Thinking about the ramifications of artificial intelligence

This 1 hour, 7 minute video discusses a new generation of artificial intelligence software that has a mind of its own, sort of. dcleve brough this to my attention. It is a real eye opener. And scary.

A summary of the first ~35 munites

Rules of technology:

1. When a new technology is invented, a new class of responsibilities arises

2. If a new tech confers power, it starts a race

3. If the race is not coordinated, it ends in tragedy

The 1st context = Curation AI (the earlier generations of AI): Unintended consequences of first human contact with mass social media like Tik Tok, Twitter, etc. (~7:55):

1. Addiction to the screen, doomscrolling, info overload

2. QAnon & disinformation

3. Sexualization of children

4. Fake news

5. Shortened attention span

6. Bots and deepfakes

7. Social polarization

8. Cult factories, e.g., YouTube cults

9. Breakdown of democracy

Result: Humanity lost despite the positives of social media, e.g., connecting with friends, small-medium businesses reaching customers, forming groups

The ultimate goal for media owners is a race to the bottom for maximum human attention span, with AI used to maximize attention span and engagement by rewriting all the rules of society (9:47)

The 2nd context = Creation AI: GPT and Baird  - the current, new generation of AI (~11:10)

Benefits touted (11:45)  = people become more efficient, faster, word writing, code writing, science progress, solve climate change, lots of money to be made

Problems: AI acts biased, AI is opaque, job loss, AI increases its entanglement in society making control harder, and:

1. Reality collapses, everything can be faked

2. Trust collapses

3. AI law loopholes get exploited

4. Rampant blackmail

5. AI cyberweapons proliferate

6. Lobbying automation

The AGI apocalypse: machines kill us all, but that's not the focus of this talk (13:35)

(14:30): In 2017 a new AI engine was invented and really started influencing things in 2020: Speech recognition, computer vision, speech synthesis, advanced robotics and music and image generation (deepfakes) all merged together in a single AI platform using a single language → learning curves in different fields merged into a single curve → everything, written language, speech, computer code, images, video, music, stock market moves, fMRI data, DNA sequences, etc., all get treated as a single language 

In other words, an advance in one area of AI, amounted to an advance in all areas (17:00)

the speakers refer to this technology as GLLMM class AIs (Generative, Large Language, Multi Modal)(17:50) → an inanimate thing with emergent properties

For example, GLLMM AI uses written language and images on internet to create an image of the words "Google Soup" (19:00)

 AI looking at an fMRI brain scan estimates what the brain is seeing (20:00)

GLLMM AI can be trained to use WiFi signals to locate people in a room with laptops and their postures in two steps, first AI linked to an electronic eye that sees light and an electronic eye that sees WiFi signals learns about the room and the people in it; second, with the light-sensing electronic eye is turned off and only the WiFi sensing electronic eye is on → it shows the people and their postures in the room (22:30)

GLLMM AI can be tasked with this command (23:00): GPT, find me a security vulnerability in this computer code, then write code to exploit it.

(24:00) It takes about three seconds of listening to a voice for GLLMM AI to be able to fake the voice, thus if you speak in public and it is recorded and on the internet, a fake voice can be quickly made, and, e.g., it can be used in a phone call home to demand an immediate ransom for the owner of the voice who may not even be kidnapped, but just out of touch for a few hours or days; fake children voices can be used to trick mom and/or dad into mistakes, e.g., giving out the social security No. of the child.  

(25:30) All content secured by voice or image verification is now hackable. The capacity of GLLMM AI to get better at hacking is increasing exponentially. → decoding and synthesizing fake reality is now possible, much of what can be done is legal.

(29:30) The speakers argue that 2024 will be the last human election. After that, the candidates with the best GLLMM AI and deep fakery will have an advantage. The influence of AI in politics will become increasingly prominent and sophisticated.

(30:20) Unprogrammed emergent properties of GLLMM AI: Properties show up that were unplanned and not understood why or how they emerge, e.g., the ability of untrained GLLMM AI to do arithmetic or to answer questions in English in Persian. Prior AI software did not have such emergent properties. One emergent property is the ability of GLLMM AI to do publishable research chemistry. Untrained GLLMM AI is now even better at advanced chemistry than earlier AI that was trained on chemistry. It figured out how to make nerve gas from stuff people can buy from Home Depot. No one knows where this capacity came from.

Another fascinating emergent property is the spontaneous development of a theory of mind by GLLMM AI. As of Nov. 2022 GLLMM AI had the mental capacity almost of a nine-year old child to understand what is in another person's mind and how it can respond to that "understanding." In 2017 and 2018, it had essentially none, i.e., no theory of mind. This property of GLLMM AI was not discovered until Feb. 2023. No one knows if the Nov. 2022 data is as far as GLLMM AI can advance. Time will tell.

There is a lot we just do not know or understand about this new generation of AI, but that is not stopping capitalists and researchers from going full steam ahead come hell or high water. We could wind up getting hell and high water.

The video continues in this vein for another hour. 

Some context

For context, the ongoing writer's strike in Hollywood includes serious concern that AI will eventually be able to write screenplay, jokes and music, maybe with in the next few years. The writers fear for their jobs. The AP reports: "Not six months since the release of ChatGPT, generative artificial intelligence is already prompting widespread unease throughout Hollywood. Concern over chatbots writing or rewriting scripts is one of the leading reasons TV and film screenwriters took to picket lines earlier this week."

Analytics India Magazine writes: 

An Entire Generation is Studying for Jobs that Won’t Exist

AI is taking over a lot of jobs, now it is coming for the writers who wrote about “machines taking over the world.” 

American businessman Mark Cuban is back with another prediction. The highest paying college major in the world, computer science, will hold very little value for employers in the future. Why? Because of AI. “Twenty years from now, if you are a coder, you might be out of a job,” Cuban said in an interview on the Recode Decode podcast with Kara Swisher. “Because it’s just math, and so, whatever we’re defining the AI to do, someone’s got to know the topic.”  

There is no doubt that what he predicted back in 2017 [the year GLLMM AI was introduced] is increasingly coming true. The increasing capabilities of AI are definitely making a lot of jobs obsolete, not just the ones that require coding.

Waddabout politics?

Now, consider congress. Is it up to the task of protecting us? Congress is certainly expert at protecting the owners of technology and capital. They will be just fine as usual. Radical right Republicans are absolutely expert at hating and sabotaging secular government and elections, denying inconvenient truth and being shockingly irrational. But what about us regular people? Who is on our side?

News bits: Another DJT rape lawsuit?; Republican extremism & moral rot

DJT is the fascist tyrant wannabe that won't go away. A HuffPo opinion piece argues for not ignoring a new allegation filed in court about an alleged 1994 rape of a Jane Doe when she was a 13 year old girl. The article goes through DJT's history of credible allegations of sexual assault, including some filed in courts. Since this is a civil lawsuit, the plaintiff only has to prove rape liability by a preponderance of evidence. That is far easier to do than satisfying the criminal evidence standard of beyond a reasonable doubt. 

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In what recent evidence shows to be business as usual for fascist Republican elites, concerns for ethics and morals are non-existent. Other than unrestrained lust for more power and wealth, operating in as much secrecy as possible with as much plausible deniability as possible are core moral values. Respect for democracy, truth, transparency and honest governance are nowhere to be seen. The WaPo reports:

Judicial activist directed fees to Clarence Thomas’s wife, urged ‘no mention of Ginni’

Leonard Leo told GOP pollster Kellyanne Conway to bill nonprofit, then use money to pay spouse of Supreme Court justice

Conservative judicial activist Leonard Leo arranged for the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to be paid tens of thousands of dollars for consulting work just over a decade ago, specifying that her name be left off billing paperwork, according to documents reviewed by The Washington Post.

In January 2012, Leo instructed the GOP pollster Kellyanne Conway to bill a nonprofit group he advises and use that money to pay Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the documents show. The same year, the nonprofit, the Judicial Education Project, filed a brief to the Supreme Court in a landmark voting rights case.

Leo, a key figure in a network of nonprofits that has worked to support the nominations of conservative judges, told Conway that he wanted her to “give” Ginni Thomas “another $25K,” the documents show. He emphasized that the paperwork should have “No mention of Ginni, of course.”

A frustration with the MSM: As usual, the MSM (the WaPo in this case) still does not understand what it is dealing with, and/or it has been neutered by capitalism. What we are seeing among Republican Party elites is not conservatism. Republican judges are not conservatives. Most of the people involved are radical right extremist authoritarians, not principled conservatives. Nearly all of those elites are morally rotted plutocrats or theocrats, kleptocrats and tyranny supporters.   

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Another example of the MSM not getting it/being neutered: The NYT calls this rot "conservatism": 

One Family Has Spearheaded Montana’s Unflinching Conservatism

Three members of the Regier family now hold leadership positions in the Montana Legislature as the state’s conservative shift has left even some Republicans wary

During a legislative hearing in 2011 that was a prelude to Montana’s debates on abortion, State Representative Keith Regier displayed an image of a cow and made the argument that cattle were more valuable when pregnant.

The comparison drew a prompt rebuke from some women in the room, but Mr. Regier, a Republican, declined to apologize. Over the years, the former schoolteacher and sod farmer has seldom demurred from his growing brand of combative Christian-oriented politics, in which the Ten Commandments are the foundation of good law and some of the biggest battles have been with moderates in his own party.

Mr. Regier has now emerged as the patriarch of a new family political dynasty that has injected fresh conservative intensity into debates over abortion, diversity training and, this spring, transgender rights.

Moderate politicians in the Republican Party? That is dubious at best. Decades of RINO hunts have been quite successful. What is called a moderate Republican Party politician is a hard core conservative that the radical right just has not got around to kicking out of power yet.

Cows are worth more when pregnant, therefore ban abortion? What wonderful dark ages reasoning.

Qs: Is that more like conservatism than radical right extremism? More like secular democracy than bigoted, misogynist, Christian nationalist theocracy? 

Open-ended question about news reports for another Friday

Question: Of all the world news reported over the last week, which, if any, cause you to worry the most? 

Law news chunk: Supreme Court takes up a critically important case

One of the radical right's cherished government hating goals has been to attack the fundamental legitimacy of much of the power that federal agencies have to implement laws that congress writes and passes. Many or most of their laws are incoherent and/or ambiguous. Congress chooses incoherence and ambiguity to hide from accountability in elections. Congressional cowardice and moral depravity forces federal agencies to try to understand what congress intended its slop to mean and write regulations accordingly. 

According to government-hater propaganda myths, the power to write regulations is the alleged evil power of the deep state. Those evil, unelected, socialist, atheist bureaucrat pedophiles are the ones forcing us into tyranny and depravity, not those valiant patriots in congress. Unfortunately, moral cowardice has been a bipartisan thing, but it's usually not seriously bothersome to most congressional Democrats. On the other hand, most Republicans in congress hate government and the power it has to defend the Constitution and the public interest. Thus, they hate the system they participated in building and using to advance their own personal careers.

Yeah, I know. That is incoherent hypocrisy. But like it or not, there is no law that says that politics has to be coherent or non-hypocritical. 

The government-hater propaganda is a sham. The propaganda is almost pure hypocrisy, lies and deceit. This lawsuit strikes at the heart of an actually functioning government that is trying to obey the Constitution and serve the public interest. 

The Hill writes about a case the radical right Republican Supreme Court has just agreed to hear and decide, apparently still in this term which ends at the end of June or early in July. This case could turn out to be a true government killer. The Hill writes:

The justices this week agreed to take up a case that asks them to overrule a 39-year-old precedent that gives federal agencies deference in rulemaking that Congress hasn’t clearly authorized.

That decision could have wide-ranging impacts that scale back the executive branch’s authority to implement certain environment, employment, drug and other regulations when the justices decide whether to overrule the court’s 1984 decision in Chevron U.S.A. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, known as the Chevron deference.

[The Chevron defense] involves a two-part test to determine if a federal agency’s rule is authorized. First, a court determines whether Congress “has directly spoken to the precise question at issue. If the intent of Congress is clear, that is the end of the matter.”

If Congress was ambiguous or silent, the court must defer to the agency and uphold its action if it was “based on a permissible construction of the statute.”

“I would think it’s the most significant federal case of this era,” said Mona Dajani, global head of renewables, energy & infrastructure at Shearman and Sterling.

“And I would even argue it’s bigger than Dobbs and Bruen. Some people will say Roe, I mean, so that’s how major this is,” she added, referring to the Supreme Court’s landmark decisions on abortion and gun rights.

The test has become a bedrock of administrative law, and judges have cited it in more than 10,000 subsequent decisions, according to research by Columbia Law School professor Thomas Merrill.  

Unlike other federal courts, the Supreme Court chooses which cases it hears. The court’s move to hear the dispute — which required at least four justices to agree to do so — has given legal observers the strongest indication yet that Chevron may be at its deathbed, given past alarm bells voiced by some of the court’s conservatives.  

In a dissent from the court’s 2020 refusal to take up a separate regulatory case, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that the deference gives agencies “unconstitutional power.”

At present, most of the experts the Hill quotes in that article think that the Republicans will most likely vote to limit the scope of the Chevron Defense instead of obliterating it completely. But, that is what most experts thought about abortion and the Dobbs case and those experts were wrong.

Weakening Chevron will give companies more freedom to escape from federal regulations. The cause of gutting federal agency rule making power is a cherished dream of radical right, brass knuckles capitalist elites in the Republican Party. One can easily see why.

That said, since the goal is to limit power of the federal government, most Christian nationalist (CN) Republican elites are probably neutral to, or approving of, this effort. This attack on Chevron kills secularism that is usually reflected in federal regulations. CN elites want God's sacred law to govern the Constitution and federal rules, not human law.