…if we’re lucky the general sense that everything’s…precarious
…might just be a function of how news works
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/may/08/canada-expels-chinese-diplomat-zhao
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/hawaii-residents-use-bottled-water-forever-chemicals
Just after Thanksgiving, dozens of state lawmakers packed into a hotel ballroom in downtown Washington to plan their next assault on a movement that pushes companies to confront global warming and social injustice. Their attacks on “woke investing” were already sticking in red-state capitols and on Fox News, but the group wanted a target with a human face.
“Every big problem needs a face and a name,” the speaker said at the private event hosted by the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council. “The worst offender out there is BlackRock and Larry Fink.”
Since then, the attacks have been unrelenting. And Fink, founder of the world’s largest investment and risk management firm, has throttled back on the urgency with which he pushes companies to confront climate change. The resolute language in public letters to CEOs is gone. And BlackRock executives have begun waving away the climate targets they once committed to helping the world meet as irrelevant to the current moment.
[…]
BlackRock frames this as an obvious evolution. Climate-focused regulators in blue states and D.C., however, see a dangerous abandonment.BlackRock sits on $9 trillion in assets from pension funds, governments, universities and companies. It is bigger than better-known rivals Vanguard and Fidelity. Its billionaire leader has unparalleled influence over the direction of the economy’s largest companies and used his position to pioneer investing that factors in the environmental and social footprint of businesses. He is not accustomed to losing control of the narrative.
[…]
“If you told me two years ago that there would be a political movement focused on attacking critical race theory, gas stove bans and ESG investing, I would have said you are standing too close to your gas stove,” said Brad Lander, the comptroller of New York City. “But they have made ESG investing part of the culture war. How clever to make Wall Street the target with their pretend populism, when they are really doing the bidding of fossil fuel companies.”It is questionable whether haranguing corporate policies will help the GOP retake the White House. But what is clear is that the way Fink navigates this storm could determine whether the world achieves its goal of limiting the most disastrous effects of climate change. Lander is among many who say he is flailing.
[…]
This is much bigger, though, than one firm’s quest to dominate the financial industry. Decades into the effort to contain global warming, America is more dependent than ever on companies like BlackRock for solutions. Without a national policy requiring industry to embrace a carbon-free future, the country is left with a patchwork of regulations and voluntary programs often reliant on Wall Street pressure.Banks and giant fund managers have landed in the role of de facto climate regulators amid their worries that warming threatens to destabilize the firms they invest in.
[…]
“There was this naive assumption that if Larry Fink and a couple of others would get out there and talk all this ESG and demand all these requirements, the oil industry just would go along,” McKillop said. “Instead, he poked the bear. The oil industry is going to fight this to the death. And it has a war chest of tens of billions to do it.”
[…]
But Fink’s moves are what Wall Street and Washington are watching most closely, as he is, in the words of one executive, the financial industry’s “800 pound gorilla.”
[…]
The billionaire’s clout was solidified during the Obama administration, which leaned on him heavily as it sought a path out of the mortgage crisis. The Trump White House would later call on Fink for help stemming the economic meltdown that accompanied the onset of the pandemic. Trump praised Fink at a 2017 White House meeting for doing “a great job for me. He managed a lot of my money and, I have to tell you, he got me great returns.”By the time President Biden took office, Fink had consolidated considerable power in Washington. His company had secured major government contracts and persuaded regulators not to impose on it the Great Recession-era restrictions and constraints that now apply to other “too big to fail” financial institutions. It pushed prominent progressives to demand BlackRock executives be blacklisted from White House jobs. They were ignored. Biden would appoint one BlackRock executive to be his top economic adviser, and another to be deputy secretary of the Treasury. A BlackRock alum would also become the vice president’s top economic adviser.
[…]
The firm has spent millions of dollars on lobbying and campaign contributions to both major parties. By the time a 2013 Treasury Department report noted that BlackRock had grown so big that it could present a risk to the U.S. financial system absent more intense regulatory scrutiny, the firm had influential allies on Capitol Hill steering the Obama administration away from taking action.BlackRock is now so large, according to a paper published in the Boston University Law Review, that it and just two other companies could control more than a third of shareholder votes in the S&P 500 within five years. Its formidable size made its embrace of ESG all the more significant.
“The problem is it is a mash-up of so many issues,” said Doug Chia, a fellow at the Center for Corporate Law and Governance at Rutgers Law School in New Jersey. “Not all of them apply to every company. But it became a perfect pretext for politicians who want to talk about the culture war and woke agendas.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/05/06/blackrock-esg-climate-woke/
The Inflation Reduction Act will reshape the physical and economic landscape of the United States over the next decade, including in ways that might surprise a lot of people.
Anyone keen to understand how should look at Brookfield Renewable Partners’ recent investment of up to $2 billion in Scout Clean Energy and Standard Solar. B.R.P. is a vehicle of Brookfield Asset Management, a leading global asset management firm, with around $800 billion of assets under management, and it purchased two American developers and owner-operators of wind and solar power-generating facilities. This took place six weeks after President Biden signed the I.R.A. into law.
The I.R.A. will help accelerate the growing private ownership of U.S. infrastructure and, in particular, its concentration among a handful of global asset managers like Brookfield. This is taking the United States into risky territory. The consequences for the public at large, whose well-being depends on the quality and cost of a host of infrastructure-based services, from energy to transportation, are unlikely to be positive.
A common belief about both the I.R.A. and 2021’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, President Biden’s other key legislation for infrastructure investment, is that they represent a renewal of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal infrastructure programs of the 1930s. This is wrong. The signature feature of the New Deal was public ownership: Even as private firms carried out many of the tens of thousands of construction projects, almost all of the new infrastructure was funded and owned publicly. These were public works. Public ownership of major infrastructure has been an American mainstay ever since.
Mr. Biden’s laws will radically overhaul this culture. Informed by what Brian Alexander, a writer for The Atlantic, in 2017 described as a profound recent change in philosophy among U.S. policymakers about “how to build and maintain America’s stuff,” the modus operandi of both statutes is principally to subsidize and catalyze private-sector infrastructure investment. Such a subsidy was explicitly factored into the aforementioned Brookfield investment in solar and wind power.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/08/opinion/inflation-reduction-act-global-asset-managers.html
Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., introduced his latest measure Tuesday to speed permitting of both fossil fuel and renewable energy projects as he tries to win support from both parties after similar bills failed several times last year.
The legislation, the Building American Energy Security Act, would set a limit of two years on environmental reviews of major federal energy projects and one year for smaller ones, reduce court delays over energy projects and direct the president to designate at least 25 high-level energy projects and prioritize their permitting.
[…]
The bill also calls for completion of Equitrans Midstream Corp’s Mountain Valley Pipeline, that would run through Manchin’s state. The $6.6 billion, 300-mile natural gas project is mostly built but still needs several permits.Environmental groups and some of Manchin’s fellow Democratic lawmakers had slammed his previous permitting measures as handouts to fossil fuel companies, which contributed to last year’s failures.
https://www.nbcnews.com/science/environment/manchin-introduces-bill-looks-speed-energy-permitting
We have reached a turning point: Climate risk is driving insurer decisions like never before.
After recent years of paying out claims for about 20 disasters a year with damages of over $1 billion, a sixfold increase from the 1980s, insurers are getting serious about new pricing models that incorporate the costs of a warming climate. Across the United States, premiums jumped 12 percent from 2021 to 2022, according to Policygenius estimates, and they are expected to continue to rise.
Even with higher premiums, unpredictable losses are wreaking havoc on insurers’ bottom lines. Ten insurers have gone belly up in Florida in just the last two years. And in many cases, insurers are pulling back in risky areas, leaving state-backed insurance plans holding the bag. Both private and government-backed insurers are undercapitalized for dealing with the potentially massive disasters we could be facing in coming years. This shortfall foreshadows more premium increases, which will drag down house prices. And losses will not be borne by those residing in higher-risk areas only; they will be borne by policyholders everywhere.
Thus far, housing markets have largely managed to ignore these potential exposures. Over the last three years, home prices are up around 37 percent nationwide. They are up even more in parts of Florida and the Southwest that are predicted to suffer significant impacts from a warming climate. Take Phoenix, which, by 2060, is forecast to endure 132 days each year with temperatures of over 100 degrees. Last summer, the water level in Lake Mead, a critical source of water for 25 million people in the Southwest, reached its lowest level since the reservoir was filled in 1937. And living in Phoenix requires energy-intensive amenities like air conditioning, which worsen these consequences. Yet Phoenix home prices are up 53 percent since January 2020.
[…]
It’s hard to make decisions based on things we haven’t experienced. But by ignoring the growing consequences of climate change, we are investing too much in potentially hazardous areas in a way that’s hard to unwind. In 50 years, the result could be miles of unlivable homes along waterfronts and in deserts. The financial consequences of these choices will be enormous, causing ripple effects through insurance markets and ultimately undermining home values.Climate risks are difficult to forecast and are increasingly correlated: From insurers’ perspectives, it’s “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” with heightened risks of floods, droughts, wildfires and more. To have the necessary buffer to pay out claims after catastrophic losses, insurers will need more reserves and more reinsurance, and they will pass those costs on to policyholders in the form of higher premiums. That includes policyholders who live well out of harm’s way. The year after the Marshall fire destroyed over 1,000 homes and caused over $2 billion in damage near Boulder, Colo., average premiums rose over 17 percent statewide.
While insurers can choose to stop offering insurance, the homeowners and governments they leave behind will still have to deal with the risks. And as the costs go up, more households may decide to reduce their coverage or may choose to go without insurance entirely. It’s estimated that only one-third of households in flood zones have flood insurance — with many risking financial ruin if the “big one” hits.
Then there’s the housing market. There is $30 trillion in housing equity in the United States, and the most important source of wealth for most American households is the home. If homeowners have to pay more in premiums, can’t obtain insurance at all or can’t find buyers because of fears about climate change, property values can erode or collapse even without a hurricane making landfall. This dynamic has already started: My research partner Philip Mulder and I found that low-lying housing markets in coastal Florida began to price sea level risk in the 2010s, leading to a roughly 5 percent discount relative to houses in similar, but less exposed, communities. Climate risks are disproportionately borne by lower-income groups and racial minorities, who may already live in riskier areas, are less likely to be insured, and may lack access to resources for pre-disaster preparation or post-disaster repairs.
As some private insurers retreat from higher-risk areas, state-backed “insurer of last resort” plans are stepping into the void. The number of enrollees in these state-backed plans rose by 29 percent between 2018 and 2021. These plans are often more expensive, they offer less coverage than private insurance options, and they face the same concerns as private insurers about their ability to pay out in the event of a crisis without burdening policyholders statewide.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/07/opinion/climate-change-homeowners-insurance-housing-market.html
…but…however slowly (sometimes a good thing)
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/may/06/nebraska-senator-filibuster-trans-rights
…& largely opaquely
The distemper in public opinion can be explained by many factors, including a social hangover from the pandemic and economic jitters, even in the face of a strong job market. But there’s a powerful case that at the heart of our uneasiness is a widespread sense that politics just isn’t normal anymore.
Let’s get the obvious out of the way: “Normal” is a problematic concept. Legal segregation was seen by many White people as “normal” for a long time. It needed to be overthrown. The word was deployed for decades to marginalize and mock LGBTQ people, as Andrew Sullivan underscored with the ironic title of his classic book on homosexuality published in the mid-1990s, “Virtually Normal.”
Nonetheless, in a democratic republic, “normal” politics involves a series of commitments that most citizens, I’d wager, rightly buy into. A modest catalogue of our departures from these callings brings home how strange matters have become.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/05/07/politics-republicans-war-on-normal/
…steps are being taken
The New York state judge presiding over the criminal hush money case against Donald Trump issued an order Monday restricting the former president from posting about some evidence in the case on social media.
Judge Juan Merchan largely sided with Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg by limiting what Trump can publicly disclose about new evidence from the prosecution before the case goes to trial.
The order says that “any materials and information provided by the People to the Defense in accordance with their discovery obligations … shall be used solely for the purposes of preparing a defense in this matter.”
Merchan’s order said anyone with access to the evidence being turned over to Trump’s team by state prosecutors “shall not copy, disseminate or disclose” the material to third parties, including social media platforms, “without prior approval from the court.”
It also singles out Trump, saying he is allowed to review sensitive “Limited Dissemination Materials” from prosecutors only in the presence of his lawyers and “shall not be permitted to copy, photograph, transcribe, or otherwise independently possess the Limited Dissemination Materials.”
In addition, the order restricts Trump from reviewing “forensic images of witness cell phones,” although his lawyers can show him “approved portions” of the images after they get permission from the judge.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-barred-posting-evidence-hush-money-case-social-media-rcna83444
…in a variety of directions & cadences
The Justice Department argued the Proud Boys’ leadership, which communicated in several encrypted group chats, viewed members as “Trump’s army” ready to do the president’s bidding. No concrete plan for taking the Capitol or stopping the transfer of power on Jan. 6 was found among those messages. But prosecutors tied discussions of revolution and revolt to video of Proud Boys leading the mob on Jan. 6, arguing that the group was unique in its embrace of violence as a political tool. They made that case using both encrypted messages and public pronouncements on Parler, a conservative social media site.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/interactive/2023/proud-boys-trial-timeline-jan6-videos-chats/
…that most likely add up to more than meets the eye
https://www.emptywheel.net/2023/05/05/how-the-proud-boy-conspiracy-might-network-out/
…sigh…when all the creatures involved are parasites…do you still call the result symbiosis?
…or
…you know
…pretty much exactly what it looks like
…because
…as fucked up as it seems
…sometimes
…it’s exactly what it looks like
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/05/08/texas-shooting-white-supremacy-non-whites
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/04/20/florida-sheriff-hate-crimes
…which…is horrific
…even if you don’t click through to the thread that much is obvious…& if bellingcat can find that stuff then it’s not beyond the wit of man to have done that…& had it been done before what happened maybe it doesn’t happen…& that sounds like a horrifying dystopian invasion of all privacy to some people
Corporate Giants Buy Up Primary Care Practices at Rapid Pace [NYT]
…but if you’re physically adorned with permanently inked symbols of of violent hatred…& an organization that’s actively recruiting people who might be willing & able to kill other people ditched you for being a liability…& you want to own firearms…that sounds like a self-selecting pool of people I’m not sure about…I know about thin ends of wedges but I feel like at some point your right to pseudonymous fun & games online fails to outweigh the potential you pose as a threat to public safety…& that process the bellingcat guy went through doesn’t feel like it ought to be beyond the scope of a thorough vetting process that would arguably already been on the books in a lot of places if it were rendered viable by brute enforcement…lot of work, though…unless…sigh…we outsource it to those AI’s?
…it’s…frustrating, I guess you could call it…the part of me that still feels aggrieved that we don’t have hoverboards & the whole panoply of sci-fi utopian goodies like those compiler/replicator things that are basically your old-school cornucopia & generally serve as a short-hand for a post-financial approach to supply & demand based on an equation that if all demands can be supplied at zero cost nobody needs money & there’s no point doing most of the shitty stuff mankind is famous for…so…not an overly realistic part of me…is giddy with speculation about the many, many ways in which this stuff is potentially…well…spectacularly cool…but that’s a whole other bit of watch-making that has roots shot through with such delights as theories of mind, the prospect of actually proving that identity persists across time & the inherently circular logic of self-awareness…you know…months & months of the fun stuff…if fun stuff includes wading through heavy prose & weighty but abstract rhetoric
Inside the many debates swirling around the rapid rollout of so-called artificial intelligence, there is a relatively obscure skirmish focused on the choice of the word “hallucinate”.
…but…like the ESG thing…the “short-hand” generally mashes a lot of that together until some of it’s broken & a bunch more is bent so far out of shape it’s unrecognizable
This is the term that architects and boosters of generative AI have settled on to characterize responses served up by chatbots that are wholly manufactured, or flat-out wrong. Like, for instance, when you ask a bot for a definition of something that doesn’t exist and it, rather convincingly, gives you one, complete with made-up footnotes. “No one in the field has yet solved the hallucination problems,” Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google and Alphabet, told an interviewer recently.
That’s true – but why call the errors “hallucinations” at all? Why not algorithmic junk? Or glitches? Well, hallucination refers to the mysterious capacity of the human brain to perceive phenomena that are not present, at least not in conventional, materialist terms. By appropriating a word commonly used in psychology, psychedelics and various forms of mysticism, AI’s boosters, while acknowledging the fallibility of their machines, are simultaneously feeding the sector’s most cherished mythology: that by building these large language models, and training them on everything that we humans have written, said and represented visually, they are in the process of birthing an animate intelligence on the cusp of sparking an evolutionary leap for our species. How else could bots like Bing and Bard be tripping out there in the ether?
Warped hallucinations are indeed afoot in the world of AI, however – but it’s not the bots that are having them; it’s the tech CEOs who unleashed them, along with a phalanx of their fans, who are in the grips of wild hallucinations, both individually and collectively. Here I am defining hallucination not in the mystical or psychedelic sense, mind-altered states that can indeed assist in accessing profound, previously unperceived truths. No. These folks are just tripping: seeing, or at least claiming to see, evidence that is not there at all, even conjuring entire worlds that will put their products to use for our universal elevation and education.
[…]
There is a world in which generative AI, as a powerful predictive research tool and a performer of tedious tasks, could indeed be marshalled to benefit humanity, other species and our shared home. But for that to happen, these technologies would need to be deployed inside a vastly different economic and social order than our own, one that had as its purpose the meeting of human needs and the protection of the planetary systems that support all life.And as those of us who are not currently tripping well understand, our current system is nothing like that. Rather, it is built to maximize the extraction of wealth and profit – from both humans and the natural world – a reality that has brought us to what we might think of it as capitalism’s techno-necro stage. In that reality of hyper-concentrated power and wealth, AI – far from living up to all those utopian hallucinations – is much more likely to become a fearsome tool of further dispossession and despoilation.
…but…another part of me…that’s generally more realistic & consequently struggles to be optimistic in the face of so much that argues persuasively against that being a good bet…that one worries at this stuff like a dog with a bone
I’ll dig into why that is so. But first, it’s helpful to think about the purpose the utopian hallucinations about AI are serving. What work are these benevolent stories doing in the culture as we encounter these strange new tools? Here is one hypothesis: they are the powerful and enticing cover stories for what may turn out to be the largest and most consequential theft in human history. Because what we are witnessing is the wealthiest companies in history (Microsoft, Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon …) unilaterally seizing the sum total of human knowledge that exists in digital, scrapable form and walling it off inside proprietary products, many of which will take direct aim at the humans whose lifetime of labor trained the machines without giving permission or consent.
This should not be legal. In the case of copyrighted material that we now know trained the models (including this newspaper), various lawsuits have been filed that will argue this was clearly illegal. Why, for instance, should a for-profit company be permitted to feed the paintings, drawings and photographs of living artists into a program like Stable Diffusion or Dall-E 2 so it can then be used to generate doppelganger versions of those very artists’ work, with the benefits flowing to everyone but the artists themselves?
[…]
The trick, of course, is that Silicon Valley routinely calls theft “disruption” – and too often gets away with it. We know this move: charge ahead into lawless territory; claim the old rules don’t apply to your new tech; scream that regulation will only help China – all while you get your facts solidly on the ground. By the time we all get over the novelty of these new toys and start taking stock of the social, political and economic wreckage, the tech is already so ubiquitous that the courts and policymakers throw up their hands.We saw it with Google’s book and art scanning. With Musk’s space colonization. With Uber’s assault on the taxi industry. With Airbnb’s attack on the rental market. With Facebook’s promiscuity with our data. Don’t ask for permission, the disruptors like to say, ask for forgiveness. (And lubricate the asks with generous campaign contributions.)
[…]
Now the same thing that happened to the exterior of our homes is happening to our words, our images, our songs, our entire digital lives. All are currently being seized and used to train the machines to simulate thinking and creativity. These companies must know they are engaged in theft, or at least that a strong case can be made that they are. They are just hoping that the old playbook works one more time – that the scale of the heist is already so large and unfolding with such speed that courts and policymakers will once again throw up their hands in the face of the supposed inevitability of it all.It’s also why their hallucinations about all the wonderful things that AI will do for humanity are so important. Because those lofty claims disguise this mass theft as a gift – at the same time as they help rationalize AI’s undeniable perils.
By now, most of us have heard about the survey that asked AI researchers and developers to estimate the probability that advanced AI systems will cause “human extinction or similarly permanent and severe disempowerment of the human species”. Chillingly, the median response was that there was a 10% chance.
How does one rationalize going to work and pushing out tools that carry such existential risks? Often, the reason given is that these systems also carry huge potential upsides – except that these upsides are, for the most part, hallucinatory. Let’s dig into a few of the wilder ones.
…the whole thing will run you the best part of 20mins reading or so…& if you’re me it seemed worth it…but it won’t tell you how much of that threat of “human extinction or similarly permanent and severe disempowerment of the human species” would remain if you could excise the AI components of that calculus…so…there’s at least some observer effect in effect that’s hard to control for…but…doesn’t sound great?
According to this logic, the failure to “solve” big problems like climate change is due to a deficit of smarts. Never mind that smart people, heavy with PhDs and Nobel prizes, have been telling our governments for decades what needs to happen to get out of this mess: slash our emissions, leave carbon in the ground, tackle the overconsumption of the rich and the underconsumption of the poor because no energy source is free of ecological costs.
The reason this very smart counsel has been ignored is not due to a reading comprehension problem, or because we somehow need machines to do our thinking for us. It’s because doing what the climate crisis demands of us would strand trillions of dollars of fossil fuel assets, while challenging the consumption-based growth model at the heart of our interconnected economies. The climate crisis is not, in fact, a mystery or a riddle we haven’t yet solved due to insufficiently robust data sets. We know what it would take, but it’s not a quick fix – it’s a paradigm shift. Waiting for machines to spit out a more palatable and/or profitable answer is not a cure for this crisis, it’s one more symptom of it.
Clear away the hallucinations and it looks far more likely that AI will be brought to market in ways that actively deepen the climate crisis. First, the giant servers that make instant essays and artworks from chatbots possible are an enormous and growing source of carbon emissions. Second, as companies like Coca-Cola start making huge investments to use generative AI to sell more products, it’s becoming all too clear that this new tech will be used in the same ways as the last generation of digital tools: that what begins with lofty promises about spreading freedom and democracy ends up micro targeting ads at us so that we buy more useless, carbon-spewing stuff.
[…]
As with the climate claims, it is necessary to ask: is the reason politicians impose cruel and ineffective policies that they suffer from a lack of evidence? An inability to “see patterns,” as the BCG paper suggests? Do they not understand the human costs of starving public healthcare amid pandemics, or of failing to invest in non-market housing when tents fill our urban parks, or of approving new fossil fuel infrastructure while temperatures soar? Do they need AI to make them “smarter”, to use Schmidt’s term – or are they precisely smart enough to know who is going to underwrite their next campaign, or, if they stray, bankroll their rivals?It would be awfully nice if AI really could sever the link between corporate money and reckless policy making – but that link has everything to do with why companies like Google and Microsoft have been allowed to release their chatbots to the public despite the avalanche of warnings and known risks. Schmidt and others have been on a years-long lobbying campaign telling both parties in Washington that if they aren’t free to barrel ahead with generative AI, unburdened by serious regulation, then western powers will be left in the dust by China. Last year, the top tech companies spent a record $70m to lobby Washington – more than the oil and gas sector – and that sum, Bloomberg News notes, is on top of the millions spent “on their wide array of trade groups, non-profits and thinktanks”.
[…]
Asked if he is worried about the frantic gold rush ChatGPT has already unleashed, Altman said he is, but added sanguinely: “Hopefully it will all work out.” Of his fellow tech CEOs – the ones competing to rush out their rival chatbots – he said: “I think the better angels are going to win out.”Better angels? At Google? I’m pretty sure the company fired most of those because they were publishing critical papers about AI, or calling the company out on racism and sexual harassment in the workplace. More “better angels” have quit in alarm, most recently Hinton. That’s because, contrary to the hallucinations of the people profiting most from AI, Google does not make decisions based on what’s best for the world – it makes decisions based on what’s best for Alphabet’s shareholders, who do not want to miss the latest bubble, not when Microsoft, Meta and Apple are already all in.
[…]
If Silicon Valley’s benevolent hallucinations seem plausible to many, there is a simple reason for that. Generative AI is currently in what we might think of as its faux-socialism stage. This is part of a now familiar Silicon Valley playbook. First, create an attractive product (a search engine, a mapping tool, a social network, a video platform, a ride share …); give it away for free or almost free for a few years, with no discernible viable business model (“Play around with the bots,” they tell us, “see what fun things you can create!”); make lots of lofty claims about how you are only doing it because you want to create a “town square” or an “information commons” or “connect the people”, all while spreading freedom and democracy (and not being “evil”). Then watch as people get hooked using these free tools and your competitors declare bankruptcy. Once the field is clear, introduce the targeted ads, the constant surveillance, the police and military contracts, the black-box data sales and the escalating subscription fees.Many lives and sectors have been decimated by earlier iterations of this playbook, from taxi drivers to rental markets to local newspapers. With the AI revolution, these kinds of losses could look like rounding errors, with teachers, coders, visual artists, journalists, translators, musicians, care workers and so many others facing the prospect of having their incomes replaced by glitchy code.
[…]
That’s an exciting vision of a more beautiful, leisurely life, one many leftists share (including Karl Marx’s son-in-law, Paul Lafargue, who wrote a manifesto titled The Right To Be Lazy). But we leftists also know that if earning money is to no longer be life’s driving imperative, then there must be other ways to meet our creaturely needs for shelter and sustenance. A world without crappy jobs means that rent has to be free, and healthcare has to be free, and every person has to have inalienable economic rights. And then suddenly we aren’t talking about AI at all – we’re talking about socialism.Because we do not live in the Star Trek-inspired rational, humanist world that Altman seems to be hallucinating. We live under capitalism, and under that system, the effects of flooding the market with technologies that can plausibly perform the economic tasks of countless working people is not that those people are suddenly free to become philosophers and artists. It means that those people will find themselves staring into the abyss – with actual artists among the first to fall.
[…]
Crabapple and her co-authors write: “Generative AI art is vampirical, feasting on past generations of artwork even as it sucks the lifeblood from living artists.” But there are ways to resist: we can refuse to use these products and organize to demand that our employers and governments reject them as well. A letter from prominent scholars of AI ethics, including Timnit Gebru who was fired by Google in 2020 for challenging workplace discrimination, lays out some of the regulatory tools that governments can introduce immediately – including full transparency about what data sets are being used to train the models. The authors write: “Not only should it always be clear when we are encountering synthetic media, but organizations building these systems should also be required to document and disclose the training data and model architectures …. We should be building machines that work for us, instead of ‘adapting’ society to be machine readable and writable.”Though tech companies would like us to believe that it is already too late to roll back this human-replacing, mass-mimicry product there are highly relevant legal and regulatory precedents that can be enforced. For instance, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) forced Cambridge Analytica, as well as Everalbum, the owner of a photo app, to destroy entire algorithms found to have been trained on illegitimately appropriated data and scraped photos. In its early days, the Biden administration made many bold claims about regulating big tech, including cracking down on the theft of personal data to build proprietary algorithms. With a presidential election fast approaching, now would be a good time to make good on those promises – and avert the next set of mass layoffs before they happen.
A world of deep fakes, mimicry loops and worsening inequality is not an inevitability. It’s a set of policy choices. We can regulate the current form of vampiric chatbots out of existence – and begin to build the world in which AI’s most exciting promises would be more than Silicon Valley hallucinations.
Because we trained the machines. All of us. But we never gave our consent. They fed on humanity’s collective ingenuity, inspiration and revelations (along with our more venal traits). These models are enclosure and appropriation machines, devouring and privatizing our individual lives as well as our collective intellectual and artistic inheritances. And their goal never was to solve climate change or make our governments more responsible or our daily lives more leisurely. It was always to profit off mass immiseration, which, under capitalism, is the glaring and logical consequence of replacing human functions with bots.
Is all of this overly dramatic? A stuffy and reflexive resistance to exciting innovation? Why expect the worse? Altman reassures us: “Nobody wants to destroy the world.” Perhaps not. But as the ever-worsening climate and extinction crises show us every day, plenty of powerful people and institutions seem to be just fine knowing that they are helping to destroy the stability of the world’s life-support systems, so long as they can keep making record profits that they believe will protect them and their families from the worst effects. Altman, like many creatures of Silicon Valley, is himself a prepper: back in 2016, he boasted: “I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to.”
I’m pretty sure those facts say a lot more about what Altman actually believes about the future he is helping unleash than whatever flowery hallucinations he is choosing to share in press interviews.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/may/08/ai-machines-hallucinating-naomi-klein
…& although yesterday got away from me in a bunch of ways I’ve been feeling like I must be missing something ever since I was too dense to figure out what was concerning @bluedogcollar the other day
Nearly 50 news websites are ‘AI-generated’, a study says. Would I be able to tell? [Guardian]
…& clearly that part of my mind has been mulling that over while the internet continues to provide any number of attempts to help me join some dots
…so…here’s a few more along with my best guess at the part I wasn’t managing to see for looking the other day
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/may/08/ai-generated-news-websites-study
…unless I’m still wrong about that…which is entirely possible…how does it go again…lies, damned lies & statistics?
…as they say in star wars…from a certain point of view…those AIs are statistical engines…about which we have reached a point of being able to build a thing which essentially assigns its own biases to things…they talk about “weighting” variables but that’s in the sense of tipping a scale so bias seems a not unreasonable synonym…in ways that it can not be induced to divulge in a verifiable fashion…& that might sound uncomfortably close to the sort of black box that sits between ears & behind eyes…but…is still more like an engine than a mind…even if a lot of articles seem to only consider it in the sense of being hooked up to generate text output based on text input
…not that that doesn’t cover a lot of ground
It’s a weird thing, workplace chatter like email and Slack: It’s sometimes the most delightful and human part of the work day. It can also be mind-numbing to manage your inbox — to the extent you might wonder, couldn’t a robot do this?
In late April, I decided to see what it would be like to let artificial intelligence into my life. I resolved to do an experiment. For one week, I would write all my work communication — emails, Slack messages, pitches, follow-ups with sources — through ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence language model from the research lab OpenAI. I didn’t tell colleagues until the end of the week (except in a few instances of personal weakness). I downloaded a Chrome extension that drafted email responses directly into my inbox. But most of the time, I ended up writing detailed prompts into ChatGPT, asking it to be either witty or formal depending on the situation.
What resulted was a roller coaster, emotionally and in terms of the amount of content I was generating. I started the week inundating my teammates (sorry) to see how they would react. At a certain point, I lost patience with the bot and developed a newfound appreciation for phone calls.
My bot, unsurprisingly, couldn’t match the emotional tone of any online conversation. And I spend a lot of the week, because of hybrid work, having online conversations.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/07/business/ai-chatbot-messaging-work.html
…so on the one hand how much damage can be done with it depends on what you can hook it up to
A curious person’s guide to artificial intelligence [WaPo courtesy of archive.ph since the WaPo site itself seemed to glitch the text out of existence on me when I went back to it]
…which is a whole other minefield
Generative AI Has an Intellectual Property Problem [Harvard Business Review]
…& on the other
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2023/05/08/fake-sign-language-asl-tiktok
…at least exposure to that stuff hasn’t scarred it the way the undertow of the internet has pulled so many minds deep down rabbit holes until they’re warped & broken
…so…we got that goin’ for us?
My reaction to “better angels in the tech community”.
Better to wait for Godot, HAL9000 or Skynet than the morality of a Tech brah.
The fact we’re at the point where we need to address the continuing horrors of climate change is why the GOPers are acting the way they do.
The visceral irrational anger is why I always had to laugh at ST:TNG’s Piccard appeal to logic and reason to defeat enemies rather than a badly placed Kirk like double fist to the back of an enemy. Sometimes you need a fully charged phaser pointed at the temple of the enemy and a kind word than just a kind word.
The oil and gas and guns and hate don’t want to give it up. Too profitable. Don’t care about the deadly affects of climate change if it gets in the way of profit. And like mediocre males in management, loathe to give up their positions without a fight which is why the GOPers are doing all these stupid, petty and hugely desperate things.
If this all makes sense.
…I already used up more than my quota of not S-ing TFU for today…& pretty shortly am likely to be subject to much the same order of stuff that kept out of reach of a keyboard yesterday…so I’ll push my luck & say it makes sense to me
…star trek has replicators…so it’s a post-scarcity society…it’s got whatever the hell dilithium is & can harness that shit to power warp engines…dunno where on the dyson spectrum that puts them but if a warp core is somewhere between a nuclear reactor & a sun those starships are at least a dyson-sphere proof-of-concept…so energy is “solved”…medical science is the stuff of dreams
…basically all the teething problems of getting everyone to take it as read that nobody needs to go hungry, lack shelter, ail from something curable or damage the environment in order to meet their every need being settled history is baked in
…getting, as the saying goes, from there to here…that’s a lot of reverse engineering to keep straight as you try to worm your way back along a probability tree in search of a match to our actual history to date…& in a lot of the candidates starting from here & trying to get there on a standard linear temporal model…are pretty rife with interesting times
You will have to pry my 5-gallon jerry-can of gasoline/heating fuel out of my cold, dead hands. (I don’t actually have a jerry can and we gave up our car three or four years ago. As to how this building is heated I don’t know. I know we had to replace one of the boilers at some point but we have two and it was the summer. I don’t remember a diminution of the hot water supply, though.)
An incel and a racist… (with a Hispanic name!?!?)
I almost want to wave it off as a “Tejas moment” that Dr Strangegun aka Abbott enabled.
Why are all the Texan GOPers awful, awfully stupid or both?
There’s been a huge amount of networking by extreme right in Latino communities that most of the press simply can’t process.
There’s a crazy amount of biased thinking that leads reporters to treat Latinos as monolithically gardeners and cleaners, Catholics, Spanish speakers and Mexicans.
They miss how much of the population is evangelical Protestants, English speakers, skilled labor and professionals, and a huge mix of people from all over Central America, South America, and the Carribean.
When you’re given everything in terms of the first framework, you can’t imagine how GOP extremists and Nazis might take hold, create a ton of turnout for Trump, and provide a lot of bodies for groups like the Proud Boys.
It’s only when the reality sets in that you can make sense of things. But press models don’t reward breaking frameworks.
Yep, this article is over a year old but still applicable…
https://www.axios.com/2022/03/10/rise-white-nationalist-hispanics-latinos
…in framework terms I think the lion’s share of what makes that problematic is more naturally at home in the business cause & effect column than the AI or press specific aspects
…radio 4 is partway through this
Frontlines of Journalism
…in that I think only a few episodes have “aired” but it’s possible that the episodes listed as available are the full series…& it does a pretty creditable job in the ones I’ve so far heard at trying to examine somewhat what that resembles from the inside looking out rather from out here through a glass darkly
…it’s an interesting listen
Latin America is extreeeeemely deep into colorism and has been since about forever. It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of “white supremacy” to presume that it only applies to white people and not to whomever is considered white enough. Italians didn’t used to be white enough!
Even if that weren’t the case, there have always been willing collaborators from marginalized groups who either helped out to save themselves or believe they could broker better treatment by assenting. There were Jews in the concentration camps who acted as guards on behalf of the SS. Dividing groups against each other has always power’s best weapon.
In the mostly Irish-American town I grew up in, in the 1970s, not the 1910s, there were a few “Italian” families, and a small group of Jewish families, and a couple of families where one of the parents was of Italian descent and the other Irish. These were considered “interracial marriages.” As a precocious, mouthy youngin I was once asked my parents about this, and my father said something like, “I don’t get it either. They’re all Catholics. What’s the difference?”
It’s hilarious in retrospect that the pasty-ass Irish — one half of my heritage — weren’t even white enough into, like, the early to mid 1900s! There’s almost nobody whiter than the Irish! I had fair-haired friends growing up who were practically translucent! (Of course my other half of my heritage is Jewish, so I definitely got the “white doesn’t automatically mean white” lesson early on.)
There’s also a big shift in generations as 2nd+ generation Latinos are more likely to hear about border crackdowns and consider them good ways to protect their interests.
It’s going to be a good test of reporters and outlets whether they struggle to address that he was a racist and try to bring up that he wasn’t White as something that makes it so hard to figure out.
It’s fair to talk about the issue in terms of an educating opportunity for an audience that doesn’t hear about the issues very often, but not as a potential exonerating or confounding factor. It will be interesting to see who gets it and who doesn’t.
What a world
Had to listen to make sure it wasn’t a cover of this one.
The IP angle to AI points to something really nuts about the position of studios in the writers strike.
One of the WGA union demands is that studios are not allowed to use human created content as the basis of AI content without a bunch of contractual protections, such as blocking studios from freely using someone’s script to spin off endless AI sequels — generate dialogue, structure stories, and so on.
Writers are smart to demand this. But it’s nuts that studios aren’t using their clout to demand AI regulation from governments too. If Warner thinks it can use AI to create new Batman content but thinks they’ll be OK without a new legal framework to sue the pants off other people using AI to create and distribute new Batman content, they’re living in a dreamworld.
There’s a huge difference between what old school human tools could do — mostly short Bully Maguire bits, and a few people willing to spend endless hours splicing together longer remixes. AI means huge opportunities for copyright pirates, and studios seem far more interested in exploiting workers in the business than in creating a regulatory enviroment in the time they have left.
The longer this stuff exists without a government regulatory framework, the harder it will be for the studios to get under control. It’s silly that they’re trying to exploit it first and worry about regulation later, and it’s going to bite them hard.
…it’s not just the writer’s stuff…the kind of boiler-plate the studios are trying to leave in all manner of contracts including performers/artists/fx/every-other-thing is along the lines of “we own this stuff & we can do anything we like with it in the future using anything currently possible & anything anyone figures out how to do in the future excepting nothing at zero recourse ad infinitum henceforth in perpetuity”
…think of just the IP disney owns rights to & extrapolate from there
…& then think about the part where compared to zuckerberg et al being able to mine the entire web without give a solitary fuck about who owns what to help them build the black boxes that could hypothetically replace the entire entertainment industry & churn out more fan-service than the fans could keep up with even before the shit hit them…disney are the good guys?
…dunno about anyone else but it about gives me whiplash
They want to step on the gas and are not anticipating the need to brake.
It may be that a lot of senior execs in movies and TV started out as junior execs in the age of Napster and think that mass production, reproduction and distribution are still issues only the recording industry really has to worry about, and movies are going to be able to keep the risks down to the acceptable levels of piracy they’re dealing with today.
The music industry went into the online era thinking CD files were too big and hard to process for piracy to be a real threat. All they did to sell their content was try to put up a record club website to keep selling CDs for $18.99. And when Napster took off, they were caught flatfooted in terms of the legal framework, enforcement, and consumer demand.
I think the movie and TV studios are perched in the same place, and the execs are still thinking their catalogs are going to be too hard for bad actors to mine efficiently. They really need to get on board with the writers and actors, not fight them.
…there was (is?) an infographic that demonstrates the “liveable wage” numbers required for a musical artist to make ends meet according to different models of distribution models…& while you don’t get a lot of independent film makers hawking dvds of their stuff they burned themselves at home out of a suitcase at a screening in a similarly independent venue…most of the cutting-residuals-to-the-bone-while-middlemen-get-fat-on-their-margins mechanics work the same way for visual media in the streaming age…that’s a massive part of why there’s a strike
…it’s not the people torrenting stranger things or game of thrones that mean cast/crew/writers can be at the top of their peak-tv game & still looking at the breadline…& I don’t believe that’s lost on studios or the amazons/disneys/netflixes/hulus in that game at a host of hierarchical levels?
I think the big risk the studios are taking is assuming change will be incremental and predictable instead of a high chance of being transformative and unpredictable.
Facing something big and unknowable right as they’ve upset an elite talent base that may have new options seems like a really bad idea. They’re also risking the possibility that a relatively cohesive public dissolves as the product degrades, which is what happened to the music industry.
I could definitely see someone like Zaslov blowing through all of the warning signs and being a hardliner, but if the industry is smart they’ll cut a deal quickly and not let hard feelings linger.
…the more cynical part of me inclines to the view that for now they know they aren’t facing something big & unknowable but a familiar labor-relations dispute where they hold the whip hand…& just spent a bunch of money on tech that (potentially one-day) could put a lot of these people’s livelihoods at risk while juicing their profit margins…which is a damoclean sword they find advantageous to dangle over the same people whose leverage they can’t yet make vanish in a puff of AI but regarding which they do want to get the spotify end of the contractual tug of war over distribution & licensing & all the ancillary stuff that made alec guiness’ star wars contract a thing of legend
…so whatever they have to concede in the short term while the leverage has a workable fulcrum & they a finite amount of financial discomfort they’re willing to tolerate…in the long-term if they can get the thin end of the contract law wedge into the deals offered by the only games in town they most likely think it’d look like losing a battle or two but winning the war
…look at de santis making disney the good guys…sometimes getting into a losing fight with an opponent that could have been an ally is what some people consider playing hardball as a negotiation strategy
…they might be nuts…but they still make what they consider a profit from the deal?
[ETA: …this posted itself before I was done trying to figure out what I was on about…but while I’m not sure which bits of the talent base have a shot at greener pastures, though I fear it might be the minority of those potentially in the same…gravitational well…I think if music is a guide the product didn’t necessarily degrade…the supply ballooned to a point that it’s hard to weed out the good stuff that used to seem much easier to find from the bad stuff that used to be much easier to ignore
…but for video stuff…or music if the deepfake drake joint is anything to go by…the thing I feel like most people actually want would be the thin skim of quality content amazon’s prime video has sitting on top of a library of content so sub-par at quantities of statistical significance that ought to be so embarrassing it would make more sense to not have it in the catalogue
…but unlike music that stuff can’t get churned out of a one room bedsit by a teenager who’s got a bit of talent & a lot of hunger
…so…does it seem like people’s response would be an unforeseen renaissance for live theatre?
…I don’t know where to find the levers but I know what the result I’m pulling for would be on a lot of this stuff, I guess…just wish the odds looked like they might favor me a little better]
I can definitely believe execs think they know what’s coming. But if they’re smart they’ll have some serious historians loading up the case histories of businesses where the execs had all of the angles figured out and then missed something obvious.
Train execs in 1938 who did the calculations on propeller plane speeds, costs, and capacities and decided — correctly! — they’d never replace cross country passenger trains. That kind of thing.
…I’ll leave worrying about that to you, then…I’ve got a full plate worrying about how that’s going to go for the non-exec components of the whole fragile edifice anyhow
…but if we’re picking trains as the metaphor…it’s not like those stopped being lucrative…for some people
…private enterprise, ladies & gents…have no fear…the market is always right
…RIP john fortune…somewhere there’s presumably footage of the railways “interview” those two did about the financial arrangements around the actual rolling stock & the risk/reward disparity with that…but I can’t find it…ran along approximately parallel lines to the year the BBC sold a bunch of its own office space to balance out some budgetary shortfalls & now has to lease them back on an ongoing basis that doesn’t exactly scream sound fiscal planning
…since I can’t find that…but did have a look…here’s a few more where that came from?
I, for one, am interested in getting some kind of AI that I can talk to and feed dialog and existing plotlines to in order to generate Downton Abbey content. If Julian Fellowes won’t step up to the plate I and my AI will.
…there’s a fairly heartwarming movie called robot & frank in which a mildly cantankerous geezer with a hidden past as a man o’heists takes the AI companion his children foist upon him for elder care purposes & talks it around to helping him plan & execute some heisting in order to keep him match fit…since that’s in line with a liberal interpretation of its operational parameters
…I bet there’s already a chatbot that could script endless downtown for you but wouldn’t it be more fun if it could also serve a passable G&T & take the bins out?
Hard to believe I found a story not covered above but how could you Nazi this coming…
https://www.rawstory.com/trump-doral-welcomes-christian-nationalists/
I need indictments people!!!
https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/08/politics/georgia-gop-chairman-says-he-was-just-following-orders-from-trump-lawyers/index.html
and as if your above climate news wasn’t bad enough…
https://e360.yale.edu/digest/birds-shrinking-climate-change-small-birds-shrinking-faster
and speaking of “when you’re trippin”…
Trump just found guilty in rape case of sexual abuse not rape.
What a creep. If the HaWt TAekS roll in that this really a victory for him, I’m going to gag.
…I’m taking that “if” as a chunk of buoyant optimism I can cling to like a shipwrecked mariner to a scrap of what they’d been hoping to sail to shore
…it helps me maintain my denial for the purposes of sanity of the chill certainty I have that if I so much as grazed the internet I’d find it was a when long past?
Oh, there will always be some. But with any luck things like this and the guilty verdict for the Trump corporation and the constricting net in other cases starts forcing the punditocracy to think twice and then three times before jumping to their lectures.
…I’ll wear the lectures if they come with a side of meaningful consequences
…hell, I’ll volunteer to endure extra lectures if they’ll convert it to a main course?
…I don’t know if the wording is/was abuse or assault but if they hadn’t found the balance of probability was that between those two parties he was the one lying about what his lawyer I believe super-sized the “alleged” part of into a “so-called rape”
…I was fixing to see an architect about an inside out house I read about in a book?
Honestly, that’s a better outcome than I expected. A case this old is going to be tough to litigate, even against an admitted sexual predator. This is a major win.
Jury finds Donald Trump sexually abused columnist E Jean Carroll
Republican who called drag shows a threat to kids quits after sex with intern
…there’s several people, that stonekettle fella being one of them, who’ve taken to posting a lot of stories with a similar formula & a tag-line that’s a variation on “still not found a drag queen that’s actually done any of this shit the way this guy has”
I’m more worried about the people (like Xtian Fundies and GOPers) who spend too much time inappropriately thinking about other people’s kids.
You and me both, brother. I’ve said it before: Your kid is a whole lot safer with a drag queen than in a Christian youth camp, Catholic church, or anywhere near a Republican.
…& hence those professions get disproportionately represented in those posts that serially point out none of that cast of shady characters has a drag alter ego…not sure it does much but it’s eloquent after a fashion?
That headline is misleading. He got the 19 year old intern drunk and assaulted her while she was intoxicated. That’s not “having sex,” that’s rape. He then threatened her to cover it up.
The headline makes it seem like it was consensual.
Again, I’d like to point out that Prenzit Rapist used the NY media (including the NYT) to condemn five innocent black teens to death for the brutal rape of the Central Park jogger.
Unlike those teens, he was the one convicted “technically” of rape in court.
More good news today!