An advent of a "messy non-linear process"

When it comes to AI, I'm a Luddite, perfectly happy to use my own good brain to do my thinking. Take your fancy, energy-hogging chips and shove 'em, as far as I'm concerned.  I'm sure there are some useful applications for this human invention, but we haven't seen them yet. Instead we get slop, enhanced enshitification of the web world, and more garbage all around. (Though I have to admit my Erudite Partner thinks language translations via AI are pretty good.)

Less backward observers than I offer interesting thoughts. Here's David Rothkopf who is sure there is something there, though sometimes uncertain whether that is a good thing. On balance, he comes down for AI's positives. I appreciated his historical analogy and ruminations on likely effects. You can find David at his podcast: Siliconsciousness: AI Fears, Scapegoats, and Myths.

It took almost two hundred years for the industrial revolution to spread worldwide. It transformed life and society in massive, immeasurable ways. But, fortunately, the pace of change gave us time to consider the outcomes, their implications, what was desirable and what was not. 

This revolution will be just as sweeping but will come at us all much faster. While it would be much better for the world for us to have the benefit of more grounded, thoughtful philosophical discussions about what we want the changes to look like (and what we should avoid), I fear the pace of change will outstrip our ability to understand what is happening and to guide it. 

Indeed, while most people see the AI revolution as one impacting our ability to process massive amounts of data then act on our analyses, I see it as one that may most notably be different from past techquakes that have shaken the globe in terms of its implications for the speed of life, decision-making and wave upon wave of future changes.

That creates a responsibility for each of us, regardless of where we are in life, to educate ourselves—because the implications are not just for technology or technologists or markets or jobs but rather they touch virtually every aspect of every life and will to an increasing degree going forward.

Will we be able to stay ahead of it all? Make the right choices? Almost certainly not. Will we be able to increasingly better handle this technology if we make that our mission? Yes. And that should be our collective and individual goal.

I should add that having been involved in and around AI and related fields for a long time now and having the benefit of speaking to leading experts in the field from all disciplines and from across the political spectrum, I have emerged optimistic about AI and its potential for making our lives much better even as I have grown aware of areas of real concern (as noted above).

Why? As a rule I believe in progress even though I am acutely aware it is a messy, non-linear process. 

Charlie Warzel [gift] at The Atlantic (which discloses an AI partnership relationship) describes the technology in terms which seem appropriate to the Christian Advent season, both apocalyptic and eschatological. He's a journalist whose business is to follow the meanderings of the tech bros who have brought us to the AI era. Like most informed observers, he both marvels and feels some skepticism about the hype deluge. 

... If you believe that Silicon Valley’s elites have lost their minds, foisting a useful-but-not-magical technology on society, declaring that it’s building God, investing historic amounts of money in its development, and fusing the fate of its tools with the fate of the global economy, being furious makes sense.

... We are waiting because a defining feature of generative AI, according to its true believers, is that it is never in its final form. Like ChatGPT before its release, every model in some way is also a “low-key research preview”—a proof of concept for what’s really possible. You think the models are good now? Ha! Just wait. Depending on your views, this is trademark showmanship, a truism of innovation, a hostage situation, or a long con. Where you fall on this rapture-to-bullshit continuum likely tracks with how optimistic you are for the future. But you are waiting nonetheless—for a bubble to burst, for a genie to arrive with a plan to print money, for a bailout, for Judgment Day. In that way, generative AI is a faith-based technology.

It doesn’t matter that the technology is already useful to many, that it can code and write marketing copy and complete basic research tasks. Because Silicon Valley is not selling useful; it’s selling transformation—with all the grand promises, return on investment, genuine risk, and collateral damage that entails. And even if you aren’t buying it, three years out, you’re definitely feeling it. 

I like a little observation Warzel include among his speculations about where all this leads:

... the pope has warned students, “AI cannot ever replace the unique gift that you are to the world ...”

The future of war -- no limits

No wonder Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, a TV talk show bully, is threatening to attempt to punish the Congresscritters [gift] who have reminded our military that its members have an obligation to refuse unlawful orders. Hegseth is reported to have ordered Seal Team 6 to ensure that any survivors in his boat sinking binge in the Caribbean were assuredly dead [gift link]. He offers no proof that the US government had any intelligence which justified any strike at all, much less a killer hit to ensure no victims remained alive.  

The secession of the Trump regime and the United States generally from any attempt to uphold the idea that there are such things as "war crimes" marks a terrifying breach with the last 80 years of the development of the international law of armed conflict. We aren't recognizing any limits any longer. This way portends unimaginable carnage.

Phillips P. O'Brien, professor of Strategic Studies at St. Andrews University and an acute observer of the Russian war on Ukraine, saw this development coming. In the world being launched into being under the axis of Trump, Putin, and Xi, what had been defined as criminal acts are returning as the definition of a successful means of waging war.

... what we are seeing now around the globe is the disappearance of any restraint, what we might call the normalizing of war crimes. Yes, I know war crimes have always been committed. However it was notable that during the period of the International Rules Based Order (now arguably over) states at least wanted to act like they were not committing war crimes. Now that pretense is over—and that means that the reality will be worse. 

As ranged weapons become more numerous, accurate and effective, and as restraints on what can be attacked lessen or even disappear, this will mean the great incentive will be to try and achieve strategic effect through devastating attacks on civilian infrastructure. 

Fighting on the battlefield will be seen as a slow, bloody slog through death zones—while ranged war crimes will be seen as faster and more effective. So when we add up what we are seeing, its terrifying and ethically bankrupt, but also strategically rational. It may very well represent the future of war. 

Russia in Ukraine, with United States encouragement, is now executing a law-free pattern of unbounded murder. All to satisfy the greedy desires of fanciful oligarchs. 

O'Brien today still points out something we should remember. Faced with invasion and internal corruption, nonetheless...

... Ukrainian democracy has proven itself now to be more resilient than American democracy...

Commentary for a moment

 

So much for what we were taught in civics ... If we get through it, there will be more.

 

Posting continues sporadic over Thanksgiving weekend as family assembles. I expect further outrages in this time when many look away. 

They hate women

No more spending money on professional training for women if the Trump administration gets its way. In particular, they apparently don't think they'll ever need nurses ...

A call for accountability from ICE and from ourselves

Martha's Vineyard island lies off the coast of Massachusetts. Reached only by ferry boat or small plane, it can seem a world apart from the agonies of the mainland. It is not. 

It has long been a landing spot for successive waves of migrants, hardy people willing to work. Early English settlers here pushed the native Wampanoags to the margins of the island, where they were often joined by previously enslaved people of African descent. Seamen and whalers from around the world came in the 18th and 19th century; the East Coast Black bourgeoisie populated the vacation town of Oak Bluffs. At present, about 20 percent of the year-round population are referred to by others as "the Brazilians" -- working class, relative newcomers from the Azores and continental Brazil itself whose industry keeps much of the life of the island going.

ICE sails away with some of its captives in a summer raid.

That mixed migrant population has put a target on the island for ICE under the Trump regime. 

When we are on Martha's Vineyard, we attend Grace Church (Episcopal) in the town of Vineyard Haven. The priest of this friendly parish shared a message this week in an island newspaper about the nightmare the Trump's anti-migrant crusade is inflicting on this place. 

Time to hold ICE accountable for its actions 

by the Rev. Stephen Harding 

As a priest ordained in the Episcopal Church, I am bound by the vows I made at my diaconal and priestly ordinations and by our Baptismal Covenant. When I was sworn in as a chaplain for the New York City Fire Department, I took an oath to support and uphold the Constitution of the United States, the Constitution of the State of New York, and the Charter of the City of New York. As a citizen of the United States, in addition to the rights provided by the Constitution, part of my obligation is to support and defend the Constitution.

When I served as director of pastoral care at NYU Langone Medical Center in Manhattan, my department and I were expected to comply with the medical center’s policies. We were directed and expected to report any unethical practice, or anything that might involve wrongdoing. The policy explicitly stated that if we saw something being done that was wrong and kept silent, our silence made us complicit in the wrong.

I believe that once Donald Trump is no longer president of the United States, and there has been time for reflection and the restoration of the rule of law, the actions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and their enablers will prove to be among the more shameful moments of our country’s history. ...

... ICE has made itself judge, jury, and enforcer, with no transparent oversight or accountability. By wearing masks, refusing to identify themselves, and detaining individuals without charging them, ICE agents are indistinguishable from masked vigilantes, and jeopardize the safety of the public and themselves. 

... If the elected, appointed, and other government officials cannot keep their oath to protect, support, and defend the Constitution of the United States, then they, too, are acting dishonorably, and are complicit in ICE’s actions.

I remain convinced that the people of the U.S. are fundamentally decent, compassionate, and generous. The tactics, actions, and insolence of masked ICE agents demean themselves, disrespect our dignity as human beings, and diminish us as a nation. ...

If ICE and other Trump officials should be held accountable, the rest of us can't turn away from our own responsibilities in the times. What can we do to care for and protect strangers in our midst? What can we do to replace government leaders who are doing wrong?

One woman drops away: where's she off to?

Tressie McMillan Cottom's dissection of Marjorie Taylor Greene's split from the Orange Toddler and his MAGA fiefdom is delicious. Don't miss it. [gift article] 

[Explaining her resignation from Congress] ... she offered a mealy-mouthed apology for her role in our “toxic politics.” But on the whole she is, like many conservative women, a beneficiary of the very feminism that she reviles. She has long thought that being a tough girl rumbling alongside the boys will earn their loyalty, when all it ever does is earn women the right to throw themselves on the sword for men who never deserved their sacrifices.

To her credit, Greene is a survivor. She took a hard look at her political fortunes and appears to be betting on herself. As some reporting indicates others in the House are also looking to retire, she may end up being prescient. Or she may have mistimed the market on Trump’s political fortunes. Either way, she took the only choice she really had available to her.

There is not a real place for women in Trumpism, in MAGA or in the mainstream Republican Party, as long as they are one and the same. But Greene’s trajectory is a lesson fit for a fairy tale. If you want to control your own destiny, it’s better to be a wicked witch than a princess.

There's a way that MTG is sharper than some of her MAGA sisters. She has been even more of a true believer in the MAGA fantasy universe than many who just offered a self-interested imitation. (Think GOP Rep. Elise Stefanik for example.) She'll seek, or more likely invent, her own new authentically crazy persona. Who knows what Greene will adopt in order to chart a new course? What seems certain is that she won't just exit the stage quietly.

The people who count and those who don't

Here we are spending a season on Martha's Vineyard island off Massachusetts and the question inevitably arises as we see old friends: "how's Alan Dershowitz holding up?" This is a small place, especially in winter, and our decidedly not-oligarchic-class friends regularly encounter the famous TV-lawyer and defender of the likes of OJ Simpson and his more recent buddy, Jeffrey Epstein.

Dershowitz is infamous around here for being angry that his chummy attachments to such criminals make him an Undesirable himself. He rages at social exclusion. He's been known to get into a loud public beef at the summer farmer's market, for example. 

Anand Giridharadas' oped, How the Elite Behave When No One Is Watching: Inside the Epstein Emails [gift link] seems to me both insightful and incisive about why elites and their hangers-on like Dershowitz feel injured when called to account. On this island, the rest of us get a close up glimpse on occasion, especially of the ones who are Democrats. A lot of people know what they are seeing; this place is full of smart New Englanders. (And yes, still feel they have to look to Democrats for something better.)

... People are right to sense that, as the [so far released Epstein] emails lay bare, there is a highly private merito-aristocracy at the intersection of government and business, lobbying, philanthropy, start-ups, academia, science, high finance and media that all too often takes care of its own more than the common good. They are right to resent that there are infinite second chances for members of this group even as so many Americans are deprived of first chances. They are right that their pleas often go unheard, whether they are being evicted, gouged, foreclosed on, A.I.-obsolesced — or, yes, raped. 

... The emails, in my view, together sketch a devastating epistolary portrait of how our social order functions, and for whom. Saying that isn’t extreme. The way this elite operates is.

The idea of an Epstein class is helpful because one can be misled by the range of people to whom Mr. Epstein ingratiated himself. Republicans. Democrats. Businesspeople. Diplomats. Philanthropists. Healers. Professors. Royals. Superlawyers. A person he emailed at one moment was often at war with the ideas of another correspondent — a Lawrence Summers to a Steve Bannon, a Deepak Chopra to a scientist skeptical of all spirituality, a Peter Thiel to a Noam Chomsky. This diversity masked a deeper solidarity.

... If this neoliberal-era power elite remains poorly understood, it may be because it is not just a financial elite or an educated elite, a noblesse-oblige elite, a political elite or a narrative-making elite; it straddles all of these, lucratively and persuaded of its own good intentions. If it’s a jet set, it’s a carbon-offset-private-jet set. After all, flying commercial won’t get you from your Davos breakfast on empowering African girls with credit cards to your crypto-for-good dinner in Aspen. ...

Many of the Epstein emails begin with a seemingly banal rite that, the more I read, took on greater meaning: the whereabouts update and inquiry. In the Epstein class, emails often begin and end with pings of echolocation. “Just got to New York — love to meet, brainstorm,” the banker Robert Kuhn wrote to Mr. Epstein. “i’m in wed, fri. edelman?” Mr. Epstein wrote to the billionaire Thomas Pritzker (it is unclear if he meant a person, corporation or convening). To Lawrence Krauss, a physicist in Arizona: “noam is going to tucson on the 7th. will you be around.” Mr. Chopra wrote to say he would be in New York, first speaking, then going “for silence.” Gino Yu, a game developer, announced travel plans involving Tulum, Davos and the D.L.D. (Digital Life Design) conference — an Epstein-class hat trick.

Landings and takeoffs, comings and goings, speaking engagements and silent retreats — members of this group relentlessly track one another’s passages through J.F.K., L.H.R., N.R.T. and airports you’ve never even heard of. Whereabouts are the pheromones of this elite. ...

Giridharadas is brutal, revealing the moral emptiness of the Epstein class. 

...the emails depict a group whose highest commitment is to their own permanence in the class that decides things. When principles conflict with staying in the network, the network wins. ... These are permanent survivors who will profit when things are going this way and then profit again when they turn. ... 

Generally, you can’t read other people’s emails. Powerful people have private servers, I.T. staffs, lawyers. When you get a rare glimpse into how they actually think and view the world, what they actually are after, heed Maya Angelou: Believe them.

American democracy today is in a dangerous place. The Epstein emails are a kind of prequel to the present. This is what these powerful people, in this mesh of institutions and communities, were thinking and doing — taking care of one another instead of the general welfare — before it got really bad.

This era has seen a surge in belief in conspiracy theories, including about Mr. Epstein, because of an underlying intuition people have that is, in fact, correct: The country often seems to be run not for the benefit of most of us. ...

Jeffrey Epstein's immediate victims are not alone in being treated like disposable trash by this set. We all are.

Posting may (or may not) be sporadic over Thanksgiving week as family assembles. I expect further outrages in this time when many look away. 

Fraught times

This is not a good year for a Sunday celebrating "Christ the King." We are -- properly -- in a No Kings mode these days in the corner of the US populace I live in. 

The Christian liturgical observance is actually quite modern -- and came along in response to threats to human life and dignity in Europe only one century ago.

Originally, Pope Pius XI instituted the feast as a direct counter to the totalitarian claims of the modern state. The immediate threat in 1925 was, of course, communism on one hand, and the looming threat of fascism on the other. In more general terms, the annual celebration of this feast with its particular focus on the lordship as well as the universal and eternal scope of Christ’s reign was promulgated to stand as a witness over against any and all secularizing tendencies of the contemporary world.

... All worldly claims to ultimate loyalties are rendered relative. For Christians, reflecting on this is part and parcel of taking stock, both personally and as a community, at the inception of a new [liturgical] year. -- What Are We Waiting For?: Re-Imaging Advent for Time to Come by William H. Peterse

Okay -- American Christians and non-Christians alike are being reminded of the need to use the good brains we are born with to discern how to live, thrive, and resist under the rule of a monarchical pretender. 

As one liturgical cycle ends and another begins, let's keep up the good work of justice and compassion and remember that no false king can claim to determine for us how we ought to live.

I am thankful for our rising rage ...

As we come into the Thanksgiving season, I realize that I am heartened by growing rage against the offenses against our country by the Trump regime and oligarchy. These are too many to catalog. The list here is necessarily short and incomplete, but plenty infuriating.

• a deportation dragnet which empowers masked thugs to abduct harmless persons within our country for the crime of speaking another language or having brown skin;

• a plan to turn over our coastlines to oil drillers to pollute; 

• the attempted surrender of the sovereign state of Ukraine to Vladimir Putin. (Europe might yet step up; Ukrainians have no choice but to resist. I remain convinced the proper historical analogy is the democracies' betrayal of the Spanish Republic to the fascists in the 1930; the resulting regime of terror lasted 50 years in unhappy Spain.)

• Trump's claim of treason against brave office holders who reminded our military they swear fealty to the Constitution, not Donald Trump;

• and then there are ongoing skirmishes over Jeffrey Epstein's sex crimes. Beneath the noise, there's a smoldering blaze sustaining too many watching women, perhaps slow to ignite, but enduring and combustible.

Somewhat to my surprise, the New York Times has given space to a professor of literature and journalism at American University, Rachel Louise Snyder, [gift link] to lay out the case for legitimate fury among women.

... the emails are just a piece of the larger story: the lengths this country and the systems we’ve created — from the smallest jurisdiction to the national stage — will go to maintain the power of men at the expense of women’s bodies. 

... Mr. Trump is right. He has nothing to hide because he stands to lose nothing. Whatever exists in those files surely will not be enough to wrest him from his perch. At least not yet. ... [He] has overseen an era that might be unique in its willingness to sacrifice democratic institutions and American norms to control women.

As I write, there is a White House proposal that aims to lower the Office on Violence Against Women’s stature within the D.O.J. and cut its shoestring budget by nearly 30 percent. This would devastate shelters, advocacy programs and violence prevention measures, and escalate the danger for victims of intimate partner and familial violence in all corners of the country.

At the same time, a report on violent deaths of girls and women from 2014 to 2020 noted that laws constraining abortion providers were associated with a 3.4 percent rise in the rate of homicides related to intimate partner violence. We are being killed for our own lack of choice. An estimated one in 20 women in the United States gets pregnant from rape or sexual coercion, which equates to a whopping six million women with violence-initiated pregnancies. Six million. Two-thirds of the women who became pregnant from rape were injured during their assaults.

Are you as angry as I am yet? The misogyny that is such a casual part of Mr. Trump’s entire modus operandi gives license to systems that prioritize men’s freedoms over women’s lives. ...

We are entitled to demand more from our leaders, to demand an open investigation into the Epstein files, to demand accountability for the perpetrators regardless of political party or cultural cachet, to demand justice for the children and women trafficked by Mr. Epstein, and perhaps more than anything to demand actual real change in which a broken system is compelled to reinvention.

In the meantime, we are entitled to all of our rage, and men, frankly, we would welcome a moment of gratitude from you that we have not burned this whole damn human enterprise down just yet. ...

Stay mad. Rage is dangerous, but it can be righteous. Our lives depend on it.

Posting may (or may not) be sporadic over Thanksgiving week as family assembles. I expect further outrages in this time when many look away.

Friday deer blogging

 

This inquisitive youngster was attracted by seeds fallen from the bird feeders. The animal showed little distress that I was watching close by. That's too bad, since it's hunting season -- though this spot is too close to a house for hunting to be legal. Eventually what appeared to be the mother rounded up and led away her offspring.