issue for me, though, is what AI gets used for. It certainly can be abusive—or satanic, in the extreme—if it’s used wrongly, and misusing it can be done subtly enough that the user might not recognize the abuse. Vice President JD Vance (R) cited a friend who used an AI package for marital advice and got back validation of his own selfishness. Children have used AI packages for advice and have been led to suicide.

Those are uses of the tool, though. AI also has been used to good effect for business moves, to identify patterns in complex and/or noisy data, to point ways toward disease controlling chemistry.

 

Even where AI sycophancy leads to failure, even egregious failure, though, it’s not that AI is misbehaved or satanic, it’s that its human programmers have programmed the sycophancy into it through flawed programming and flawed testing.

AI in itself is just another tool, neither good nor bad intrinsically. It’s necessary to discriminate between the tool and what the tool gets used for. Build the data centers, and get training in how to use it. Then take care in its use, just as is necessary for any other tool, whether a power saw or a firearm.

An Illegal Strike

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Teachers strikes are explicitly illegal in Washington, but so far that State’s law men and women, at both the State and city level, have lacked the integrity to enforce their law. Thus, Seattle’s children are in danger of being deprived, yet again, of their access to education: the teachers of Seattle’s teachers union voted 91% in favor of striking and are set to walk off their jobs before the current school year starts.

There are two responsible answers to this move, if the union follows through, and both of them should be carried out. One is to fire for cause every teacher who goes on this illegal strike. The other is to decertify the teachers union for carrying out the illegal strike.

There are no other legitimate alternatives. The fact that the State’s and city’s managers have kowtowed to teachers unions in past illegal strikes presents no excuse for letting the union and those of its members get away with its illegal action this time. All acquiescing would do would be to demonstrate, once again, the intrinsic dishonesty of those in the State’s and city’s government.

Update: It appears the school district and the teachers union have reached an agreement. Apparently, the union is getting 9% in guaranteed salary increases, plus added school staff, but no added teachers on anything else to improve the children’s academic performance.