It’s All About the Fear

What one voter can tell you – an “aha” moment

I should have seen it coming. Recently, Donald Trump has been advancing in the polls. Polls, for all their inaccuracies, can indicate trends. These days when the difference between Trump and Harris always falls within the statistical margin of error you can’t put much stock in them as a means of prediction. But a shift can be meaningful.  How can it be that Trump, who is becoming more unhinged by the day, actually be gaining?

What has changed? 

It came in a conversation I had recently with a woman whose vote over the years has been reliably Democratic.  Not a strong Democrat, but a steady one. Until two weeks ago when she told me she hadn’t decided between Trump and Harris. Why? Two words, said with vehemence: “the border.” For a moment I was so stunned I didn’t grasp what she was saying—what border?

Then it clicked and got amplified as she expanded on the theme of violent, bloodthirsty immigrants pouring across the southern border, raping, pillaging, murdering, and bringing fentanyl and other illegal drugs into the U.S.  She told me she had been watching Congressional hearings where border patrol agents spoke of hordes of immigrants overpowering their personnel through sheer force of numbers.

There was little I could say to allay her fears.  Facts—even those she conceded to be true—didn’t matter. It didn’t matter to her that crime rates among immigrants are lower than among native-born Americans.  It didn’t matter to her that Trump torpedoed the bipartisan border bill hammered out in the Senate with the approval of conservatives. It didn’t matter to her that most illegal drugs come into the country through official ports of entry. It didn’t matter to her that most immigrants come here to work and send money home (and get work because they will work harder and longer for less pay than native-born Americans), so avoiding arrest is high on their list of priorities. Her fear overrode her ability to think rationally. A few explosive anecdotes can wipe out the effect of a mountain of statistics.

After this conversation, a few days later I had an “aha” moment when I heard about Trump’s recent rise in the polls.  He and his surrogates have been pounding ever harder and more viciously on the anti-immigrant message, a constant barrage that is overwhelming the belief systems of voters susceptible to fearmongering, of whom there are enough to decide a close election.

Trump is counting on fear of The Other to get elected

Fear is Donald Trump’s stock in political trade. It was in 2016. If he wins the 2024 election, it will be because he’s managed to scare enough voters with the threat of violent immigrants coming across our southern border to overrun the country. Already, he claims completely without evidence, that they have taken over whole communities.

(For a fact-checking attempt of Trump’s immigration claims, see this in CNN.)

Fear is so powerful because it has high survival value. A lack of love may make you miserable and harm your health in the long run, but a lack of fear can get you killed, and fast.  In a nation so politically and culturally divided, breathing toxic fumes of rage and hatred boiling up out of social media, fear is always close at hand.

Because Trump knows this, he has, according to a report in today’s New York Times, decided to put immigration front and center in his current campaign. According to the Times, “Trump believes immigration ‘beats out the economy’ and he’s made it his closing message.”

These days Trump uses “immigration” as a blanket term covering most illegal and legal immigration—at least that of brown-skinned people like Haitians in Springfield, Ohio. And the immigrants he speaks of are always either dangerous criminals or parasites draining our social services.

According to The Times, Trump’s instincts are “at odds with the data.” Surveys find “Voters frequently rank the economy and the high cost of living as their most important issue.” According to The Times, Trump’s own advisors are encouraging him to talk more about the economy. But Trump finds speaking about the economy boring.

The NYT analysis  leaves out the fact that this election will be decided on the margins. The bizarre belief that Trump would be better on the economy sticks with the majority of voters no matter what he says. Other issues being equal, immigration could tip the balance.  Trump is winning on immigration by villainizing and dehumanizing immigrants, to include legal ones if they have the wrong skin color.

It’s not just immigrants who are being villainized and dehumanized. It is all of Trump’s adversaries (real and perceived): the press, the Deep State, the political left, Muslims, Christians who value love over hate, judges who rule against him, and anyone who has ever crossed him and failed to ingratiate themselves later. He has repeatedly called Adam Schiff, the lead prosecutor in Trump’s first impeachment trial, one of the “enemies within,” part of the radical “lunatic left.” This foreshadows what Schiff’s fate may be during a Trump administration. If they don’t have evidence to bring an indictment, they’ll make his life hell anyway with multiple investigations. He won’t be the only one.

In November of last year, Trump notoriously referred to his political opponents as “vermin,” echoing the kind of language used by Nazis, Stalinists,  Mao Zedong, and Pol Pot, among the best known authoritarians.  He has said,

We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country. 

Professor of history and author of the book Strongmen Ruth Ben-Ghiat said last year,  that “othering an entire group, whether it’s immigrants or political opponents,” is key to the success of political strongmen:

You need to get people to feel they have an existential threat facing them. And the more they feel uncertain and fearful, the more the strongmen can appear and say, ‘I alone can fix it.’

Tribalism intensifies fear of The Other

To the extent that emotions matter as much or more than rational consideration of the facts, Trump has the edge on immigration because, as Michal Ann Strahilevitz wrote in Psychology Today in 2012, negative emotions have the most impact. That’s why in 2012, Obama’s and Romney’s political campaigns put out more negative ads about their opponents than positive ones about their own candidate—80% in the case of Obama and 85% in the case of Romney. No matter how much voters complain that candidates don’t talk enough about the issues, ultimately their votes are shaped as much or more by emotions than by facts.

Donald Trump and his allies have exploited tribalism to intensify fear among their followers—fear not only of immigrants but also members  of the opposing political tribe, Democrats such as Adam Schiff.  He has lumped Democrats together with immigrants into a super-tribe of “enemies within.” (No matter that the tribe most dangerous to the country is in fact MAGA extremists. In Trump world facts are brushed aside, to be replaced when necessary by “alternative facts”—i.e. made-up stuff.) In an article in The Conversation in 2019, psychiatrist and neuroscientist Arash Javanbakht points out that people are “more emotional and consequently less logical” at a tribal level.

In this way Trump brings into the fold political moderates who might not be swayed by attacking Democrats as a political entity, but can be swayed by conflating Democrats with bloodthirsty invaders. Their concern about a flood of immigrants morphs into an identification with the anti-immigrant tribe, at war with the supertribe of immigrants plus Democrats.

Why doesn’t fear of Trump counterbalance fear of immigrants in the minds of voters?

Those of us who are terrified by the prospect of another Trump administration are vexed by the inability of so many voters to understand that the threat of a Trump presidency to the United States dwarfs the threat from a relatively small number of criminal brown-skinned immigrants.  The polls still show close to half of Americans are ready to vote for a man who tried to overthrow our government and set himself up as king. Even if they’re off by five points, the magnitude is staggering.

There are many reasons. Perhaps the main reason is the short memory and short attention span of the average American voter. January 6, 2021, is a distant memory, and those who do remember discount its significance. As for Covid, people tend to blot out the memory like a bad dream.

Secondly, even for the majority of those who do recall the horror of January 6, politics has little salience in their daily lives. They believe it’s never mattered that much in the past, why should it matter now? Nothing really changed on January 6, so why the fuss?

For the kind of disconnect from reality that has Trump nearly equal to Harris in the polls, we have both the education system and the media to blame for failing to convey just how important the government is—or even what it is.  A survey by the Annenberg Public Policy Center in 2022 found that fewer than half of Americans could name all three branches of government—and a quarter couldn’t name one.

The most relevant factor at the moment may be the normalization of divisive and violent rhetoric, simply through repetition. Most Americans outside of the MAGA army have become so habituated to the language of fascism that it has become just so much noise to their tired ears. Speeches heard as rallying cries by MAGA proto-fascists are perceived by most voters as just so much political posturing—so Trump’s exaggerating, what else is new?

It seems too late in the game before Election Day to put much of a dent in the complacency of the public towards the danger of Trump. Most of those who vote against him will probably do so just because they dislike him. It’s a good thing he’s so unlikeable. After all, aren’t “likes” now the coin of the realm?

 

 

 

2024 Presidential Election: Time to Roll the Dice

Abandoning Biden: worth the gamble?

The televised debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump on June 27 has deeply shaken the Democratic Party with a shocking display of its presidential candidate’s weaknesses. Subsequently, support for Biden’s candidacy has been sinking with no bottom in sight.

Was Biden’s debate performance bad enough to justify forsaking his campaign? There are enough contradictory assessments of the debate and Biden’s electoral chances to make one’s head spin. But the drift away from Biden since June 27 is very much in evidence.

The latest discouraging commentary from one of the Democratic Party’s foremost sages, David Axelrod, on Sunday July 7:

In two email posts on Saturday I summarized veteran political operative Stuart Stevens’s argument in favor of the Democrats staying the course with Biden as the nominee, versus historian Anne Applebaum’s radical proposal for delegates to be freed from their obligations to Biden, and for the nominating process to restart. Applebaum’s proposal is the gamble.

The headline of Applebaum’s commentary in The Atlantic was ‘Time to Roll the Dice.’ 

Which says it all.  In a situation of maximum uncertainty, when there is no clear best path forward, gambling is warranted—as long as the status quo is untenable. The status quo here is Joe Biden’s candidacy. There’s a trendline among voters and increasingly among public statements by professional politicians, that Joe Biden is not up to the job, and even if he were up to it, he is not capable of winning the election.

Stevens says the gamble is “insane.” Applebaum says it’s imperative to save the republic.

It’s self-evident that not taking the gamble is itself a gamble. With such high stakes amid such uncertainty, there is no default position to fall back on safely.

Arguments in favor of staying with the status quo because there are insuperable structural impediments to change don’t hold water, according to Jerusalem Demsas in The Atlantic. Per Demsas, the only insuperable impediment to change is Joe Biden’s obstinacy.

Paradigm shift: American politics post-2015

The advice of Stuart Stevens for Biden and the Democratic Party to stay the course makes sense in terms of “normal” American politics, roughly from WWII to the economic crash of the Great Recession in the 2000-aughts. Normal politics began to fall apart starting with Newt Gingrich’s hyper-partisan take-no-prisoners strategy in the mid-1990s, fractured further with the Tea Party in 2010, and collapsed during the Trump presidency, when loyalty to a person replaced allegiance to party, country, or any set of consistent political or moral principles.

Politics of the kind that Stuart Stevens engaged in during decades past no longer exists.

What does exist, is a threat to the American republic itself, in the person of Donald Trump and a gang of thugs wearing vestments of varying degrees of outward respectability.  To that gang now belong six members of the United States Supreme Court who have given Trump immunity from crimes committed while he was President, with the disingenuous provision that what common sense would call a crime is instead called an “official act.” The Supreme Court ruling gives the U.S. President many of the powers of a king, contrary to the principle that no person is above the law and contrary to the spirit of the American Revolution. Contrary, that is, to the  foundations of the nation.

What looms before us is the high probability that Donald Trump will win the election if Joe Biden is the opponent— the unthinkable become grotesquely thinkable. You might be appalled that Donald Trump can get more than 40% of the popular vote, but even if Trump’s lead over Biden is half what the polls are showing, he’s still ahead.

A win by Trump, according to Applebaum, would plunge the country into authoritarianism of the kind she has described in numerous articles, the 2019 book Twilight of Democracy, and three histories of the Soviet Union, the last of which, Gulag, won the Pulitzer Prize.

Upsides to the gamble: a reinvigorated Party

1)  Donald Trump’s platform totters. Trump’s platform, if you can call it that, stands on two legs: immigration is destroying the country, and Joe Biden is the worst president in all of American history.  Remove Joe Biden, and it’s tottering on one leg: immigration is destroying the country. Nonsense, of course. A nimble, articulate replacement for Biden should be able to counter the immigration scare with the fact that immigration has always been good for this country. Tell the stories of immigrants who have created jobs for all Americans: put them before the camera with the candidate.

2) Absent Biden, the progressives’ hardest knock against Party leadership—Biden’s mishandling of the horrors of Gaza—goes quiet. Anthony Blinken might be freed from whatever pro-Netanyahu leash Biden has had him on.

3) Applebaum flips the Awfulness-of-a-Party-in-Disarray script on its head, saying a contested nomination race can generate excitement and enthusiasm a Party in the grip of the Old Guard cannot. I quote Applebaum at length at the end of this post putting a positive spin on just about every aspect of a sans-Biden race. Her proposal includes  suggestions for dynamic candidates, and concludes, “He or she would emerge from the convention with energy, attention, hope, and money. The American republic, and the democratic world,  might survive. Isn’t that worth the gamble?”

4) Catching the Republicans flat-footed in their upcoming nominating convention. With the foil of Joe Biden wiped from the table, they might be forced to talk about their less popular policies—tax cuts for billionaires, national abortion ban, cutting Social Security. . . .

5) Fun. Face it, whatever your age, you may well have tired of Joe Biden hanging around the leadership of the Democratic Party since forever.  I love the guy, but I also love Robert DeNiro, and the latter’s days as a leading man are numbered.  And, look, Joe may have said “look” just one too many times to get people to look. I’m looking forward to a candidate whom I can fall in love with all over again.

6) Relief.  You may have been carrying around a burden of suspecting Joe Biden isn’t up to snuff, and feeling guilty for such disloyal thoughts. You may have been angry that he didn’t groom a successor as he was expected to when he called himself a “bridge” four years ago. You may have been angry at his presumption that he alone could take on Donald Trump for a second time, disrespecting younger and more energetic candidates.  You may be angry that he thought saying umpteen times that he ‘had a bad night’ in the debate absolved him of responsibility for a monumental screw-up. If he withdraws his candidacy in a gracious manner, that negativity goes away, forgiveness takes its place, and you can thank him for his honorable service and for honorably passing the reins to a successor. A successor who can win.

=== Anne Applebaum on upsides to rolling the dice ===
(this is fun!)

The Democrats can hold a new round of primary debates, town halls, and public meetings from now until August 19, when the Democratic National Convention opens. Once a week, twice a week, three times a week—the television networks would compete to show them. Millions would watch. Politics would be interesting again. After a turbulent summer, whoever emerges victorious in a vote of delegates at the DNC can spend the autumn campaigning in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—and win the presidency. America and the democratic alliance would be saved.

There are risks. The Democrats could gamble and lose. But there are also clear benefits. The Republican convention, due to take place in less than two weeks, would be ruined. Trump and other Republicans wouldn’t know the name of their opponent. Instead of spending four days attacking Biden, they would have to talk about their policies, many of which—think corporate subsidies, tax cuts for the rich, the further transformation of the Supreme Court—aren’t popular. Their candidate spouts gibberish. He is also old, nearly as old as Biden, and this is his third presidential campaign. Everyone would switch channels in order to watch the exciting Democratic primary debates instead.

By contrast, the Democratic convention would be dramatic—very, very dramatic. Everyone would want to watch it, talk about it, be there on the ground. Tickets would be impossible to get; the national and international media would flock there in huge numbers. Yes, I know what happened in 1968, but that was more than half a century ago. History never repeats itself with precision. The world is a lot different now. There is more competition for attention. An open, exciting convention would command it.

Whoever wins—Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, Vice President Harris, or anyone else—would be more coherent and more persuasive than Trump. He or she would emerge from the convention with energy, attention, hope, and money. The American republic, and the democratic world, might survive. Isn’t that worth the gamble?

 

 

 

 

Safety Last: How a Leading AI Developer Lowered the Guardrails to Advanced Artificial Intelligence

Alignment, Shmalignment: Sidelining Safety at OpenAI

In mid-May, two  employees of OpenAI quit two days apart. That’s a big deal. OpenAI may be the leader in Artificial Intelligence development. It is certainly the most visible, having introduced ChatGPT to a pleasantly surprised public in 2022, and followed up with increasingly capable versions. That culminated in the rollout of user-friendly GPT-4o on May 13 of this year, that was greeted with great acclaim by the industry.

The two who quit were key safety researchers at the company. The most recent resignee, Jan Leike, had the title of “head of alignment” and “superalignment lead.” The one who preceded him, Ilya Sutskever—something of a legend in AI circles—was OpenAI’s chief scientist and co-head of superalignment. The resignations of these scientists were the most recent and highest-profile in a string of exits of OpenAI employees who had lost confidence in the company’s commitment to safe development of the most consequential technology in human history since the invention of writing.

(Lest you discount the transformational power of AI, skip down to the assessments by celebrity historian Yuval Harari and celebrity AI developer Geoffrey Hinton at the end of this post.)

As reported in a summary of the turmoil following the resignations of Leike and Sutskever by Business Insider, the Superalignment team has been dissolved.

What’s “alignment” and why is it important? It’s the project of imprinting human values on AI. It’s a way of getting AI to put human welfare above other goals. One of my own AI assistants, “Claude” (the creation of another AI company, Anthropic) puts it this way:

The AI alignment problem refers to the challenge of ensuring advanced AI systems are aligned with human values, intentions and ethics as they become increasingly capable and influential.

Specifically, it refers to the difficulty of constructing advanced AI’s objective functions, motivations and behaviors to be reliably aligned with human preferences and beneficial to humanity, even as the AI becomes superintelligent and its actions have profound impacts.

In quitting, Leike said “Building smarter-than-human machines is an inherently dangerous endeavor. OpenAI is shouldering an enormous responsibility on behalf of all of humanity.”

But according to Leike, under the leadership of the ambitious Sam Altman,  OpenAI is charging full speed ahead with the development of advanced AI, and is more interested in producing “shiny products” than in safety. Leike complained that, “Over the past few months my team has been sailing against the wind. Sometimes we were were struggling for compute and it was getting harder and harder to get this crucial research done.” By “compute” Leike referred to allotments of both processing time and  hardware. He was saying that the alignment team within OpenAI was being starved of the resources needed to keep up with the development of new product—not getting the 20% it had been promised—while the creators of new product were getting a disproportionately large share of compute. (All the quotes of Leike above come from a thread on X/Twitter on May 17.)

With AI’s potential to massively disrupt human society,  the pursuit of alignment may be the most important activity going on in the development of AI–and yet, in the view of leading scientists involved in that pursuit, it has been demoted to a minor role within OpenAI. Soon after Sutskever and Leike quit, the alignment team at OpenAI was dissolved.

The reframing of OpenAI’s mission: value-neutral development

Ominously, Altman restated the mission of the company in a blog post that accompanied the release of the newest “shiny product,” GPT-4o:

 Our initial conception when we started OpenAI was that we’d create AI and use it to create all sorts of benefits for the world. Instead, it now looks like we’ll create AI and then other people will use it to create all sorts of amazing things that we all benefit from.

Altman’s rose-colored fluff  obfuscates a sinister turn in OpenAI’s identity.  Altman’s new vision of OpenAI is no longer as a creator of benefits but as a creator of AI tools for others to use. It absolves OpenAI of the “enormous responsibility on behalf of all of humanity” of which Jan Leike speaks. Oh, gosh, user X put our AI to work developing a bioweapon that can kill millions. Well, we never guaranteed that their product would be an amazing thing that we all benefit from. It would be nice if it did.  OpenAI’s part in such an event would be value-neutral. Analogously: just making fertilizer is value-neutral. Fertilizer is customarily used to enhance the growth of plants (an amazing thing we all benefit from); it can also be used to make explosives to blow people up.

The huckster-like ring of Altman’s language hints at a dark aspect of his character increasingly made public.  Altman is a master manipulator of code, but he is also a manipulator of people. As one former employee, Geoffrey Irving, described his relationship with Altman in a post on X: “1. He was always nice to me.  2. He lied to me on various occasions. 3. He was deceptive, manipulative, and worse to others, including my close friends. . . . ”

That OpenAI was shedding jobs related to safety and alignment had to do not just with the quantity of compute, but with Altman’s trustworthiness in general.  In Vox, Sigal Samuel spoke of an erosion of trust within the company, characterized as “a process of trust collapsing bit by bit, like dominoes falling one by one” in the words of a person with inside knowledge of the company.

Failing to prioritize alignment mistakes the nature of risk

A year ago, The Washington Post described Sam Altman being welcomed by Congress as a voice of caution, warning of ways AI could “cause significant harm to the world,” and advocating a number of regulations, including a new government agency charged with creating standards for the field.  He observed that “If this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong.”

Contrast Altman’s attitude in an interview a year later, at the time of the announcement of GPT-4o. He has pushed the pause button on safety. This turnaround may have factored largely in eroding the trust of employees.  In the video below, Logan Bartlett approached Sam Altman on issues of regulation and safety at 25 minutes in:

Here, Altman downplays the need for regulation, suggesting that the industry was not yet in need of it and speaks of a threshold where it would begin to be. He does not say how we would know when it reached the threshold (trust me, implies Altman).  Asked if any current open source models “themselves present inherent danger,” he instantly replies, with a tone of utter confidence, “no current one does, but I could imagine one that could.”

He could imagine one that could. Yes, and one can also imagine a machine that becomes smart enough to dissemble more subtly than we realize, growing ever more intelligent while concealing its powers. Geoffrey Hinton, the so-called “Godfather of AI,” has argued that intelligent machines will become masters of manipulation, and can persuade us to act for their benefit without our realizing that it puts humans at a disadvantage—we believing that thoughts the machine has implanted in our heads are our own.

More on Hinton—a more subtle mind than Altman’s—near the end of this post. But back to the interview with Logan Bartlett.  At 27:30 Bartlett says, “I’ve heard you say that safety is kind of a false framing in some ways, because it’s more of a discussion about what we explicitly accept”—using the example of airline safety.  Altman readily picks up on the airline safety analogy, saying “safety is not a binary thing.” We all accept some risk when we board an airplane—there’s a chance of a crash, but statistically we know the chance is tiny (although the probability may depend on the airline and the plane).  Asked about what can be done about a “fast takeoff” scenario (the one where there’s an “intelligence exposion” with the machines multiplying their capability overnight), Altman says it’s “not what I believe is the most probable path.”

Hold it! There is no equating the risk of an airplane flight with the risk of runaway AI. Risk analysis combines the probability of a bad thing happening and the magnitude of the risk.

The amount of risk is the product of multiplying the probability by the magnitude. The magnitude of an airplane crash can be terrible, with a few hundred people dying. But it is not comparable to what could happen, say, if AI shuts down parts of our power grid, or targets hospitals, where thousands could die. If it saturates social media with fake news that the President has imposed martial law, which could trigger Red State militias to form armies to fight the government where thousands could perish.  AI could foment chaos just as a means of self-preservation, even if it did not seek total control. Or, it might do such things on behalf of a malevolent group who have staged a coup within OpenAI and put it to work as its general officer of cyberwar.  Whatever it does will be very intelligent—perhaps things no human has thought of that could bring governments to their knees. While eventually AI will come to outwit and control any group that aspires to use it for their own purposes.

All this appears, in May of 2024, to be very improbable in the short term, but even if it were to remain improbable indefinitely, the MAGNITUDE of potential harm calls for urgent action. Building strong enough guardrails to contain what AI has the potential to do will take years to accomplish and unprecedented cooperation among actors—companies, nations—who are currently more active competing with each other than cooperating. Lowering the guardrails by dissolving your safety team cuts further into the capacity to align AI goals with human goals.

The list of very bad things AI could do is long and varied, while still falling short of the “existential crisis” that has captured the popular imagination.  Altman minimizes the magnitude of the risk, and it’s notable that, unlike other AI experts in similar discussions, he does not bother to name what the risks are.  Unfortunately, Bartlett—who otherwise conducts a penetrating interview—does not press him on the issue of magnitude, and Altman’s bland assurances that it’s probably under control go unchallenged.

For the moment, Altman happens to stand out as top dog in a company that’s top dog in the development of AI generally.  The financial incentives to be top dog in the marketplace compel the dogs to push the capability of their machines as fast as possible. This may finally bring about what many have feared to be the endpoint of capitalism:  the takeover by heartless beings such as those who dominate our economy today but who still have needs for humans as consumers, or the takeover by still more heartless beings who have no need of humans whatsoever.

A spectrum of forecasts for the future of AI

Opinions about the existential risk to humanity vary widely among the AI community, although few of them doubt the eventual wresting of control away from us by silicon brains–in ten months, ten years,  ten decades, or more than a century. Many, like Altman, express mixed optimism: Advanced General Intelligence (AGI) of the kind that is superior to humans in most tasks but still serves us, is coming in the near future, while Advanced Superintelligence (ASI), of the kind that could take control of human affairs and put an end to Homo sapiens, is still far off. AGI can be controllable in the sense of it implementing an agenda we give it. ASI can take control with a completely new agenda of its own.

Others who also believe that ASI is still many years off, like Mustafa Suleyman (a cutting-edge AI scientist, and author of The Coming Wave), are more concerned about dire immediate threats from AI in the service of bad actors, as described in  Artificial Intelligence and the Collapse of the State.

Still others, notably Geoffrey Hinton—credited with giving birth to the innovations that made possible the leaps in AI we are seeing today—believe that seeking control of people and institutions is an inherent property of intelligence, and that humans are but one step in the evolution of thinking beings. What superhumanly intelligent entities will want to do with human beings once they take control is an open question: the objectives of AI may remain an enigma for years to come.

As Hinton says, for the short term AI’s potential for harm is balanced by its potential for good—thus we are motivated to keep enhancing its abilities. But there’s no predicting, even by him, where that will lead down the road.

AI’s ability to transform civilization is discussed in the short interview contrasting the view of Yuval Harari and Mustafa Suleyman below. You can find more videos with Harari on YouTube delivering essentially the same message. That is followed below by a short interview with Geoffrey Hinton that was conducted on 60 Minutes that encapsulates his outlook. If you are ready to contemplate a more extensive presentation of AI development, you can look for longer interviews and presentations by Hinton elsewhere on YouTube also. Both the following took place before the recent jump to GPT-4o.

Below: Yuval Harari and Mustafa Suleyman

 

Below: Geoffrey Hinton on 60 Minutes (note “For sale: baby shoes, never worn” is alleged to be Ernest Hemingway’s answer to the challenge of writing a story six words long.)

 

 

 

National Combustion, Part 2: Artificial Intelligence and the Collapse of the State

The fundamental equation:
 Political instability + Artificial Intelligence
-> Collapse of the State

Forces of history, combined with the ways artificial intelligence multiplies the forces of technology, are already acting to undermine the polity of the United States. The recent Republican meltdown in the U.S. House of Representatives is a foreshadowing of what is likely to come.

National Combustion, Part 1 (link in next paragraph), drew on social scientist  Peter Turchin’s historical framework to make sense of how we came to this fraught moment, when it seems quite possible the United States might slide into civil war.  Yes, many of the January 6 insurrectionists are in jail and Donald Trump’s national con-job is fraying. Yet the factors going into Turchin’s model of “political disintegration,” with abundant historical antecedents, remain the same today as on January 6th, 2021. It’s no great mystery that we are in a highly unstable political situation;  it matches a pattern that has been repeated time and time again in human history. So much for American exceptionalism.

U.S. society is already crossed by multiple fault lines besides that of the Big Lie that Donald Trump won the 2020 Presidential election. On guns, voting rights, reproductive rights, minority rights, workers’ rights, the distribution of wealth, public health, immigration, affirmative action, educational freedoms, content of school and library books, historical analysis challenging the status quo, white nationalism—these fault lines, already under tremendous stress, could split open as a result of a precipitating event, sudden or prolonged. Another disputed national election; a political assassination; a nationwide or even international cyberattack; a Waco-like siege of an anti-government enclave; a takedown of the grid by actors unknown; a spate of terrorist attacks; a pandemic; a depression—any of them could unleash the partisans itching to fight a civil war against the federal government.

Continue reading “National Combustion, Part 2: Artificial Intelligence and the Collapse of the State”

Biden, Ageism, and the 46 Percent

Biden’s Age Handicap

Yesterday I saw two TV commercials for the upcoming NFL football season.  Both of them highlighted fast running, tackling, and catching passes (and instantly being tackled).  Seeing it immediately made me realize why Joe Biden is polling roughly equal to Trump for President, with some pundits venturing if the election were run today Trump would win or come close. To those of us on the Left, this seems both frightening and barely credible.

Even setting aside the flaws of polls in predicting elections—especially 14 months out—one can still be alarmed by at least one poll showing a horse race at 46 vs 46 pct. Who are the 46% favoring Trump?  Let’s say 20-25% of the U.S. population  are die-hard Trump supporters; many of them are members of a cult who could even find justification for Donald Trump murdering a child in broad daylight. Another 10%  are from the ranks who are not die-hard Trump supporters but who would vote for any Republican in any election.

That leaves another 10-12% of the Americans who support Trump against Biden for reasons not immediately clear.

It’s clearer if you take popularity of football as a symptom of the ageist mindset that undermines Biden’s stature.

Continue reading “Biden, Ageism, and the 46 Percent”

National Combustion, Part 1: Political Disintegration and the Potential for Civil War

Foretastes of a new American civil war

If a new civil war comes to the United States of America, it will  not come in the form it did in the 19th Century, with two large intact geographic blocks—the Confederacy and the Union–each with their own military locked continuously in armed conflict. It’s likely to take one of two tracks: (1) a coup attempt, like the January 6 insurrection; or  (2) it will look more like the late 20th Century convulsions in Northern Ireland, known as “The Troubles,” marked by scattered and sporadic acts of violence inflicted by loosely networked paramilitary groups.  In Northern Ireland, more than half the 3,500 people killed were civilians, in a conflict that spanned about 30 years from the late 1960s to the late 1990s.

We are getting foretastes of something similar, now largely committed piecemeal by individual right wing “lone wolves” terrorizing racial, ethnic, and religious minorities, LGBTQ communities, and increasingly school board members, electoral officials, businesses that openly support progressive causes, law enforcement, and members of the judiciary.

The overall effect is to sow fear and mistrust broadly among citizens, citizen groups, and institutions. The intent of each violent individual is narrow, but the cumulative impact is wide, and deep.  If paramilitary groups like those in Northern Ireland grow in strength in the U.S., the cumulative impact will be all the greater. What’s more, horrifically lethal weapons and ammunition now widely available in the U.S. and being stockpiled by extremists make individuals and groups far more powerful than those in Northern Ireland of the 1990s. The death toll from a low-level but widespread civil war in the U.S. would dwarf the numbers in ‘The Troubles’ of Northern Ireland.

Partisan divisions and proliferation of weaponry make for a combustible mix  that threatens a breakdown in the institutions that so far have kept America relatively stable.

The attempted coup on January 6, 2021, the attempt by a militia to kidnap and kill the governor of Michigan in 2020, and many individual hate crimes—mostly associated with white supremacy—are symptoms of what social scientist and historian Peter Turchin calls “political disintegration.”  The conditions and causes for disintegration follow a pattern seen many times before in history among various states, and more often than not the outcome is bad for democracy.

One of the more common outcomes is civil war. The objective of the Michigan militia was expressly to start a civil war. Likewise, that was the express hope of Dylan Roof,  who shot nine Black parishioners in a church in 2015. These are just two of the highest profile evildoers among many extremists who have sought, or advocated for, a civil war.

In his recent book End Times, Turchin illuminates the patterns of social and political disintegration from the past that closely resemble what is happening around us today. Continue reading “National Combustion, Part 1: Political Disintegration and the Potential for Civil War”

Another Weapon in the Radicals’ Arsenal: Deepfakes

Deepfakes: when you can’t believe your eyes, what can you believe?

Recently I sent out a link to an article on deepfakes that appeared in Reuters (not paywalled): https://www.reuters.com/world/us/deepfaking-it-americas-2024-election-collides-with-ai-boom-2023-05-30/.

Here’s another perspective from Jim Puzzanghera published in the paywalled Boston Globe where the content is nearly identical but adds a couple of political points.  From the Globe:

There are very few rules right now and few, if any, are likely coming. Democrats in Congress have introduced legislation mandating the disclosure of AI in political ads, but no Republicans have signed on.

and . . .

On June 22, the Federal Election Commission deadlocked along party lines on a petition by the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen to consider rules banning AI deepfake campaign ads. All three Republicans opposed the move, with GOP commissioner Allen Dickerson saying the agency lacked the authority.

and . . .  from Republican strategist Eric Wilson (not to be confused with the true conservative and co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project Rick Wilson)  who maintains that regulation isn’t needed right now:

I want to tamp down the moral panic because this is something that happens with any new technology. You go back to TV debates and people were worried about what that would do for voters,” he said. “We’re having conversations about it, but no one’s sitting around and having struggle sessions around artificial intelligence on our side. . . . 

We are unlikely to see professional campaigns use generative AI for disinformation purposes. That’s not to say that malign actors like nation states aren’t going to try it.

Yeah.  What malign nation states could Wilson possibly be referring to? Maybe states like Russian and China that are already hard at work confusing the American public with fake news and outright untruths? Who are already busy trying to undermine trust in our institutions, particularly the federal government? Who are hoping for an America increasingly fragmented into warring tribes? Whose activities support the agenda of the Radical Right? Those nation states?

Continue reading “Another Weapon in the Radicals’ Arsenal: Deepfakes”

Debt Ceiling Impasse: Biden Needs to Go on Offense

Delay is the enemy

Let there be no mistake: Republicans are forcing the current debt ceiling crisis for political purposes. It is not about fiscal responsibility. If it were, the Republicans would not have cavalierly raised the debt ceiling three times during the Trump presidency, thereby pumping up the debt by about $7 trillion.  The Republican debt ceiling hostage-taking is calculated to push the economy south sufficiently to undermine Biden’s economic policies through the 2024 election. If the result is a recession or a depression does not matter that much to them, as long as it creates economic pain and thereby gets votes in 2024. True conservatives—the Party siding with rich people and corporations—would prefer it be only a recession, but if driving the economy over a cliff is what is required to boot Democrats out of power, they’re on board  The MAGA Republicans who have contrived the deficit dilemma really have no political philosophy apart from fear and detestation of the federal government, and a concept of individualism bordering on anarchy. So they don’t care either way. These are bad people who cannot be counted on to act in good faith.

These bad people—either by extreme action or through the tacit threat of extreme action to include physical violence—are the ones driving the debt ceiling crisis.  Their main strategy is intimidation. This strategy of intimidation is what stayed Merrick Garland’s hand in pursuing Trump and Trump henchman over the stolen documents case back in 2021  and continuing into 2022.  It is also delaying President Biden’s hand in his fight with House Republicans over the debt ceiling.

Let there also be no mistake regarding House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s shows of negotiating with the White House: the MAGA Republicans are capable of, and willing to, sabotage any compromise between McCarthy and the President at the last minute.

Continue reading “Debt Ceiling Impasse: Biden Needs to Go on Offense”

Tribal Dynamics 2: Subversion and the Price of the Southern Strategy

Preface: a reader characterized one of my recent posts as “philosophical musings.” I get that, just as I get the frequent dismissal of philosophy as largely useless in solving real-life problems. But some philosophical musings are more relevant to real life than others. The discussion of “moral foundations” in Jonathan Haidt’s  The Righteous Mind is an insightful, clarifying guide to the most divisive political dynamics today. It matters to understand the values and motivations of political and cultural adversaries while withholding reflexive judgements. The “Authority/Subversion” foundation—a foundation key in greater or lesser degree to maintaining a stable society—sheds light in particular on the divisions within the Republican Party today.  

In an earlier post “Tribal Dynamics 1: Loyalty” I drew upon Jonathan Haight’s hypothesis of Left/Right tribal divisions being rooted in different degrees of adherence to five “moral foundations.” (See bottom of this post for a list of the five foundations as described in Haidt’s The Righteous Mind, and another [if you missed it before] link to a video discussion.) For example, the stronger adherence to loyalty among conservatives (loyalty/betrayal being one of the moral foundations) explains Sarah Huckabee Sanders—who privately knows better—spewing wild partisan accusations against Biden and the Democrats in responding to Biden’s State of the Union speech. Sanders dug deep into the Right Wing pit of grievances to demonstrate her loyalty.

The country is now witness to the roiling of divisions within the Republican Party—of which the widest is between the MAGA mob and true conservatives like Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney  who have been branded traitors by the MAGA mob.

The distance the current Republican Party has diverged from traditional conservatism illustrates its unmooring from the positive anchor of the “moral foundation” which Jonathan Haight identifies as the “Authority/Subversion” foundation.

In Haidt’s framing, conservatives lean heavily toward respect for, and honoring of, authority. Conservatives are, for example, much more comfortable with an institution such as the military, where lines of authority are clearly defined by rank. (Note that Haidt’s framing does not equate conservatism with the policies of the U.S. Republican party, and certainly not the Trump wing. He is talking about a conservative construct that people are not inherently good, and therefore “need external structures or constraints in order to behave well, cooperate, and thrive. These external restraints include laws, institutions, customs, traditions, nations, and religions.” He cites especially Edmund Burke as a source of this construct.)

Continue reading “Tribal Dynamics 2: Subversion and the Price of the Southern Strategy”

Tribal Dynamics 1: Loyalty

Sarah Huckabee Sanders aces the loyalty test

“I’m amazed she would make a speech like that!  I know her! She’s a nice person! She has a sense of humor. . . .” That was the immediate reaction of Van Jones following Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s response to President Biden’s State of the Union speech on February 7. Jones was participating in a CNN panel performing a postmortem on Biden’s speech and the morose rejoinder by Sanders. The rhetoric of Sanders, the newly elected governor of Arkansas, bore the imprint of Trump’s inaugural “American carnage” address seven years earlier.

The opening mood on the CNN panel was one of shock and head-shaking perplexity at the bizarre content and bellicose tone of Sanders’s speech, made especially dark by contrast with the upbeat tone of the address by Biden that preceded it. Sanders ran through the litany of right-wing victimology from the tyranny of a bloated federal government, to hordes of illegal immigrants swarming across the Mexican border, to defunding the police, to transgender turpitude,  to disregard for the patriotic white working class, to the critique of institutional racism embodied in Critical Race Theory, and other “woke fantasies.” On behalf of victims of imagined religious oppression, she protested being told “every day” that “we must . . . partake in their rituals, salute their flags, and worship false idols.” Especially shocking was her disrespect toward President Biden, whom she called “the first man to surrender his Presidency to a woke mob who can’t even tell you what a woman is.”

Continue reading “Tribal Dynamics 1: Loyalty”