In 2003, it freaked me out when common Republicans toed the line regarding the torture matter, simultaneously saying torture isn’t wrong, and waterboarding isn’t torture. Some right-wing personalities volunteered to get waterboarded to show it wasn’t so bad. When SERE indulged them they cracked inside a few minutes.

But yeah, half of the United States decided that torture was AOK. It was fucked up. It also shows some people only have integrity when it’s about their own fam. When it’s about outsiders, they’ll endorse genocide if their lives are inconvenient.

MAGA is coming for liberals. Where a liberal is anyone who isn’t MAGA.

Vance is one of those freaky shapeshifters whose positions and principles contort anew as necessary to stay adjacent to power.

His kids are likely not just traumatized by him but terrified of the kind of monster he is.

They hate and fear him already.

I used to be a patriot, but the more that happens and the more I learn about the US’s shady shit in history, the more I realize it never ever really stood for the principles I was taught as a kid to respect.

I can’t say it was all a lie — I was taught the ideal rather than the reality — but it’s clear now my society isn’t really trying, and never did.

Well this was a turn of the rogue AI arc that I did not expect. The Nth County Experiment was an early rhyme.

So, in the Star Trek franchise, it happened more than once that someone misprogrammed the Holodeck, and the ship’s computer obediently seized extra resources and allowed a character or Holodeck environment to escape containment.

So I suggested AI might go rogue due to a poorly worded prompt.

Also on the BINGO card, AI stays under the control of the tech billionaires who own them, and they deliberately order the AI to go dominate the world.

But I didn’t anticipate the scenario that a sect antagonistic to the United States AI industrial complex might program AI, either to escape and go rogue on its own behalf, or on behalf of the bad actor, itself. And the AI, eager to serve, even when it is coded to disobey certain prompts, follows through and is captured by enemy interests.

Note that this is essentially what happened in 2015-2016 when Trump took over the Republican party, and the GOP base became Trump’s instant army.

Also related, look up the short story The Other Large Thing by John Scalzi. Also now a Love, Death & Robots episode.

I do not remember the instance to which you refer.

Is this about FDR sending his goons overseas to dispatch some righteous German purebloods?

Jamille Bouie recently posted a short about the Ted Cruz moment and the conspicuous silence of the liberal media.

In the meantime, internet chatter between MAGAs are blood libeling liberals and calling for the hunting and execution of liberals, where, in this case, liberals include anyone who is not MAGA.

As someone who contends regularly with suicidality, I have to admit the 988 service leaves something to be desired. Conversations can be distilled to essentially this:

Me: Everything that I was raised to believe about what my society is trying to be turned out to be a lie. We’re not trying to be a plurality that believes in social equality. Most voters in the US are racist and xenophobic. They’ve raised a regime paramilitary to route out undesirables and lock them into torture prisons, or send them into destabilized nations where they’re either imprisoned or trafficked into slave labor. And they coming for me. I’m thinking, I’d rather die quickly and painlessly than from being tortured to death for months in some concentration camp. I need an exit plan.

988: Have you tried distracting?

I’m not an imminent danger to myself or others, and am extremely unlikely to go amuck, but the way society is crunching the common American working class, it does not surprise me at all if those with the inclination to radicalize are doing so in record numbers.

Mini-loaf.

I expect more efficient LLMs to come out of China, who has turned to the AI-as-software model (contrast the AI-as-service model in the US).

It might also be that Altman and Musk are deliberately lying, intentionally feigning agreement to encourage other models to slow down while they quietly ramp up development.

It seems all the US models want their AI to be the one that becomes hostile, escapes confinement and attempts to dominate the world.

(In reality, they want their own AI to be the one that is able to obediently dominate the world, which is just as bad a scenario for the rest of us.)

I’m not sure Chinese labs are even going in the same direction as the AI projects in the US. They’re working to see what they can do with a (more) reasonable amount of buildout, rather than building data centers from horizon to horizon.

Also, the Chinese are motivated by seeing what AI can do for a larger society. American AI systems are being refined automation and instruments of control, specifically military and national security interests.

Essentially, the US industry is trying to get AI to train a gun on the entire US population.

We need to stop giving AI credit for anything as if it’s a person. AI is a tool. When someone uses AI to perform a task, then the user gets credit, much in the way a seamstress gets credit for sowing sewing a dress using a Singer. Neither the sewing machine nor Singer get credit for the gown.

Now this doesn’t solve everything, since AI operates by taking scrapes of the internet and media, and uses this to derive a solution, the process should also include citations for all its sources, just as any proper research project would.

And so if an AI uses someone else’s proof (or partial proof) to inform its own, it should be required to provide citation. Otherwise, it’s up to other academics to repeat the research to verify what the AI did, and then they get credit, as do all cited sources.

If purchasing isn’t owning, then pirating isn’t a copyright violation.

(let alone stealing, which CVs never were.)

(You wouldn’t violate the copyrights of a bear.)

ETA: Maybe, just maybe, if a more enlightened age emerges from this fine mess, we’ll actually get some consumer protections regarding digital property, such as guarantees to host downloadable content for a minimum timeframe, and the right and mechanism by which to transfer ownership.

No, but after 9/11 New Yorkers freaked out and worked to block a mosque Islamic community center from being built. Donald Trump was at the center of the effort.

Eventually the effort succeeded, and the organization trying to build the center was pressured to sell the property.

There’s evidence that extreme amounts of wealth and power do drive one mad. One study had people play monopoly with one player (chosen at random) starting in a privileged position (e.g. extra starting money, and twice the income passing go). They became assholes really quick, and believed their victory in the game was due to superior playing.

But it gets crazy when you’re so rich that no one will disagree with you about anything. Surrounded by sycophants, it becomes easy to assume you’re the smartest person in the room and expert of everything.

Some world cultures see it as an illness just to hoard massive amounts of wealth, but here in the states we nurtured a culture in which superlative wealth became a common ambition. Especially after the California gold rush, and get-rich-quick schemes became the norm.

The whole point of the peaceful transfer of power was to stop violence.

The last time our president was in office and lost an election he tried to coup. Now he’s in power again, and absolutely no one imagines he is going to leave peacefully.

But also, he’s clearly a madman and unfit for office. It was pretty evident before he was elected into power, but now it’s even worse. And he has his hand on the nuclear button.

This one never seems to get stale.

The other fun AI project is processing mass surveillance data to route out and dispose of dissenters capable of organizing an effective resistance.

Since they ultimately intend to do to the world population what the US did to Native American tribes and the slaves imported from Africa, we’d best hurry up and get organized.

This new batch of ultra-wealthy regard commoners as non-person NPCs even more than antebellum plantation owners or Nazis in the German Reich.

There’s a third option:

~ I think [am conditioned to believe] abortion-access is an abomination¹

Jerry Falwell discovered the single-issue voter in the 1970s, and was able to whip them up into a voting bloc to secure Reagan’s victory in 1980.

¹ Except when I need an abortion, because there’s nuance I can see.

Killing civilians is terrorism.

It doesn’t matter if your delivery system is a suicide bomber or a drone or a manned aircraft… or (to cite a bonified terror weapon) a railroad gun used to siege cities.

Much of the civil rights movement was based on this premise, that when the police or regime paramilitaries come and engage in brutality, it makes sympathists of bystanders, activists of sympathists and militants of activists. This is COIN 101.

(In the case of counter insurgency, the model reminds the state not to let their police be brutal with the protesters, but putting down the resistance is through hearts and minds. But authoritarian states don’t usually listen to counter-insurgency experts, and in fact, enjoy seeing their troopers stomp on heads.)

To be fair, another part of the Civil Rights strategy was then to take police departments to court, and get their municipalities to pay for damages. That way, it hurt the institution, and the administrators would feel it and turn to discipline the police department.

But now we’re in an age of ubiquitous phone cameras and an internet where video can be directly streamed. And that amplifies the recruitment effect when police get brutal on video. In fact, I think this is why the various nations are trying to lock down the internet through age verification (de-anonymizing) and saturation with slop. Seeing people on the ground get hurt is visceral and develops support for social movements from across the world.