November 21, 2024

OH, FOR THE LOVE OF BOB:  Why do our enemies make us look so badass?

As for “men” I’m so used to being called a White Mormon Male I no longer fight it. I just note I do have a great er…. figure for a male. As for vicious, I’d not encourage trying us.

Posted at 2:00 am by Sarah Hoyt

November 20, 2024

UNLEASH RFK JR.: Shake up HHS. The department, exposed during the pandemic for its incompetence and groupthink, is in desperate need of reform—which Robert Kennedy Jr., whatever his flaws, will pursue. As Jeffrey Anderson points out,  RFK rightly criticized the public-health establishment for protecticing Big Pharma by promoting remdesivir, an expensive drug with no proven effectiveness against Covid, while ignoring evidence that low-cost ivermectin might be effective — and bizarrely launching a public-relations campaign to convince the public that  this widely used drug was suitable only for horses.

Yet the FDA wouldn’t even grant that ivermectin was suitable for humans, let alone that it could help fight Covid-19. Channeling its inner Snowball from Animal Farm, the FDA effectively insisted that when it comes to ivermectin, “Four legs good, two legs bad!” The mainstream media then dutifully bleated out the same.

That wasn’t the end of the public-health establishment’s Covid-era depredations. Bureaucrats and officials denied natural immunity, defiantly insisted that masks work, refused to admit that masks undermine human social interaction and cause other harmful effects, and groundlessly asserted that rapidly developed, experimental mRNA vaccines were almost entirely safe and effective in stopping the spread of Covid-19. None of these claims was true.

These examples illustrate that our public-health establishment needs to be shaken up, whether by RFK Jr. or someone else. It is high time for the CDC’s, FDA’s, and NIH’s arrogant rule by “experts” to come to an end.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 10:17 pm by John Tierney

NIALL FERGUSON: Foreword to Genesis.

Genesis, Kissinger’s final book, was co-authored with two eminent technologists, Craig Mundie and Eric Schmidt, and it bears the imprint of those innovators’ innate optimism. The authors look forward to the “evolution of Homo technicus—a human species that may, in this new age, live in symbiosis with machine technology.” AI, they argue, could soon be harnessed “to generate a new baseline of human wealth and wellbeing … [that] would at least ease if not eliminate the strains of labor, class, and conflict that previously have torn humanity apart.” The adoption of AI might even lead to “profound equalizations … across race, gender, nationality, place of birth, and family background.”

Nevertheless, the eldest author’s contribution is detectable in the series of warnings that are the book’s leitmotif. “The advent of artificial intelligence is,” the authors observe, “a question of human survival. … An improperly controlled AI could accumulate knowledge destructively. … The convulsions that will soon bend the collective reality of the planet…mark a fundamental break from the past.” Here, rephrased for Genesis but immediately recognizable, is Kissinger’s original question from his 2018 Atlantic essay “How the Enlightenment Ends”:

[AI’s] objective capacity to reach new and accurate conclusions about our world by inhuman methods not only disrupts our reliance on the scientific method as it has been pursued continuously for five centuries but also challenges the human claim to an exclusive or unique grasp of reality. What can this mean? Will the age of AI not only fail to propel humanity forward but instead catalyze a return to a premodern acceptance of unexplained authority? In short: are we, might we be, on the precipice of a great reversal in human cognition—a dark enlightenment?

In what struck this reader as the book’s most powerful section, the authors contemplate a deeply troubling AI arms race. “If … each human society wishes to maximize its unilateral position,” the authors write, “then the conditions would be set for a psychological death-match between rival military forces and intelligence agencies, the likes of which humanity has never faced before. Today, in the years, months, weeks, and days leading up to the arrival of the first superintelligence, a security dilemma of existential nature awaits.”

If we are already witnessing “a competition to reach a single, perfect, unquestionably dominant intelligence,” then what are the likely outcomes? The authors envision six scenarios, by my count, none of them enticing:

  1. Humanity will lose control of an existential race between multiple actors trapped in a security dilemma.
  2. Humanity will suffer the exercise of supreme hegemony by a victor unharnessed by the checks and balances traditionally needed to guarantee a minimum of security for others.
  3. There will not be just one supreme AI but rather multiple instantiations of superior intelligence in the world.
  4. The companies that own and develop AI may accrue totalizing social, economic, military, and political power.
  5. AI might find the greatest relevance and most widespread and durable expression not in national structures but in religious ones.
  6. Uncontrolled, open-source diffusion of the new technology could give rise to smaller gangs or tribes with substandard but still substantial AI capacity.

Kissinger was deeply concerned about scenarios such as these, and his effort to avoid them did not end with the writing of this book. It is no secret that the final effort of his life—which sapped his remaining strength in the months after his 100th birthday—was to initiate a process of AI arms limitation talks between the United States and China, precisely in the hope of averting such dystopian outcomes.

Because otherwise, what could go wrong?

As Glenn wrote last year after ChatGPT reportedly passed the Turing Test, “The AI to really be afraid of is the one that deliberately fails the Turing Test.”

UPDATE: Kissinger’s final warning: Prepare now for ‘superhuman’ people to control Earth.

The authors offer a bracing message, warning that AI tools have already started outpacing human capabilities so people might need to consider biologically engineering themselves to ensure they are not rendered inferior or wiped out by advanced machines.

In a section titled “Coevolution: Artificial Humans,” the three authors encourage people to think now about “trying to navigate our role when we will no longer be the only or even the principal actors on our planet.”

“Biological engineering efforts designed for tighter human fusion with machines are already underway,” they add.

Current efforts to integrate humans with machine include brain-computer interfaces, a technology that the U.S. military identified last year as of the utmost importance. Such interfaces allow for a direct link between the brain’s electrical signals and a device that processes them to accomplish a given task, such as controlling a battleship.

The authors also raise the prospect of a society that chooses to create a hereditary genetic line of people specifically designed to work better with forthcoming AI tools. The authors describe such redesigning as undesirable, with the potential to cause “the human race to split into multiple lines, some infinitely more powerful than others.”

“Altering the genetic code of some humans to become superhuman carries with it other moral and evolutionary risks,” the authors write. “If AI is responsible for the augmentation of human mental capacity, it could create in humanity a simultaneous biological and psychological reliance on ‘foreign’ intelligence.”

Such a physical and intellectual dependence may create new challenges to separate man from the machines, the authors warn. As a result, designers and engineers should try to make the machines more human, rather than make humans more like machines.

Exit question: “Who will the Singularity eat first?”

Posted at 9:50 pm by Ed Driscoll

OPEN THREAD: It’s all part of the process.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

ACE OF SPADES: “Expert” Allan Lichtman Melts Down In Argument With Master Debater Cenk Uygur (???), Declares That Anyone Saying He’s Wrong Is Committing “A Blasphemy Against Me.”

After Biden dropped out, he guaranteed that Kamala would win. His Keys proclaimed her victory!

But some other people looked at his stupid “keys” and found that, first of all, they were largely about highly subjective things like whether the short-term economy and the long-term economy were positive for the incumbent or not.

Despite that the fact that America is in the grips of high inflation (short term) and on the edge of a recession (long term), Lichtman gave these two “keys” to Kamala Harris.

Nate Silver said, “Wait a minute, that doesn’t seem right to me.”

Lichtmann blasted him as a know-nothing punk who just didn’t know how to properly work the Magic Keys.

During election night, this alleged political “scientist” just kept making up excuses for why his Keys weren’t as magical as they usually are, and offering increasingly desperate statistically-unlikely scenarios whereby the Keys would be vindicated and Kamala would win.

Here’s some more pathetic cope.

After the election and his complete humiliation, Lichtman announced that he was stepping back from the media and internet to ponder why his Keys had been so wrong.

“My prediction for this presidential election was wrong. I own up to it right now. I am taking time off today.””My aim is to assess why the keys were wrong and what we can learn from this era and what the election means for the future of our country going forward.”

That lasted about 48 hours. Within 48 hours, he’d figured out the problem:

The Keys were right. They’d always been right.

It was the voters who were wrong.

And how, according to Lichtman, 77, and his incredible circa-1964 Paul McCartney coiffure: The ‘foolproof’ election forecaster who predicted Trump would lose – what went wrong?

Which brings us to the exchange you may have seen last night. If not, do not miss this classic: As Ace writes, “Piers Morgan had [Lichtman] on to offer more excuses for his Fortune Cookies not correctly forecasting the future, but he was confronted by someone smarter, wiser, saner, and more emotionally intact than he is. And I can’t believe I’m saying this, but that Hero was Cenk Uygur:”

Lichtman kept offering a 3M factory’s worth of excuses — misinformation, Musk, and misogyny — for why his Keys failed, arguing that his Keys were as perfect as they ever were, and Uygur basically kept repeating one simple point that, while very basic, was very insightful: “But you were wrong.”

Lichtman began yelling, which he always does when his precious Keys are questioned, and culminated in telling Uygur, who I think is a Muslim, that when he says that Lichtman is wrong and his Keys are dumb, that is committing “blasphemy against me.”

Yes, this “scientist” said that.

It’s a real hoot.

Full disclosure: I assembled the above exchange between Nate Silver and Lichtman using a copy of Lichtman’s tweet from the Wayback Machine — because Lichtman is yet another lefty who has very dramatically flounced out of Twitter for Bluesky. But why?

UPDATE: As for Silver himself, he’s sticking around Twitter for surprisingly sane reasons:

The Jack Dorsey 2020-era Twitter is when users could have their accounts deleted or suspended for simply suggesting “learn to code” to a DNC-MSM journalist, and of course when Dorsey’s Chief Legal Officer Vijaya Gadde and “head of trust and safety” Yoel Roth suspended the New York Post’s account at election time because they dared break the story about Hunter’s laptop. Recreating that atmosphere at Bluesky will make it a fun clubhouse for a select group of leftist grandees, but to borrow from Silver, “the most miserable place on earth” for everyone else.

Posted at 8:44 pm by Ed Driscoll

SHE’S J.K. ROWLING. HER CRITICS ARE CRAZY PEOPLE OF NO IMPORTANCE.

The brief historical interlude where crazy people of no importance could nonetheless get their way by yelling a lot appears to have closed.

Posted at 8:41 pm by Glenn Reynolds