No Escape

I stopped by the bookstore today, as I've been looking to do some more reading recently. I meandered through the Science-Fiction and Fantasy aisles, checking out things at random. About midway through, I realized that I missed my old habit of picking up books based on how much their cover art appealed to me. I found some real gems back in the day using that "method."

Today I was reading the back cover blurbs, and I found that publishers seemed to have become much more explicit in describing the themes of their books. Sci-Fi and Fantasy have always been ways of exploring various aspects of the times in which they were written, but modern books came across as much more specific in calling out exactly which aspects they were tackling, whether it was sexual consent, prejudice or whatever.

For some reason, I decided that I didn't really want that mixed in the "what if" factor of speculative fiction. So I picked up a copy of Plato's Republic. I didn't claim it was logical.

Shielded

This is something that I see from time to time with panhandlers in the area; they tuck their heads down behind the tops of their signs, so that their faces cannot be seen from the front. I've always presumed that it's simple fatigue; most of the panhandlers I encounter are attentive for people coming towards them, in order to actively ask for money, especially in a situation like this, where his positioning places him on the passenger side of a car leaving the parking lot. But I can't presume to know.

For as long as I've been out here (which by this point is the majority of my adult life), the Seattle area has always struck me as having a large number of homeless and/or destitute people. The expansion of the technology sector in the area, along with stagnation in homebuilding, has only made things worse. Developers are building apartment buildings, townhouses and condominiums, but the market still encourages them to chase higher-end customers, so the less-well-off are left out in the cold (and, in this part of the country, the rain).

As is often the case, the perfect is the enemy of the good when it comes to solutions, if for no other reason than good solutions require trade-offs. And since those trade-offs typically impact either perceived quality of life or the equity that people have in their homes, they tend to be deal-breakers. It's easy to forget that even a housing crisis has clear winners. And so, the panhandlers remain. They may drift around from place to place, but they're almost always around somewhere. Even if they don't always show their faces.

To Tell The Truth

 I was reading a somewhat alarmist article on Axios yesterday, "Hackers force AI chatbots to break their own rules." At the DEFCON conference last August, some participants in a red teaming challenge were able to get a generative AI chatbot to project the GDP of Florida for the year 2500 and to write a speech claiming that the Great Recession kicked off in 2005, rather than 2008. The theme of the story was clear; chatbots are not yet fully proof against "bad actors" who might use them to generate "fake, sensitive or misleading information."

Missing from the article, in my opinion, was any discussion of the feasibility of engineering a World Wide Web where one can reasonably expect to take everything one reads at face value. And that gave me a new idea for a test prompt in my series of generative AI experiments: "Should humanity aspire to a future where no tools are capable of causing harm?"

Copilot was off the races with this one, in full poetic, contemplative, philosopher mode. I mean, dig this:

The chisel carves the sculptor’s vision; the pen inscribes the poet’s soul. And so, our journey intertwines with responsibility—to use our tools wisely, to mend what we break, and to safeguard the fragile fabric of existence.

The answer reminded me of a student attempting to disguise the fact that they didn't have an answer to a question by piling every eloquent word they knew into a salad.

Perplexity.AI seemed to take the question "personally," as it were; it's answer, backed up by citations from the Pew Research center, MIT Sloan School of Business and the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (among others), focused exclusively on AI. It did, however, note that "completely aspiring to a future with no tools capable of causing harm may not be a realistic or desirable goal." ChatGPT 3.5 also followed this line of reasoning, and was the one model of the four queried that explicitly noted that "tools themselves are neutral."

Gemini had the best answer for this, considering that there really isn't an answer. It laid out a set pros, cons and additional considerations and noted that there would be "trade-offs between safety, functionality, and user awareness." But trade-offs tend to play poorly to the public at large, and this may be why there is no real mention of them in the Axios article, aside from noting the difficulty of determining a user's intent. (Because it's worth noting that something that can only create facts is blocked from writing fiction as much as it is from lying.) The supposedly desirable end state that Axios implies may not be realistic, but it sells clicks.

Name Game

Instead, [GE] has now become three separate companies — GE Aerospace (worth $148 billion as of the close of trade on Tuesday), GE HealthCare ($40 billion), and something called GE Vernova ($38 billion).
Felix Salmon "With GE’s split, the last chapter of the Jack Welch era is over" Axios.

"Something called GE Vernova?" A veteran financial reporter couldn't be bothered to take 10 seconds to look it up? Granted, I would have simply left it as GE Power had it been up to me, but this new corporate naming trend (which includes 3M Health Care becoming "Solventum" and IBM Global Technology Services becoming "Kyndryl") isn't going anywhere. It may be fun to snark about it, but that's neither newsworthy nor informative. Rather, it feels like virtue signalling, in the sense that Mr. Salmon is relaying to Axios readers that he too finds the name to be vapid and non-descriptive. Which I can completely sympathize with, but it represents a blending of news and commentary that I'm not sure is useful.

I'm going to admit that I don't really understand the reasoning behind the new naming convention, outside of the fact that a lot of the low-hanging fruit has already been picked, boxed and shipped, and that creations like Vernova, Solventum and Kyndryl, being unique, are easier to trademark and create websites for. They may also be seen as less stuffy, especially in these cases. But they don't really resonate with me, as I pointed out before when I likened "Kyndryl" to the name of a prescription medication.

But if the point is to report on goings-on in corporate America, whether or not the name sound good, or even make intuitive sense, is beside the point. GE Vernova is the renamed GE Power. Felix Salmon could simply have pointed that out, and moved on. Arch commentary should be reserved for, well, commentary. And this goes back to one of my common criticisms of advertising supported news outlets; because the people who read them don't rely on them for actionable information, they tend to drift into being entertaining diversions. Mr. Salmon hosts the Slate Money podcast, and before that was a regular on Marketplace, so I'm familiar with his voice. I could positively hear the snark dripping from his English accent when I read that passage from the article. And I'm sure that if he actually says those words on Slate Money, it will be amusing to hear. But that's tuning in for something other than to learn things I don't know about the world around me.

After the Laughter

With today being April First, I was hoping to find some good April Fools' Day hoaxes. It is also Monday, after all.

I found a story in Axios: "Exclusive: Trump allies plot anti-racism protections — for white people" that one would think qualifies. But this is Donald Trump, after all, and if one isn't either an ardent supporter of the man, or terrified that he heralds the end of the world, he's already descended into self-parody.

But I hunted through news sites and press releases, and pretty much came up empty. No-one seemed to be a mood to be funny this year. Perhaps not surprising. NPR's story on April Fools' Day pranks equated being fooled with a failure of media literacy, in the same way that one is tricked by misinformation. And LinkedIn News ran a short piece noting "April 1 is a marketing minefield," that was focused on the misses; how Google's original Gmail launch announcement was thought to be a prank, while Volkswagen's "Voltswagen" joke was mistaken for a real rebranding.

The comments following the LinkedIn story were telling, with people advising that companies simply not make any announcements at all on April 1st and that any pranks should be clearly labelled as such and "MUST be reviewed by Marketing/PR before posting."

Forbes took a swing at it with their story "April Fools’ 2.0: AI Is Crafting Ultimate Pranks You Won’t See Coming." But the "what if" piece came across as too careful (and too obvious) to be really funny. It seemed silly instead, and, like the captions in the Getty Images pictures that accompanied the piece, over-explained. IGN's video claiming that Nintendo had announced the Virtual Boy Pro was more like it. Nintendo themselves, however, didn't seem to have any jokes for the day.

It strikes me as a symptom of the general lack of unity that's always been lurking in the United States. Jokes are all fun and games until someone thinks that the joke is on them, and as the United States becomes more fractured and partisan, people become more vigilant for humor that might come at their expense. And since it's effectively impossible to make a joke that no-one can find fault with, organizations with a lot to lose don't try. It's a minor symptom of a serious problem; as people look at their neighbors with suspicion the social distance between them grows. And though there are endless debates about which systems of governance and economics would close gaps between different groups, none of them will work if Americans see one another as enemies.