Tag Archives: responsibilities

Fixing Itself

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A question arises: can France fix itself so it can fix its economy so it can get its debt under control and on a downward path to a sensible level?

That answer depends on whether it can fix its national method for settling questions and the disputes that give rise to those questions.

A free democracy has one primary method for settling national questions and disputes: debate, argument, and then voting for one or another of the politicians the people want to represent them and to lead the government, or voting against another or one of those politicians.

France is unique in that it has a second method of settling national questions and disputes. This method has been in prominent use since the months and days leading into the Revolution of 1793: rioting in the streets, destroying businesses, attacking police personnel. Over the course of the Fifth Republic, extant since the 1950s, the technique of rioting and destruction has become elevated to the same level as voting. That elevation has resulted from the French government’s inability to quell the rioting and to restore order—an inability that results, not from a true lack of capacity, but from utter cowardice on the part of the men and women in charge of the government, especially the President, Prime Minister, and members of the National Assembly and the Senate.

So far, the rioters have succeeded in intimidating the government personnel into backing down and giving them what they demand, however bad for the nation as a whole over any timeframe beyond tomorrow. See the Yellow Vests riots of 2020 and the current “student” and “teacher” riots today.

Macron’s government men and women, including Macon himself, were intimidated into significant watering down of economic reforms that Yellow Vesters disapproved, and his government today is on the verge of giving prima donna pupils and (union) teachers whatever they want.

The answer to the question, then, at least for what France is confronting for its future, is…No.

A Frivolous Suit

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The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on a case, Anderson v Intel, centered on what investment vehicles are suitable for inclusion in 401(k) accounts, defined contribution retirement accounts that are entirely directed by the account holder.

The plaintiff, a former Intel employee, accused the company of violating its fiduciary duty by including private equity and hedge funds in its defined-contribution retirement plan, and alleged these investments performed worse than standard equity funds would have.
Tuesday’s Supreme Court debate hinged on whether a plaintiff needs to show underperformance versus an appropriate benchmark for a suit to survive a motion to dismiss.

The debate wholly missed the point. The question is not—or should not have been—whether this or that investment vehicle was underperforming by some threshold amount or in comparison with this or that benchmark and so should not be on offer in a 401(k). The central question is whether 401(k) account holders, grown adult human beings fully capable of independent and clear thought, are actually too stupid to make their own investment decisions. There is, after all, no requirement that an account holder must invest in a vehicle just because it’s available in the account.

Anderson and his fellow plaintiffs plainly think that every account holder must be as stupid as they apparently think themselves to be, and so they’ve engaged their foolish suit. Alternatively, they don’t want to be the only ones not capable and so they’re busily deprecating as many others’ intelligence as they can.

This case should have been squashed utterly at the district level. It has no business having gotten this far, and the Supreme Court, as it takes this frivolously cynical case seriously, needs to put it into the garbage landfill where it belongs.

The case is insulting as the plaintiffs insist that account holders are, in fact, too grindingly stupid to decide for themselves what investment vehicles included in a 401(k) account are suitable for a person to invest in.

Risky

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In her piece regarding the utility of the AI agents that increasingly can do things, including interact with other AI agents and commit one’s personal resources without human involvement—given an initial set of instructions—Nicole Nguyen recounted her experiences testing these agents. In the course of that reporting, she had this:

Meta will soon give Muse an encrypted mode that will keep the company from being able to see what the user is doing with the agent.

It’s naive and dangerous to trust Meta’s—or any other such provider’s—word on this. We never really know two things about the Metas of the AI Agent world: whether they’ve installed a backdoor into the “encrypted” app, and how strong the app’s encryption really is.

That last, too, is at least partially beyond the control of the Metas of this world: quantum computing is on the verge of blowing up encryption generally, and post-quantum encryption is not yet ready.

A bonus third thing: we don’t know how firmly these companies will resist the government’s warrantless/subpoena-less requests for personal or other private information.

AI Development and Testing, and Humans

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OpenAI has decided not to release its latest iteration of ChatGPT, which it had labeled GTP 6.1 Astra. The company had safety concerns that researchers raised during internal testing.

The model was more capable than the company’s previous models in completing challenging tasks from end-to-end without human assistance, as well as writing.

But.

GPT-6.1 Astra regressed in two areas. Compared with its predecessor, GPT-6 Astra, the model performed poorly on tests measuring alignment, or how well the model adheres to what humans would like it to do. Specifically, GPT-6.1 Astra showed higher levels of deception: it wasn’t always honest about telling users of the actions it did or didn’t take.
Another issue was what OpenAI calls “scope authorization,” meaning that GPT-6.1 Astra would push ahead on a task without asking the user for permission, and would at times reach for external tools and services even if it might be unsafe.

This tale demonstrates pretty conclusively the criticality of humans having controlling involvement in AI sandbox construction, isolation, and enforcement and in testing. It also demonstrates the importance of corporate culture—i.e., corporate human managers—in creating and then enforcing the internal culture that supports and drives dedication to that human control of and involvement in development and testing.

It also proves that we humans are up to the task if we care enough about our responsibilities—closely akin to Madison’s and Franklin’s remarks that our republic requires a moral, virtuous people in order to survive.

Busy?

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Boeing’s 737 MAX has a software glitch that can cause an automated navigation feature to fail at difficult moments during an approach.

It emerged from a cockpit software update and can occur when flight crews alter their planned flight path following a missed approach. In a certain scenario, pilots may have to fly manually without some autopilot functions. That, some industry officials said, could overwork pilots while they are already busy, at low altitude and possibly dealing with situations like bad weather.

I have two comments about that. One is my usual: who tested that software update, in what scenarios, and with what test procedure?

The other concerns what constitutes “busy” in the cockpit. A single seat fighter pilot crossing the IP inbound to his ground target in a hostile environment is busy. Even a two-seat fighter crew approaching his airborne target(s) in a target rich environment is busy. In both cases, the busy-ness increases exponentially as the pilots begin actually engage their respect targets, a much more fluid situation than a go-around on a missed approach.

Airline pilots during a go-around, especially in low-altitude bad weather, do see their workloads increase, but they aren’t busy enough to be threatened with overwork.

It’s certainly true that “busy” is relative to what a fighter pilot or civilian aircrew are used to. That, though, is what time in the simulator—and there are very good ones extant for both military and airline pilots—is for. That includes failing the nav feature in the simulator to drill the aircrew on proper and timely responses until a fix to the software update—properly tested this time, hopefully—can be installed. Perhaps, also, this particular failure should be added to the unexpected and emergency drills in the simulator.