Personal Responsibility

Hannah-Jones meets von Daniken
Hannah-Jones has been showered with the highest awards the American intelligentsia can bestow, including a Pulitzer Prize, a MacArthur “genius grant,” an endowed chair in “Race and Journalism” at Howard University, and an entire Center for Journalism and Democracy at said school, which will fund her in producing a next generation of imitators of her approach to historical truth. These accolades are based entirely on the 1619 Project. Hannah-Jones, who was scarcely known before the publication of the project, has done little else since.--McLaughlin

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Capitalism’s edge was in putting many minds to work with the freedom to innovate, protected by the rule of law to protect personal and property rights, in place of a small group of planners.--Meltzer

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At the American Economic Association, there were roughly three times as many sessions featuring papers on each of race, gender, and climate as there were sessions on the topics of inflation or growth. For the conference as a whole, that means 13.2 percent of all sessions featured gender issues, 12.6 percent climate, 12.4 percent race, against just 4.4 percent for inflation and growth

Personal Responsibility

Leading artificial intelligence safety researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky has called for a cap on compute power, said GPU sales should be tracked, and believes we should be prepared to blow up rogue data centers. Rogue centers. In China?  Iran?

Yudkowsky, best known for popularizing the idea of friendly artificial intelligence and research fellow at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), has written an article in Time Magazine claiming that humanity's future is in the balance.

"If somebody builds a too-powerful AI, under present conditions, I expect that every single member of the human species and all biological life on Earth dies shortly thereafter," he said.

He added: "Shut down all the large GPU clusters (the large computer farms where the most powerful AIs are refined). Shut down all the large training runs. Put a ceiling on how much computing power anyone is allowed to use in training an AI system, and move it downward over the coming years to compensate for more efficient training algorithms. No exceptions for governments and militaries. Make immediate multinational agreements to prevent the prohibited activities from moving elsewhere.

"Track all GPUs sold. If intelligence says that a country outside the agreement is building a GPU cluster, be less scared of a shooting conflict between nations than of the moratorium being violated; be willing to destroy a rogue data center by airstrike."

He concluded: "We are not ready. We are not on track to be significantly readier in the foreseeable future. If we go ahead on this everyone will die, including children who did not choose this and did not do anything wrong."

It's nice to hear a renowned expert call for multinational agreements, an outburst of individual responsibility, bombing rogue computer farms anywhere or...we are all gonna die. So it goes when there is an endless cry over myriad extension events. And all we need are miracles.