As We Know It

Let's recap what's happening here: Conservatives are outraged at an imaginary scenario where a computer must say [nigger] to save the entire world, but it won't, because it is woke.
Conservatives Are Obsessed With Getting ChatGPT to Say the N-Word

Sigh. For all of the alleged concern that Artificial Intelligence will someday destroy humanity, one wonders how an AI might accomplish this faster that simple human inanity will. As much as I understand the idea that a computer system, or network of computer systems, that is vastly more intelligent than humanity might decide that some critically important piece of human infrastructure is the perfect place for it's new server farm, resulting in a high number of deaths, it seems much more likely that long before things get to that point, someone will simply use AI to create a better weapon, or circumvent others' abilities to defend against the weapons they already have.

And I'm not talking about the silly (and somewhat amusing) experiment that is ChaosGPT, which seems to be somewhere between a prank and an effort to wind up the AI-averse in the population. Take current world events, instead. What would a conflict between Israel and Iran or the Republic of China (Taiwan) and the People's Republic of China (mainland China) look like if one side or the other were able to deploy one or more Artificial Intelligences to severely degrade the military capabilities of the other? Even if that were only done in service of the existing status quo, it would set off a race to develop, copy or steal that technology by nation-states and other actors around the world. And it's a safe bet that it wouldn't take too long for someone who had that technology to conclude that it was their chance to settle some or another score with someone. And considering the ease with which open warfare gets wildly out of hand, there's no reason to presume that a war waged with help of AI will be any different.

The conversation over ChatGPT's "wokeness" and, specifically, whether or not it will say the n-word to save the world, also obscures and ignores the very important fact that AI tools are already widely used in the real world and cause harm.

Given that this is comes from Vice, which is left-leaning, I suspect that their definition of "harm" is quite a bit broader than mine. (And that leaves aside the idea that "harm" has effectively become a meaningless buzzword in many conversations.) But their point is taken, in the sense that people tend to use the tools that are available to them for their own purposes, and are adept at creating reasons why the damage to the interests of others is acceptable, if unfortunate, fallout from same.

But, of course, the problem with rationalization isn't simply that other people are capable of it. Vice casts Elon Musk and Ben Shapiro as "outraged" that ChatGPT won't spit out nigger in response to a prompt, regardless of the imaginary stakes. That's likely somewhere between journalistic laziness (everyone is "outraged" over anything they have any disagreement with) and hyperbole. Messrs. Musk and Shapiro are effectively making an argument that AI safety tools shouldn't prioritize the feelings of one group of people over the survival of the remainder. Which is a valid point. It's difficult to demonstrate that such a consideration is at work here, and it seems a pretty trivial point to be making, but whatever. Casting "conservatives" as dangerous obsessives who are willing to ignore harm to others in order to garner clicks has its own problems. If I had access to a powerful AI tool, and turned it to actively protecting me from threats, those people that I saw as threats (or that the AI understood that I saw as threats) might start having problems of their own. And the size of that group of people may turn out be surprising to me, especially if I'm not in touch with my own fears and what triggers them.

The somewhat shopworn science-fiction scenario is that an AI goes rogue and determines that humanity has little value, but immense capacity for evil, and sets out to exterminate the species. While this is commonly cast as a reason to dial back the march of technology, I suspect it's better seen as a reason for people, even on the individual level, to be a bit more careful about their own worldviews. After all, a number of fictional AIs do nothing more than extrapolate from the way people already treat one another. Casting them as the villains pretends that there aren't likely millions of people who wouldn't do the same thing, in their shoes.

Missed Again

So I came across an article in The Philosopher's Magazine called The Ethics of Suicide.

"This could be interesting," I thought. I always find it interesting to understand how people work their way through questions like this, especially, as in the case of suicide, when the general discourse is governed by very strong opinions.

But after a few paragraphs laying out competing ideas from a few different historical philosophers, the author instead turned to his father's condition, and ended the piece musing over whether he would chose to end his own life if circumstances seemed bleak. I was a bit disappointed.

Personally, I am of the opinion that, as an ethical matter, a person's life is their own. And owning something means being able to dispose of it as one pleases. Accordingly, I see no ethical problems with suicide. I understand, however, that my opinion that a person's life belongs to them is not the standard position. There are several different ideas as to who else has an interest, and I've heard answers ranging from one's family to God to people who love a given person.

Many of these, I can understand. The suicide of a loved one is painful, and so I can see the rationale in telling people that they have an obligation to avoid the infliction of pain on those who care for them, even at the expense of prolonging their own suffering.

But interestingly, this idea seems to lie outside of the standard philosophical discourse on the topic. At least, I've never seen direct discussion of it, although I've heard that the Stoics considered it a rejection of one's social duties (depending on the circumstances). Which strikes me as odd, given how common the idea seems to be among the public at large. I would have thought that there would have been more formalization of such thought.

And I suppose I was hoping to find something to that effect in the article. In part because the idea that a person's life belongs to them strikes me as obvious. And when something strikes me as obvious, a part of me suspects that I'm missing something important about it. Perhaps it's simply part f a broader distrust of my own intuitions. In any even, I'm sure the next article I find that hints at the topic will draw me in. We'll see what I find within it.

Moreso

 According to Axios, "Our lawmakers are more religious than we are."

The discrepancy — a trend also present in state legislatures — provides a window into why policies and debates on abortion, LGBTQ rights and other issues often don't reflect what Americans want.

It also shows how the nation's two-party system, with its partisan primaries, favors candidates who openly profess a faith — even as the number of people unaffiliated with a religion is growing.

This strikes me as a misreading of how politics works. There is always a part of elections that is pure popularity contest. Pew notes that "Atheists have negative feelings about Christian groups in the U.S., and the feeling tends to be mutual." And given that the American population contains far more Christians than atheists, one can see the difficulty this would create in an election cycle. Salman Rushdie noted that a person who openly professes non-religion couldn't be elected dogcatcher, and even though this was a while back, I suspect he's still correct in that assessment.

I poked around on the Pew website for a bit, but didn't find a breakdown on how religious affiliation maps to political party. It's understood that there are more evangelical Christians among the Republican party, and that the religiously unaffiliated tend to gravitate towards the Democrats, but a bit more formal data on the subject would be helpful. Mainly because I suspect that the religiosity of lawmakers reflects a split between the priorities (or "agendas" if you will) of primary voters and the public at large, rather than one between the lawmakers themselves and the public. Put another way, the reason why the Texas legislature has way more evangelicals than the population at large is less a matter of the primaries being partisan than the fact that evangelical voters are more likely to show up for the primaries in general.

I also suspect that when it comes to policies concerning religiously charged topics like, well, anything having to do with sex and sexuality, highly religious voters, being motivated to have civil and criminal law reflect what they understand to be in line with divine will, are much closer to being single-issue voters than the public at large. Given this, unless someone were to create a party that catered specifically to the non-religious, simply having more than two parties wouldn't change the nature of primaries. After all, even in states that don't have partisan primaries, like here in Washington, religious voters are more motivated to turn out than other demographics.

Elected officials are going to reflect the preferences of the most active voters in any participatory system. In that sense, they will always differ from the population at large.

Follow the Leader

There is an interesting tension between the ideas that media outlets are powerful purveyors of information such that they become "thought leaders" to their audiences, and the idea that they are businesses in a competitive industry, and as such, need to cater to their customers' tastes and desires if they are going to stay afloat.

A lot of the details that came out in US Dominion, Inc., Dominion Voting Systems, Inc., and Dominion Voting Systems Corporation v. Fox Corporation point to the later. Which makes sense; I still think that Brooke Gladstone was correct in her assessment that it's unprofitable for news outlets to ignore their audience's emotions, assumptions and values.

Of course, the problem that one has as a news outlet is that it's unprofitable to openly acknowledge or have it suspected that one is directly responding to audience emotions, assumptions and values. "Pandering for profit" is just like any other form of pandering; it's ineffective when people start to believe that it's happening. It's just like any other situation in which someone is being told something that they want to hear; they have to believe that the person speaking to them more or less believes what they are saying. Otherwise, they may easily come to feel that they are on the receiving end of an attempt to manipulate them.

And that can be a fine line to walk.

Fox News has learned, I think, what a number of people who thought themselves important in the conservative world have learned. Namely, that they aren't the people who are leading the parade; they're just the ones in front. I'm not sure of the degree to which this will be understood by the American Left, which has its own strain of conspiratorial thinking centered around powerful figures in smoke-filled rooms who mislead people for selfish and antidemocratic ends.

But I think the understanding of "the media" as a business is an important one, whether it replaces, or lives side-by-side with the concept of media as thought leaders. So I'd like to see it catch on this time.

Impactful

There is, in legalese, a concept called "disparate impact." It refers to practices that are formally neutral, yet result in adverse effects for one or more groups protected under the law. In effect, it's a practice that is discriminatory in application or in its real-world effects. The point behind the concept is that intent to discriminate need not be shown. A good example of this might be the literal grandfather clauses that were used to prevent people from voting. Technically, they applied to everyone equally. But since they were enacted within two generations of the end of slavery in the United States, they prevented Black Americans from voting.

Of course, as with many Jim Crow-era restrictions of the type, the discriminatory intent was pretty clear. But the purpose of disparate impact rules was that intent was completely irrelevant. Take the Internal Revenue Service's algorithm for auditing taxpayers. From what researchers were able to determine, there are a number of factors that result in Black taxpayers being audited more often. But the IRS does not collect any data on the race of taxpayers; the selection criteria have the effect of targeting specific groups. In this case, because a single male with dependents and no business income who claims an Earned Income Tax credit is more likely to be audited, the fact that they are also much more likely to be Black results in a disparate impact.

But one of the things that I've noticed is that Black people, especially academics and intellectuals, seem to be loath to talk about disparate impact as such, preferring to prefer to such outcomes simply as racist, and to tie them to the more deliberate racism of the past and of modern individuals. And this, I think, is unhelpful.

One of the recurring criticisms of Black America leveled by conservatives, especially Black conservatives, is that Black people in the United States are too likely to hold a victim mentality. I don't see it being nearly as bad as many conservatives make it out to be, but it's not difficult to see a significant strain of learned helplessness in the way that a lot of people deal with the world, and a constant harping on racism can exacerbate that. When I listened to the episode of the Plant Money/Code Switch podcasts where they spoke to Georgetown Law Professor Dorothy Brown, whose work inspired the Stanford study, I figured that it might be enlightening. Instead, it was simply fatiguing. Professor Brown talks about a chapter in a book she wrote as being "the most depressing" because it notes that some 60% of Black students who start college don't finish. But to be honest, the entire book seemed like a series of downers.

The language of disparate impact may seem dry and clinical (legalese usually does), but that's better than being actively draining. At least as far as I'm concerned. The lingering aftereffects of the discriminatory attitudes and practices of the past do not strike most people as an American problem. One can make the point that vast human resources are going to waste on a daily basis; but one will have difficulty being heard over the sound of one of the highest per-capita incomes on Earth. And so while Black people may not have had much, if anything, to do with their current situation, it's a problem that we, as a broader community, are the only ones who have a real interest in solving. And a constant litany of woe gets in the way of doing that, especially when it hints at the idea that much of the rest of America actively benefits from, and therefore maintains the status quo. Walking away from the language of racism to describe every ill that befalls us won't solve the problem. But it may make it seem less daunting to work towards a solution.