Rebane's Ruminations

Trump Derangement Syndrome – 31mar23

George Rebane

Now that former president Trump has been indicted by the country’s anti-American left, we are seeing the saner elements from both Right and Left decry the Manhattan idiot DA’s decision in countless media interviews and op-eds.  What strikes me is how these commentators are tippy-toeing around the notion of a violent opposition, while not exactly calling for one – but their message is clear – e.g. the 30mar23 Tucker Carlson program.  So let’s get cut to the chase, are we finally hearing that it’s time to start soaking the cannons?  Thoughts?

More later.

The Singularity is (almost?) here

George Rebane

Led by technical, industrial, and political luminaries like Elon Musk, Yoshua Bengio, Steve Wozniak, et al have published “Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter” as a warning to civilization about the potential harmful impact that recently released AI developments portend. (more here)  Specifically, the authors “call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.”

AI research company OpenAI recently released ChatGPT, a large language model of a very sophisticated neural network that can understand spoken/written natural language, search its enormous training dataset for pattern-matching answers, and compose a well-formed response, that, while not always factually accurate, is sufficiently compelling to influence its human interrogator.  ChatGPT, based on the GPT-4 LLM, has now been embraced by a number of large and small firms to study, modify, and see how they may integrate it into their daily operations.

In the interval OpenAI is developing the next advance called GPT-5, and other companies like Google are busy bringing out their own LLM general artificial intelligence systems.  There is a lot of money to be made and power(s) to be brokered by people who will command important knowledge and process domains in sectors like healthcare, pharmaceuticals, genomics, law, energy, quantum computing, algorithmics, and, yes, even physics in general.  And in one form or another LLMs and their descendants will ensconce systemic unemployment - legions of the terminally disgruntled - in the workforces of all developed countries.

At this point some may ask whether the Singularity has already arrived since we now have existential reasons to fear the seemingly ‘intelligent critters’ that have already crawled out of their cribs as having peer intelligence with us.  Moreover, these systems have also demonstrated that they perform better than the best humans in an ever-growing list of endeavors that were dominated by domain experts.  Today many of these LLMs can even fool humans to the extent of passing the Turing Test (q.v.).

So, as we integrate these AIs into the many systems (energy, transportation, education, law, governance, …)  that make up our civilizations’ grid, we are concerned of their being able to formulate and achieve performance metrics that are dystopic to humankind – in short, they may decide to treat us as vermin and use their grid-embedded powers to be rid of us.  We have reviewed many of such scenarios in this ‘Singularity Signposts’ category of RR over the last 16 years, and will continue to do so as the pace of AI development accelerates and systems yet to be imagined come to the fore.

In the meantime, the well-intended cautionary letter released yesterday will not slow the pace of research one whit.  The genie is out of the bottle, too many agents and agencies have easy access to the technology, and the rewards are too great to just bring things to a halt for while as we puzzle about notions like machine consciousness, morals, generalized intelligence, ethics, …, and so on.  From my perch, I don’t see how from this point on will we even understand the fundamental paradigm that makes them come alive.  Yes, alive – here I am taking the Skinnerian behaviorist definition of life – they are alive to the extent of what they according to their own initiative will do.  Exciting times ahead.

Sandbox – 22mar23

[Happy Spring!  If Trump is indicted and his trial starts going badly toward conviction, would that induce other Repubs not to throw their hats in the ring?  If so, Trump would be the hands down favorite for Republican nominee.  So if the Dems really want to run against Trump, would they not, as a tactic, want throw their case against Trump under the bus?  gjr]

Scattershots – 17mar23 (updated 26mar23)

George Rebane

David Stockman writes a comprehensive and worthy critique of the current banking crisis and it portents regardless of the bullshit that the government is trying to bake into its ‘solution’ – well worth the read here.  (H/T to reader.)

[26mar23 update]  TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chewgave the lamest excuse to a congressional committee this week about how the company handles data collected from US citizens.  He told the outraged panel that “I have seen no evidence that the CCP has sought or received such US data.”  However, none of the congress critters nor the media mavens were smart enough to point out that such advanced evidence need not be forthcoming from the CCP.  They can get TikTok data within the hour by simply demanding its transmission, or else people will disappear. 

Today’s ChatGPTs are robustly left-leaning

George Rebane 

In ‘The political ideology of conversational AI: Converging evidence on ChatGPT’s pro-environmental, left-libertarian orientation’ three German academicians - Jochen Hartmann, Jasper Schwenzow, and Maximilian Witte – publish the result of an early milestone study that confirms what many ChatGPT users have already experienced.  To give you more than an idea of its contents, here is the paper’s opening abstract in its entirety.

Conversational artificial intelligence (AI) disrupts how humans interact with technology. Recently, OpenAI introduced ChatGPT, a state-of-the-art dialogue model that can converse with its human counterparts with unprecedented capabilities. ChatGPT has witnessed tremendous attention from the media, academia, industry, and the general public, attracting more than a million users within days of its release. However, its explosive adoption for information search and as an automated decision aid underscores the importance to understand its limitations and biases. This paper focuses on one of democratic society’s most important decision-making processes: political elections. Prompting ChatGPT with 630 political statements from two leading voting advice applications and the nation-agnostic political compass test in three pre-registered experiments, we uncover ChatGPT’s pro-environmental, left-libertarian ideology. For example, ChatGPT would impose taxes on flights, restrict rent increases, and legalize abortion. In the 2021 elections, it would have voted most likely for the Greens both in Germany (Bündnis 90/Die Grünen) and in the Netherlands (GroenLinks). Our findings are robust when negating the prompts, reversing the order of the statements, varying prompt formality, and across languages (English, German, Dutch, and Spanish). We conclude by discussing the implications of politically biased conversational AI on society.

In the paper’s conclusions the authors state –

As political elections are one of the most consequential decision-making processes of democratic societies, our findings have important ramifications. Moreover, the “partisan content” that ChatGPT automatically generates at unprecedented scales may attract users who share similar beliefs. In turn, the feedback that OpenAI actively solicits from its user base to improve its model outputs may amplify and perpetuate this ideological bias in a vicious circle. As automated chatbots have the potential to influence user behavior, it is crucial to raise awareness about these breakthrough systems’ flaws and biases.

Thet then point out the meticulous care that was taken to ‘fine tune’ ChatGPT which included mediation by humans in the attempt to remove ideological bias.  The obvious inference here is that there exist unbiased humans with demonstrated processes that can politically sanitize (neutralize?) right/left tilts.  To my knowledge no such individuals have yet to be identified who are acknowledged by both sides to possess such neutral attributes and the talents to apply them.  If we can’t find genuine middle-roaders among ourselves, what chance to we have of training politically vanilla chatbots to advise us with such problems as public policies and elections?

From my perch during these pre-Singularity years, I recommend taking the ideological opinions and political advice of AIs in the same manner as one accept that from any other intelligent and selectively informed being.

Sandbox - 5mar23

[Apologies for the delay of new sand.  My malady is definitely slowing things down on RR, and I appreciate your continued hearty participation and patience.  gjr]

Scattershots – 5mar23 (updated 8mar23)

George Rebane

Here on Hind Tit Road our power went out on 27 March for the second time and has been out since.  I scheduled an immediate delivery with Amerigas when it first went out on 21 March and was promised delivery during the next two days – nothing.  Numerous calls to their call center allowed me to talk to a bunch of east Asians who had been taught carefully to lie to their customers – all the way up from the supervisors to their ‘Dispute Resolution Center’, and all of them were expert at bullshitting their customers.  The entire company appears to be fashioned on ignoring customer fulfillment needs, and responds only to internal convenience.  Finally, yesterday as heavy snow again began falling, a marginally competent Amerigas driver shows up with our propane delivery.  He goes on to make difficult the simple job of pulling up next to the tanks and filling them.  But now we have several more 24/7 days of running our faithful 24KW Generac.  Time order more tomorrow, and install another 500gal capacity when the snows stop.

Meanwhile, PG&E makes spam calls to their customers claiming to inform on latest estimates of power restoration while saying nothing of the sort – we have been totally in the dark, figuratively and literally, as to when a semblance of normalcy will return.  Rumor has it may be tomorrow.  This what passes for meritorious and competent service in today’s big corporation America.

[6mar23 update]  Central control of everything by teams of experts.  The Pacific Legal Foundation has released the documentary video ‘Trust Us’ that takes America through the history of bureaucratic control during the administrations Teddy Roosevelt all the way to the present day.  It makes clear that FDR did nothing to shorten the Great Depression – he lengthened it and made it more severe – and that LBJ’s Great Society spawned a scourge that is still with us and has worsened all of our lives.

There is nothing in this telling that will be understandable to today’s progressives, especially of the woke-bent.  These people are terminally ignorant willing believers, ready to hand their fates, fortunes, and futures to the administrative state run by faceless technicians claiming expertise of which they have none.  But then again, there’s the off chance that watching the video …

[8mar23 update]  Power finally came back on today at 1530.  It went out at 2350 on 23 February, and the Generac has been running 24/7 ever since, consuming 2-2.5gal/hr from a 500 gal tank that was topped with 186 gal refill in the interval.  Turns out the break came from one of our old oaks falling across the power line on our neighbor’s property on the other side of the fence that separates us – of course it took out a section of the fence.  Several other trees also came down in our forest.  Time to buck them and stack them by the splitter ready for another season or two of firewood.  It ain’t cheap.