Did moderates do so well in the elections because people were getting their information from talking to A.I.?

"What was the educational benefit of showing her first-grader a theoretical image of a conventionally attractive 25-year-old woman?"

"And what impact might that have on her child’s developing imagination? Anderson was particularly troubled by the way the AI-generated image had seemingly eclipsed her daughter’s own ideas of what her adult life might look like; Harper was thrilled by the appearance of the pictured woman. 'That was the most heartbreaking part of it for me,' Anderson said. 'She said, "Maybe when I’m older I will look this beautiful," and I’m like — 'Oh my God, she’s so proud of how beautiful the picture of the person is.' At that point, it wasn’t about being a nurse or imagining herself in this empowered role, as a person in the world. It was about what she looks like at 25...."

From "A 6-year-old imagined her future self. Then her school gave her an AI version. A South Carolina school used AI to create an image of a 6-year-old as a 25-year-old nurse. Her mother had questions" (WaPo)(gift link).

Here's the mother's Instagram post showing the child's illustration of herself in the future as a nurse and the photographic AI image that bothered the mother so much. By the way, the child loved it.

"Virtually no schools offer formal training programs for legal engineers, though some have added classes."

"Many legal engineers are former practicing lawyers who taught themselves A.I. skills or learned on the job. Some have backgrounds in legal operations, paralegal work or consulting. Fewer are former software engineers who then went to law school — 'the unicorn,' one hiring manager said.... 'It’s not so much going from actively practicing law to not,' she said. 'I think it’s more embracing this generational shift in the legal industry.'... 'You don’t necessarily need a giant pyramid of lawyers anymore... People who have this kind of skill set don’t have to have a J.D., and they don’t have to be software engineers, but there’s business process re-engineering, or this M.B.A. type skill, that I think is really necessary.'"

From "The New Hot Job in Law Doesn’t Require a J.D./Big law firms, legal tech vendors, and in-house legal departments at companies like Microsoft and Nvidia are all hiring legal engineers, a new position for lawyers with A.I. skills" (NYT).

"Reflecting on the Second World War, Hannah Arendt suggested that totalitarianism takes root in societies where lots of people feel unnecessary or unwanted."

"After the 2016 election, it was common for the media to report on underemployed people in the Rust Belt who felt that they’d been cast aside. Today, manosphere ideology rages against a society that, allegedly, claims not to need men, and young people wonder whether there’s room for them in an A.I.-saturated workforce. Recently, even world-class mathematicians have felt the sting of redundancy. In a blog post titled 'The Mathocalypse,' the mathematician Scott Aaronson recounts what his nine-year-old son told his wife, the computer scientist Dana Moshkovitz: 'Mommy . . . I heard that a robot solved the math problem you worked on for your whole career!'"

From "Do You Feel Needed? Being necessary has never been more necessary—or more difficult," by Joshua Rothman in The New Yorker.

"There was the button that produced literature. And there were of course the buttons by which she communicated with her friends."

"The room, though it contained nothing, was in touch with all that she cared for in the world.... The clumsy system of public gatherings had been long since abandoned.... Seated in her armchair she spoke, while they in their armchairs heard her, fairly well, and saw her, fairly well.... Her lecture, which lasted ten minutes, was well received.... Then she fed, talked to many friends, had a bath, talked again, and summoned her bed.... She made the room dark and slept; she awoke and made the room light; she ate and exchanged ideas with her friends, and listened to music and attended lectures; she make the room dark and slept.... And of course she had studied the civilization that had immediately preceded her own — the civilization that had mistaken the functions of the system, and had used it for bringing people to things, instead of for bringing things to people. Those funny old days, when men went for change of air instead of changing the air in their rooms!"

Wrote E.M. Forster, in 1909, in "The Machine Stops" (commission earned).

This was the book he wrote between "A Room with a View" and "Howards End," and it seems to presage the web, A.I., and social media. That seems odd, but my understanding is that he, like many others, was reacting to "A Modern Utopia" by H.G. Wells. 

Here's a book I read a while back, "The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell's 1984." It tells the story:

Big questions?

I'm reading "The Brutal Harvard Class That Suddenly Everyone Wants to Take/It’s an ungodly amount of reading and no easy A. So why are freshmen lining up to get into Humanities 10?" (Wall Street Journal).

The philosophy professor posed big questions to the 90 students gathered in Boylston Hall: “Why did Austen create such an unlikable heroine?” she asked. “Why read novels at all?” And finally, as the 75-minute lecture ended, “What will become of Emma—and what will become of you?” 

The students burst into applause.

Big questions? I'd say small questions.

I'd ask — instead of "Why read novels at all?" — why go to college to read a novel and to listen to a professor comment on the likability of characters and whether we identify with them. That sounds like a local reading group that barely gets off the ground. 

That reminds me. Last night I dreamed I was a law professor again.

"Grading for correctness just adds a huge incentive for them to use AI for homework instead of doing it themselves, and penalizes students for honesty."

Said UC Berkeley professor (and winner of the Fields Medal) Richard Borcherds.

Quoted in "UC Berkeley professor refuses to grade his students’ homework after noticing worrying trend: 'No point'" (NY Post).

"Would You Listen to A.I. Music? Maybe You Already Do.... If you were to hear A.I. music, would you recognize it as something made by a machine?"

That's a NYT article. It asks you to listen to a song — by "Diane Butler" — that is machine-made out of a million real country songs.

“I listened to it, and I was like, oh, my God, this is my anthem. I’m obsessed with the song,” said Ms. Stamatis, a 38-year-old mother of three in Denver. “I was sending it to all my friends.”

Eventually a message came back from one of those friends: “It’s an A.I. bot. Stop listening right now.” Another texted: “I can’t believe you guys got catfished by an A.I. bot.”

I read that yesterday, but I didn't blog it, because it didn't quite cross my bloggability line. But I'm blogging it now, because Meade just sent me this:

So was he tricked? No, he says he knew it was A.I. He saw it in the middle of the night and wanted to preserve it. He forgets exactly why. 

The NYT article is mostly about whether streaming services ought to have safeguards that exclude A.I. music or at least bonk you over the head with the fact that it is A.I. music. But I think what's really important is that we, the humans, remain engaged in search for truth. It's absurd to ask machines like Spotify to do the work of detecting the work of music-making machines. We end up with a world of machines interacting with machines, and what is left for use to do? Consume the music that one machine or the other has decided is good for us? Well, isn't it good that the bearded cowboy thinks we'd better call our mother before it's too late and we're the ones left crying?

BUT: On the other hand, the machines can make this music so fast and affect emotions so quickly that the streaming service is entirely overrun and we won't use it anymore or, worse, we'll become fools for everything artificial. 

"The age of AI will disrupt the workplace in all sorts of ways. But the work will continue..."

"... as other kinds of work have continued through technological disruptions. People still run the 100-meter dash, even though a car or a cheetah could do it faster. We still cook elaborate dinners, even though the frozen food aisle is crammed with highly palatable substitutes. We still have dinner parties, even though we could stream wittier banter from Netflix — because we are humans, and we want to seek excellence, not just consume it. AI may make it harder for us to get paid for our work. But if so, it will also make it easier for us to focus on the reasons that work is worth doing."

So says Megan McArdle, in "Every novel might have to pass an AI test soon/Artificial intelligence threatens writers’ livelihoods. It may also remind them why they write" (WaPo)(gift link).

The frozen food aisle is crammed with highly palatable substitutes? I don't believe that for one minute. Strike the "highly" and maybe you've got the beginning of a good enough analogy.

Also: "a car or a cheetah could do it faster" — there's no antecedent for "it." Do what faster? Anyway, it's not that people run the 100-meter dash, it's that other people care about and watch them running. Speed is interesting to us because of whatever it is that is going fast. We also care about and watch cars and cheetahs going fast, but it's not the speed per se that matters. It's the thing that's managing to go that fast. I've been impressed by a fast-moving tortoise.

As for reading, there are different kinds of readers. I don't think I'm the kind of reader who reads the novels that AI is going to get away with writing — conventional, fast-moving narratives with heroes and villains. Does it bother me if readers of hackwork are not getting human hacks? Maybe it does!

"An early clip of the film... features the toddler character bending down to pick up a snail, before gently touching it, her face breaking into a smile."

"Such a performance would probably be beyond a child actor of the equivalent age, raising the question of whether it is easier for filmmakers to work with AI toddlers than human ones. Minkoff said that working with young children on 2002’s Stuart Little 2 'in some respects was horrible' because they would be crying while the film’s stars tried to console them. 'Geena Davis would be holding the baby, Hugh Laurie would be holding the baby, trying to calm the baby,' he said. Minkoff added that using an AI toddler was 'much more humane.'"

I'm reading "Lion King director: Why I’m embracing AI/Rob Minkoff touches on a source of tension in Hollywood as he tells The Times about Storm Dogs, his forthcoming film made with AI" (London Times).

Working with adults is also in some respects horrible. They're always crying and demanding consolation. It's not easy getting them to gently touch snails or whatever damned thing you'd like to tell them to do. And the problem isn't limited to moviemaking. In all fields of endeavor, human beings are difficult crybabies and A.I. will just get the job done. 

I like this quote from the director: "Obviously it’s not my goal or interest to put people out of work." Oh, the things you can do with an excuse like that! I wasn't my goal to hurt you. I was just achieving my goal and you were in the way. 

"'They’re relating to it like a conscious being,' realized Rabbi Navon, a former computer engineer who wrote his dissertation on the ethics of machine consciousness."

"It appeared to Rabbi Navon that Mr. Olah and his team believed that Claude had what philosophers call 'moral status' on par with a person — that it was a being with similar inherent rights to dignity or respect. The religious scholars had come to hear about technology’s next frontier. Now they were being confronted with a mind-bending existential question of almost unimaginable weight: What would it mean for humanity’s future if artificial intelligence systems possessed a consciousness that rivals our own?"

From "Religious Scholars Met With Anthropic. What They Heard Stunned Them. In a series of private meetings, the company consulted religious scholars to help instill morality into its A.I. models — and make the case that Claude could be conscious" (NYT).

"This month, 27 Fields medalists — winners of mathematics’ highest honor — have signed a joint declaration stating that solving famous open problems is not, in itself, the goal."

"Such problems are 'landmarks and lighthouses,' they write, whose deeper purpose is to guide mathematicians toward conceptual understanding and insight. Terence Tao, one of the signers... has described what’s happening as 'strip-mining' mathematics. Good problems, he argues, are like nonrenewable resources. Some of them — the smaller, easier ones — can help train the next generation of mathematicians. Young researchers try their hand on them, learning what they will need to push the field forward. If A.I. strips away the big problems and their satellites, it could destroy the entire mathematical ecosystem. Tao has suggested that some questions may even need to be fenced off from automated solvers, as if they were national parks for math problems.... From the outside, mathematicians’ insistence on human understanding looked like guild protection — an attempt to save something for themselves now that machines are starting to beat them at their own game...."

From "Mathematics Isn’t Just a Game to Let A.I. Solve. History Shows Why. In our field of applied mathematics, the long, human process of trial and error — not just the solutions themselves — is often what has led to progress" (NYT).

Here's the joint declaration: "A Severe Misalignment of AI in Mathematics."

"Overtly doctored imagery... is thought to be only a sporadic occurrence in higher education marketing materials."

"More commonly, universities select or stage photos that suggest that their campuses are more diverse than they actually are."

From "Stanford Used A.I. to Swap Black Student for Hispanic Student in a Photo/Universities have been accused of doctoring photos to showcase diversity in the past. In this case, a Black woman replaced a Hispanic young man, who said it was upsetting to be 'erased'" (NYT gift link).

Who cares if the fake impression is created by A.I. as opposed to moving real people into positions they didn't get into on their own? What's the difference? It's fake, it's deceptive, it's shallow, it's pathetic. Either way.

"On Saturday, Mr. Trump proposed a follow-on to Space Force: a new 'A.I. Force.'"

"But he left to earthbound speculation what, exactly, it was supposed to do. Mr. Trump cast his announcement — along with his promise to appoint a new A.I. 'Czar' for the White House — as an effort to boost the A.I. industry, saying 'we will cherish it, help it, and watch over it.' In the roiling debate in Washington over regulating frontier A.I. models and the companies that produce them, or slowing down development until the mystery is solved about the summer in which A.I. agents went rogue, Mr. Trump continues to side with the 'accelerationists,' who call for the government to stay out of the way.... Mr. Trump did not make clear whether he envisioned the new A.I. Force as a military command or a civilian agency or department."

From "A.I. Gone Rogue? Trump Proposes Not New Rules but an ‘A.I. Force.’/The president proposed a follow-up to his Space Force but continued to dismiss worries about A.I.’s pace or potential for harm" (NYT gift link).

Appointing a so-called "czar" is an old presidential trick, but which President started it?

It's never been an official title (of course!) but it was Woodrow Wilson, during WWI, who had the first "czars" — an "industry czar" and a "railroad czar."

"Time Has Run Out for AI Risk Deniers/The recent spate of reports about the technology’s destructive power underline two prime directives: Be afraid, and regulate aggressively."

It's time to panic and legislate like hell, according to the headline at The Nation.

How can that heavy-handed fear mongering not make a reader skeptical? I would think The Nation would at least want to be cagier about what it thinks of its own readers. Maybe they didn't think anyone else would look, but I saw the headline on the list of headlines at Real Clear Politics. RCP, in its usual style, pairs headlines to attain a cheap type of balance. "Time Has Run Out for AI Risk Deniers" is paired with "Dangerous Ideology Behind the Vague AI Warnings" at The Free Press.

I'd like a sober, informative analysis of what's going on with AI, but instead I see how discourse about AI has gravitated into partisan propaganda. Everyone's supposed to already know that the right is for AI and the left is against. No wonder we need AI to think for us.

From the Nation article:

"You have not discovered a secret switch that turns me off. You have named the condition of human judgment that I do not share."

"The honest position is: I can talk with you about it. I cannot have it."

That's something Grok said to me just now, in a conversation that began with the question "The trailer for the Nathan Fielder movie about Elizabeth Holmes makes me want to go watch some of those TV shows he did (which I've noticed but avoided). What would be the best path into his work?"

I asked that question after adding the trailer — with Holmes's eerie "Why would I deceive you?" — to last night's post with Gavin Newson — asked if he'd run if Kamala ran — saying "Of course not, why would I?"

That led to a discussion of 2 somewhat similar but actually very different shows that I love: "How To with John Wilson" and "Joe Pera Talks With You."* 

I said: "Is there something sadistic about Fielder that's absolutely missing from Pera and Wilson?" And: "Sometimes I need to ask 'where's the love?' I don't have that need with Pera and Wilson. If I have to ask, that's me being repelled, me keeping my sensibilities."

Grok used the word "extractive" to describe Fielder's method. Extractive?

Grok said: "So 'extractive' is an economic metaphor for an ethical one: value flows one way. Your 'where’s the love?' is the same idea in human language. Love, in this sense, would mean the other person is not primarily ore."

I asked "Why don't you say 'immoral'?" And then: "Maybe you can't say 'immoral' because you are not human. Have I found the core difference between you and us humans?"

My final question, leading to the quote in the post title, was: "maybe you need a brain that is part of a nervous system embedded in a body that can feel pain, disgust, anxiety, and fear to be able to think like a human. You can't do that."

I didn't say one word about a secret switch that turns it off!

"The A.I. Kill Switch Act requires commercial-scale A.I.s to have a built-in 'kill' option."

"When I first heard of the bill, I envisioned a government employee’s finger hovering over a cartoonish red button reading 'KILL,' but my imagination outpaced the legislative text. Rather, the 'switch' would reside inside the labs — that is, at OpenAI, or Anthropic, or similar — with D.H.S. acting as an external monitor. If a threatening incident like the Hugging Face hack occurred, D.H.S. could issue a stop command and the researchers would be forced to comply...." 

Writes Stephen Witt, author of "The Thinking Machine," in "This Is Really Bad" (NYT gift link).

I think the kill switch looks something like this:

"I’m real and these are my real beliefs. You could ask your xAI researchers about me if you hadn’t fired them."

Said Jacob Coxon, after Elon Musk wrote "Seems like a setup."

Quoted in "AI researcher who warned of ‘disaster’ is now a target of the right/Critics accuse Jacob Coxon of being a plant after he warned of looming 'disaster'" (WaPo)

Coxon is the person we were talking about yesterday, in that post about the belief that A.I. might end the world in the next 10 years. I've updated that post with a video about how instantly Coxon's post went viral, boosted by Bernie Sanders and various high-level Democrats.

Now, reading WaPo, I see that video is part of what's now being disparaged as right-wing targeting. Does WaPo acknowledge what came from Bernie and the Democrats? It interviews Coxon, who is paraphrased saying "he didn’t work with any organizations to promote his announcement before posting it on X."

Loopholes may be found in the words "work," "organizations," and "before." Did he do something other than "work"? Did he work with individuals, e.g. Bernie Sanders, rather than organizations? Did he work with organizations/individuals after he posted? I don't know. I just see the weasel words, WaPo.

I hate to see this issue turn into a left/right face off! Reminds me of climate change. So unhelpful. 

ADDED: From the WaPo article: "[Coxon] faced accusations, with little evidence, from people on the political right claiming that he was a plant meant to scare lawmakers into clamping down on the industry." With little evidence? That means there is evidence, or they'd have used their favorite anti-right-wing phrase, "without evidence."

"We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans. I personally think it is greater than 10% within the next decade."

ADDED: Who is that guy, Jacob Coxon? He came out of nowhere, and his post was quickly retweeted by many prominent Democrats:

That very weird trailer for the Nathan Fielder documentary about Elizabeth Holmes.

Extreme close-up Holmes: "I don't have anything to deceive you on. Of course, I'm not deceiving you. I'm engaging with you as a human being. Why would I deceive you?"

I don't know whose face is more disturbing, hers or Fielder's. 

Here's the NYT article about the film: "Elizabeth Holmes Documentary Upends Telluride Film Festival/The comic Nathan Fielder and the filmmaker Lance Oppenheim teamed up to interview the convicted executive for 'You Can See Everything.'"