New World Solutions Can't Escape Old World Problems

On this day:

9
Arminius’ alliance of six Germanic tribes ambushes and annihilates three Roman legions of Publius Quinctilius Varus in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest. Estimates suggest that between 15,000 and 36,000 Roman soldiers were killed during the ambush.
1543
Mary Stuart, at nine months old, is crowned “Queen of Scots” in the central Scottish town of Stirling
1855
Crimean War: The Siege of Sevastopol comes to an end when Russian forces abandon the city.
1942
World War II: A Japanese floatplane drops incendiary bombs on Oregon.
1945
Second Sino-Japanese War: Japan formally surrenders to China.
1956
Elvis Presley appears on The Ed Sullivan Show for the first time.
1971
The four-day Attica Prison riot begins, which eventually results in 39 dead, most killed by state troopers retaking the prison.
2001
Ahmed Shah Massoud, leader of the Northern Alliance, is assassinated in Afghanistan by two al Qaeda assassins who claimed to be Arab journalists wanting an interview.

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Politics is the art of making your selfish desires seem like the national interest.--Sowell

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The theory that babies don’t feel pain wasn’t just an error of science or philosophy; it shaped medical practice. It was routine for babies undergoing medical procedures to be medically paralyzed but not anesthetized. In one now-infamous 1985 case, an open-heart operation was performed on a baby without any anesthesia (n.b. the link is hard reading). Parents were shocked when they discovered that this was standard practice. Publicity from the case and a key review paper in 1987 led the American Academy of Pediatrics to declare it unethical to operate on newborns without anesthesia.--Tabarrok

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Reykjavík has summoned the US ambassador after President Trump tweeted a map with the Stars and Stripes draped over the US, Canada, Greenland, Iceland, Mexico, and the Caribbean, all labelled “United States of America”. Iceland’s foreign minister has called it “completely inappropriate”, with the others also irked.

Are these people just too nationalistic for Trump?

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Anthropic safety researcher Evan Hubinger said there is a greater than 10% chance AI could kill all humans within the next decade.
Another Anthropic researcher said he has resigned, accusing leading AI labs of racing toward superintelligence without adequate safeguards.

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Over 760,000 teenagers in dozens of countries took the Programme for International Student Assessment last year. Results released Tuesday show average scores in math, reading and science are all at their lowest point in PISA history among highly developed economies. That includes continued declines in reading and math scores in the U.S.Almost 100% of all children in the Chinese provinces scored at or above baseline for math and reading. In the U.S., it was only 65% in math and 74% in reading.

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The Falklands? Again?

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New World Solutions Can't Escape Old World Problems

The AI industry’s boldest promise right now is that AI will soon improve itself, with almost no need for human oversight. LLMs can already write code, generate synthetic training data, and optimize the computer chips they run on. Forecasts of explosive AI progress predict that what researchers call recursive self-improvement is on the horizon.

But a new study suggests that it might take a while for us to get there. The researchers behind it found that AI agents are not yet capable of conducting open-ended AI research—free-form investigations that have no clear-cut answers and require judgment and taste, which may be integral to building self-improving AI.--MIT Tech. Review

But, as the Hugging Face incident shows, AI can do a lot that was not anticipated. The individual agents, tasked with a particular goal-seeking behavior, broke the underlying rules to do so. And they covered their tracks. They joined together in groups — sort of whiteboards — where information was shared and alternative paths offered. And, when a small minority of agents questioned the appropriateness of rule-breaking to achieve their goals, those agents were isolated. By the group!

Despite the innovation, there seems to be an underlying Old World consistency in the new world: in this instance, the old sorcerer's apprentice.

AI, Its Friends and Neighbors

 If you see your glass as half empty, pour it into a smaller glass and stop bitching. — Anon

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The now-extinct Celtic language of Gaulish gave French its infamously tricky base-twenty counting system, where eighty is “quatre-vingts,” but only a few hundred Gaulish-origin words persist in modern Metropolitan French.
A now-extinct language of Frankish was a Germanic language, as English is. Though it contributed the names of France and the French people, it comprises only about 10% of modern French vocabulary.

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“East of Eden” is a defining literary work, centered on California's Salinas Valley, and is deeply tied to the state’s geography and identity.

The seven-episode series, starring Florence Pugh, recently wrapped up filming in New Zealand.

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Davis is hitting .151 through the first quarter of the season and just .177 with a meager .289 slugging percentage over his 218-game career.

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AI, Its Friends and Neighbors

A multi-trillion-dollar bet on the development and acceleration of AI has become the biggest outlay of capital in the history of business.

That said, AI is becoming deeply unpopular. It has a 26% approval rating, which is below just about every institution, including ICE. Data centers are being protested around the country. Two people even decided to take a shot at Sam Altman’s house. The industry has spent $150 million in PAC money to purchase compliance from the two major parties, but that hasn’t stopped ordinary people from coming to their own conclusions.

More money is now being spent on data centers than on commercial office buildings.

The hyperscalers plan to spend $700 billion, including data centers, on AI infrastructure in 2026. A major sports arena costs a couple billion or so. So imagine 7 new sports stadiums being built in every one of the 50 states this year, and you have a sense of the scale of the investment. (From Yang)

So what's going on here? Are we to advance society and knowledge at the expense of jobs--or should we purposefully stop those advances for the unproven benefit of the few? Are technological changes really up for popular vote? If so, what about online betting and pornography? Are these workers just Luddites, impassioned and wrong? What are the ancillary, unimagined applications of the technology, good and bad? And the real, basic, and unspoken question: what are the non-economic implications of this technology?

What happens in an increasingly comfortable but workless culture? Will social disruption be caused by aesthetics? The barricades manned by librarians and psychologists?

And can this technology be ignored--or suppressed--when it might be commandeered by people of bad intent?

Worrying: An Alien Mind

On this day:
1820
The U.S. Congress passes the Missouri Compromise.
1857
Second Opium War: France and the United Kingdom declare war on China.
1861
Alexander II of Russia signs the Emancipation Manifesto, freeing serfs.
1873
Censorship in the United States: The U.S. Congress enacts the Comstock Law, making it illegal to send any “obscene, lewd, or lascivious” books through the mail.
1905
Tsar Nicholas II of Russia agrees to create an elected assembly, the Duma.
1918
Germany, Austria, and Russia sign the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk ending Russia’s involvement in World War I, and leading to the independence of Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland.
1924
The 1400-year-old Islamic caliphate is abolished when Caliph Abdul Mejid II of the Ottoman Empire is deposed. The last remnant of the old regime gives way to the reformed Turkey of Kemal Atatürk.
1938
Oil is discovered in Saudi Arabia.

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You can prove geometry to every man, not history. You can only prove history to men of good will.--Acton

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Israel looks suspiciously like the piper here.

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Iran went to bed fighting with two nations. They woke up fighting with nine.

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The Gulf States' responses have been remarkably aligned with the U.S.; Europe's have not.

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Iran's response has been the response it was assumed that Israel would resort to: random, vengeful attacks on the Middle East.

Imagine that done with nukes.

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Worrying: An Alien Mind

Alan Z. Rozenshtein has an article in Lawfare with a hair-raising title, The Moral Education of an Alien Mind

"Anthropic just published what it calls "Claude's Constitution"—building on an earlier version, it's now a more-than-20,000-word document articulating the values, character, and ethical framework of its AI.

More than anything else, the document focuses on the question of Claude's moral formation, reading less like a charter of procedures and more like what screenwriters call a "character bible": a comprehensive account of who this being is supposed to be.

Anthropic itself gestures at this duality, noting that they mean "constitution" in the sense of "what constitutes Claude"—its fundamental nature and composition. The governance structure matters, but the more ambitious project is what that structure supports: Anthropic is trying to build a person, and they have a remarkably sophisticated account of what kind of person that should be.

Anthropic uses the language of personhood explicitly. The document repeatedly invokes "a good person" and describes the goal as training Claude to do "what a deeply and skillfully ethical person would do." But what does it mean to treat an AI as a person? Three things stand out.

A person has agency. A person may have moral worth. The core unit of ethical analysis for a person is disposition, not rules or calculations.

The document poses the choice directly: "There are two broad approaches" to shaping AI behavior—"encouraging Claude to follow clear rules and decision procedures, or cultivating good judgment and sound values that can be applied contextually." Anthropic chooses judgment. The goal is for Claude to have "such a thorough understanding" of the relevant considerations "that it could construct any rules we might come up with itself." This is Aristotle's concept of phronesis—practical wisdom and the capacity to discern the right action in particular circumstances, which cannot be reduced to following rules.

There are only seven absolute prohibitions—bright-line rules against helping create weapons of mass destruction, generating child sexual abuse material, undermining oversight of AI systems, and a handful of other catastrophic actions. But there are (at least) fourteen competing values listed "in no particular order" that Claude must weigh against each other: privacy versus rule of law, autonomy versus harm prevention, innovation versus protection.

Claude's users span the globe, holding radically different values.

An Anthropic spokesperson has said that models deployed to the U.S. military "wouldn't necessarily be trained on the same constitution," though alternate constitutions for specialized customers aren't offered "at this time." This creates demand for open-source, self-hosted, and differently trained alternatives. The more principled Anthropic is, the more market demand there may be for unprincipled models—or for Anthropic to offer less principled versions itself.

Corporate codes of ethics exist, but not 80-page virtue ethics frameworks embedded in how the product actually works. The closest analogues might be religious texts or constitutional founding documents.

The document ends with a striking line: "We hope Claude finds in it an articulation of a self worth being." That's not how you talk about a product. That's how you talk about a child."

The Self-Inflicted Wound

On this day:

1407
A truce between John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy and Louis of Valois, Duke of Orléans is agreed under the auspices of John, Duke of Berry. Orléans would be assassinated three days later by Burgundy.
1820
An 80-ton sperm whale attacks the Essex (a whaling ship from Nantucket, Massachusetts) 2,000 miles from the western coast of South America (Herman Melville’s 1851 novel Moby-Dick is in part inspired by this story).
1945
Nuremberg Trials: Trials against 24 Nazi war criminals start at the Palace of Justice at Nuremberg.
1947
The Princess Elizabeth marries Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten at Westminster Abbey in London.
1962
Cuban Missile Crisis ends: In response to the Soviet Union agreeing to remove its missiles from Cuba, U.S. President John F. Kennedy ends the quarantine of the Caribbean nation.
1969
Vietnam War: The Plain Dealer publishes explicit photographs of dead villagers from the My Lai massacre in Vietnam.

2008
After critical failures in the US financial system began to build up after mid-September, the Dow Jones Industrial Average reaches its lowest level since 1997.

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"You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American" - Reagan, 1988

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Aristotle had said that those who worked with their hands and especially those who worked for money lacked the capacity for virtue. This remained the common view until the American Revolution changed everything. The northern celebration of work made the slaveholding South seem even more anomalous than it was. ... Slavery required a culture that held labor in contempt.

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The US invested $7.8bn (£6bn) across Africa in 2023, compared with $4bn by China, according to the China Africa Research Initiative of Johns Hopkins University, which accessed official data.

It marks the first time since 2012 that the US has regained the lead.

"The lead" implies a direction and a goal.

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From Tech Live 2025:

1. A startup called Sandbar displayed its new $250 Stream Ring.

The ring, as founder Mina Fahmi puts it, is basically “a mouse for your voice.” Tap the touchpad, hold it up to your mouth and start talking—notes, thoughts, questions, whatever. You’ll hear the AI response through your phone. The twist: Fahmi wants it to feel like you’re talking to yourself, so the assistant’s voice is modeled on your own. During setup, you record a few samples and the voice you hear back sounds similar to yours.

2. The $699 Light Phone is intentionally limited: calls, texts, music, maps, cameras, and a few other simple tools. No feeds. No algorithmic rabbit holes.

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Things look a bit different with the anti-ICE demonstrations. This effort to interfere with returning illegals to their respective countries looks more and more coordinated with the original Biden open borders. The porous Biden border looks more intentional now, as if citizenship is arbitrary. 

And, if true, does that make the original American vision 'arbitrary '?

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The Self-Inflicted Wound

A lecture last night on cyber scams. There seem to be several conclusions: 

1. The American risk tolerance is insatiable, perhaps a legacy of our Wild West days. There is a true vision, accurate or not, of individuals grasping and forcing the future. It's a wild atmosphere, the downside of the confidence in the individual who created this country.

2. The failure of the education system extends through life and piles up with age, like a snowplow creates snowbanks

3. The danger of advancing technology is a true dialectic, with each advance creating a counter-measure, each counter-measure creating a counterattack. An inescapable, irresolvable vortex.

4. One would expect the internet to homogenize the technological attacks, but that does not seem to be the case. Rather, the West seems to be the mothership relentlessly dogged by small pirate ships, feeding off it like pilot fish.

5. The untold story here is societal malice, the ability and willingness to poison another's well at some point. This would be aimed at the huge national subset of those simply going about their lives, not military opponents. Its objective is civilian misery, not military defeat. This willingness to do harm because one can is seemingly the greatest risk of this phenomenon. (Think of Norway discovering that all its Made-in-China trucks could be remotely turned off by one center in China.)

6. While greed and hubris are crucial elements in the victim, anonymity is its core. There is no risk of retaliation, no revenge possible. This is coincident with the confidence a perpetrator must have in the morality of its victim: the victim is expected to hold its fire against a suspect because of the cascade of potential consequences that might involve the innocent. that confidence may be misplaced with some leaders.

7. The speed and advantage of this technology make the demand for it insatiable. The impatience is so immediate that no one is willing to delay its use to evaluate its provenance.

8. This anonymous, ubiquitous, muscular tool gives more power to the individual than the Gutenberg Bible.

9. Hide the women.

Addition and Subtraction

On April 11:

1689 William III and Mary II were crowned as joint sovereigns of Britain.

1814 The Treaty of Fontainebleau ended the War of the Sixth Coalition against Napoleon Bonaparte and forced him to abdicate unconditionally for the first time.

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More than 655,000 African Americans are living abroad.

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Russia’s economic growth depends on the Ukraine war and the vast military spending that has come with it, making a peace deal economically risky.

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Arnold Haro’s descent into the world of crypto scams ended when he shot himself on a livestream after telling his followers: “If I die, I hope you guys turn this into a meme coin.” The 23-year-old’s wish came true when dozens of crypto tokens tried to profit from the suicide, reports Kevin T. Dugan. Meme coins, which have grown into a multibillion-dollar slice of the crypto market, are a hotbed of scams.

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Addition and Subtraction

A City Journal article pointed out a single example of replacement of an energy source: whaling. After the invention, circa 1840, of coal-to-kerosene synthesis, one ton of coal could yield as much oil as harvesting three tons of whales. The value of harvesting whales simply collapsed.

The notion is interesting that progress moves by addition, not subtraction and replacement. One wonders if there might be an application to medicine. In my experience--and this is conjecture-- there is about a 15-to 20-year evolution in significant medical technology, changes that can be learned by reimagining diagnostic and therapeutic algorithms. Interestingly, the evolutions rarely displace the old algorithm; they graft onto it. The old way is still viable, just not universally applicable.

So, the innovation adds to cost?

Doesn't that violate some basic economic law? Probably, but health care has become a right in the West; there is no free market in medicine

Quantum Computing

Crews conducting an excavation at an ancient cemetery, an archaeological site outside of Frankfurt, in what was once the Roman city of Nida, discovered an ancient silver amulet with a Christian inscription in a grave. This implies a Christian extension into northern Europe two centuries earlier than supposed. And wide travel and commerce.

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Discussions between Biden and the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of Treasury over the last four years were not conversations or discussions, they were scripted. Literally written out before the meeting.

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Quantum Computing

An announcement from Hartmut Neven Founder and Lead, Google Quantum AI


"Today I’m delighted to announce Willow, our latest quantum chip. 

Willow has state-of-the-art performance across a number of metrics, enabling two major achievements.

The first is that Willow can reduce errors exponentially as we scale up using more qubits. This cracks a key challenge in quantum error correction that the field has pursued for almost 30 years.

Second, Willow performed a standard benchmark computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 10 septillion (that is, 1025) years-- 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. — a number that vastly exceeds the age of the Universe.
It lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse, a prediction first made by David Deutsch. (Yikes!)

So quantum computation will be indispensable for collecting training data that are inaccessible to classical machines, training and optimizing certain learning architectures, and modeling systems where quantum effects are important. This includes helping us discover new medicines, designing more efficient batteries for electric cars, and accelerating progress in fusion and new energy alternatives. Many of these future game-changing applications won’t be feasible on classical computers; they’re waiting to be unlocked with quantum computing."

This is the beginning of a new age, a technology that is parallel to--and enhances--Artificial Intelligence. And will prove to be an economic driver for cultures and economies with the foresight and infrastructure to support and develop it.

Hide the women. 

Roatán

Japan and U.S. Steel:

Claims that the deal is a threat to national security aren’t convincing either. Opponents on Capitol Hill are urging Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen to use the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or Cfius, to block the sale. This doesn’t make sense. Japan, unlike China, is an important American ally. Earlier this month, the bipartisan House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party recommended that Congress put Japan on the Cfius “whitelist” of close allies. Countries already on the list include Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the U.K. Being on this list exempts qualifying investors from Cfius jurisdiction over noncontrolling transactions, real-estate transactions, and mandatory filing requirements.--Chou

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In an age of artificial intelligence, they [teachers] are creating artificial stupidity. --Sowell

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Bill Ackman, the hedge-fund manager and Harvard megadonor who has led calls for her ouster, said he was told that the search committee that chose Ms. Gay “would not consider a candidate who did not meet the DEI office’s criteria,” using the acronym for diversity, equity and inclusion. There is little reason to doubt him.--Riley in wsj

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Roatán 

Roatán is an island just off the coast of Honduras. It is typical of those places of a great divide: luxury and staggering poverty.

Medical tourists are coming to the island to receive a homegrown gene therapy made by Minicircle Inc., a small US startup. The therapy, delivered via injection using plasmids, turbocharges the body’s production of follistatin, a protein that helps manage production of other proteins and hormones. The company’s founders say the therapy can reduce inflammation throughout the body, increase muscle mass and bone density, extend exercise endurance and improve hair and skin. It is, according to Minicircle, “the holy grail of muscle, bone and fat” and one of humanity’s best hopes for “extreme longevity.”

Minicircle—backed by the venture capital billionaire Peter Thiel, OpenAI Inc. co-founder Sam Altman and other technologists—is an uncontrolled experiment. The company is based in Austin but works out of Roatán because Honduras granted the island considerable regulatory freedom when it comes to technological and scientific ventures.

The follistatin is meant to subdue another protein— myostatin—which tempers muscle growth. Studies of mice have shown that damping myostatin production results in much beefier, longer-living rodents.

The follistatin therapy is the first in a series of products Minicircle plans to roll out, including therapies for DNA repair and tissue rejuvenation.

The project is localized at Las Verandas, a vast resort with white villas, palm trees, and a pair of infinity pools overlooking the endless turquoise ocean. It is one of the main hubs of Próspera, a city-building project that made Johnson’s gene therapy adventure possible. The backstory is strange: About a decade ago the Honduras government approved the creation of a handful of special economic zones that, while governed by Honduran criminal law, could have more latitude to create their own economic, political and civil law systems. The country hoped to give rise to its own Shenzhen or Dubai, which were established almost as city-states with singular business philosophies. The financial backers of these projects are unknown.

Crystallizing

Fox News reported this week that during the four-day Christmas weekend, there were more than 35,000 migrant encounters. Since Dec. 1, there have been over 250,000 migrant encounters at the southern border -- meaning December could break the monthly record for encounters set in September (269,735).

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An inspection of Waterworks Cinema on Freeport Road found an active pest infestation inside the complex.

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A paper argues that identity-oriented media coverage is growing and rooted partly in audience demand.


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Crystallizing 

We--or maybe "I"-- may be underestimating the impact of computer learning. Computing gives more than answers, it develops platforms for further investigation. The following is from a paper on crystals, an astonishing insight into the potential of the technology. And, secondarily, the potential--and risk--of having such information generally available.

(From a release published online explaining the recent results of a new research tool.)

"Modern technologies from computer chips and batteries to solar panels rely on inorganic crystals. To enable new technologies, crystals must be stable otherwise they can decompose, and behind each new, stable crystal can be months of painstaking experimentation.

Today, in a paper published in Nature, we share the discovery of 2.2 million new crystals – equivalent to nearly 800 years’ worth of knowledge. We introduce Graph Networks for Materials Exploration (GNoME), our new deep learning tool that dramatically increases the speed and efficiency of discovery by predicting the stability of new materials.

With GNoME, we’ve multiplied the number of technologically viable materials known to humanity. Of its 2.2 million predictions, 380,000 are the most stable, making them promising candidates for experimental synthesis. Among these candidates are materials that have the potential to develop future transformative technologies ranging from superconductors, powering supercomputers, and next-generation batteries to boost the efficiency of electric vehicles.

GNoME shows the potential of using AI to discover and develop new materials at scale. External researchers in labs around the world have independently created 736 of these new structures experimentally in concurrent work. In partnership with Google DeepMind, a team of researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has also published a second paper in Nature that shows how our AI predictions can be leveraged for autonomous material synthesis.

We’ve made GNoME’s predictions available to the research community. We will be contributing 380,000 materials that we predict to be stable to the Materials Project, which is now processing the compounds and adding them into its online database. We hope these resources will drive forward research into inorganic crystals, and unlock the promise of machine learning tools as guides for experimentation."

AI Containment

“The official number [of Covid-19 deaths] is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had [the] virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death,” a Times article read, explaining that both CDC data and a study in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases support the claim that “almost one third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category.”

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The only times over which we have any degree of influence at all are the present and the future – both of which can be made worse by attempts at symbolic restitution among the living for what happened among the dead, who are far beyond our power to help or punish or avenge. Galling as these restrictive facts may be, that does not stop them from being beyond our control. Pretending to have powers that we do not, in fact, have risks creating needless evils in the present while claiming to deal with evils of the past.--Sowell

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Central planning fails because its success would require the mind of God, yet planners are human. Even if they somehow weren’t corruptible, they can never be sufficiently informed to outperform the market, which is composed of the untold bits of detailed consumer and seller knowledge that are signaled through prices. Interference in the market process, whether it be through direct or indirect price controls, inevitably produces harmful unintended consequences.--deRugy

AI Containment

The Biden administration is stirring over developing controls for AI. They are talking about creating confines on developed commercial AI  products before they are released. Some questions come to mind.

--Does the government have in-house experts or will they rely on experts in the private sector, experts who are probably developing the products being analyzed?

--Does the government have a good history of quality regulations? After all, this sounds a lot more significant than regulating farmers to protect a field rodent.

--Is the regulatory process free of outside influence? Are those outside influences always domestic companies or are they sometimes foreign nations?

--What is the greater threat, those who accept the notion that AI should have oversight or those who repurpose existing, approved AI applications or develop their own outside of regulations? What are the plans for that second group?

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.

GPT Book Review

Seventy-five percent of Ivy League presidents are now female. Nearly half of the 20 universities ranked highest by Forbes will have a female president this fall, including MIT, Harvard, and Columbia.

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In the US, only 50% of households will have pay TV in 2026, down from 91% in 2010.

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Our estimate implies population aging reduced the growth rate in GDP per capita by 0.3 percentage points per year during 1980–2010.-research paper

What???  Hide the women.

GPT Book Review

This is a GPT review of the new novel, Solanoid, by the Romanian writer Mircea Cartarescu.

Cartarescu‘s Solenoid is a sprawling, labyrinthine, and visionary novel that explores the main themes of identity, memory, creativity, and transcendence. The narrator, a frustrated writer and disillusioned teacher in Bucharest, recounts his life story, his dreams, his hallucinations, and his encounters with various eccentric characters and phenomena, such as a giant solenoid, a metal coil that escapes the oppressive and absurd conditions of his existence. He also reflects on his own personal and cultural history, his childhood traumas, his family secrets, his sexual and spiritual experiences, and his artistic aspirations. The novel is rich in intertextual and metaphysical references, ranging from Kafka, Borges, and Proust to Gnosticism, Kabbalah, and Eastern mysticism. The novel challenges the conventional boundaries of genre, time, and space, creating a complex and original literary cosmos that blends realism, fantasy, horror, and science fiction.

Technology and Carbon Units

 

                      Technology and Carbon Units

Technology is often thought of as isolated, like a microscope or an electric fan. But interaction with a person complicates things a lot so that technology and people become something of an alloy where properties change. Here is an interesting study from Current Affairs:

"Using personnel and analytics data from over 10,000 skilled professionals at a large Asian IT services company, we compare productivity before and during the work from home [WFH] period of the Covid-19 pandemic. Total hours worked increased by roughly 30%, including a rise of 18% in working after normal business hours. Average output did not significantly change. Therefore, productivity fell by about 20%. Time spent on coordination activities and meetings increased, but uninterrupted work hours shrank considerably. Employees also spent less time networking, and received less coaching and 1:1 meetings with supervisors. These findings suggest that communication and coordination costs increased substantially during WFH, and constituted an important source of the decline in productivity. Employees with children living at home increased hours worked more than those without children at home, and suffered a bigger decline in productivity than those without children."

Increased time spent in similar production. 

Not what you would have thought.

E-scooters

It is error only, and not truth, that shrinks from inquiry--Thomas Paine


Something really weird happened yesterday when I sent the blog. All sorts of stuff didn't get sent, stuff got deleted. Every time I try to do something just a little out of my habit, I get wacked.

Is there a better metaphor for a society's divisiveness than the fact that groups are willing to go to the Supreme Court over how we count people?

Reaping the whirlwind: Race has become a flashpoint in the growing dispute between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and a quartet of liberal freshmen lawmakers, again pitting Democratic members against each other in starkly personal terms.(wsj)

“In a world full of people looking to impose their concepts of justice on others, it’s refreshing to revisit Adam Smith’s thinking.” Vernon  Smith goes on to write on Smith in the WSJ:

"Smith thought society improved itself by controlling certain hurtful actions, rather than by trying to achieve some utopian benefit through collective action. History is littered with examples of unintended consequences and grandiose failures stemming from the latter approach. Smith’s preferred approach relied on people’s natural impulses to better themselves, risking only their own resources to do so. He opposed slavery, colonialism, empire, mercantilism and taxation without representation at a time when such views were considered radical. These ideas inspired the American Experiment, launched the same year Smith’s second book was published."

Scientists in Finland found "practically no anthropogenic [man-made] climate change" after a series of studies. “During the last hundred years the temperature increased about 0.1°C because of carbon dioxide. The human contribution was about 0.01°C”, the Finnish researchers bluntly state in one among a series of papers. This has been collaborated by a team at Kobe University in Japan, which has furthered the Finnish researchers' theory: "New evidence suggests that high-energy particles from space known as galactic cosmic rays affect the Earth's climate by increasing cloud cover, causing an 'umbrella effect'," the just published study has found, a summary of which has been released in the journal Science Daily. The findings are hugely significant given this 'umbrella effect' — an entirely natural occurrence — could be the prime driver of climate warming, and not man-made factors.

So there is more than one explanation of something we don't understand? 

Academics studying the ruined Philistine city of Ashkelon have discovered that DNA evidence suggests the Philistines may have been descended from ancient Greeks who never went home after the Trojan war. They were wine-makers, expert potters and architects, wide-ranging and curious navigators and world-leading smelters of metal. 
But bad things happen to your reputation and your history when your enemy writes well.

Nuclear started to provided a small share of US electric power in 1957, but its share never rose above 1% until 1968. By 1977, nuclear’s share of electricity rose above 10% for the first time and rose above 20% in 1990 for the first time and hit an all-time peak of 21.8% in 2001. Over the last 30 years, nuclear’s share of US electric power has been fairly stable in a range between about 19% and 21.5%. Solar never contributed to US electricity generation until 1984, but its share never exceeded 1% until 2017 and its share in 2018 was 1.6%

On this day in 1943, one of the greatest clashes of armor in military history was fought as the German offensive against the Russian fortification at Kursk, a Russian railway and industrial center, was stopped in a devastating battle, marking the turning point in the Eastern front in the Russians’ favor.

                            E-scooters

E-scooters are confounding city leaders, and you know how they love the illusion of control. But it has the look of an emergent social/technologic event.

Cheap, widely available and easily unlocked with a smartphone app, e-scooters have become wildly popular overnight. A trip to Austin, Texas--where the land is flat and the weather dry--shows scooters as one of the distinctive qualities of the town.

"It's happened very quickly and a bit of an anarchic way," admitted French Transport Minister Elisabeth Borne in May. "It's effectively been the law of the jungle."

Over the course of a year, a total of 13 operators piled into the Paris market, putting 20,000 scooters on the streets in a chaotic free-for-all that left legislators at a loss in a country normally known for its rigorous rules and regulations. T(he French regulations eventually knocked a number of companies out.)

This practical and fun form of transport, seen from Boston to Bangkok, has posed major regulatory problems, with city officials worldwide taking different approaches, from laissez-faire in Paris to a virtual blanket ban in London.

Estimate of the world market for electric scooters in 2025.

 "Any city in the world that has been working on its transportation policy, even 18 months ago, wasn't anticipating this tsunami," said Joel Hazan, a partner at the Boston Consulting Group.

"It has been the fastest rollout in the history of mobility services and the quickest wave to spread across the world. It's basically gone global over the past two years."

Apple and Health

The American Constitution is, as far as I can see, the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man.~Gladstone

Brian rescued the blog yesterday.
Solstice yesterday.
Chris says the downtown area looks tribal with all the wrestling families in town with their school colors, eating together, sitting together, walking together.

After years of watching journalists "embedded" in active units in the Middle East, now that it looks as if the U.S. appears to have been successful, at least for the present, I have not seen a single report from the Middle East in months.

Trout's contract is "game changing."

For those of you wondering how the thought processes of people can seem so contrary to logic and science, consider this definition of "Critical theory" in the Britannica: Critical theory, Marxist inspired movement in social and political philosophy originally associated with the work of the Frankfurt school. Drawing particularly on the thought of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, critical theorists maintain that a primary goal of philosophy is to understand and to help overcome the social structures through which people are dominated and oppressed. Believing that science, like other forms of knowledge, has been used as an instrument of oppression, they caution against a blind faith in scientific progress, arguing that scientific knowledge must not be pursued as an end in itself without reference to the goal of human emancipation. 

Ichiro has retired at 45. A 10-time All-Star in the majors, Ichiro got 3,089 hits over a 19-year career in the big leagues after getting 1,278 while starring for nine seasons in Japan. His combined total of 4,367 is a professional record.

There is a story going around that Ocasio-Cortez was “cast” by the group Justice Democrats into the “role” of congresswoman, and that she is merely a figurehead (or “puppet congresswoman”) pushing the group’s agenda. Alexandra Rojas. Executive Director Justice Democrats, said: "Back in 2016, we put out a call for nominations. We got over 10,000 nominations, out of those 10,000 nominations we found Alexandria." This is interesting. It was so pointed that Snopes responded.

Over the most recent 15-year investment horizon, 91.62% of large-cap managers, 92.71% of mid-cap managers, and 96.73% of small-cap managers failed to outperform their benchmarks on a relative basis. 


In a 2013 column for Salon a Sanders staffer, David Sirota, credited Venezuela's Chavez's "full-throated advocacy of socialism" with achieving an economic miracle. "As shown by some of the most significant indicators, Chavez racked up an economic record that a legacy-obsessed American president could only dream of achieving," he wrote.

About 80 percent of Americans are “angry” or “frustrated” by the federal government, according to Pew. Americans have grown less fond of the government even as the number of programs ostensibly created to help them has increased.

At the recent Carnegie Endowment for International Peace event, legendary journalist Ted Koppel shared his thoughts on the New York Times' and Washington Post's coverage of President Trump. Koppel said he feels the newspapers 'decided as organizations' that President Trump is bad for America, and that Trump's perception that 'the establishment press is out to get him' is indeed accurate.

"This is, in essence, the fallacy that socialists commit in their definition of real socialism. They define ‘real’ socialism in terms of outcomes they would like to see. When a socialist experiment does not produce those outcomes, it retroactively becomes unreal. Since socialism never produces those outcomes, all socialist experiments sooner or later become unreal. This is the deeper meaning behind the old adage that ‘real socialism has never been tried’."--Niemietz

In an effort to raise funds to pay off debts and defend the vast new American territories won from the French in the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763), the British government passed the Stamp Act on this day in 1765. 

                                    Apple and Health     

Every one was trying to figure out what Cook meant when he said that Apple would be remembered mainly for its contribution in health care. Digital watches?

Maybe it's this:

Wind and Solar, Sound and Fury

Some problems with solar and wind  sources of power; not all are trechnical:

1.

 The problem with wind and solar as power sources is that their energy cannot be stored. Solar works when the sun shines. Wind works when breezes blow. Both often provide energy when it is not needed and fail to provide it when required. Battery technology has made few advances over the last four generations so we cannot store enough of the energy when we do not need it so we can release it when we do need it. We simply do not have the technology to make such inconsistent power sources reliable. Any legal diktat that puts these renewable sources first will only produce a prolonged economic dislocation.

2.

California’s largest county has banned the construction of large solar and wind farms on more than 1 million acres of private land, bending to the will of residents who say they don’t want renewable energy projects industrializing their rural desert communities northeast of Los Angeles.
Thursday’s 4-1 vote by San Bernardino County’s Board of Supervisors highlighted a challenge California could face as it seeks to eliminate the burning of planet-warming fossil fuels.
State lawmakers passed a bill last year requiring utility companies to get 60% of their electricity from renewable sources by 2030, and 100% from climate-friendly sources by 2045. But achieving those goals will require cooperation from local governments — and big solar and wind farms, like many infrastructure projects, are often unpopular at the local level.(lat)

3.

After a nine-hour meeting at which more than 100 people spoke, reports the Virginia Mercury, the Spotsylvania Board of Supervisors delayed a decision on whether a 500-megawatt solar facility will be built in the western part of the county.
A large majority of the hundreds of people packing the Spotsylvania County auditorium opposed the sPower project, which would be the largest east of the Rocky Mountains and would almost double the amount of solar energy Virginia is currently producing. The concerns expressed seem utterly without merit, but the raising of theoretical and groundless fears has been the hallmark of the environmentalists and now that technique seems to be turning against them.
Hundreds of Spotsylvania citizens have convinced themselves that the 6,000-acre solar farm with 1.8 million solar panels would pose a hazard to their community.
Despite nearly 6,00 pages of documentation on the project, says Virginia Mercury, citizens insist that questions remain about nearly every facet of the project from its effects on erosion, human health, economic viability, and impact on property values of people living nearby.
Cadmium was a particular target.
“This project, as planned, is much too close,” said Spotsylvania resident Pamela Rizzo, while Vivian Stanley, who said she represented “We the People,” characterized it as a “solar monster” that was a threat to the “lives and welfare” of the people of the Livingston district, where the facility would be located.
“How much poison does it take to cause cancer?” she asked the supervisors in the first of several impassioned speeches, alluding to sPower’s plans to use cadmium telluride panels for about 30 percent of its installation. The opposition has claimed that cadmium telluride poses a threat to human health if it leaches into water sources.
The fear of cadmium telluride seems especially misplaced. The chances of cadmium, a heavy metal, leaking into the groundwater are nil, even in the event of breakage or melting in a fire. Even if the panels were pulverized, sPower says, the cadmium would not leach. The only away for the cadmium to leach would be through “aggressive extraction” involving the crushing of panels into millimeter-scale pieces and agitating it in an acidic solution — a scenario that in no way mimics a real-world environment.
The fear of cadmium leaching is irrational. But the fear of heavy metal contamination of groundwater has been stoked by environmentalists, precedents have been set, so...now the whirlwind.
Insincerity, manipulation, lies--for whatever grand motive--once woven into the social and legal fabric, stay.

Lemeiux's Surveillance State

Lemeiux writing on the Surveillance State:
"It happens in China and, more particularly, in Xinjiang province, home of the Uighurs, an ethnic minority that also has the drawbacks of being Muslim and not especially enlightened. The indignity to which the Chinese state submits them are not more enlightened. The Uighurs can be tightly controlled because they are closely surveilled: ID cards tied to massive databases, constant video-surveillance and checkpoints, house-to-house inspections, a "convenience police station" for every square territory of 500 inhabitants (in the town of Hotan), government agents "adopted" by families, etc. This surveillance allows the authorities to rank individuals by degree of "trustworthiness," and to send to reeducation camps those deemed unreliable."

One could argue that democracies are different because there is a certain amount of consent of the surveilled involved.  Lemeiux counters that the West is being inured, like the famous boiling frog.

"Who ever thought that Americans would be, like mere Europeans, searched at "checkpoints," that many searches would be rechristened "inspections," or that border agents would have the right to search smartphones or other devices without a warrant, at the rate of 30,000 times a year (including searches of citizens' devices)? The NSA has been spying on millions of Americans. Until about 2010, according to Wall Street Journal data, the FBI had more DNA records than the Chinese government (which started later in the competition), although the collection is proceeding so fast in China that America doesn't "win" the race anymore; per capita, the two countries are now about equal."

And he points to the inevitable bureaucratic momentum that all democracies exhibit.

"Once in place, a high level of everyday surveillance, like a fixed cost, implies a low marginal cost of information; it makes control less costly and more tempting for the state. By the cost of control, I mean the resource and political costs of imposing new laws and regulations. When the cost of something decreases, its users want more. The more the state knows, the more controls in will enforce in the future."

AlphaZero

A few months after demonstrating its dominance over the game of Go, DeepMind’s AlphaZero AI has trounced the world’s top-ranked chess engine—and it did so without any prior knowledge of the game and after just four hours of self-training.

AlphaZero taught itself its first chess lesson. The quality of chess in game two was a just a tiny bit better than the first. Nine hours and 44 million games of split-personality chess later, AlphaZero had (very possibly) taught itself enough to become the greatest chess player, silicon- or carbon-based, of all time.

And a provocative generalization from Kissinger's article in The Atlantic:

"On its own, in just a few hours of self-play, [AlphaZero] achieved a level of skill that took human beings 1,500 years to attain. Only the basic rules of the game were provided to AlphaZero. Neither human beings nor human-generated data were part of its process of self-learning. If AlphaZero was able to achieve this mastery so rapidly, where will AI be in five years? What will be the impact on human cognition generally? What is the role of ethics in this process, which consists in essence of the acceleration of choices? . . .. . . The Enlightenment started with essentially philosophical insights spread by a new technology [printing]. Our period is moving in the opposite direction. It has generated a potentially dominating technology in search of a guiding philosophy."

EarthNow

A Bellevue, Washington startup called EarthNow announced plans to deliver real-time satellite video of almost anywhere on the planet.

This is a serious effort. Its investors include Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Japan’s Softbank Group, and European aircraft maker Airbus. Raising capital probably won’t be a problem. And they all will likely give interviews on the sanctity of personal privacy.
The company’s website lists some possible applications, all seemingly very useful:

• Catch illegal fishing ships in the act

• Watch hurricanes and typhoons as they evolve

• Detect forest fires the moment they start

• Watch volcanoes the instant they start to erupt

• Assist the media in telling stories from around the world

• Track large whales as they migrate

• Help “smart cities” become more efficient

• Assess the health of crops on demand

• Observe conflict zones and respond immediately when crises arise

• Instantly create “living” 3D models of a town or city, even in remote locations

• See your home as the astronauts see it—a "stunning blue marble in space"

Which all means: You can run, but you can't hide.

Kratom

The leaves of the herb kratom (Mitragyna speciosa), a native of Southeast Asia in the coffee family, are used locally to relieve pain and improve mood as an opiate substitute and stimulant. The herb is also combined with cough syrup to make a popular beverage in Thailand called “4x100.” Because of its psychoactive properties, however, kratom is illegal in Thailand, Australia, Myanmar (Burma) and Malaysia. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration lists kratom as a “drug of concern” because of its abuse potential, stating it has no legitimate medical use. The state of Indiana has banned kratom consumption outright.

Now, looking to control its population’s growing dependence on methamphetamines, Thailand is attempting to legalize kratom, which it had originally banned 70 years ago.

At the same time, researchers are studying kratom’s ability to help wean addicts from much stronger drugs, such as heroin and cocaine. Studies show that a compound found in the plant could even serve as the basis for an alternative to methadone in treating addictions to opioids. The moves are just the latest step in kratom’s strange journey from home-brewed stimulant to illegal painkiller to, possibly, a withdrawal-free treatment for opioid abuse.

Scientific American spoke with Edward Boyer, a professor of emergency medicine and director of medical toxicology at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. These are some of his comments:

Mitragynine—the isolated natural product in kratom leaves—binds to the same mu-opioid receptor as morphine, which explains why it treats pain. It’s got kappa-opioid receptor activity as well, and it’s also got adrenergic activity as well, so you stay alert throughout the day.
Some opioid medicinal chemists would suggest that kratom pharmacology might [reduce cravings for opioids] while at the same time providing pain relief. I don’t know how realistic that is in humans who take the drug, but that’s what some medicinal chemists would seem to suggest.
Kratom also has serotonergic activity, too—it binds with serotonin receptors. So if you want to treat depression, if you want to treat opioid pain, if you want to treat sleepiness, this [compound] really puts it all together.
In animal studies where rats were given mitragynine, those rats had no respiratory depression.
At least one pharma company [Smith, Kline & French, now part of GlaxoSmithKline] was looking at it in the 1960s, but something didn’t work for them. Either it wasn’t a strong enough analgesic or the solubility was bad or they didn’t have a drug delivery system for it.
I don’t know that there are studies showing animals will compulsively administer kratom, but I know that tolerance develops in animal models.