Brad Smith, President of Microsoft, was on Face the Nation last week selling us Artificial Intelligence. He paints a beautiful picture, but none of the problems are in that picture. Sure, using AI will certainly help us do more things in less time, maybe even more accurately, but it will also open up the universe of intellectual achievement to all kinds of abuses, the least of which is the people behind the computers taking over the world.
Chris Krebs a noted cyber security expert followed Smith’s monologue, pointing out examples of foreign actors already trying to muddy the reality of the cyber universe when he talks about China and others interrupting our programing and cutting into the controls of our utilities and fuel supplies.
This will be the biggest controversy of the rest of the century, and we should have started dealing with it twenty years ago. We absolutely have to make it the biggest thing on the agenda right now!
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Biden and McCarthy have worked out a plan to settle the debt ceiling. It looks something like this.
*Raises Debt ceiling for two years
*1% cap on non-defense spending increases for 2025 fiscal year
*Claw back of unspent COVID 19 funds
*Expanded work requirements for some adults on food stamps
*Rescind some new funding to the IRS from the inflation Reduction Act
*New rules to make it easier to gain permit approval for energy projects.
This is the kind of give and take necessary to get stuff passed. No one is expected to like everything in this compromise, but logical, reasonable people will understand that give and take is necessary to achieve results. Sure, the ultra-progressives and the Right-Wing crazies will foam at the mouth over some of the points, but they are the useless fanatics who never get anything constructive done. *****
The draft dodger who was once in charge of the country celebrated Memorial Day by once again insulting the memory of those who gave their lives so that this country could remain free. I won’t repeat what the major asshole said this time. Nothing he says bears repeating, especially when he has such a history of calling our sacred dead “suckers and losers.”
It’s a crime that this degenerate is running for President again. This clown, who has never won a popular election, will once again drag his party down to defeat. Yes, he won once, in the elections which he influenced, but that was because of the Electoral College, the mistake our nation refuses to correct. It’s a mystery to me why anyone votes for this guy. He was a disaster as President, and he spends each election dragging other Republicans down to defeat. If he was the manager of a sports team, he would have been fired sometime in 2017.
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Sheldon Whitehouse & Roy Blunt on the Supreme Court:
This is a court that tells everyone what to do but gets its balls in an uproar when anyone tries to impose any kind of ethics regulations on it.
It can tell the women of America what to do with their bodies, it can tell congress it can’t regulate guns, it tells the President he can’t do anything about climate change, but don’t you try to tell us that we have to abide by any ethics rules.
What is the result of this avoidance of any standards? Simple; the loss on a daily basis of all respect for the court and more importantly for its decisions. The average joe looks at the Court, sees a bunch of cheesy lawyers avoiding any self-discipline and decides: “Why should I be guided by them? They’re just stealing with both hands.”
And so, no one follows the rulings, of the court anymore and we will end up with chaos.
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One of NYC Mayor Adam’s assistants was on the tube this weekend babbling about the huge increase in bike riding in the city this year and what a good thing that is.
Well, it’s certainly a good thing for the bicycle industry, and it’s a healthy way to get exercise for cyclists but for most of the rest of the people who live in this city it’s a catastrophe.
Bloomberg and his commissioner, Janette Sadik-Kahn started closing down streets in order to make biking safe and popular because she thought it worked in Paris and who doesn’t love Paris. It was a move without thought as Parisian and many other European streets, having been laid out centuries ago, are far too narrow, without traffic lights and therefore much more suitable for bikes than cars.
But NY isn’t Paris, or Amsterdam, or Rome and turning loose tens of thousands of untrained, unaware, unlicensed, and uninsured free wheelers to savage the pedestrians of this city is most definitely a bad idea.
Yes, the city should be amenable to bike traffic, but with the understanding that bikers must be trained, licensed, and insured. Right now, we have hordes of bikers who don’t know or care that it’s against the law to ride on sidewalks, more that don’t seem to understand the meaning of a red light or what a one-way street is.
A trio of mayors who saw a lot of voters with their asses on bike seats have cut down vehicle lanes on major traffic streets to give bikers lanes on which they can now go the wrong way and hit pedestrians in the crosswalks. All this kind of bitching could be eliminated if bikes were regulated the way they should have been before they were encouraged. But no politician in charge has wanted to do the work or risk the opposition. Which means that New Yorkers who are still able to walk must risk their lives so a minority of pseudo athletes can run wild on the city streets.
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The trashy NY Post ran a series of pictures in Friday’s edition of Joe Biden after he fell over a sandbag that somebody should have picked up the other night. It gave Rupert Murdoch a cheap thrill.
But aides picked Biden up and he went on to solve another problem for America. That’s what he does. Biden solves problems. That’s what he’s been doing ever since America put him in office. Last week he solved the insoluble debt ceiling problem. Sure, he had a little help from a couple of Republicans but that’s how he gets stuff done. He knows how to get that help instead of turning those guys from the other party into desperate enemies. That’s how he got all that legislation passed that will help the country for decades. That’s how he put off Russia and continued to help Ukraine. That’s how he’s going to convince China’s Xi to back away from Taiwan and mitigate his economic policies.
Joe may be getting old but he is still one of the best thinkers in the capitol and he may be getting a little clumsy but that hasn’t affected his ability to get more shit done than any President since FDR and damn few of you remember him.
This is going to be a little wonky, so I apologize in advance. I didn’t see the Brad Smith or Chris Krebs appearance on Face The Nation. But years ago when we were much younger I got fascinated by AI, and actually wrote a few academic papers on AI when I was in grad school at USC. At that time (late 60’s), the characteristic that defined AI was the ability of inanimate objects to learn from their environment and then modify themselves (computer code) based on what they observed (learned).
Today, the definition of AI seems to include any computer activity them does human like activities. The computer code remains unchanged, the data gets modified but that’s how computers have always worked. The best example I can think of was the computer HAL in 2001:A Space Odessey. He learned and changed based on his environment.
The majority of AI we are seeing and talking about today is straight but sophisticated computer code working with highly volatile data.
Fortunately, we are putting on the years pretty rapidly, so the problems will be faced by our succeeding generations.
It’s going to come down to “What was the intent of the person doing the software development?”