What supersedes what?

Consider two phenomena that are often at odds with each other: Public Safety versus Freedom of Speech, in particular, of the negative Dark Free Speech (DFS) variety.  Probably the most famous example of all is someone yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater, where there is no fire. Nope, no can do.  It threatens the public’s safety. 

Keeping beloved freedoms and keeping the greater society safe is a difficult challenge for democracies. How to find the right balance?  Much like Heisenberg’s famous Uncertainty Principle, you often end up losing one at the expense of gaining the other.  

So, I think we have to ask ourselves, Do “the needs of the many (public safety) outweigh the needs of the few (freedom to perpetuate DFS such as uncorroborated conspiracy theories and propagating misinformation) … or the one (It’s All About Me Syndrome™️),” if a democratic society is to remain intact?

Questions:

- To your way of thinking, what ultimately supersedes what?  Public safety or freedom of speech? How do you draw that difficult line?  Give details and examples.  

- If public safety is your priority, what is the best way to implement that? How do we force public safety on resistors? (Impose fines which won’t solve the problem? Other?)

- If freedom of speech is your priority, how do we keep the greater public safe from harmful speech? (Regulate it, and if so, by whom? Other?)  

News chunks: The war of mindsets that control AI; Capitalists are watching you 👀

It helps to understand what the elites with control over AI (artificial intelligence) are thinking. Two clashing visions are at war right now, but the war helps clarify the mindsets. The war broke out into the open last Friday. The NYT reports:

What Just Happened in the World of Artificial Intelligence?

The abrupt ouster of Sam Altman as chief executive of OpenAI on Friday has upended the industry, with investors, executives and others getting to grips with a head-spinning series of twists that reshuffled the major players at the forefront of one the hottest areas in technology.

In the end, after OpenAI rejected appeals to restore Mr. Altman to the top job, Microsoft, the company’s biggest investor, announced on Sunday it would hire him to run a new advanced research lab.

More broadly, the weekend’s turmoil highlighted an unresolved debate in the A.I. community over artificial intelligence, which many see as the most important new technology since web browsers but also poses potential dangers if misused.  

Details of his departure are still emerging but a dispute with a colleague at OpenAI appears to have played a role. Ilya Sutskever, a board member who founded OpenAI with Mr. Altman and several other people, was said to be growing increasingly alarmed that the company’s technology could pose a significant risk, and that Mr. Altman was not paying close enough attention to the potential harms. Mr. Sutskever also objected to what he perceived as his own diminished role inside the company.  

The A.I. industry is split among so-called doomers who say the technology is moving too quickly, risking disastrous results as machines learn to do more things; and others who say it can make life-saving enhancements for humanity.  

More than 1,000 tech leaders signed on to a letter in March calling for a pause in the development of A.I.’s most advanced systems, saying the tools have “profound risks to society and humanity.”

Mr. Altman, who did not sign that letter, has urged responsible management of A.I. while also promoting the technology, and in recent months pitched ideas to investors and others.

Note the implied false dilemma logic fallacy here by the brass knuckles capitalists: taking time for safety will eliminate most or all of the good that can come from the use of AI in commerce. That is false. We can get the benefits and safety by being reasonably careful and cautious. 

In my opinion, this is a very important bit to be aware of. One mindset among the AI elites (probably mostly multi-millionaires (> ~$25 million) and billionaires) can be called the brass knuckles capitalist mentality. It's sacred moral value is free markets running free (unregulated) and butt naked wild (no social conscience, little or no accountability for harm) in pursuit of the sacred God called Profit. The other mindset can be called reasonably regulated capitalism operating in service to the public interest or general welfare. 

When framed like this, one can instantly see the clash of morals, i.e., profit vs the public interest. This issue isn't that AI is useless, because that's false. The issue is safety and respect for the public and the environment. Brass knuckles capitalists could not care less about anything that gets in the way of profit. That includes safety and respect for the public and the environment.

At present, Microsoft and probably Google are in the brass knuckles capitalist army. I suspect that most other big business entities are too, even if they deny it in the PR (propaganda) messaging. So, while Altman urged "responsible management" of AI, that is PR. His comment clearly means he is on the side of brass knuckles capitalism.

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The brass knuckles capitalist war on privacy: NYT columnist Zeynep Tufecki (professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University) wrote an interesting opinion about huge corporations watching us and what it is worth to them:

A report in The Guardian in August that lawyers who had had business before the Supreme Court gave money to an aide to Justice Clarence Thomas for a Christmas party was surprising [IMO, bribe money laundering]. Just as surprising was the way the publication learned about it: from the aide’s public Venmo records. Brian X. Chen, the consumer technology writer for The Times, wrote that even he was surprised that such records of money transfers could be public.

A few years ago it became known that Alexa, Amazon’s voice device, recorded and sent private conversations to third parties, that Amazon staff members listened to recordings and kept an extensive archive of recordings by default.

Both companies responded to these startling violations of privacy by suggesting that the burden to keep this information from going public was on users, who could, they said, opt out of devices’ default settings to ensure privacy. This [in other words, f*ck off] is often the standard industry response.

Even if you’re aware of these problems, how easy is it to protect your privacy? Chen helpfully shared instructions for opting out of Venmo’s public disclosures.

“Inside the app, click on the Me tab, tap the settings icon and select Privacy. Under default privacy settings, select Private,” he explained. “Then, under the ‘More’ section in Privacy, click ‘Past Transactions’ and make sure to set that to ‘Change All to Private.’”

Got all that? I did, and changed my settings, too, as I had also been in the dark. 

On more than one occasion I discovered that my privacy settings had changed from what I thought they were. Help forums are full of similarly befuddled users. Sometimes it’s a bug. Other times, when I dug into it, I realized that another change I had made had surreptitiously switched me back into tracking. Sometimes I learned that there was yet another setting somewhere else that also needed to be changed.

The bigger problem is not the sometimes ridiculous difficulty of opting out, it’s that consumers often aren’t even aware of what their settings allow, or what it all means. If they were truly informed and actively choosing among the available options, the default setting would matter little, and be of little to no value.

But companies expect users to accept what they’re given, not know their options or not have the constant vigilance required to keep track of the available options, however limited they may be. Since the power in the industry is concentrated among few gatekeepers, and the technology is opaque and its consequences hard to foresee, default settings are some of the most important ways for companies to keep collecting and using data as they want. 

Tufecki went on to explain that default settings that automatically track people are worth billions to big tech corps. Apple changed the default settings on iPhones and other devices so that users could not be tracked automatically via a unique identifier assigned to their Apple device in 2021. Apple apps had to ask for and receive explicit permission before they could have access to that identifier. In that same year, Snap, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube were estimated to have lost about $10 billion in total because of the change. Similarly, in 2022, Meta, Facebook’s parent company, said it alone stood to lose $10 billion. 

Also in 2021, during a Google antitrust trial,  Google said that it paid $26.3 billion in 2021 to be the default search engine on various platforms. A big portion of the money went to Apple. $26.3 billion was more than a third of the entire 2021 profit of Google’s parent company, Alphabet.

Tufecki comments on how ridiculous this heavily rigged asymmetric war of information really is:

I’m not a tech novice: I started programming in middle school, worked as a developer and study these systems academically. If professionals can be tripped up, I’d argue that an industry rife with information asymmetries and powerful, complicated technologies needs to be reined in. .... Regulators can require companies to have defaults that favor privacy and autonomy, and make it easy to remain in control of them.

Yeah, they need to be reined in . . . . . bwahahahaha!! Make it easy? Bwahahahaha!! 

The brass knuckles capitalism wing of the authoritarian radical right Republican Party (i.e., the entire GOP leadership) will make damn sure that the playing field will be tipped in tech company’s favor as much as possible or even legal. After all The Profit God is sacred and infallible.

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Here's a quick quiz that evaluates your work habits to see if you’re a Boomer, Gen X, Millennial or Gen Z. I'm 29%/29%/24%/17% (B/X/Mil/Z), so some of all four generations, but mostly older fart rather than younger fart. We should all be aware of what we are because . . . . . not sure why. It’s important to know our fartiness anyway for future reference. Maybe.

Biden's Birthday, to make a fuss or not make a fuss?

                                                I say let's make a BIG FUSS!

                                                 I say we need less Sleepy Joe, and more......

Now if only the friggin' media would get on board:

Biden’s birthday prompts debate about age and wisdom of America’s oldest president

Washington, DC (CNN) — President Joe Biden is marking his 81st birthday milestone Monday with a low-key family celebration as he braces for a strenuous election year ahead.

But even as the first family keeps the celebrations muted and out-of-sight, the moment nevertheless highlights his greatest campaign liability – his advanced age and, along with it, perceptions among voters that his physical and mental fitness have declined.

https://ktvz.com/politics/cnn-us-politics/2023/11/20/biden-spends-a-low-key-birthday-with-family-but-questions-about-his-age-grow-louder/

From this Snowflake's perspective, we already see the problem:

"low-key celebration" when it would be better to show he can still party hardy?

"celebrations muted and out-of-sight" is sure not going to help the image of a frail old man. So why would they even think of such a tactic? Pull out all the stops I say. Whatyousay?

For an Aging President, a Birthday With a Bite

President Biden has no plans for a lavish public celebration when he turns 81 on Monday, even as Democrats search for a strategy to assuage voters’ concerns about his age by next year’s election.

Egads! That looks like a Fox News headline, but nope, this one is from........

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/19/us/politics/biden-birthday-age.html

In short folks, if the press is gonna focus on the negativities of his age, and he is being urged to stay "out-of-sight" HOW IN THE HELL is any of this going to help change the perception that Joe is just an old man and has lost his oomph!

It's like we keep blaming Rightwing media, when it is he himself, his advisors, and the media that should be supporting him, making him out to be an old man. 

SHEESH!

News bits: Joe is adamant; Climate optimism from an expert; Another DJT warning

A NYT opinion reports that Joe Biden is ferociously adamant about running for president again:

David Axelrod is not a prick. I’ve known him since 2007 ....

So when President Biden privately employs that epithet for Axelrod, according to Politico’s Jonathan Martin, it’s bad for a few reasons.

The ordinarily gracious president is punching down at the strategist who helped elevate him onto the ticket with Barack Obama in 2008 and who thinks he was “a great vice president” and has done a lot of wonderful things as president.

When some in the Obama camp chattered in 2011 about switching Biden out for Hillary Clinton, Axelrod said, he protested: “That would be an incredible act of disloyalty to a guy who has done a great job for us.”

Axelrod drew Biden’s ire because he urged the president to consider stopping at one term, throwing open the race to younger Democrats while there’s still time, and leaving as a hero. He said that, despite Biden’s insult, he got a slew of messages agreeing with him.

“I don’t care about them thinking I’m a prick — that’s fine,” the strategist told me. “I hope they don’t think the polls are wrong because they’re not.” 

According to a New York Times/Siena College poll, Donald Trump is ahead in five battleground states and, as some other surveys have found, is even making inroads among Black voters and young voters. There’s a generational fracture in the Democratic Party over the Israeli-Hamas horror and Biden’s age. Third-party spoilers are circling.

The president turns 81 on Monday; the Oval hollows out its occupants quickly, and Biden is dealing with two world-shattering wars, chaos at the border, a riven party and a roiling country.

“I think he has a 50-50 shot here, but no better than that, maybe a little worse,” Axelrod said. “He thinks he can cheat nature here and it’s really risky. They’ve got a real problem if they’re counting on Trump to win it for them. I remember Hillary doing that, too.”

Based on that, it sounds like Joe is not going to change his mind about running. And, it makes him angry to hear contrary advice. 

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A NYT opinion by Dr. Kate Marvel (climate scientist at the environmental nonprofit Project Drawdown, a lead author on the Fifth National Climate Assessment) opines:

Two and a half years ago, when I was asked to help write the most authoritative report on climate change in the United States, I hesitated. Did we really need another warning of the dire consequences of climate change in this country? .... In the end, I said yes, but reluctantly. Frankly, I was sick of admonishing people about how bad things could get. Scientists have raised the alarm over and over again, and still the temperature rises.

Our report, which was released on Tuesday, contains more dire warnings. There are plenty of new reasons for despair. Thanks to recent scientific advances, we can now link climate change to specific extreme weather disasters, and we have a better understanding of how the feedback loops in the climate system can make warming even worse. ....

.... But our findings also offered a glimmer of hope: If emissions fall dramatically, as the report suggested they could, we may never reach 2 degrees Celsius at all. For the first time in my career, I felt something strange: optimism. And that simple realization was enough to convince me that releasing yet another climate report was worthwhile.

Something has changed in the United States, and not just the climate. State, local and tribal governments all around the country have begun to take action. Some politicians now actually campaign on climate change, instead of ignoring or lying about it. .... The conversation has moved on, and the role of scientists has changed. We’re not just warning of danger any more. We’re showing the way to safety.

I was wrong about those previous reports: They did matter, after all. While climate scientists were warning the world of disaster, a small army of scientists, engineers, policymakers and others were getting to work. These first responders have helped move us toward our climate goals. Our warnings did their job.

I could still tell you scary stories about a future ravaged by climate change, and they’d be true, at least on the trajectory we’re currently on. But it’s also true that we have a once-in-human-history chance, not only to prevent the worst effects, but to make the world better right now. It would be a shame to squander this opportunity. So I don’t just want to talk about the problems anymore. I want to talk about the solutions. Consider this your last warning from me.

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The Economist writes:

Donald Trump poses the biggest danger to the world in 2024

A shadow looms over the world. In this week’s edition we publish The World Ahead 2024, our 38th annual predictive guide to the coming year, and in all that time no single person has ever eclipsed our analysis as much as Donald Trump eclipses 2024. That a Trump victory next November is a coin-toss probability is beginning to sink in.

This is a perilous moment for a man like Mr Trump to be back knocking on the door of the Oval Office. Democracy is in trouble at home. Mr Trump’s claim to have won the election in 2020 was more than a lie: it was a cynical bet that he could manipulate and intimidate his compatriots, and it has worked.  

The greatest threat Mr Trump poses is to his own country. Having won back power because of his election-denial in 2020, he would surely be affirmed in his gut feeling that only losers allow themselves to be bound by the norms, customs and self-sacrifice that make a nation. In pursuing his enemies, Mr Trump will wage war on any institution that stands in his way, including the courts and the Department of Justice.

A Trump victory next year would also have a profound effect abroad. China and its friends would rejoice over the evidence that American democracy is dysfunctional. If Mr Trump trampled due process and civil rights in the United States, his diplomats could not proclaim them abroad. The global south would be confirmed in its suspicion that American appeals to do what is right are really just an exercise in hypocrisy. America would become just another big power.

A second Trump term would be a watershed in a way the first was not. Victory would confirm his most destructive instincts about power. His plans would encounter less resistance. And because America will have voted him in while knowing the worst, its moral authority would decline. The election will be decided by tens of thousands of voters in just a handful of states. In 2024 the fate of the world will depend on their ballots.

And it is worse than that. The Economist did not even touch on the possible effects of ARR (authoritarian radical right) Republican laws designed to subvert and reverse bad election results and suppress non-Republican votes. The 2024 election will probably turn out to be very close, unless something big changes before the election. In that case, Biden could lose because ARR Republican election rigging and vote suppressing laws were a necessary factor in Biden's loss.