Author: Mark J. Heinicke

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.

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Cannot Indict a – What?

“Impermissible” – You Gotta Be Kidding Me

Key to Attorney General William Barr’s prevarications about the culpability of Donald Trump, is the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel’s (OLC’s) official policy that the indictment of a sitting president is “impermissible” because it would “unconstitutionally undermine the capacity of the executive branch to perform its constitutionally assigned functions.”

How does that square, Mr. Barr, with Donald Trump’s boast in January 2016, “I could stand in the middle of Times Square and shoot somebody and not lose any voters?”

Trump apologists will say the latter was merely a comic metaphor just to illustrate the utter loyalty of Trump voters. He “didn’t really mean it.”

But what was it he didn’t really mean? Just the shooting part, or the idea  that his followers absolutely believed he was above the law? Or the implication that, if he acquired enough loyal followers, that he really would be above the law?

Continue reading “Cannot Indict a – What?”

A Cooler Look at Global Warming: Bjorn Lomborg Runs the Numbers

Skewed Priorities? Another AGW Perspective

Bjorn Lomborg is a thorn in the side of many a climate change warrior. As a self-described environmentalist (onetime Greenpeace member), he’s been accused of global warming heresy, largely  on account of his book, The Skeptical Environmentalist (1998, English editon 2001).  In that book, Lomborg accused climate alarmists of making mountains out of climate molehills, forecasting doom when we had much more urgent needs to address. Fast forward to 2011, and he was taking a more modest tack, admitting that Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) had progressed further, and its impacts were likely to be more severe, than he had previously forecast. Nevertheless, he maintained the future progression, and potential harm, were far less urgent than claimed by climate hawks, when compared with other threats.

Fast forward to 2019, and he has come to admit that climate change is a problem of daunting dimensions. Where he parts ways with most environmentalists and climate scientists is how he ranks climate change against other threats to the well-being of most people and natural systems: e.g. malnutrition, disease, air and water pollution, war, subsistence agriculture, habitat destruction, unsustainable exploitation of natural resources, and failing infrastructure. The last is most glaring in the Third World, where the state of roads, bridges, power delivery systems, flood containment, and the resistance of buildings to earthquakes, high winds, flood, and fire, are all woefully inadequate by the standards of the developed world. He disagrees with climate warriors who overwhelmingly prioritize the elimination of fossil fuel use as soon as possible, regardless of the consequences to other economic activities.*

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Crimes against Nature, I: Border Wall

Inhumanity compounding inhumanity: the monumental price of “homeland security”

Trump’s border wall, an embodiment of cruel immigration policies, is inhumane to people to a degree that is criminal—if not according to written law, then according to moral laws we grasp by intuition. Even many of those whose job it is to enforce draconian immigration policies intuit those laws—it’s just that they don’t obey them.* 

Border Wall dividing and conquering life

There’s another, less visible, less publicized inhumanity, that is not so plainly criminal. But in the long run it may be just as devastating to the living world as to refugees and asylum seekers. That’s the way a continuous wall carves up vital, often fragile habitat, puts up barriers to creatures who have neither understanding of, nor use for, political boundaries, and robs the environment of resiliency. We know how habitat fragmentation has diminished the capability of living things to cope with such additional man-made injuries as climate change.  However, some things that fragment and destroy habitat have at least the excuse of some utility: roads, farms, power lines, airports, wind farms, solar energy arrays, etc. But this ugly artifice has little purpose besides division for division’s sake. It is a monument to human vanity, and especially the vanity of one corrupt, depraved individual, U.S. President Donald Trump.

Ocelot native to southern Texas

So many wildlife refuges and sanctuaries are already under assault by the Wall or are soon to be, that I gave up trying to list them here.  Just do a search on a string such as “threatened wildlife refuge border wall,” or similar keywords, and you’ll find enough of them to make you seethe, or weep. One particular lovely and  imminently jeopardized landscape can be seen at Lower Rio Grande Valley Wildlife Refuge

The horrific and potentially irreparable damage resulting from extensions of a continuous border wall would spread well beyond wildlife refuges, as described in a paper in the journal Bioscience and summarized last summer in an article in Cosmos. (I referred to this same piece in a post last year; it’s even more urgent today.) The article had 16 co-authors and was endorsed by 2,500 scientists worldwide.

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Statistical Case for Global Warming Approaches Certainty

Five Sigma threshold crossed for Global Warming
What the heck is “Five Sigma?” 

The online publication Earther recently reported the strengthening of the statistical case for global warming based on satellite data.  If you find Earther’s Evidence for Global Warming Passes Physics’ Gold Standard Threshold readily comprehensible, then you need not read most of this post. (The “Gold Standard” is five sigma.)

If you have been pretty satisfied with the Earther article, I invite you to skip way down to the section “Three further notes of clarification [etc.]“

If Earther’s piece is not easily comprehensible, that’s probably because writer Daniel Kahn did not explain just what “five sigma” means statistically.  My hunch is that 30% of my readers will understand and remember it, another 45% understood it in the past but have forgotten a lot of it, and the remaining 25% may never have had it presented to them.  If you belong to the latter group, don’t blame yourself—blame the scattershot American education system.

Simply said, “five sigma” comes down to we have zillions of measurements and 99.99994% of them confirm that global warming is real. There is an item of faith here: you have to trust that NASA has amassed enough data over a long enough period of time to meet the requirements of a statistical analysis. My “zillions of measurements” encapsulates that faith to my satisfaction. Very scientifically of course. (Well . . . The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines zillion as “a very large but indefinite number.”)

Does understanding “five sigma” matter?

It matters if you’d like to have a scientifically bulletproof case for the existence of global warming. Don’t you want bulletproofness?

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Is She Too Tough? Amy Klobuchar Takes Heat

Klobuchar staffers cry Bad Boss

Presidential Democratic candidate Amy Klobuchar got sandbagged last week by Klobuchar staffers who were characterized as “terrified aides” likening her to no less a petty tyrant than Donald Trump.  Reports of her abusiveness headlined in Buzzfeed and the Huffington Post, followed up by a piece in Vanity Fair by Tina Nguyen  (February 8).  Nguyen’s coverage fortunately came around  to positive comments by Klobuchar supporters (yes, current and former aides! with skins, we are made to think, are like a rhinoceros!).

Last week, NPR’s night anchor Mary Louise Kelly was interviewing a politics specialist regarding Klobuchar, who had at the time not yet declared as a candidate for President.  The guest journalist mentioned the knock against Klobuchar’s alleged bitchiness, at which Mary Louise observed that the same kind of criticism would rarely be leveled at a male candidate for office.* The reporter (a woman whose name I don’t recall) hesitated for a moment and then said, in the tone of someone being thrown slightly off her game, something like “yeah, you  have a point.”

Mary Louise Kelly’s suggestion of a double standard being applied to Senator Klobuchar does not excuse Klobuchar’s behavior if she was/is in fact, cruelly abusive. Of course I don’t know what goes on behind closed doors, but I do know that many admired and inspiring leaders do not and have not suffered fools gladly. I also know that there are other staffers who have come to Klobuchar’s defense. I know that on the Rachel Maddow show a few days ago Klobuchar admitted to losing her temper on occasion, with her usual matter-of-fact tone, sans defensiveness. (She made a similar admission to George Stephanapoulos on live TV.)

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How Bad a Joke Are “Alternative Facts?”

What you see is often not what you get.

The now infamous video of a confrontation between a Catholic high school student and a Native American elder near the Lincoln Memorial on January 18th shook the cable news landscape like the launch of a Saturn Five rocket. Much of what was left after the first 48 hours of media conflagration was a lot of hot dust and scorched earth. Many were outraged, some were burned, many were confused, and no one was happy.

(I’ve embedded the initially-released video at the very end of this post.)

After a cool-down of a few days, some perceptive commentators noted that what went most terribly wrong in the immediate aftermath of the incident was the dependence on one three -and-a-half minute video, shot from one angle with the camera held almost perfectly still throughout, to convey truth.  It was that video— and one intense image in particular pulled from it—that triggered a righteous media blast from the Left.  A tweetstorm erupted, blown initially from the Left and soon answered by gusts from the Right, while more, and increasingly ambiguous, information flowed in.

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Trump Gets Pushback from the Senate; Mitch McConnell Calls Dysfunction Dysfunctional; Reagan Anti-Government Crusade Marches On

McConnell implies Trump may have gone a step too far

While Senate Republicans cast about for some legislative hodgepodge to satisfy both President Trump and House Democrats in order to prevent another government shutdown, Mitch McConnell was saying, publicly, that he was “for whatever works that prevents the level of dysfunction we’ve seen on full display here the last month.” This not only addressed the narrow matter of the border wall standoff, but also spoke to calls from Democrats and some Republicans to create a legislative mechanism to prevent both the President and the legislature from using  government shutdowns as a bargaining tool on any legislation. McConnell, with the weight of  35 years in the Senate and at least six government shutdowns behind him, commented, firmly “I don’t like shutdowns. I don’t think they work for anybody.”

If such a mechanism could be put in place, that would take away what Trump feels is his strongest bargaining chip.  His other chip, the declaration of a national emergency, is proving so far to be too hot for even Trump to handle.

This would be the closest thing to a public rebuke of Donald Trump that Mitch McConnell has delivered since the Republican primary season in 2016 when McConnell supported Rand Paul and made evident his disdain for the eventual winner. He is now, obliquely, standing up to Trump’s cavalier use of the federal government as a hostage in his all-or-nothing campaign to get $5.7 billion for an expansion of the magnificent border wall.

By framing the shutdown dilemma as a matter of process rather than substance, McConnell may dodge a counterattack by the President.  He may think Trump owes him something for his month-long refusal to bring to the Senate floor a veto-proof bill to re-open the government. He may think that Trump himself believes he owes McConnell something. Enough to keep his trap shut for a few hours.

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Geoengineering: Not If, But When

 Reality: We  are losing the fight against climate change

It’s time to stop kidding ourselves.  Global carbon emissions are going up, not down. No surprise there.  Even if they stayed flat, we’d be in a world of hurt. Even if they were halted immediately, with CO2 at 405 parts per million, planetary greenhouse warming will continue for many decades, perhaps hundreds of years.

Well, you already know that. 

Of course if fossil fuel burning were stopped immediately, we’d have a world-wide depression that would make the recent Great Recession look like a garden party.

The climate change conference in early December in Katowice, Poland, accomplished the usual: not much.  Politico carried a succinct summary of a largely disappointing affair, written by Kalna Oroschakoff and Paola Tamma: Climate disappointments in Katowice

The leading solution is geoengineering. Like it or not.  

Is geoengineering inevitable?  Just do a web search on “geoengineering inevitable” and you’ll find all sorts of smart people, realistic smart people, coming to the conclusion that without geoengineering, we’re sunk (as many coastal cities will literally become).

Continue reading “Geoengineering: Not If, But When”