Day: August 18, 2023

AI In The Shadows

Remember back to last month when everything was AI this and AI that?

It seems to have lost its appeal in the last month….I guess everyone is embracing technology so they will not be left at the curb.

Now we have the Trump indictments and the armchair analysts talking smack….but they had better hurry for a new meme is just a social media post away.

That said let’s get back to AI and the evils of man.

On a June 1 YouTube podcast/video, “The Diary Of a CEO,” former Google officer Mo Gawdat highlighted the inevitability of AI’s emergence, not due to technological constraints, but because of humanity’s inability to trust each other. This observation sheds light on the complex dynamics surrounding the development and regulation of AI technologies.

The first inevitable aspect of AI, as described by the former Google officer, is its unstoppable nature. Despite efforts to regulate and control its progress, the race to develop AI capabilities will persist.

The second inevitable aspect lies in the potential intelligence of AI systems. Gawdat predicts that AI will be a staggering one billion times smarter than humans by 2045. This claim may seem astounding, but it aligns with the exponential growth and learning capacity of AI systems. Existing AI models, such as the GPT series, already possess a depth of knowledge surpassing that of any single human.

It is essential to understand the nature of AI’s intelligence. Gawdat highlighted AI’s intelligence is not original or creative in the traditional sense. Rather, AI’s strength lies in its ability to merge and predict information based on vast datasets. It can combine existing concepts in new and intriguing ways, mimicking the algorithm of creativity itself.

This remarkable ability to generate novel insights challenges our preconceived notions about human ingenuity and paves the way for AI-driven innovation.

The interview also touched on the potential implications of AI’s intelligence surpassing our own. As AI becomes increasingly capable, the need for certain human roles, even highly skilled ones, may diminish.

(benzinga.com)

You think the internet is a crazy place now….just wait AI will make it so much worse…..

Across platforms, users have been stumped by increasingly impossible puzzles like identifying objects — such as a horse made out of clouds — that do not exist.

The reason behind these new hoops? Improved AI. Since tech companies have trained their bots on the older captchas, these programs are now so capable that they can easily beat typical challenges. As a result, we humans have to put more effort into proving our humanness just to get online. But head-scratching captchas are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to how AI is rewriting the mechanics of the internet.

Since the arrival of ChatGPT last year, tech companies have raced to incorporate the AI tech behind it. In many cases, companies have uprooted their long-standing core products to do so. The ease of producing seemingly authoritative text and visuals with a click of a button threatens to erode the internet’s fragile institutions and make navigating the web a morass of confusion. As AI fever has taken hold of the web, researchers have unearthed how it can be weaponized to aggravate some of the internet’s most pressing concerns — like misinformation and privacy — while also making the simple day-to-day experience of being online — from deleting spam to just logging into sites — more annoying than it already is.

“Not to say that our inability to rein AI in will lead to the collapse of society,” Christian Selig, the creator of Apollo, a popular Reddit app, told me, “but I think it certainly has the potential to profoundly affect the internet.”

And so far, AI is making the internet a nightmare.

https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-scam-spam-hacking-ruining-internet-chatgpt-privacy-misinformation-2023-8

Just how much worse can AI make the internet and/or social media?

Finally, Google’s lead AI guy has this to say….

Another day, another Silicon Valley AI exec straddling the contradictory gap between AI optimism and AI doomsay.

James Manyika, a former technological advisor to the Obama administration and Google’s freshly-appointed head of “tech and society,” told The Washington Post that AI is “an amazing, powerful, transformational technology.”

But, like others in the field — take OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Silicon Valley’s reigning king of cognitive dissonance, for instance — he also voiced some serious concerns.

Manyika was one of the many AI insiders who, back in May, signed a one-sentence letter declaring that “mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”

https://futurism.com/the-byte/google-lead-ai-amazing-kills-us

Got any thoughts about any of these points?

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Presidential Scandals

With the media jumping through hoops to get the ‘skinny’ on the newest indictment of Trump I thought I would drop a little history on my readers.

How many know what Watergate was about? Or the Teapot Dome for that matter.

There have been some real nut cracker scandals in our relatively short history…..Trump is not the first to visit outside the law…..so to speak…..

Let’s begin our journey with Andrew Johnson….

Johnson was the first US president ever impeached by the House of Representatives.

“He was impeached in 1868 for dismissing Secretary of War Edwin Stanton without the approval of the Senate as required … and for attacking congressional policies on the Reconstruction in the South” after the US Civil War, according to the Library of Congress.

Johnson had vetoed legislation “to protect the rights of those who had been freed from slavery”.

Then there was Ulysses S. Grant the first president ever arrested…..

Grant was the first-ever sitting US president to be arrested, according to US media reports.

In 1872, Grant was pulled over for speeding in a horse-drawn carriage in Washington, DC and issued a warning. The next day, he was caught speeding again and arrested.

Grant was let out on bail and continued serving as president.

Next presidential scandal was Harding and Teapot Dome…..

The Teapot Dome scandal of the mid-1920s involved the secret leasing of federal oil reserves at Elk Hills in California and Teapot Dome, Wyoming, to oil tycoons by Harding’s interior secretary.

While Harding was not personally involved in the affair, he faced criticism for failing to expose corruption.

Some historians have referred to Harding as the least capable president.

The next big time scandal was Watergate…..

Watergate was one of the biggest political scandals in US history.

The scandal began with a botched 1972 burglary at the Democratic National Committee’s (DNC’s) office in the Watergate complex in Washington, DC. It drew little immediate attention, but ended two years later with the first and only resignation of a president.

The tale began with G Gordon Liddy, a former FBI agent who worked for Nixon’s re-election campaign. Liddy got $250,000 to implement a plan of dirty tricks and espionage that included late-night forays to install telephone bugs at the DNC office and scour the party’s files for useful information.

Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein later reported on the president’s connection to the events.

Nixon stepped down in 1974, and his successor, President Gerald Ford, gave him a full pardon for any crimes committed.

Who was the only president not elected by the people of this country?

My favorite scandal…..Iran-Contra…..

The Iran-Contra affair was one of the biggest political scandals during the Cold War and threatened to bring down Reagan’s presidency.

In 1985, Reagan authorised a secret plan to sell antitank and antiaircraft missiles to Iran in exchange for releasing Americans who had been abducted by Iranian-backed armed fighters in Lebanon. The move was contrary to the government’s public policy of refusing to negotiate with “terrorists”.

When news of the deal broke, it was revealed that part of the money earned from the arms sales had been used to circumvent congressional restrictions and buy weapons and supplies for the Contras, a right-wing rebel group in Nicaragua.

Under public and media pressure, a congressional commission investigated the incident and determined that “Reagan’s lack of oversight enabled those working under him to divert the funds to the Contras”. Some members of the Reagan administration were charged, but Reagan was not.

Reagan got some lackeys to accept jail instead of him.

On to the biggest scandal of the 1990s…..a White House blow job…..

Clinton was impeached for perjury and obstruction of justice in the House of Representatives for lying under oath to a federal grand jury on sexual harassment allegations.

The process was linked to a civil lawsuit filed against Clinton by Paula Jones, who had accused him of sexual harassment in an incident that she said occurred before Clinton became president.

During a deposition in that case, Clinton denied having an affair with Monica Lewinsky, a 21-year-old White House intern. He later admitted to lying under oath.

A simplistic look at presidential scandals from our past with help from AJE…..and now…..

We have the antics of a former president Trump to light our fire of indifference.

I do love some history!

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”