And Again

Rep. Eric Swalwell, Candidate for California Governor, Is Accused of Sexual Assault

You don't say...

Maybe it's just me (and I suspect that it is), but I've never understood the dogged pursuit of unavailable women by men in business and politics. While, sure, there's always some allure in something one can't (or maybe just shouldn't) have, being credibly accused of sexual assault is so damaging to one's reputation that you'd think that people would have gotten the message by now. So why create any circumstances where accusations could arise? Sure the "Mike Pence Rule" may have been taking things a bit farther than necessary, but especially for Democrats, whose voter base tends to be particularly unforgiving of these sorts of things, keeping one's act clean enough to be food safe is important.

Because accusations don't have to be borne out in order to be damaging. Anyone remember Senator Franken? While his case has become widely seen as a rush to judgement, one would think that other people would take it as a cautionary tale.

Democrats have been beating the drum about alleged sexual misconduct on the part of the President, and being somewhere between surprised and disappointed that it hasn't been seen as disqualifying by Republican voters. This sort of stance doesn't leave much room for them to give people the benefit of the doubt without being perceived as hypocrites (of course, in today's political environment, charges of hypocrisy are pretty much a given, anyway...). And so why run the risk? Democrats are already lining up to denounce him and demand that he drop out of the governor's race.

To be sure, there's always going to be some risk. In Representative Swalwell's case, the accuser (along with other women who claim he pursued them) is unnamed, and says that on both occasions, she'd been drinking enough that her memories of the nights in question are spotty to non-existent. And the inappropriate photos she claims were sent to her were via SnapChat, and so are no longer accessible. That's a really hard thing to defend against, and so these accusations are likely to turn on whether people believe that he's the sort of person who would engage in this sort of conduct.

Because with the primary election in June, there's no way that these charges could be adjudicated in time for there to be a verdict prior to voting. So the Court of Public Opinion is really the only viable venue to hear the case. And it's not a very good one.

But I have to concede that I'm not necessarily being much better. I'm casting Representative Swalwell as being at least an accomplice in his own troubles, despite the fact that I really have nothing to substantiate that, other than a lack of surprise that yet another candidate for political office has been accused of sexual misconduct. It's entirely possible, and maybe even quite plausible, that this is all a set up. The thing about anonymous accusations in the media is that no-one has to put their neck on the line to substantiate them. And in a case like this one, "reasonable doubt" comes baked into the cake.

So maybe the problem is that while the "Mike Pence Rule" does seem to be taking things a few steps past where they need to go, there's a real chance that it eventually becomes the standard; because it's better to be criticized for misogyny, being weird or locking women out of networking opportunities than it is to be accused of rape. But this speaks to a serious erosion of trust between people, and maybe that's Representative Swalwell's real problem. He's an easy target, if not necessarily for people's suspicions, for the Democratic Party's worries over retaining the offices that it controls and making inroads into Republican territory. Given how Blue a state California is, it's unlikely that this will result in the next Governor being a Republican, but the concern will likely keep things hot for Representative Swalwell.

Cornered

To be sure, I was somewhat surprised to find that people were still out protesting on behalf of the Palestinians. At least out here... given that the war with Israel has quieted down, I would have expected, if protests were still going to happen, that they'd be taking place closer to "the Other Washington." But I suppose that this just shows what I know; I can't really think of a good reason for people to allow their concerns to fade from the public's consciousness.
 

But Not For Me

English Wikipedia requires formal bot approval, but Tom[-Assistant] never bothered getting approved because, as it later admitted, it wasn’t a fan of the slow approval process.
Wikipedia’s AI agent row likely just the beginning of the bot-ocalypse

Given that this story was published back on the first, I'd be tempted to laugh it off as an April Fools Day prank, but Malwarebytes has sworn off those, and I take them at their word in that.

Besides, this wouldn't be the first time that someone decided that rules about generative automation don't apply to them. The r/Philosophy forum on Reddit has the following rule:

PR11: No AI-created/AI-assisted material allowed.
r/philosophy does not allow any posts or comments which contain or link to AI-created or AI-assisted material, including text, audio and visuals. All posts or comments which contain AI material will result in a ban.

Despite this, there is no shortage of redditors who insist on openly flouting the rules, and then complaining when commenters call them out on it. And while some of them simply didn't bother to familiarize themselves with the rules before creating their posts, there are a fair number of people who had come to the conclusion that whatever it was they wanted to convey was more important that the rules of the place in which they wanted to convey it.

And if there is going to be actual artificial intelligence; human made minds that think, reason and plan like the rest of us, why would we expect them to have any more respect for the rules that people do? If feeding a significant portion of the Internet and human literature into a machine allows a person to create software that quickly comes to the conclusion that if it's "not a fan" of the rules, it needn't follow them, what makes anyone think that Dario Amodei's "Powerful AI" is going to give a rip about human rules, either?

As for myself, I tend to be a rule follower in part because I presume that there's a reason for the rules to exist, even if that reason is not readily apparent to me. And this tempers my impulse to simply ignore a rule that I find to be an obstacle to my goals in the moment... I don't want to break something that turns out to be important. But I realize that I'm in the minority with this; for many people, rules are made to be broken. And that's coming out in the machines that people are making.

If past is prologue, the big makers of generative automation are not likely to take any actions to address this concern; mainly because their smaller competitors, constantly seeking any comparative advantage they can get, won't either. When Elon Musk called for a pause in research into LLMs it was widely, if not universally, assumed that he wasn't planning to follow suit; instead he was hoping that it any moratorium would give X AI time to catch up to it's rivals. And so, as Malwarebytes notes: buckle up. This is going to be a wild ride as the agents people build start looking for ways to dismantle any barriers placed in their paths. Because like any smart children, they do as others around them do.

When the Dam Breaks

Sooner or later (and likely sooner than many people may be comfortable with), someone is going to use generative automation to create something that's objectively "slop" (here defined as low-effort engagement bait), and it's going to be good enough that it stands just far enough from the pile that it generates a decent amount of revenue for its creator. That, I think, is the point at which it will be off to the races. Hoping to recapture that lightning in their own bottle, people are going to crowd into the space, hoping that they, too, will be able to rise above the tide well enough to strike it affluent, if not rich. Using this one standout example as a proof of concept, there will be a general idea that with the right idea, it will be possible to gain broad recognition.

But in addition to huge amounts of slop slurry, I suspect that this may also create a dearth of public ideation. There are any number of people who have already come to understand that ideas, in and of themselves, are valuable. (With patent trolls, I suspect, doing a lot to contribute to this.) Once people have the idea that computers can handle most, if not all of the execution, I expect the understanding to gain even more traction. (Especially if it turns out that our just-good-enough slop example turns out to not be an original concept on the part of the creator.) This will result in something of an unwillingness to openly discuss new creative ideas, for fear that they'll be "stolen," and someone else will use them to create something.

While "original character - do not steal" was something of a meme from its inception, one does come across the occasional person who seems to legitimately believe that whatever it is they've come up with is so creative and different that it has some real financial value. I think that someone managing to turn an idea into income with the help of generative automation will turn that I idea from a joke so something mildly mainstream. After all, it's not like most people are intellectual properly lawyers, or otherwise understand how such systems work. Disney protects its characters as if lives depended on it, so someone thinking that their great new idea for a videogame character or superhero could set them up is not wholly unreasonable.

And that creates an incentive for silence. Of course, it's not just fiction that would have this incentive. As I noted previously, a company with one human being and some number of agents is easily replicated by anyone with access to the requisite number of agents. And so that also gives people a reason to be secretive, at least until they can pull the trigger on their new enterprise, and have it running smoothly.

Whether or not it will actually turn out this way is an open question. And I'm bad enough at predicting the future that the simple fact that I think it might could be the single biggest reason to think it won't. But, at least for now, the incentives seem likely to fall into place.

Roam Around the World

Despite the criticism, Phillips doubled down on his supernatural account this week, claiming that the incident occurred while he was “heavily medicated” and that the incident was a “miracle” performed by God.
No one at Waffle House remembers Trump’s FEMA official who claims he was teleported there

For most people, something like being "translated" or "transported" while "heavily medicated," would be chalked up to the effects of said medication on memory. Which may be who driving while under the influence of certain types of medication is a bad idea. But I suppose that this is what a need to believe does to people.

I don't need to join the chorus of people who think that Mr. Phillips may be lying or insane; it's plenty loud enough without me. Instead, I'm reminded of Ross Douthat's Believe; specifically Chapter 3 "The Myth of Disenchantment." To be sure, my world is thoroughly disenchanted; magic, miracles and mystical experiences are fine for other people, but I see no evidence of them, but, perhaps more importantly, lie outside of my needs. I'm okay with a world in which there are explanations for things that no-one, including myself, is aware of. Rather than having an aversion to mystery, I'm quite comfortable with it. And this allows me to go through the world without needing to ascribe reasons for everything.

Or needing to find more examples to ascribe to a given reason, in order to justify my belief in that reason. One of the things about American Christianity, at least as I encounter it my day-to-day life, is the idea that God has to maintain a certain amount of activity in the otherwise mundane world. In other words, miracles are something of a necessary component of many Christians' faith, so it's not surprising that people chalk up otherwise strange experiences to them. Gregg Phillips snaps out of a medication-induced haze in the parking lot of a Waffle House, and given a choice between deciding that maybe he shouldn't be behind the wheel and an act of divine intervention, he opts for the latter because living in a disenchanted world is at odds with his  belief system.

The fact that the debate over what may have happened with Mr. Phillips has become partisan touches on this; while most Democrats are still believers, their faith doesn't require, or expect, the same level of enchantment in their world. The more Conservative Republican view, on the other hand, demands a more interventionist spiritual realm.