Month: May 2019

185 Democratic Wafflers Waiting for What?

Yesterday I saw that 50 House Democrats have called for either the impeachment of Donald Trump or an “impeachment inquiry.” The latter is to impeachment what a match is to a fuse—you light it only if you are aiming for an explosion—but the softer term lends the process a tone of propriety.

Which leaves another 185 Democrats waiting to see from what direction the strongest wind will blow. Most of them are in thrall to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who continues to put politics ahead of principle when it comes to calling evildoers such as the U.S. President and his henchmen to account.  (I had my Elizabeth Warren-inspired say on the politics-vs-principle issue in my two-weeks-old post,  The Impeachment Dilemma.)

A welcome breath of fresh air was stirred by Robert Mueller’s long-awaited public statement to the effect that Donald Trump had committed a crime but there was nothing he—Mueller—could do about it because of the absurd (he couldn’t say “absurd” but you know he thought it) Department of Justice policy against indicting a sitting President. Therefore, he implied in the driest but most cutting possible language, it was up to another branch of government (i.e., the legislature) to go get the S.O.B.

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Are Machines Too Dumb to Take Over the World? Part II: the Common Sense Factor

Common sense and competence

In Part I of this series, we saw examples of how machines, putatively endowed with “Artificial Intelligence,” commit laughably stupid mistakes doing grade-school arithmetic. See Dumb machines Part I

You’d think that if machines can make such stupid blunders in a domain where they are alleged to have superhuman powers—a simple task compared with, say, getting your kid to school when the bus has broken down and your car is in the shop—then they could never be expected to achieve a level of competence across many domains sufficient for world domination.

Possibly machines are not capable of the “common sense” that is vital to real, complicated life, where we range across many domains, often nearly simultaneously.

A trivial example from Part I: the machine correctly calculates 68 when asked for the product of “17 x 4.”   But it calculates  “17 x 4” as 69.   Stupid, right? A human looks at the discrepancy and says aha! It’s the missing period that threw it off. Getting the correct answer would require knowing something about punctuation. The period is not a mathematical object, it’s a grammatical object.  Getting the difference requires bridging from math to grammar—another common sense activity we do without consciously missing a beat.

Continue reading “Are Machines Too Dumb to Take Over the World? Part II: the Common Sense Factor”

Are Machines Too Dumb to Take Over the World? Part I: the Duh! Factor

Existential Angst: Nuclear War, Donald Trump, or Artificial Intelligence?

Apart from worldwide nuclear war (unlikely), or Donald Trump grabbing dictatorial powers (not quite as unlikely), my greatest worry is the possibility of Artificial Intelligence (AI) taking over the world—or at least enough of it to doom humanity as we know it.*

Likely? Experts have views as divergent as the sides that disputed whether the notorious DRESS was black and blue or white and gold.  More seriously, people way smarter than me (and perhaps you) have made predictions ranging from AI threatens the elimination of humankind, to AI is the greatest tool for the betterment of humankind that has ever existed. 

(The remainder of this post addresses machine intelligence, which is really a sub-category of AI—but since most people assume  AI equivalent to machine intelligence, I use the terms interchangeably unless specified otherwise.)

Ultimately AI may be a greater threat than Climate Change.** I know Green New Dealers don’t want to hear it, but consider: there have been drastic changes in climate in the geological record—and life, including humans, adapted. Recent Ice Ages are notable examples.  (This is NOT to defend inaction on Climate Change! Especially because the changes we are imposing on the planet, unlike most previous climate shifts, are so devastatingly swift.)

Super-AI, on the other hand, will be utterly unprecedented, and its advent, unlike Climate Change, could come swiftly and with little warning—especially if we continue to pooh-pooh it as an illusory bogeyman.

Continue reading “Are Machines Too Dumb to Take Over the World? Part I: the Duh! Factor”

The Impeachment Dilemma: Good Politics versus Good Governance

Impeach Now? Y/N

Answer: Y 

A month ago Elizabeth Warren was the first Democratic presidential candidate to call for the impeachment of Donald Trump ASAP.

Robert Reich, non-presidential candidate but straight shooter, did likewise in The Guardian on May 8.

In both cases, they saw evidence of obstruction  of justice so plainly exposed in what was the redacted version of the Mueller Report, that the case for impeachment was transparent and compelling.

Last night on CNN  Tom Steyer, who has been calling for the impeachment of Donald Trump since the man took office (even before the Special Counsel’s  investigation had started), once again called for impeachment ASAP.  In Steyer’s view, the Mueller (Special Counsel’s) report had strengthened an already ironclad case.

The political counterargument

The argument against starting impeachment immediately is political. It’s the Nancy Pelosi-led camp urging the Democrats to go slowly and carefully with investigations to build a body of evidence incrementally—and to proceed with impeachment only if the body of evidence reaches critical mass. Otherwise, the violence of the reaction from the Trump base, plus the exhaustion of the political center of the electorate, would make Trump the victim he has consistently claimed to be, and turn the public against a rabid, overreaching, unjustifiably partisan Democratic Party.

The put-a-hold-on-impeachment policy is spun as “let the people decide,” as in, the verdict on Trump should be delivered in the 2020 election.   (Based on the questionable assumption that the election will not be decided by Vladimir Putin.)  What outrages Trump may commit in the interval between now and November 2020 are overshadowed by political considerations.

Continue reading “The Impeachment Dilemma: Good Politics versus Good Governance”