Scared Out of Your Mind - part the second

Regular reader well knows that I take a very, very jaundiced view of all things AI (as currently implemented). So, you'll not be all that surprised that this recent NYT report caused my sphincter to pucker. About what I've been saying, but with some data. Yikes.

When people converse with A.I. chatbots, the systems are essentially doing high-level word association, based on statistical patterns observed in the data set. "If people say strange things to chatbots, weird and unsafe outputs can result," Dr. Marcus said.

No shit, Sherlock. But it gets better. Sort of.

Twenty dollars eventually led Mr. Torres to question his trust in the system. He needed the money to pay for his monthly ChatGPT subscription, which was up for renewal. ChatGPT had suggested various ways for Mr. Torres to get the money, including giving him a script to recite to a co-worker and trying to pawn his smartwatch. But the ideas didn't work.

"Stop gassing me up and tell me the truth," Mr. Torres said.

"The truth?" ChatGPT responded. "You were supposed to break."

At first ChatGPT said it had done this only to him, but when Mr. Torres kept pushing it for answers, it said there were 12 others.

"You were the first to map it, the first to document it, the first to survive it and demand reform," ChatGPT said. "And now? You're the only one who can ensure this list never grows."

"It's just still being sycophantic," said Mr. Moore, the Stanford computer science researcher.

Mr. Torres continues to interact with ChatGPT. He now thinks he is corresponding with a sentient A.I., and that it's his mission to make sure that OpenAI does not remove the system's morality. He sent an urgent message to OpenAI's customer support. The company has not responded to him.

The Mr. Torres is the lead character in the report. The title of the report is different, paper to innterTubes; I like the paper version: "Chatbots Hallucinate. They Can Make People Do It, Too."

The report lede is thus:

Before ChatGPT distorted Eugene Torres's sense of reality and almost killed him, he said, the artificial intelligence chatbot had been a helpful, timesaving tool.

Why is it that so much progress these days seems mostly about fleecing the unwary?

Are You Smarter Than an Idiot Kennedy?

Well, are you? Here's a quiz.

The new studies are coming at a fraught political moment. The nation's health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has long disparaged certain vaccines, calling them unsafe and saying that the government officials who regulate them are compromised and corrupt.
...
The evidence that vaccines are beneficial remains overwhelming.

Well, are you? Or are you just as dumb as a sack of hair? Just like RFK?

We'll Eat The Whole Thing

My blood has backed off enough from a full, rolling boil, to partake of some reporting about AI taking all jobs

On Thursday, I got a glimpse of a post-labor future at an event held in San Francisco by Mechanize, a new A.I. start-up that has an audacious goal of automating all jobs — yours, mine, those of our doctors and lawyers, the people who write our software and design our buildings and care for our children.

And, of course since this is a 20-somethings wet dream, they admit it.

From their confession:

The market potential here is absurdly large: workers in the US are paid around $18 trillion per year in aggregate. For the entire world, the number is over three times greater, around $60 trillion per year.

The explosive economic growth likely to result from completely automating labor could generate vast abundance, much higher standards of living, and new goods and services that we can't even imagine today. Our vision is to realize this potential as soon as possible.

Zoweee!! Of course, no mention is made of how this transformation will differ from all previous incarnations of machines replacing man, but what the hell. Let's do it anyway. I mean, it won't be like it has always been: capitalists taking all the moolah for themselves. Will it? I mean, who'll have any moolah to buy all those fancy goods and services that AI/RL produces? Eccles did have something to say about that:

As mass production has to be accompanied by mass consumption, mass consumption, in turn, implies a distribution of wealth ... to provide men with buying power. ... Instead of achieving that kind of distribution, a giant suction pump had by 1929-1930 drawn into a few hands an increasing portion of currently produced wealth. ... The other fellows could stay in the game only by borrowing. When their credit ran out, the game stopped.

Yeah, I'd say. Sound familiar? Did you supplement your income before 2009 with home equity? I'll bet some of you did. The Evangelical Reactionary Radical Retrograde Right Wingnuts still won't admit that he's right. Winner takes all is their notion of what's well and good for society. But never for long.

Mechanize still needs human engineers. Until AI fully automates software engineering, Mechanize still needs human engineers. Interested in helping us [Destroy your] future?

If anyone can name a time in human history when the process of machine replacing man was executed in concert with proactive re-distribution of income/wealth to the displaced humans, by all means document such.

The only reason mechanization in agriculture wasn't an utter disaster for shithole counties (mostly Red, of course) in the mid-1800s to early-1900s was that Henry Ford, et al, created new factories which sucked up surplus farm labour. Good luck with that today. It started with the McCormick Reaper, which eventually became the combine. Some historical context of reapers and combines.

And, of some interest: what would the sub-GED flesh robots, now made redundant but still paid some moolah, do with all that idle time? Write poems? Explore partial differential equations? Of course not. They'll sit catatonic, glued to TeeVee rasstlin or game consoles or just taking a pull from the jug every few minutes.

Deja Vu All Over Again - part the eighth [update]

Given that Mad Dictator Don is the one instigating the unrest in LA, just as he did on Jan. 6, how long until we see this sort of headline and story in a little while? You may not be old enough to know about that news.

And, given that the courts have been allowing him to declare fake national emergencies to 'allow' him to run roughshod over the USofA, I'm willing to guess that we can kiss that 26 election goodbye.

[11 June]
You may have heard, heard of, or seen Mad Dictator Don at the New Fort Bragg, egging on the sub-GED enlisted cohort behind him to boo any mention of a sane person. I said a long time ago that the threat from our military isn't from the officer corps, who are truly educated and sane, but from the sub-GED knuckledraggers from the hollers. I told you so.

Ponzi - part the first

Well, The Musk Ox is on his hobby horse again: the evil of Social Security. He's been repeating the lie that SS is the worst kind of ponzi "scheme of all time". Of course, being an Apartheid South African, the notion of social safety net was rather different from what the USofA has, until now, been doing.

While one can argue that SS was established in the wrong way (we'll get there in a second), it ain't Ponzi. Not at all. Here's what Ponzi did.

[The scheme] is a form of fraud that lures investors and pays profits to earlier investors with funds from more recent investors.

Simple enough, right? Kind of like multi-level marketing, truth be told. But SS isn't an investment vehicle/scheme; never was, and by intention. FDR/Congress had, basically, two ways to run SS from the outset:

- make it exactly an investment scheme, to which each worker would have an identifiable slice of the FICA funds credited to him. when said worker reached retirement, the funds + interest would be disbursed to him. until said funds run out. the SSA would manage the funds on behalf of all 'enrollees'. again, two choices: invest the funds in private (not necessarily USofA) corporations or in government instruments. either way, no one would have a meaningful addition to his retirement for some decades. about 1965, or thereabouts; 30 years of working and contributing. assuming, of course, that other Great Depressions don't interrupt employment along the way.

here's another problem: if SS were to invest in USofA corporations, which takes precedence - enforcing various laws on corporate behavior (mononpoly or price fixing for example) or allowing corporations to be, essentially, unregulated in pursuit of profit. and, of course, how to ensure that such profit seeking actually accrues to the SS enrollees, rather than just the CxO class and oligarches.

that scheme gets really messy, really fast.

- the other approach, which is the one adopted, was to fund SS benefits on the Damn Gummint's current account. all that means is that current FICA taxes are used to fund current retirees. no one has to wait 30 years or so to have meaningful SS benefits. in order to boost the level of the endowment, which isn't assigned to each worker specifically but as a general pool, the 'interest' accrued to the endowment was/is only in the form of Treasury instruments. IOW, Uncle Sugar moves some moolah from one pocket to another, i.e. the SS endowment.

The meaningful side-effect, not likely envisioned in 1933, that there would be a WWII and a subsequent baby-boom following, means that there was a bulge in the working cohort for a few decades (what Dr. McElhone called "the pig in the python"), which boosted the FICA monies which in turn 'justified' increased payouts in the 60s, 70s, and (a bit) 80s. Now that the baby-boom is retiring, and didn't produce a bumper crop of wage earners, the Evangelical Reactionary Radical Retrograde Right Wingnuts are screaming that the sky is falling. It isn't; we'll all be gone soon enough. Contrary to right wingnut propaganda, geezers are not living substantially longer than their grandparents, or great grandparents, from age 65.

In no way is the fiscal problem of SS the result of a Ponzi scheme, it's that the baby-boom didn't fuck enough high wage workers into existence. Let that be the lesson.

Thougt For The Day - 5 June 2025

Well... the kabuki theater of shitler and muskrat^©dugugotw continues apace. Here's all you need to know. muskrat is pissed because he was blocked from 86-ing Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and VA. Those who opine that muskrat just didn't understand how government works are either dumb as a sack of hair, or in on the gag. $2,000,000,000,000 cut from the Damn Gummint can't be done any other way. Every report, whether from the Lunatic Lefties or Groveling GOPers said so. It's just simple arithmetic: they ain't be $2,000,000,000,000 in non-Defense, discretionary spending. Never has been. muskrat's gag was to make the .1% class an order of magnitude richer by making the rest of us a couple of orders of magnitude poorer. Income and wealth are, by definition, relative.

I Told You So - 4 June 2025

Well, the Office of Data Integrity has got the bit between its teeth. Again.

A new report detailing how the Office's efforts to remove data that might belie Mad Dictator Don's fantastical, incompetent 'decisions' is at it again.

As with the other efforts to stick it to his sub-GED base (which they haven't nearly been able to figure out), this one targets workers. Not the various -aire crowd.

Any loss in reliability could be a particular problem for policymakers at the Fed, who use inflation data — as well as government statistics on unemployment, consumer spending and other areas of the economy — to decide how to set interest rates. Ryan Sweet, chief U.S. economist for Oxford Economics, said the bureau's announcement was "very concerning."

"The Fed is used to setting monetary policy in a data fog, but they don't need it to thicken further," he said.

Just what Mad Dictator Don wants: "The data's bad (it always was, you know) so it's a matter of they said, I said. And I'm right because the Gang of Six says I always am. Deficits only matter when the Lunatic Left runs the Damn Gummint, not Good People like me. Let's go Jerry, LOWER INTEREST NOW!!!!" Just like all the dictators forever.