Talkative

I had just gotten out of the car when I heard it: "Hello. Hello." The voice sounded strange, like that of an elderly person, but more high pitched than one would expect.

I looked around for the source, and then heard it again; "Hello. Hello." Now I realized that it was coming from above me. I looked up, and, there in a tree overlooking the walkway was a crow. "Hello. Hello."

"Hello, hello, little crow," I said back to it, cheerfully. It really didn't seem to take notice of me. It simply repeated "Hello. Hello." every ten seconds or so.

I had shopping to do, and a time limit on top of that, so I left the talking bird to converse with my car and went into the store. While I was wandering the aisles, it occurred to me that I'd heard that crows could do this; they were one of any number of bird species that could mimic sounds from their environment. But this was the first time that I'd actually encountered a crow actually mimicking a sound, let alone a human voice.

So now I'm curious as to why it seems to be so rare an occurrence. After all, there's no shortage of the birds in this area; I see and/or hear them pretty much every day. And when it comes to grocery store parking lots, and other places where one might encounter dropped or discarded food, they're effectively a constant presence. And while Seattle and the Eastside are much quieter (at least as it seems to me) than my native Chicagoland, there are still plenty of sounds to repeat.

It's possible that I simply haven't been paying close enough attention, so I'll have to be more alert in the future, to determine if there are more talking birds in the area. 

Group Think

I was reading "Reclaiming Democracy From the Market," with MIT economist Daron Acemoglu sitting down to interview Harvard political philosopher Michael J. Sandel. Professor Acemoglu opens with:

From our conversations, and even more from your books, I have the sense that you see political philosophy as not just an inquiry into abstract concepts or a search for absolute truths, but as part of an ongoing dialogue with society about how we should organize our collective life, what we should value, and what we should resist.

This raised an immediate question for me: Who is the "we" Professor Acemoglu was referring to? Sure, one can make the case that it simply refers to "society," but even then, there is a question, because it's unlikely that a society is going to be unanimous about its values and the like. But just as importantly, how does "society" represent a "we" in a way that "the Market" does not, if they are the same people?

At one point Professor Sandel notes:

But even if the wealthy paid their taxes, they might still enjoy a kind of honor, prestige, and esteem that is out of proportion to the value of their contribution, especially when compared, say, to teachers or caregivers.

Okay... so? Honor, prestige, and esteem, unlike something like attention, are not rivalrous; I can give as much prestige to people I decide to, without reducing the amount I have "left over" to give to other people. So why does there need to be a society-wide dialog as to how much any given person is valued.

This is why I'm dubious of ideas, like those of Professor Sandel, that imply that certain choices should be collectively, rather than individually made, when all that really comes down to is some number of individuals deciding that their choices should trump everyone else's. Because, at least as I understand it, markets do represent a kind of social choice; it's simply emergent from a number of individual choices rather than a large group deliberation. So what really does deliberation create that can't otherwise be obtained? Certainly not unanimity. True, collective action gets a group around collective action problems, but even that's different than presuming that this creates some sort of unity.

And I think that this is what kept nagging at me as I read the interview... the idea that some sort of problem-solving solidarity would emerge without any mechanism being proposed for how that would happen. "Democratic deliberation" may be a great thing, but it's not magical. It can't bring together subsets of the populace who are actively at cross purposes with one another, or create enough of a scarce resource to share between people. Granted, markets don't necessarily do any of that, either, but I'm not sure they purport to.

This isn't to say that markets are necessarily better solutions to social problems than democratic deliberation (although they tend to be faster to operate), but in a way that's the point. There are problems, like what happens when one group considers the actions of another group to be an active threat to themselves and/or their interests, that neither institution is well-suited to solve. 

Chatty

I stopped by the bookstore this evening, and saw this rack of ChatGPT-related magazines. Having picked up an earlier one from one of the same publishers, I understand that they're about how to use generative automation more broadly, so it's interesting that they still treat the public as equating "ChatGPT" with "A.I." more broadly. Personally, I don't think that it's true anymore, but maybe it's just the circles I run in.
 

Available to Everyone

The United States Supreme Court has declined to hear an appeal of a lower-court ruling that the U. S. Copyright Office's understanding that copyright only applies to works by human authors. The Court had also rejected another appeal, by the same plaintiff, of a ruling that affirmed a similar policy on the part the U. S. Patent and Trademark Office.

I'm not a intellectual property lawyer, but it appears to me that between these rulings, items created by generative automation, and genuine artificial intelligence, if/when it comes along, are not eligible for intellectual property protection. In the case of most audio/visual media, I'm not sure that this will really move the needle all that much, at least at the start. But in the case of inventions, it could have repercussions. If part of the promise of automation is that it could create new medically-useful drugs, or create other products, the inability to patent them may be a strike against broad adoption of the technology for such purposes. Given this, it seems that large companies will take this lying down. I doubt that they'll attempt to directly re-litigate these sorts of cases; it's highly unlikely that this, or a future Supreme Court would reverse itself on this, simply because it was Pfizer Inc. bringing the appeal, unless things had gotten to a point where the Court simply stopped caring if the public felt that it was openly in the pocket of Big Business.

And so that leaves Congress. If corporations are going to want to outsource their research and development to some datacenter somewhere, and still be able to claim a government-enforced monopoly on whatever it is said datacenter comes up with, intellectual property law will have to change. And, regardless of what individual Representatives and Senators might say, Congress tends to be very willing to openly ally itself with business interests, and then make the case that they're doing it all in the name of helping the general public.

Of course, it's unlikely that the overall business community will be aligned on this; there are likely to be some sectors who feel that computer creations having to be either closely-guarded trade secrets or effectively in the public domain works in their favor, and so I can see lobbyists working both sides of the issue here.

But (as there always is), there's a simpler way, perhaps to deal with such issues: lying. I wouldn't put it past anyone, especially not someone who feels that they've created an amazing new advance in some field or another, to simply claim that a person invented it. The same goes for artwork, for that matter; launder something through Photoshop enough times, and would it be possible to determine that the original had been created by a machine? In this way, I can see detection of automation-generated outputs becoming a big business, if for no other reason than the amount of money that could be on the line.

There's also another angle: If the Copyright and Patent/Trademark Offices won't grant protection to the outputs or autonomous automation, that's another obstacle to the idea of a one-person company with a billion-dollar valuation. Because if they can't copyright or patent the products or services that the agents produce; they'd have to be in business that's extremely difficult to copy.

Picking Sides

Over the weekend, there was an Ipsos/Reuters poll that covered the ongoing attacks on Iran and the Trump Administration's use of force in general. While the headline proclaimed "Just one in four Americans say they back US strikes on Iran, Reuters/Ipsos poll finds," for myself I wonder if that was what was actually being measured. Consider the results that drove the headline:

While the Democrats booed louder than the Republicans cheered, there's still a pretty clear partisan divide in the numbers, to the point where I wonder if this is really a poll about partisan identity. I'm pretty sure that Ipsos/Reuters weighted their results to better align with what they understand the current partisan percentages to be, so it's unlikely that the percentages given reflect the raw numbers. It is interesting, however, where the numbers for partisans do and do not align with the "Other" category at the bottom of the graph. It's also interesting that, in terms of the "No" choice, that the numbers for the "Other" category roughly align for those for all survey participants, given the broader variance in the other two options.

Overall, the Democratic-identified participants come across as the most reflexively partisan, in the sense that they are more likely to disapprove than Republicans are to approve, less likely to approve than Republicans disapprove and less likely to be undecided about the matter. This could give Republican office-seekers heartburn come this year's election season, as the Democratic coalition tends to have more high-propensity voters, as I understand it. If that holds, and the lower-propensity voters who would otherwise lean Republican stay home, the Democrats may find that they have enough new seats in Congress to actually change things, at least on some level.