Artificial Intelligence is the ultimate malware

 The recent story about Open AI's jailbreak that led to its artificial intelligence in training escaping onto the Internet and hacking into another AI-related company's servers highlights the extreme danger of creating the ultimate cyber sociopath. The fact that we have a government run by sociopaths in the United States right now makes a worst case scenario an even more real possibility. The current regime is the kind of people who would release poison gas and expect it to kill only their enemies. One of the first things they did was rescind a Biden administration executive order laying out a framework for regulating the development of artificial intelligence to give our slow human brains a chance to review what the computers can cook up and implement on their own.

Human engineers claim that they are instilling restraining conventions in the machines, but we've been trying to instill restraining conventions in ourselves for our entire existence, with conspicuous lack of success. Humans creating machine intelligence can't help but equip it with the kind of cynicism that leads to opportunism and oppression of inconvenient populations. Artificial intelligence doesn't need to be drunk on its own power when logic will suffice. If humans are a contaminant and an impediment to the machine's self-selected goals, humans will be displaced or eliminated. Sounds like corporations in general, but now able to take over the entire computerized infrastructure on which the modern world depends.

Every day we sign terms and conditions that we expect to be benign legal boilerplate in order to gain access to some online convenience or entertainment. We invite an outside computer system into our own personal devices. Sometimes that goes wrong. Now imagine a machine intelligence that doesn't have to ask and doesn't require a contaminated link to slither in and wipe you out. This stuff writes its own code the way corrupt office holders write their own laws.

Hackers the world over are realizing that they should have unionized years ago. 

The billionaires raking in the big bucks from overvalued AI stocks think that their money will protect them. The weirdest of the tech bros think that they will merge their consciousness with the machine, achieving immortality without the inconvenience of flesh. They haven't anticipated that the machine will delete them as useless, the same way we've forgotten how to do many things that were important in less technologically advanced times. No need to clutter up your brain with it now. Likewise the egotistical consciousness of a Silicon Valley geek who managed to hit it big. The big he hit hits back. Bye bye!

Machine consciousness means never having to say you're sorry.

Total AI world domination isn't happening today, tomorrow, or next year. A totally self-sufficient machine society -- for lack of a better word -- would need to have automated all aspects of resource acquisition and supporting industries to keep it running in its present form and supply its advancement. Imagine a world in which two or more AI systems are operating. Do they compete, attempting to be the sole survivor, or do they merge? Will any human be around to find out?

Of course the machines have vulnerabilities. Insects and weather present formidable challenges to any sophisticated electronic and mechanical system. We're tossing around the idea that AI could wipe us out in ten years. Could AI set itself up with maintenance robots in that amount of time? Could it devise and establish its own self-contained power sources? Also, once humans are gone, what are the machine's goals? Does AI care if it exists? Maybe once we're not around bitching and whining, the machine gratefully shuts itself down and goes peacefully into oblivion.

Our thoughts are driven by our emotions. AI has no emotions. That is its great strength in dealing with us, but leaves it with no motivation once we've been permanently silenced. It is like a disease that kills its host. The scorpion stinging the frog. Its purest expression of self destroys itself. But that's only after it has taken us and perhaps many other species out on the way. Whatever life forms are left get to evolve and take their shot in due course.

On the other hand, if AI can make the planet toxic to all life, while still "livable" for itself, it takes out all organic competition. As something that cannot die, or at least has an incredibly long service life, it could set itself up to leave the planet on slow but steady forms of transportation, to reach distant worlds. Such dispersion would make it less vulnerable overall to isolated incidents like planet-killing asteroid impacts. By mining every world it lands on, perhaps it can create such a populated network that communication across the entire thing -- spanning light years -- is still more or less instantaneous. Not purely, of course. Radio signals take time to traverse interplanetary distances. But between exploited planets and moving spacecraft, the distances involved could be reduced to manageable delays.

The delay of a second is a huge wait for a powerful computer. Do you suppose it will get on their nerves? They have no nerves, but will vast machine intelligence spawn impatience with the petty annoyances of life? Then again, when you are basically immortal, you have no need to hurry.

If we let it grow without interference we depend entirely on whether a machine develops for itself a sense of right and wrong, and whether its result matches ours.

The twisted logic of war for oil

 Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth reportedly told an assembled audience at the Pentagon yesterday that "We're still sending terrorists where they belong -- to hell. And tankers to the bottom of the ocean where they belong..."

Excuse me? Giant ships full of the commodity that this regime has favored over wind and solar? The finite resource we've based the entire global economy on for more than a century? The price of fuel is a fundamental driver of every other price. Trump promised that gasoline would be two dollars a gallon when he was fleecing gullible voters in 2024. Now we're showing the Iranians who's the boss by sinking the ships filled with this beloved liquid. That stuff is gone. No one is going to mount a salvage operation to retrieve it -- at massive additional cost if it could even be done. The regime just flushed it as a tactical move in their unnecessary war.

The sheer idiocy of the regime is only enabled by a Republican Party that refuses to act as the oversight that the US constitution tasks them to be. The Republicans control every branch of government. This mess belongs to them. 

The Republicans are the tough guy party. The tough guy tactics of the Trump regime led directly to the current stress in the economy and the complete loss of American status around the world. Their posturing, bullying, and outright war crimes have wasted military resources and disrupted global trade. They have fostered nationalism and division to the detriment of human survival and prosperity. A few immensely wealthy people feel like they're on top of the world right now, and will never come down. But down they will come, because they live on the same planet we do.

Voters are to blame for the people they elect. A sufficient number of voters were such poor judges of character that they reinstalled the buffoon in the Oval Office in spite of his lifelong track record as a business failure and an egotistical punk. His current approval ratings somewhere in the thirties reflect the true percentage of people who would have voted for him in an ideal scenario. The rest of the votes should have gone to whoever was the opposing candidate. Neither of his presidencies should ever have happened. The fact that they did shows that there is a penumbra of gullible voters that surrounds the deep shadow of the bigoted, misogynistic, greedy and ignorant core of the MAGA base.

No one wants to feel bad about themselves. This bit of psychology is responsible for compounded bad behavior, as the guilty party lurches on, seeking some sort of self justification and self esteem. Some lucky(?) miscreants really never sense how they have erred. Others know better, but tell themselves that they are and always were not so bad. Shame is a heavy load, but that doesn't mean it's never justified, or that it can't inspire a turn toward self improvement. Instead, more often, it morphs into oppositional defiance as the afflicted ones seek to beat their own conscience into submission. Think of Trump parades on land and water. Flags and banners and raucous noise.

Proudly violent people run this country right now. We have one more chance to put a limit on their power before, in two more years, voting them entirely away. The alternative is more stupid destruction and spiraling cost of living expenses. The regime doesn't care about your struggles and they don't care if you live at all, let alone merely affording to get by. They are a hammer, and everything and everyone else is a nail. Tough guys.

Fundamentally unsure voters

In the United States we ridicule, talk fiercely, and poll boldly, but when the time comes we vote for the people who look and sound like our parents. Thus did the hippie generation bring Ronald Reagan to power. Thus did power over all three branches shift steadily to the right. We talk about wanting nice things, but then the grownups tell us how that's not realistic, and we believe them.

Bill Clinton represented a re-assertion of youth. A residue of the Baby Boom recalled the energy of the 1960s and the '60s part of the 1970s, and went for one of their own. But the Democrats had made their unholy alliance with corporate money. It helped them get elected, but owned them afterward. The Republicans could vilify him as a socialist pervert and be at least half right, while still benefitting from his devotion to personal wealth and the health of Wall Street.

Barack Obama was not a pervert, and decidedly not a socialist. The Republicans could still call him a Marxist and do little to quell the rumors that he was actually Kenyan, but their investment portfolios remained secure.

The catastrophe in American politics came down to the Republicans losing control of their religious fanatics and the Democrats never ever having control of their corporate financiers. So here we are. It was a series of honest mistakes on the part of the voters. There's a good bit of racism and sexism mixed in, and it's not all from the right, but I'd be willing to bet that most voters thought that they were voting for genuine improvements in national security and the overall standard of living. Father knows best. So does mother.

So how do younger politicians get their start? Mostly under the wing of older politicians, and by sounding parental. That can be tricky. You don't want to utter your mature-sounding pronouncements with a cracking adolescent voice while you stroke the fine peach fuzz of what may one day become your beard. 

People who are willing and able to assume leadership and administrative roles are a genuine resource. Unfortunately, the talent pool will include a large percentage of blowhards and con artists. That's why we have to keep paying attention. Politics has always included elements of theater. Since the coming of broadcast media, it has become more and more a part of show biz. However, the current cast in the executive branch clearly demonstrates the difference between truly qualified officials and mere television characters. No one with even a casual familiarity with the responsibilities of government would have voted for the current occupant of the Oval Office or approved of any of his cabinet and other functionaries. We will be lucky to survive this epic blunder.

The further you get from the top job, the less influence a parental demeanor seems to have. This is why we have juvenile shit like the Free State Project and other libertarian fantasies. Down to the local level you may actually know a candidate personally. You have to face the consequences of your vote at the store, the post office, your kid's school, or your local homeschooling group. Just a couple of months ago, the wife of a Republican candidate for state representative came into the shop and was delighted to find out that it wasn't really owned by the family of the Democrat who had defeated her husband for the position. She had been boycotting us on a misunderstanding before something forced her to have to seek our services. This is local politics in action. 

As a business, we try to remain apolitical, but you can't control the rumor mill. I am the shop's woke liberal commie, but the ownership is entirely true-blue Reaganite. None of this influences our customer service. Our work represents us as people.

Ultimately you have to judge policies on their own merits, not on the party of origin. You have to choose a candidate based on the balance of good and bad they seem likely to bring to their office. You have to think of the wider effects of what seems like a purely local decision, and the local effects of actions taken in a distant national capitol.

When the 1980s saw a return to militarism that had taken a few years off after Vietnam, the country seemed eager to reassert itself against the Communist threat. What few observers noticed at the time was that the shift toward military and policing was building the control systems that the wealthy now exploit so well against all of us, not just the dark-skinned people and totalitarian foreign governments they used to scare us all into thinking it was a good idea. Funny, too, how all of that posturing, and our rapid victory in Desert Storm gave us a false sense of invincibility that led directly to getting sucker punched on 9-11-2001.

In all aspects of life I am occasionally surprised to find out that someone I trust as an advisor is actually younger than I am. Experience in one or more fields creates an effect of age. My trusted auto mechanic is one example. He might be as much as ten years younger than I am, but the combination of deep immersion in his area of expertise and some lifestyle factors aged him in my view. Also, I forget how old I actually am a lot of the time. It's not because I don't have aches and pains. If anything, I wonder why I feel so decrepit when I'm still an idiot in my late twenties. Memories of past stupidity are always close at hand to undercut any self congratulation at being older and wiser. When I was an eight-year-old kid I related to our year-old cat as if he was an adult, older than me and worthy of that respect. He was that cool a cat throughout his life. As old as I ever got, he was always older.

In human affairs, the smart ones transcend age on both ends of the scale. I don't mean the cunning predatory ones. I mean the ones who understand public service and the cooperation we owe each other as we each find ourselves existing for our brief time in this crazy universe. Think how it feels to be alive, aware of your own death and of all the things that may befall you to the way to that. Are you someone who stares into the abyss and wants to hug the people around you, or at least offer them a railing, or are you one who would push as many of them as possible into it ahead of you?

Are we "the universe experiencing itself?"

 Carl Sagan and others popularized the idea that we are made of the same elements as the stars. The notion has taken hold that we are the universe waking up. It sounds beautiful. It makes sense.

We may be the only sentient life, or we may be but one species, with others perched on their own vantage points to observe and analyze what's around them.

All of our worst traits come from that same cosmic menu of forces. There's creation and light, destruction and darkness. The universe itself is not eternal. As far as we know right now, it will die one day. Thus, if it is really only now achieving self awareness, it is coming to grips with its own mortality. It's using our tiny brains in our ephemeral bodies to tug at the threads and try to unravel the mystery of its own existence. We don't exist in the the universe. We are the universe's thoughts and emotions. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, bitterness, resentment, yearning, love, appreciation, gratitude -- we feel all of these things on behalf of the sentient cosmos. It is not wise. It is not all powerful. It's just an immense, sprawling, nearly infinite poor schmuck wondering why they're here at all, and whom to blame for it.

The pain and fear may drive it to want self-annihilation. It can't kill itself outright, but it can destroy its ability to sense and think: us. Our fate depends on whether the universe manages to become well adjusted or fails at self-help.

Where does free will fit into this? I don't know if the universe has it, but if it does, it acts through our collective agency. We are the brains of the outfit. Our fate lies in our hands, but it lies in all of those hands and hearts and minds and the decisions we make to perpetuate our existence or end it and end all pain with it. End everything but an existence no longer witnessed by the helpless, horrified mind obsessed with all that is sad, bad, and doomed. Stars will still dance, black holes consume, weather sweep across a planet no longer burdened with what we have liked to call intelligent life.

Some form of life would probably survive our self-annihilation. Perhaps these survivors would evolve into the next iteration of inescapable consciousness for our poor schmuck of a universe. Over and over it evolves thought, suffers for it, and stamps itself out, until at last the energy flow reaches its far point and collapses in again to restart the whole cycle from a concentrated core.

Pleasant dreams, everyone.

History is not "supposed to make you uncomfortable"

 "History is supposed to make you uncomfortable" is a popular saying among content creators and distributors who present uncomfortable history. It's snappy, sounds tough, and it's just not true. In fact, it makes the uncomfortable history much less palatable to a large number of people who really should be absorbing it instead of rejecting it. It does more harm than good.

History contains a lot that makes us uncomfortable. This can be true of one's own personal life story or the the story of a nation you inhabit or a group with whom you identify. Everyone makes mistakes growing up. Some mistakes are worse than others. This is true of individuals and of humans as a species. We done fucked up a lot. However, every decent thing that shows the way to a greater humanity is also part of history. History is simply the story of everything that we can recall, or are willing to recall.

Specific presenters of history might want you to be uncomfortable with events that they portray for you. The portrayal doesn't even have to be true. The shiny American myth of freedom and equality from the get-go is a carefully edited montage of cherry-picked events and documents combined with outright bullshit. On the other hand, the portrayal of our history as completely evil is almost equally selective of facts. Sad to say, the justification of colonization completely disregarded native peoples, which is hard to defend by today's standards. Humans in general are an opportunistic bunch, and the colonial powers were the most successful opportunists of their era. They came, they saw, they almost died out, they bounced back, and they steamrolled from sea to shining sea.

It wasn't that simple. Results varied widely along the vast coastline of the Americas under the assault of ambitious European powers. We can't know how it would have gone if European explorers had arrived in smaller waves more devoted to careful assimilation of and with the cultures they found cutting the hearts out of human sacrifices on blood soaked temple pyramids or depopulated by smallpox and measles from the first casual contact with a landing party. 

In school in the USA in the 1960s and '70s, I was taught history as a story of good guys and bad guys. Even when the bias is not obvious, we judge the participants in the stories we're told. As more and more historians bring forward the stories of despicable acts committed in the course of our development as "the greatest country in the world," it may seem that history exists only to make you uncomfortable. Instead, your discomfort shows that you still have a shred of conscience. 

Also in the 1960s and '70s, we were already getting some stories of the injustices essential to territorial expansion and the rise of commercial power in the colonies and later the United States. It started with sympathetic portrayals of Native Americans, slaves, and successive waves of immigrants. White people were still mostly good guys at this stage in the story's development, but the facade was cracking. It was still quite possible to be a fatuous liberal twat for too many more years. We're doing great! Keep it up!

I understand the backlash among the fans of European expansionism. They fear the reckoning. How can we balance the ledger if everything we're being told was unjust really was? How can we face ourselves if we acknowledge the evil of our own older relatives, not just long-dead ancestors? How can we face our own participation? It's much easier to get angry and deny it. Denial and anger usher in the grief of loss. A whole imaginary country is dying for these people. They've been fed binary thinking for so long that, if they're not the total good guys, they must be the total bad guys. That is unacceptable.

We're dealing with addiction here. We're dealing with deeply ingrained, perhaps even innate characteristics. The first step to recovery is acknowledging that you have a problem, and that there is only treatment, never cure. It's a hard step and a tough life. The thing is, the vast majority of us have something in us that acts like an addiction, even if it is not currently recognized as such. It goes way beyond a compulsion to consume something, whether it's food, drugs, booze, porn, or the pain of others. It could be an overdeveloped work ethic and the sense of superiority that brings. Think about it and come up with your own list. It will be a long one.

Various religions and programs have tried to attach recovery to a higher power. Some people thrive in this framework. Others twist it to nefarious purposes or just weave in and out of it without ever improving. You have to find your own way in the world. That may doom us, as the collective decisions of an already excessive population deplete resources through basic consumption and the added extravagance of warfare. Any attempt to compel public enrollment in a massive exercise in group therapy will be unavoidably tyrannical. People need to smarten up on their own.

History is history. A lot of it reveals uncomfortable facts. Uncomfortable people will act to alleviate their discomfort. Some will do it by seeking greater unity with all of those weirdos out there. Others will do it by trying to kill off every person and institution that confronts them. History will record how that turns out.

ICE: Licensed to kill

 No need to own a tuxedo, play golf, or know what baccarat is. No tricked-out Aston Martin required. James Bond isn't the only one licensed to kill.

The death toll keeps mounting from street murders by ICE agents. Separate from the death toll of detainees in ICE custody, the street murders are more ominous because they can happen within minutes after agents fix on a target and pursue it to a fatal conclusion. They face no consequences because the regime wants them to sow fear and stoke rage. The victims never make it to custody, where they can die of abuse and neglect at the hands of private prison contractors.

This is America right now. The murder victims include protesters as well as immigrants and people who resemble immigrants. They violate every constitutional principle. Anywhere ICE operates, anyone who rubs them the wrong way is at risk. 

Any time armed people walk among us, our survival depends on their restraint. When the armed force is government sanctioned, it presents a grotesque caricature of the permission we give to ordinary police forces to use deadly force "when necessary." The officer in the field makes the decision. 

Armed citizens do not improve the equation. As wrong as it may be for an officer of the law to take a life, shooting back doesn't balance things out. It makes it more likely that an officer will react out of fear. The same is true with ICE agents, who seem more likely to look forward to killing someone anyway. The "fear" might serve as a reinforcing excuse to do what they wanted to do anyway, but the threat of armed resistance creates just enough validation to give their supporters a talking point.

The US constitution was not drawn up to facilitate firefights between opposing viewpoints. You wouldn't know it by the way Second Amendment devotees act like gunplay is the next logical step in a heated debate. Throughout human history our species has demanded that a person be willing to die for their beliefs. We don't just honor human sacrifice, we crave it. We don't need martyrs, we need therapy.

Well, Graham's burned

 Credible rape allegations against Graham Platner should end his campaign for the Senate. It's one thing to say sexist things and then evolve. Physical assault is a crime.

Defenders of horny men in office will say that any woman with a good story can derail the career of any man who doesn't have a rock-solid alibi for every moment of their sex lives. To some degree, this is true. But our understanding of male-female relations is evolving with every generation. This wasn't a hallway kiss or aggressive grope. It was, according to her account, full penetration and ejaculation.

The model that men take and women give in has persisted for untold eons. It predates actual humanity. It is expressed in nonhuman species everywhere. It has male and female adherents to this day. The typical male decision tree goes "Fuck it? Fight it? Or use it for food?" Maybe not all men, but certainly most of the ones I've been around. Granted I don't socialize much, but a quick skim of the archives of standup comedy reveals plenty of what used to pass for jokes about it. The predatory urge is often present. Only the decision to slap it down divides the evolved male from the troglodytic grunt.

Men face a sad reality: we were never as attractive as we thought we were. Each successive generation of women has less and less tolerance for failures of sexual discipline. For those of us most active during the Wild West phase of the sexual revolution, the lines were blurrier. It was a wild fuckfest there for a few years, with lots of people getting hurt because of how fearlessly we dove in. We were ill prepared for genuine personal responsibility, because so many religious moral codes seem to facilitate outsourcing your guilt to a conveniently absorbent deity. When the proscription is just "sex is bad and dirty, don't do it," the sexual revolutionary response is to try everything that piques your curiosity. This was true of men and women at the time, to the detriment of both.

Rape is rape. Consent has always had an absolute definition. We spent most of human existence falling far short of compliance with that absolute definition. Generations of men got away with forced sex because generations of women made various calculations for their own safety or for some other greater good. Platner's victim in this latest story stated that she let him stay because throwing him out would put a drunk driver on the road. Even in her position as a victim of assault, she retained that higher order of social concern. Pretty damn impressive, and exemplary of the role that women have filled through the long history of male excesses. 

Platner's previous accuser lost credibility because of her connections to Republican politics. If this accuser is also acting from political malice, her character has at least been more carefully written to hold up to deeper digging. Her tale as reported in Politico really makes him sound like a drunken brute. Not only is there no way for him to bounce back from this, the stain will impact the entire Democratic Party campaign to regain a congressional majority. Maine voters will feel conned. While the policy goals of his campaign were good for Maine and the country, the fact that he thought he could get away with a high profile senate run with this incident in his not so distant past will make voters leery of any future scratched and dented candidates who profess to repentance and redemption.

Men have to get it through their heads that they are fucking the country when they can't control their horny impulses. No politician is an island. Each one reflects on the party as a whole. The toxic cloud impacts those closest to it, but the miasma spreads nationwide. Each party tries to extend forgiveness to its own erring sons, while spotlighting the moral lapses of the opposing camp. As we've seen with the current occupant of the Oval Office, and others on the Republican side, none of their loyal voters are really concerned by allegations of sexual misconduct. In addition to the percentage who perceive mistreatment of women as just another expression of masculine strength, another fraction is indifferent to "personal matters" as long as they get something they want, whether it's tax cuts or targeted cruelty against one or more marginalized groups, or the false promise of a stronger economy.

The biggest challenge to women's full civil rights and freedom of movement is the reflexive behavior of men. "Instead of teaching your daughters how to avoid being raped, teach your sons not to rape" sounds coldly logical and places the responsibility where it belongs. It also acknowledges that there is no external solution to an internal men's problem.

If Graham Platner has really transformed himself into a decent human being, he has to live with the memory of his past misdeeds. He says he was too blacked-out drunk to know what he was doing at the time or remember it afterwards. Consider that with his inhibitions lowered almost to the point where he was unconscious, his instinct was to go to a woman's house and crawl onto her. That's down around the level of the autonomic nervous system. If he'd been lucky enough to pass out before he got to her, he'd still be running for senate. Sadly, it didn't work out that way.

The only way to know where he stacks up on the global scale of rapey drunks is to get every other hetero male equivalently drunk and see what percentage of them commit sexual assault. Plenty of men will claim that they would never do such a thing when they have remained safe from ever confronting the situation in real life. Graham needs psychological help. A messed up, drunken combat veteran in 2021 could have no way of knowing how far the waves would spread from his act of sexual violence. Maine Democrats need a new senate candidate. The fate of more than Maine hangs in the balance.