A report published earlier this week warns that AI could pose an "‘extinction level” threat to humans, according to CNN.
The headline says so—and also notes that this report was commissioned by the U.S. State Department and says the U.S. “must intervene.”
Several million reports are “commissioned” by the U.S. government every year, and strangely enough most of them conclude that there’s a big problem that’s going to kill us all unless the U.S. government is given more money, more power, more military equipment.
I made that last paragraph up. I have no idea how many reports are generated or how many of them paint doomsday scenarios, but even as a casual observer it seems clear that it’s a substantial number.
Two points in the CNN article back me up on that. The first one comes in the fourth paragraph:
A US State Department official confirmed to CNN that the agency commissioned the report as it constantly assesses how AI is aligned with its goal to protect US interests at home and abroad. However, the official stressed the report does not represent the views of the US government.
And the second is comprised by the 14th and 15th paragraphs:
Gladstone AI’s report calls for dramatic new steps aimed at confronting this threat, including launching a new AI agency, imposing “emergency” regulatory safeguards and limits on how much computer power can be used to train AI models.
“There is a clear and urgent need for the US government to intervene,” the authors wrote in the report.
So there you go: the hysterical report doesn’t represent the views of the U.S. government, but it was commissioned by the U.S. government, and it calls for “dramatic new steps” including:
Creation of a new federal agency
Imposing “emergency” regulations
(Also, I’m sure, more funding for more reports from Gladstone AI.)
And CNN is ready and willing to pump up the hysteria to frighten Americans into demanding their government “intervene” by making itself more powerful and exerting more control over their lives.
You may have noticed that this is establishment’s recommended solution to everything. To AI, to the climate, to the border, to education, to the economy, to transphobia, to Islamophobia, to homophobia, to misogyny, to Christian Nationalism, to gun ownership, to abortion, to school lunches: give the federal government more power and control or terrible things will happen!
But that’s exactly the opposite of what we see happen in reality: take the most innocuous area of American life, put it under federal control, and it will be a disaster before you know it. But guess what? That’s just perfect because the federal government is right there to solve all disasters! Which turns them into dumpster-fire shit show train-wrecks, but so what? Give the federal government more power and they can address the dumpster-fire shit show train-wreck they just created!
The U.S. government’s “war on poverty” has been running sixty years, the “war on drugs” has been running forty. Behold the fruits of that glorious and valiant effort!
Let the visible and obvious lack of poverty and drugs in America be your barometer of government efficiency at problem solving. Let the country’s 34 trillion dollars of debt, and its inability to balance a budget, be your barometer of its fiscal sobriety. Let its grand, glorious, and lasting victories in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan be your barometer of its genius for warfare.
“We’re facing an extinction level threat,” says Gladstone AI, “so the most irresponsible, inefficient, unproductive, and corrupt institution in America must intervene!”
Look, he’s drowning! Send the quadripelegic swimming squad to save him!
We never have challenges or problems any more: it’s just one damn apocalypse after another.
If something isn’t apocalyptic, there’s a risk you may not react appropriately: in the case of the media, you may not click on their link, stay tuned to their channel, forward their video, like their post. In the case of the government, you may not approve their demand for new powers or additional funding.
You need to be scared. You need to be terrified. And you need to know that only the government’s Top Men can fix what ails you—so you’ll willingly give them just a little more control over your life.
I’ve got a theory.
And no, my theory is not that all brontosauruses are thin at one end, much, much bigger in the middle, and then thin again at the far end. That’s a good theory, one of the best, but it’s not mine. (It’s an Elk’s. Specifically, Anne Elk’s. Which is to say, it is hers and not mine.)
My theory—the one that is mine—is that we are facing an extinction-level threat from the catastrophic level of bullshit being hurled at us by the media-government-industrial-military complex.
I don’t know how it could actually bring about our extinction, but if a 1.5 degree Celsius increase in temperature over eight decades can do it, and if unchaperoned AI can do it, and if the election of Donald Trump can do it, then obviously five hundred gazillion petabytes of total bullshit being dumped on us daily can do it as well.
There’s no easy way out of this.
If you try to counteract the bullshit you’ll be accused of promoting conspiracy theories or misinformation (often by the very same people who used to drive around with bumper stickers that said QUESTION AUTHORITY).
If you try to ignore it, the bullshitters will only redouble the effort and demand even more resources and power in order to reach holdouts like you. Your indifference will be used to justify even more bullshit, even more often.
If neither resistance nor indifference can work, what can?
Only the dismantling of the machinery responsible for the generation of the bullshit.
Shrink the federal government. Starve it. Redirect power back where it belongs: with individuals and communities. It’s right there in the Constitution, spelled out in the 9th and 10th amendements:
Amendment IX
The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.Amendment X
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
That’s the stuff!
Godzilla’s always gonna Godzilla. He’s going to stomp around and breathe fire, effortlessly laying waste to whole cities, there’s no stopping him. Not when he’s the size of the Chrysler Building. But what if he were only chin-high to a mosquito? How big a threat would such a micro Godzilla be? What harm could he do?
But wait! you say, Godzilla is purely destructive, he’s a monster! Unlike Godzilla, the federal government does some good things.
This is true. The federal government does a handful of necessary things. They’re laid out pretty plainly in Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution. Set and collect taxes, borrow money, pay the nation’s debts, regulate commerce, set up post offices, protect intellectual property, establish courts, declare war, create and manage a national military, yada yada yada.
Except there had to be a kicker: “… and to make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.”
That’s the bitch of it right there. . . the “necessary and proper” clause, which really has proved to be the Santa of clauses for the big government set.
Any objection to any proposed new authority for the federal government can be answered that the authority in question is in fact necessary and proper to the larger federal project.
Of course, that sword cuts both ways: anyone with the balls to cut a federal program or agency not explicitly authorized by the enumeration clause (the aforementioned Section 8) can reassure critics that it was not “necessary or proper.”
The Godzilla shrinking mechanism, I’m saying, is already there for anyone willing to use it.
The real problem is that so many Americans believe themselves dependent on Godzilla that the prospect of his diminution terrifies them. Add to them the people who don’t feel themselves personally dependent on Godzilla but feel compelled by compassion to support Godzilla for the sake of the less fortunate Americans who do, and you’ve got a hell of a Godzilla fan club out there. Everywhere. Swarming over everything. Like flies. Like Swifties!
Because the size and scope of the federal government could so easily and Constitutionally be reduced, these people must be kept in a constant fevered pitch of hysteria lest their support for Godzilla begin to wane.
Crisis after crisis, threat after threat, must be manufactured and amplified to maintain that elevated fear. So it is. They are.
That’s why the climate, which has always been changing, and to whose changes we have always adapted, is going to kill us all and end all life as we know it unless we give the government more power and control.
That’s why AI isn’t just a technology that we need to approach with caution and prudence, but something that’s going to kill us all and end all life as we know it unless we give the government more power and control.
That’s why covid wasn’t just a virulent virus requiring individuals to adjust their behavior as their own situations and risk tolerances dictated, as with the 1968 influenza pandemic that caused comparable mortality rates in America—worse, in some ways, in that it was especially lethal to infants—but was instead an End Times Affliction that was going to kill everyone and therefore required the government to take more power and control than it had ever before taken during peacetime. Or wartime.
That’s why the left can’t just say that Donald Trump is an ideological adversary who’d block their progressive policies and impose conservative ones instead: no, he has to be cast as the Prince of Darkness, the Man Who Came To Kill Democracy, rape your wife, and exterminate everyone who isn’t straight, white, and Christian.
It’s why every progressive policy preference becomes a moral crusade even though progressives don’t even believe in morality and OMG did I actually use the word crusades?
I’m talking about the left and progressives, here, but I mean the establishment: the political, cultural, and social establishment that’s been so completely captured by the left and by progressives. They’re working together, grinding out one terrifying scenario after another, because without truly terrifying scenarios there’s no need for their (even more terrifying) solutions.
The climate will change and we’ll adapt. We’re good at adapting.
AI is an advanced technology. Like nuclear fission, it can be used for good or ill. Unlike nuclear fission, it may have ideas of its own about how it would like to be used. That’s weird and interesting—but much less likely to cause extinction level events than are the human scientists playing around with lethal pathogens in laboratories.
Covid was a pandemic and we got through it—and Sweden got through it just as well as the rest of us despite leaving its people largely free through the whole thing.
Donald Trump is a politician. He was president once already and the republic survived. Hate him all you want, but the country already proved it could survive four years of President Trump.
The hyperventilating has to end, but it won’t until we shrink Godzilla and tune out the doom mongers.
We’ll muddle along. We always do. We always will.
(Unless a Democrat wins the American election November—in that case, life as we know it will come to an end and everyone will die.)
Borscht Boy
(Some content plagiarized from The 5-Minute Iliad.)
At the end of the second world war, America dropped two atomic bombs on Japan. Each bomb killed so many people so quickly and made the world so safe for peace-loving democracies that America began feeling pretty good about things and forgot all about being Depressed, etc. This caused the hula-hoop, the soda fountain, and Annette Funicello.
Not everyone could master the hula-hoop, however, and the alienation experienced by those who couldn't resulted in the development of an American counterculture.
Scoffing the traditional values of mainstream America, the counterculturalists experimented with bold new ideas. They forsook the established middle-class pleasures, such as wine, woman, and song, in favor of radical new ones, such as sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll.
Born 102 years ago yesterday, Jack Kerouac was a child of the Depression and a veteran of the second world war. He was therefore torn between these competing value systems and roamed the country aimlessly in search of grammar and punctuation.
The adventures described in On the Road were based loosely on his real-life travels with the infamous Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters, whose insatiable appetite for borscht led Kerouac to dub them “The Beet Generation.”
Also
March 13 is the birthday of L. Ron Hubbard (the "L" is silent). Mr. Hubbard invented Dianetics, which eventually led to Scientology, causing Scientologists and Personality Tests. Scientologists are easily distinguished from Jehovah's Witnesses in that they don't ask you subscribe to The Watchtower and they can often be seen in major motion pictures.
Standard time was established in the United States on March 13, 1884. Standard time was not well received at first. Americans were outraged at the soul-deadening conformity imposed by this new standard, an infringement on the natural liberties of a free people, and—look! A squirrel!
Sharing Mr. Hubbard's birthday of March 13 are actor William H. Macy (1950), singer Neil Sedaka (1939), former chief spook William Casey (1913), and Pluto predictor Percival Lowell (1855).
March 13 is Revolution Day in Grenada and National Youth Day in Fiji.
Happy Hump Day!
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