Science bits: AI designs new enzymes; A neuroscience advance; Hackers hacking

This one could be a game changer: Since the 1980s humans have been tinkering with changing genes and enzymes to make them work better or differently. Directed evolution is one way to generate new enzymes. Genetic engineering has advanced to the point of being able to engineer humans. Now, artificial intelligence software is starting to design new enzymes. Sci Tech Daily writes: 

A natural language model has jumpstarted the process of protein design by creating active enzymes.

Researchers have developed an AI system that can generate artificial enzymes from scratch. In laboratory experiments, some of these enzymes demonstrated efficacy comparable to natural enzymes, even when their artificially created amino acid sequences greatly deviated from any known natural protein.

The experiment shows that natural language processing, initially created for reading and writing language text, can grasp certain fundamental concepts of biology. The AI program, known as ProGen, was developed by Salesforce Research and employs next-token prediction to construct artificial proteins from amino acid sequences.

Scientists said the new technology could become more powerful than directed evolution, the Nobel-prize-winning protein design technology, and it will energize the 50-year-old field of protein engineering by speeding the development of new proteins that can be used for almost anything from therapeutics to degrading plastic.

“The artificial designs perform much better than designs that were inspired by the evolutionary process,” said James Fraser, Ph.D., professor of bioengineering and therapeutic sciences at the UCSF School of Pharmacy, and an author of the work, which was recently published in Nature Biotechnology. 

“The language model is learning aspects of evolution, but it’s different than the normal evolutionary process,” Fraser said. “We now have the ability to tune the generation of these properties for specific effects. For example, an enzyme that’s incredibly thermostable or likes acidic environments or won’t interact with other proteins.”  

With proteins, the design choices were almost limitless. Lysozymes are small as proteins go, with up to about 300 amino acids. But with 20 possible amino acids, there are an enormous number (20^300 - twenty to the 300th power) of possible combinations. That’s greater than taking all the humans who lived throughout time, multiplied by the number of grains of sand on Earth, multiplied by the number of atoms in the universe. (🥴!)

Given the limitless possibilities, it’s remarkable that the model can so easily generate working enzymes.

This is an area of application for AI that could revolutionize medicine. It's still too early to predict the long-term impacts. Buy my gut tells me this will turn out to be a big deal within the next couple of years. This will play out pretty fast, for better or worse.

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An advance in understanding the brain: Medical Express writes:

For the first time, researchers record long-term electrical activity in a single brain cell

.... scientists need to understand how individual brain cells contribute to a larger network of brain activity and what role each cell plays in shaping behavior and overall health. Until now, it's been difficult to get a clear view of how brain cells in living animals behave over extended periods of time. 

But Jia Liu's group at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) has developed an electronic implant that collected detailed information about brain activity from a single cell of interest for more than a year.

"This research solves a fundamental issue—the challenge of creating a brain-electronic interface that does not disturb brain function or degrade over time," says Liu.

"Maybe one day it's cold and gray outside, and you feel unhappy and in a bad mood. Another day, it's sunny and you're on the beach and you're in a great mood. How those representations change in the brain cannot be studied by current technology because we haven't been able to stably track activity from the same neuron," he says. "This research completely overcomes that limitation. It's the beginning of a new era of neuroscience."

The researchers intend to transmit brain activity in real time from the brain to an artificial neural network in a computer for analysis. Researchers will look at how the mesh nanoelectronic sensors can be used to study phenomena such as "neural representation", which is how the brain generates images we perceive via vision.

This is a significant advance in brain-machine interface technology. At some point, computers and brains will be communicating. That could lead to major knowledge advances in hard to study areas such as consciousness, sentience, and the will to live. 

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Technology is a two-edged sword: As is usual these days, morally rotted people rush in and misuse new technology that was designed to be helpful and good. Mashable writes:

Scammers are spoofing ChatGPT to spread malware

No new product can be called successful online until the scammers show up

ChatGPT has blown up in just a few months' time, becoming the fastest growing app of all time.

So, of course, hackers are already weaponizing the popularity of OpenAI's artificial intelligence chatbot in order to scam internet users.

Cybersecurity researchers have already uncovered hundreds of recently registered(Opens in a new tab) domains utilizing the term "ChatGPT." While not all of these domains will be weaponized for nefarious purposes, some of them already are being used in that way.  

.... as first reported by Bleeping Computer, one such website "chat-gpt-pc.online" attempted
to convince visitors to its page that ChatGPT was offered as a downloadable local application for Windows. Alvieri found that this download would inject users with the RedLine information-stealing malware. Essentially, this malware steals stored information in users' applications, such as their web browser. For example, if a user has Google Chrome store their passwords or credit card information, this malware can pull the data and send it to the hacker. 

Sigh, this is why we have so many bad things these days. 

A very comprehensive look at biased news outlets....

 To quote the author:

COMMENTARY

I spent an incredible amount of time on this article. By far the most I’ve ever done for a single piece.

The constant anger, arguments, and contempt we see in our everyday lives spurred me on to gather and analyze this dataset.

And yet, I find myself now with even more questions than I was able to answer in creating this article.

• How can we stop such bias from infecting the national discourse?
• Where is the line between allowing propaganda to permeate freely versus free speech? Is this an absolute argument, or can we somehow find a line to discern the truth from fiction?
• Can we please stop listening to tinfoil hat-wearing maniacs?

As you can see from some of the data above, there are many sites that are clearly spreading false information, opinion, and extremism.

This does not bring us together.

It leads to us doubting our neighbors, our friends, our parents, and other important people in our lives.

Eternal distrust.

You can’t believe what you hear.

Every man for himself.

It seems that many people these days, mistakenly in my opinion, search for sources based on what they already want to hear.

They look for articles to confirm their suspicions. Their thoughts and feelings.

Right or left, it doesn’t matter. If you search on Google for something to back up your feeling on a subject (regardless of truth) — you will find it.

There’s an article for everything now.

Opinions being added to the news cycle has corrupted the impartiality of it.

This is not how we come together as a world, as a nation.

We must be better than this.

It’s my belief that many of these websites, their owners, and their anchors are one of the largest absolute causes of anger in the world today.

Be better, people.

I’ll close off by stating my most nagging thought after conducting this extensive exercise — I couldn’t wait to clear my browser cookies fast enough.

J.J. Pryor

https://threwthelookingglass.com/how-biased-is-news/

Talk about dissecting what is and isn't trustworthy news. The above link is very comprehensive and a time consuming read. I love the thoroughness though. 

The article starts out with a challenge:

“I challenge anybody to show me an example of bias in Fox News Channel.”

Challenge accepted.

You will have to read the rest of the analysis at your leisure. 😏

News bits: About breaking American up; GOP demagoguery

Does the GOP reject democracy?: The New Republic writes:

Our political divides seem more intractable now than at any other time in living memory.

In this grim hour, the nation naturally turns to one of its leading political thinkers: Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. Her proposed solution is simple. “We need a national divorce,” she wrote on Twitter on February 20. “We need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government. Everyone I talk to says this. From the sick and disgusting woke culture issues shoved down our throats to the [Democrats’] traitorous America Last policies, we are done.”
Greene’s vision is not just about realizing conservative policy ideas—it is an authoritarian rejection of democratic government itself.

Greene’s call, however, is not a cure for the disease in our body politic but a symptom of it. Every call for the United States to break apart or divide itself based on the political factions of the moment are built on a fantasy. In that fantasy, the proponents get to live in a world where everything they want comes true, and the perceived opponents finally get the self-inflicted comeuppance that they and their ideas deserve. Greene’s vision is not just about realizing conservative policy ideas—it is an authoritarian rejection of democratic government itself.

Greene said that she thought the two sides of American politics had reached the point of “irreconcilable differences” on a variety of topics. “I’ll speak for the right and say, we are absolutely disgusted and fed up with the left cramming and forcing their ways on us and our children with no respect for our religion/faith, traditional values, and economic & government policy beliefs,” Greene explained.  

“Perhaps some blue states would even likely have government funded Antifa communists training schools,” Greene added, almost as an afterthought. “I mean elected Democrats already support Antifa, so why not.”  

After a national divorce, Greene claimed, red states would be able to ban transgender people from everyday life, use fossil fuels whenever possible, throw out ESG (environmental, social, and governance) requirements for businesses, treat police officers as “heroes” instead of “racists,” secure the border, and hold in-person elections without voter fraud. Blue states could abolish the police, let dead people vote, and eliminate guns and private property.

So exactly what are the all bad things the left has crammed and forced on the right? Forced birth laws? Nope. Those come from the right. Severe restrictions on religious freedoms or tax subsidies for religion? Nope. Free and fair elections? Yes, but the right is getting rid of that. Civil liberties? Arguably, but the radical right is getting rid of those too. Severe limits on gun ownership? Nope, not according to majority public opinion. Medicare and social security? Yes, but it seems that most of the right likes those things too. Antifa communist training schools and let dead people vote? Those lies are QAnon-level crackpottery. Abolish the police? No blue state has done that. Another radical right lie. Critical race theory? Nope, for the most part. 

Does the radical right respect values and economic & government policy beliefs of the left? Hell no. The right insults and slanders liberals. The radical right calls liberal values and beliefs socialist tyranny, pedophilia, evil and etc. This is more evidence of how far into deranged anti-democratic authoritarianism and anti-inconvenient truth the GOP has degenerated into.

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Republican elites demagogue Democrats: The Hill writes:

Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) attacked Democrats ahead of a potential 2024 White House bid, accusing the party on Sunday of “working on a blueprint on how to ruin America.”

“The left is trying to sell a drug of victimhood and the narcotic of despair,” Scott said during an interview on “Fox News Sunday.”

“The left today seems to be working on a blueprint on how to ruin America.”  

Scott on Sunday, however, argued that pointing at the failures of the Democratic Party shouldn’t be considered negative.

“Why is that negative to point out the fact that under Joe Biden’s leadership, we’ve had the highest inflation in 40 years?” the senator asked.

Right, Biden alone caused global inflation. Things like the war in Ukraine, climate change, corporate price gouging and past Republican policies have nothing to do with it. That’s standard radical right GOP lies- and slanders-laden demagoguery. 

And, the radical right, including Scott, do not play the victimhood card? What a blatant hypocrite. Republicans whine about their victimhood all the time.

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More radical right Republican demagoguery: The Hill Writes:

Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) slammed President Biden for his approach toward relations with China on Sunday, accusing him of attempting to appease Beijing.

“All that Biden does is pacify China,” Scott told John Catsimatidis on WABC’s “Cats Roundtable,” adding, “I don’t know what it is, but this is a guy who won’t stand up to dictators around the world.”

This shameless hypocrisy comes from Rick Scott. Scott never criticized Trump for his open support of dictatorship, including the murdering dictators in Russia and North Korea. He does not criticize Republicans in congress who want to stop supporting Ukraine and allowing the Russian dictator to murder everyone he wants. Scott does not criticize nationwide authoritarian Republican laws that subvert free and fair elections. Scott should criticize himself because he and other Republican Senators endorse the killing of Hungarian democracy by Viktor Orban:

Sen. Rick Scott of Florida insisted that “everybody’s got different views” on Hungary’s leadership and pivoted to criticizing American democracy. He said he had a Hungarian friend who’s considering moving back to his home country if the US “keeps going down this path of systemic socialism.”

Systemic socialism? What is that? Whatever it is, we can trust Scott to keep it a well-guarded secret. It’s the popular KYMS rhetorical tactic at work. 

KYMS = keep your mouth shut

 

Yup, everybody’s got different views, 

but hypocrisy is still hypocrisy and 

that sometimes includes different views

News bits: Regarding the federal judicial nomination process; A Charter school insight

There is a possibility of completely eliminating Senators’ power to block or slow federal judge nominees. At present, Republican Senators are slowing Biden’s federal judge nominees in states that have Republican one or two Senators. It is likely that the Republicans will take control of the Senate after the 2024 elections. In that case, it is reasonable to expect that Senate Republicans will (i) eliminate this power if a Republican also takes control of the White House, or (ii) reinstate the power if Dems eliminate it now but control the White House after the 2024 elections. The AP writes: 

The rising friction over what in Washington parlance is known as the “blue slip” is creating tensions on the Senate panel that handles judicial nominations and prompting stern warnings from Republicans about a dangerous escalation in the partisanship that already dominates the judicial confirmation process.

The clash over Senate procedure could have major ramifications for Biden as he seeks to fill as many court vacancies as possible during the final two years of his term. Aghast at the speed with which Republicans approved judges during the Trump era, Democrats have made the confirmation to the courts a top priority, vowing to fill every seat possible. Their focus on the nominations is even greater now that Republicans control the House and can stall much of Biden’s broader legislative agenda.

Since at least 1917, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee has sent a blue-colored form, or “blue slip,” to the senators representing the home state of a judicial nominee. A blue slip returned with a positive response signals the senator’s approval of moving forward with a nomination hearing. But if the blue slip is not returned or comes back with a negative response, that means the home state senator objects, which can doom the nomination.

 

Republicans during Donald Trump’s presidency determined the lack of a positive blue slip would not stop them from moving forward with considering appellate court nominees — and they did so 17 times. Democrats were livid, pointing out that Republicans blocked several of President Barack Obama’s appellate nominees by declining to return a positive blue slip.

Now, Democrats are being encouraged to follow suit and do away with the blue slip when it comes to the district judges whose courts serve as the starting point for federal civil and criminal cases.

Is it time to get rid of the blue slip right now? It sure looks that way to me. The Dems cannot afford to let authoritarian Repubs slow or block any Dem judicial nominees at any of the three federal levels, trial, appeals and supreme. Radical right Repubs do that now with a vengeance when they are in power. They enthusiastically blocked Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court for no reason whatsoever. That hyper-partisan mindset has not improved one iota since then. In fact, it has gotten worse. 

There is no evidence the authoritarian radical right will be changed for the better once they claw their way back to power. In this matter, meaningful bipartisanship is 100% dead. All that's left is GOP threats and maybe some feeble lip service.

Unfortunately, the Dem in charge of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Dick Durbin (D-IL) does not want to end the blue slip practice. Durbin is an incredibly incompetent fool. His idiotic policy could wind up dooming meaningful democracy and civil liberties in America.

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Waddabout them charter schools?: The Hill writes about that:

Charter schools aren’t fixing public education. Here’s what is.

Charter schools, private school vouchers and other market-based reforms to public education are not working. They are like a medication that only treats symptoms, like Prilosec for heartburn or Advil for arthritis. They look good in shiny brochures and work for some families and students, but they don’t address the root cause of the problem. And sometimes the side effects make the problem worse.

We know the root cause: Whether in rural Oklahoma or the southside of Chicago, we don’t invest enough in public schools in low-income ZIP codes. Market-based reforms ignore this problem and instead merely hand over control of schools to private organizations. This siphons away funding meant for traditional public schools, many of which are already starving for dollars.

What low-income students and their families need is what those from wealthier neighborhoods already have: enough funding and a say in how that funding is spent. In other words, those closest to the classroom – students, teachers and parents – know what they need. We just have to listen.

The good news is that there are schools that are listening, in diverse places such as Hillsborough County, Fla., and the Washington, D.C., suburbs. They’re called “community schools,” and they aim to support the entirety of a student’s well-being to ensure they are healthy, well-fed, safe and in a better position to learn. Most importantly, they empower those closest to problems at school to guide the solutions to those problems. (emphasis added)

Unequal funding for public schools has been a known problem for decades. This is another indictment of the inherent inability of free market capitalism to sometimes best serve the public interest. The free markets always want more revenue and power and that usually comes at the expense of the public interest. Just take out the profit motive and one gets a very different, more pro-public interest operating system.

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Florida county GOP votes for crackpottery: From the crackpot land of Florida, comes this news bit: Florida county Republican Party votes to ban the COVID-19 vaccine. Joe Sansone, the crackpot who drafted this crackpot resolution, said, “The Lee County Republican Party is going to be on the vanguard of this campaign to stop the genocide because we have foreign non-governmental entities that are unleashing biological weapons on the American people.” (Twilight Zone music quietly tinkling)

Fortunately, the Lee County crackpot squadron has not power to make it so in crackpotlandia. This freak incident will probably go quietly away. One observer commented: “Stop the genocide? Foreign non-governmental entities unleashing biological weapons? Holy space-laser-operating-lizard-alien-living-on-a-flat-Earth-with-a-5G-transmitter!”

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Christian theocracy in Idaho -- The American Redoubt blither: This radical right-inspired news bit comes from Idaho:

‘Christian patriots’ are flocking from blue states to Idaho

COEUR D’ALENE, Idaho — Earlier this month, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia Republican, addressed the Kootenai County Republican Central Committee, whose purview runs from this small resort city up along the Washington state border. Before she spoke, a local pastor and onetime Idaho state representative named Tim Remington, wearing an American-flag-themed tie, revved up the crowd: “If we put God back in Idaho, then God will always protect Idaho.”

The event may be the closest thing yet to Greene’s vision for the GOP, which she has urged to become the “party of Christian nationalism.” The Idaho Panhandle’s especially fervent embrace of the ideology may explain why Greene, who has sold T-shirts reading “Proud Christian Nationalist,” traveled more than 2,300 miles to a county with fewer than 67,000 Republican voters to talk about biblical truth: Amid ongoing national debate over Christian nationalism, North Idaho offers a window at what actually trying to manifest a right-wing vision for a Christian America can look like — and the power it can wield in state politics.

The origin of North Idaho’s relationship with contemporary Christian nationalism can be traced to a 2011 blog post published by survivalist author James Wesley, Rawles (the comma is his addition). Titled “The American Redoubt — Move to the Mountain States,” Rawles’s 4,000-word treatise called on conservative followers to pursue “exit strategies” from liberal states and move to “safe havens” in the American Northwest ....  

“In calamitous times, with a few exceptions, it will only be the God fearing that will continue to be law abiding,” writes Rawles, who declined to be interviewed for this article.

One thing about the radical right Christian nationalist movement, it is consistent in lying, slandering and crackpot ‘reasoning’. Claiming that only Christians will be law abiding is a slander and a lie. Safe havens from liberal states is an undeniable reference to the Christian persecution myth that is central to theocratic Christian nationalist dogma. 

A big thing about political extremism is that it cannot survive by relying on truth, sound reasoning or respect for others. It has to gin up fake enemies and fake conspiracies. Then they can demagogue and slander the fake enemies and their fake plans as evil horror. Radical right Christian nationalists like these aren’t just immoral. They are evil because they are malicious deceivers. They intend harm to others. That includes death if they see fit to kill for their bigoted, hateful extremist beliefs.

The Vincible Ignorance Movement: How the radical right sees outreach efforts;

INTRODUCTION

Vincible ignorance: 1) ignorance a person could eliminate by applying reasonable diligence under the circumstances; 2) ignorance a reasonable person ought not to have; 3) moral culpability for willful ignorance of matters that one is obligated to know, e.g., as in an elected politician or religious leader being morally obligated to determine and tell the truth when reasonably possible

Blog note!: Going forward, I will sometimes characterize or refer to the “Vincible Ignorance Movement” (VIM) to describe radical right demagoguery about issues of woke, wokeness and the like the. The core concept is “vincible ignorance” (VI). The radical right wants Americans to be ignorant of inconvenient truths, including historical truths. Those labels applied to the radical right elites and their operatives are accurate and appropriate. 

VIM ideologues, elites and propagandists rely heavily on both ignorance and affirmative lies, deceit, slanders and emotional manipulation. The VI label is an intentional attempt to point out the fact that either the radical right elites are liars or they advocate things that are false.

From what I can tell, the VIM and Christian nationalism are tightly linked. Much of what VIM elites and operatives are doing looks like core Christian nationalist dogma. As with CN dogma, the VIM is focused on accumulating power and wealth for elites, usually at the expense of the public interest, civil liberties, pluralism, tolerance and the like. One can think of the VIM as a key part or manifestation of the CN movement. It's not clear to me how the brass knuckles capitalist movement in the Republican Party fits in, but it is probably at least sympathetic because most hard core capitalist ideologues are not supporters of civil liberties. And, many hard core capitalist ideologues are hard core Christian nationalists themselves. 

A NEWS BIT

Radical right oozes arrogant contempt for diversity and outreach: The WaPo reports about how the radical right sees pluralism in universities and what it is starting to do about it:

After Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) named him last summer to the University of Virginia’s governing board, Bert Ellis had a platform to influence the school’s administration. He spotted a potential target, a vice provost named Louis P. Nelson, tasked with community engagement, public service and academic outreach programs.

Nelson, who reports to U-Va’s chief academic officer, Provost Ian Baucom, is also a professor of architectural history and an award-winning scholar and teacher. He has researched buildings and landscapes that shaped slavery in West Africa and the Americas, including at the prestigious public university that Thomas Jefferson founded in Charlottesville.

Ellis was unimpressed.

“Check out this numnut who works for Baucom and has nothing to do but highlight slavery at UVA,” Ellis wrote on July 22 in text messages to two other new board members, Stephen P. Long and Amanda Pillion. “This bloated bureaucracy has got to be slashed.”  

“We’re like Patton,” Ellis was quoted as saying. “We go forward. We don’t retreat.” 

In 2021 Ellis criticized how guides were portraying Jefferson to campus visitors. They seemed intent “on ‘contextualizing’ Mr. Jefferson as a slave holder and rapist,” Ellis wrote at the time — a portrayal that he said completely undermined “his part of the Founding of America and our University.”  

“These numnuts at the CD [Cavalier Daily] and Student Council will not stop until the Administration removes everything on the Grounds,” Ellis replied on Sept. 1, referring to the student newspaper by initials. “At some point they will bitch that all the red brick that Mr. Jefferson used is racist and needs to be replaced. I am not sure if ignoring them or confronting them is the right strategy but they are definitely gearing up for a fight.”

Ellis claims that characterizing Jefferson as a slave holder and rapist completely undermines his role in founding America and UVA. Is that true? Or, does at least pointing out that Jefferson was a slave owner present actual historical fact, leaving people free to think what they choose on the basis of disclosed facts, instead of facts cherry picked by elite White people? What about calling Jefferson a rapist? 

Again, the intent of the radical right to rewrite inconvenient history, or prevent it from ever being written or even discussed in public, is clear and undeniable. American history will be Whitewashed if the radical right gets its way. This culture war battle by the Vincible Ignorance Movement (VIM) is underway at a major University. This is not about a public primary, middle or high school. This is far beyond the VIM arguing that evil liberals are grooming 5 and 6 year old children into the sex trade by talking about sexuality. We are dealing with adults here, not children. 

What is going on at UVA arguably mostly reflects (i) immoral vincible ignorance by radical right elites to Whitewash inconvenient history, (ii) even more immoral cynical radical right elites flat out lying (lies of omission via deleting the inconvenient bits of history), or (iii) some combination of both. In my opinion, it is mostly option ii. They know better, but their cynical goal is to instill VI in the American public.

Q1: Is that analysis off the mark, over the top, just wrong or otherwise not credible? We can all be pretty sure that radical right elites firmly rejects all of it. They want us ignorant for our own good.

Q2: Does distorting history like this represent White bigotry, racism, some of both or none of either? 

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The radical right culture war on woke AI: The WaPo writes:

Christopher Rufo, the conservative activist who led campaigns against critical race theory and gender identity in schools, this week pointed his half-million Twitter followers toward a new target for right-wing ire: “woke AI.” 

The tweet highlighted President Biden’s recent order calling for artificial intelligence that “advances equity” and “prohibits algorithmic discrimination,” which Rufo said was tantamount to “a special mandate for woke AI.”

After ChatGPT wrote a poem praising President Biden, but refused to write one praising former president Donald Trump, the creative director for Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), Leigh Wolf, lashed out.

“The damage done to the credibility of AI by ChatGPT engineers building in political bias is irreparable,” Wolf tweeted on Feb. 1.

His tweet went viral and within hours an online mob harassed three OpenAI employees — two women, one of them Black, and a nonbinary worker — blamed for the AI’s alleged bias against Trump. None of them work directly on ChatGPT, but their faces were shared on right-wing social media.  

OpenAI’s Altman has been emphasizing that Silicon Valley should not be in charge of setting boundaries around AI — echoing Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other social media executives who have argued the companies should not have to define what constitutes misinformation or hate speech.

It is fine to try to limit bias and bias-inspired errors in AI. But the what about AI refusing to praise Trump when he is a traitor, chronic liar and a criminal? Those are facts in evidence, not just opinions. The radical right advocates keeping misinformation and hate speech on the same level as honest speech. That is authoritarianism, pure and simple.

Of course the radical right denies essentially all of the proven bad things about Trump. It demands equivalence where there is none to be had. There is no way that AI engineers can avoid political backlash from people who are all in on advocating falsehoods based on vincible ignorance and/or just lying to the public.  

Things sure are getting really ugly, aren’t they. 

“Nothing” doesn’t exist. Instead, there is “quantum foam”

Danger: Science Ahead 😉

From the BigThink Blog: “When you combine the Uncertainty Principle with Einstein's famous equation, you get a mind-blowing result: Particles can come from nothing.”

Key Takeaways

• The concept of "nothing" has been debated for millennia, by both scientists and philosophers.
• Even if you took an empty container devoid of all matter and cooled it to absolute zero, there is still "something" in the container.
• That something is called quantum foam, and it represents particles blinking into and out of existence.

The full BigThink article link is here.

Oh, I love this stuff.  If you’d rather just get the gist of it instead of wading through the entire article, I’ve copy/pasted the entire article below with the more intriguing sentences highlighted by me.  If you are not interested in the details, you can scroll to the TL;DR mark.  For the full context, click on the article link above.  My OP questions will follow.

Option: Scroll down to the TL;DR skip mark ↓

***

What is nothing? This is a question that has bothered philosophers as far back as the ancient Greeks, where they debated the nature of the void. They had long discussions trying to determine whether nothing is something.

It’s nothing, really

What would happen if scientists took a container and removed all the air out of it, creating an ideal vacuum that was entirely devoid of matter? The removal of matter would mean that energy would remain. Much in the same way that the energy from the Sun can cross to the Earth through empty space, heat from outside the container would radiate into the container. Thus, the container wouldn’t be truly empty.

However, what if scientists also cooled the container to the lowest possible temperature (absolute zero), so it radiated no energy at all? Furthermore, suppose that scientists shielded the container so no outside energy or radiation could penetrate it. Then there would be absolutely nothing inside the container, right?

That’s where things become counterintuitive. It turns out that nothing isn’t nothing.

The nature of “nothing”

The laws of quantum mechanics are confusing, predicting that particles are also waves and that cats are simultaneously alive and dead. However, one of the most confusing of all quantum principles is called the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which is commonly explained as saying that you cannot simultaneously perfectly measure the location and movement of a subatomic particle. While that is a good representation of the principle, it also says that you cannot measure the energy of anything perfectly and that the shorter the time you measure, the worse your measurement is. Taken to the extreme, if you try to make a measurement in near-zero time, your measurement will be infinitely imprecise.

These quantum principles have mind-bending consequences for anyone trying to understand the nature of nothing. For example, if you try to measure the amount of energy at a location — even if that energy is supposed to be nothing — you still cannot measure zero precisely. Sometimes, when you make the measurement, the expected zero turns out to be non-zero. And this isn’t just a measurement problem; it’s a feature of reality. For short periods of time, zero is not always zero.

When you combine this bizarre fact (that zero expected energy can be non-zero, if you examine a short enough time period) with Einstein’s famous equation E = mc², there is an even more bizarre consequence. Einstein’s equation says that energy is matter and vice versa. Combined with quantum theory, this means that in a location that is supposedly entirely empty and devoid of energy, space can briefly fluctuate to non-zero energy — and that temporary energy can make matter (and antimatter) particles.

Quantum foam

Thus, at the tiny quantum level, empty space isn’t empty. It’s actually a vibrant place, with tiny subatomic particles appearing and disappearing in wanton abandon. This appearance and disappearance has some superficial resemblance to the effervescent behavior of the foam on the top of a freshly poured beer, with bubbles appearing and disappearing — hence the term “quantum foam.”

The quantum foam isn’t just theoretical. It is quite real. One demonstration of this is when researchers measure the magnetic properties of subatomic particles like electrons. If the quantum foam isn’t real, electrons should be magnets with a certain strength. However, when measurements are made, it turns out that the magnetic strength of electrons is slightly higher (by about 0.1%). When the effect due to quantum foam is taken into account, theory and measurement agree perfectly — to twelve digits of accuracy.

Another demonstration of the quantum foam comes courtesy of the Casimir Effect, named after Dutch physicist Hendrik Casimir. The effect goes something like this: Take two metal plates and put them very near one another in a perfect vacuum, separated by a tiny fraction of a millimeter. If the quantum foam idea is right, then the vacuum surrounding the plates is filled with an unseen flurry of subatomic particles blinking into and out of existence.

These particles have a range of energies, with the most likely energy being very small, but occasionally higher energies appear. This is where more familiar quantum effects come into play because classical quantum theory says that particles are both particles and waves. And waves have wavelengths. 

Outside the tiny gap, all waves can fit without restriction. However, inside the gap, only waves that are shorter than the gap can exist. Long waves simply cannot fit. Thus, outside the gap, there are waves of all wavelengths, while inside the gap there are only short wavelengths. This basically means that there are more kinds of particles outside than inside, and the effect is that there is a net pressure inward. Thus, if the quantum foam is real, the plates will be pushed together.

Scientists made several measurements of the Casimir effect, however it was in 2001 when the effect was conclusively demonstrated using the geometry I have described here. The pressure due to the quantum foam causes the plates to move.

The quantum foam is real. Nothing is something after all.

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Questions:

Now that we know “nothing” doesn’t actually exist, what objective implications does this have for:

A: Religious belief (e.g., first cause, etc)

B: The Big Bang event (e.g., inflation theory, etc)

C: The concept of Infinity (e.g., bubble universes, etc)

Any ideas?