We’re in Sci-Fi Territory…

Time on the treadmill goes faster when you listen to a podcast, but the other day, I should have listened to music. Instead, I listened to Ezra Klein and his guest discuss AI (Artificial Intelligence).

In case you’ve missed the mountain of reporting, recriminating, pooh-poohing and dark prophesying, let me share the podcast’s introduction.

OpenAI last week released its most powerful language model yet: GPT-4, which vastly outperforms its predecessor GPT-3.5 on a variety of tasks.

GPT-4 can pass the bar exam in the 90th percentile, while the previous model struggled, around the 10th percentile. GPT-4 scored in the 88th percentile on the LSAT, up from GPT-3.5’s 40th percentile. And on the advanced sommelier theory test, GPT-4 performed better than 77 percent of test takers. (GPT-3.5 hovered around 46 percent.) These are stunning results — not just what the model can do but also the rapid pace of progress. And Open AI’s ChatGPT and other chat bots are just one example of what recent A.I. systems can achieve.

Every once in a while, a commenter to this blog will say “I’m glad I’m old.” Given the enormity of change we are likely to see over the next decade, I understand the appeal of the sentiment. You really need to listen to the entire podcast to understand both the potential benefits and the huge dangers, but an observation that really took me aback was the fact that right now AI can do any job that humans can do remotely.

Think about that.

In 2018, researchers reported that nine out of ten manufacturing jobs had been lost to automation since 2000. That same year, Pew asked 1900  experts to predict the impact of emerging technologies on employment; half predicted large-scale replacement of both white- and blue-collar workers by robots and “digital agents,” and scholars at Oxford warned that half of all American jobs were at risk.

It would be easy to dismiss those findings and predictions–after all, where are those self-driving cars we were promised? But those cited warnings were issued before the accelerated development of AI, and before there was AI able to develop further AI generations without human programmers.

Many others who’ve been following the trajectory  of AI progress describe the technology’s uses–and potential misuses–in dramatic terms.

In his op-eds, Tom Friedman usually conveys an “I’m on top of it” attitude (one I find somewhat off-putting), but that sense was absent from his recent essay on AI. 

I had a most remarkable but unsettling experience last week. Craig Mundie, the former chief research and strategy officer for Microsoft, was giving me a demonstration of GPT-4, the most advanced version of the artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI and launched in November. Craig was preparing to brief the board of my wife’s museum, Planet Word, of which he is a member, about the effect ChatGPT will have on words, language and innovation.

“You need to understand,” Craig warned me before he started his demo, “this is going to change everything about how we do everything. I think that it represents mankind’s greatest invention to date. It is qualitatively different — and it will be transformational.”

Large language modules like ChatGPT will steadily increase in their capabilities, Craig added, and take us “toward a form of artificial general intelligence,” delivering efficiencies in operations, ideas, discoveries and insights “that have never been attainable before across every domain.”

The rest of the column described the “demo.” It was gobsmacking.

What happens if and when very few humans are required to run the world– when most jobs (not just those requiring manual labor, but jobs we haven’t previously thought of as threatened) disappear?

The economic implications are staggering enough, but a world where paid labor is rare would require a significant paradigm shift for the millions of humans who find purpose and meaning in their work. Somehow, I doubt that they will all turn to art, music or other creative pursuits to fill the void…

I lack the capacity to envision the changes that are barreling down on (unsuspecting, unprepared) us–changes that will require my grandchildren to occupy (and hopefully thrive) in a world I can’t even imagine.

If we’re entering a world previously relegated to science fiction, maybe we need to consider applying and adapting Asimov’s three laws of robotics:  1) A robot (or any AI) may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2) A robot (or any AI) must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3) A robot (or other AI) must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Or maybe it’s already too late…..

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The Tyranny Of The Minority

Among the newsletters I receive is one from historian Heather Cox Richardson, who regularly provides historical context for contemporary issues.

These two paragraphs from a recent newsletter have prompted me to dust off and recycle one of my old classroom lectures.

The right-wing rejection of democracy was on display at a meeting of the Federalist Society in early March. Politico’s Ian Ward covered the meeting. The Federalist Society organized in the 1980s to argue that the civil rights decisions of the past several decades corrupted democracy because liberal judges were “legislating from the bench” against the wishes of actual voters. The society’s members claimed to stand for judicial restraint.

But now that their judges are on the bench, they have changed their philosophy. Last summer, after a Supreme Court stacked with Federalist Society members overturned the right to abortion, voters have tried to protect that right in the states. Now, according to Ward, the Federalist Society appears to be shifting away from the idea of judicial restraint in the face of popular votes and toward the idea that judges should “interpret the Constitution” in ways right-wing Americans support. They are quick to claim that democracy is not the answer: it would result, they say, in the tyranny of the majority.

When I taught Law and Public Policy, we talked a lot about the U.S. Constitution, and the Founders’  approach to that “tyranny of the majority.”

The phrase points to a legitimate concern: if the law is anything a majority of voters say it is at any given time, individual rights are at risk. A majority can vote to disenfranchise a minority, require everyone to attend a particular church, criminalize anti-government sentiments… the list goes on.

It is easy, after 200 plus years, to find fault with our Constitution, and in this blog I have pointed to areas that I think need to be amended or re-construed. But the philosophy with which the Founders approached these very real worries about what they called the “passions of the majority” was (in my view) as close to perfect as possible.

Drawing on Enlightenment scholarship, the Founders distinguished between matters that were properly within the decision-making authority of “the people”–the majority– and matters that were to be protected from the majoritarian passions of those people.

That division was the entire purpose of the Bill of Rights.

In our system, a majority of voters get to select their lawmakers (theoretically, at least, voting for those whose positions they endorse). Those representatives then decide, via legislative majorities, issues ranging from waging war, to taxes, to electoral processes, to the establishment of government agencies…on and on. (And yes, as I periodically point out, this process is currently not working very well…)

The Bill of Rights constrains the ability of the majority to determine the law. It protects the right of individuals to self-govern, marking out legal territory that the majority cannot enter. Your neighbors cannot vote to make you attend a particular church or  prevent you from reading a particular book; they may not authorize a government functionary to “search and seize” you without probable cause. Etc.

For years, judges and lawyers have debated the range of personal liberties protected against majority disapproval. Was the Bill of Rights to be read as an organic whole, encompassing the “unenumerated” rights retained by the people, or was it to be limited to rights expressly identified? I think the expansive reading is more consistent with the text and the Founders’ original expressed philosophies, but it’s a legitimate debate.

The about-face by the Federalist Society is not legitimate. It is an argument for the tyranny of a minority–so long, of course, as that ruling minority agrees with them.

The American constitutional system was based upon the libertarian principle (libertarianism as properly–and originally–understood). I’ve shared it before; let me share it again: The libertarian principle holds that Individuals should be free to pursue their own ends–their own life goals–so long as they do not thereby harm the person or property of another, and so long as they are willing to accord an equal liberty to their fellow citizens.

We can argue about the nature of the harms that justify government intervention, but Jefferson had it right: “It does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are 20 gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”

The purpose of the Bill of Rights was to erect a boundary between those matters that harm others, which the majority can properly sanction, and the individual, profoundly personal human rights that are simply none of government’s business.

We can argue about where that boundary belongs, but the Federalist Society,  MAGA warriors and  Christian Nationalists are trying to erase it altogether.

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Who To Believe?

I just encountered an article raising the very troubling possibility that–in the absence of clearly trustworthy and widely trusted sources of information, all of us, Right and Left alike, get played–purposely or not– by people pursuing partisan agendas.

As regular readers of this blog have probably surmised, I subscribe to a wide array of publications: newspapers, magazines, newsletters and the like, representing a pretty wide swath of political opinion/argumentation. Ever since Louis DeJoy was named Postmaster General, I have gotten regular “warnings” from a Democratic organization insisting that DeJoy is busily privatizing the Postal Service, and asserting that–among other nefarious things– he had interfered with delivery of election materials in order to help Trump. More recently,  those emails have been asking me to sign petitions “demanding” that Biden instruct his postal board appointees to fire DeJoy.

Those emails did raise a question: What was the holdup? Why was this Trumper still there?

Then I came across this lengthy  and apparently well-researched article from Time Magazine, titled “Louis DeJoy’s Surprising Second Act.” It included a fairly “deep dive” into several of those accusations.

DeJoy may be best known as the Trump-era GOP megadonor the left accused of meddling with mail-in voting to subvert the 2020 election. But by the time Schumer called him on that frigid winter night, DeJoy was on his way to convincing congressional Republicans—120 in the House and 29 in the Senate—to buy into a lengthy Democratic wish list of postal reforms. When President Joe Biden signed the landmark legislation into law two months later, it guaranteed a union-friendly version of six-day mail service and stabilized health coverage for the 650,000 USPS employees. “There’s no way we could have gotten [the] votes without Louis DeJoy,” says Jim Sauber, the chief of staff for the National Association of Letter Carriers at the time. “That’s for sure.”…

But to the astonishment of many in Washington, the man Democrats once denounced as a threat to American democracy has become one of their most important allies in government. Defying the far right, he delivered more than 500 million COVID-19 test kits to Americans in the winter of 2022. Crossing conservatives last December, he agreed to transition the Postal Service’s entire fleet to electric vehicles by 2026. DeJoy’s capstone collaboration with Democrats was the Postal Service Reform Act, which is arguably the most bipartisan piece of major legislation in the Biden era, drawing 10 more GOP Senate votes than the $1 trillion infrastructure bill.

According to the article, the postal unions and the Biden-appointed Democratic majority on the agency’s Board of Governors have bought into DeJoy’s plans, although members of Congress who don’t want to see rate increases continue to object.

DeJoy had been active in GOP politics for many years, and was certainly no “Never Trumper,” but he insists that Trump wasn’t involved in hiring him.

“I swear on my mother’s life, the President had nothing to do with it,” DeJoy says. “He didn’t know anything about it. I would never even think to tell him before I had a decision, because who knows what he could do with his tweets!”

The article is lengthy, and goes into detailed explanations of the various accusations about politically-motivated chicanery. You should read it yourself, and decide whether you find this far more nuanced reporting more convincing than the generalized accusations made in those periodic emails.

I am not posting this in an effort to convince readers one way or the other; my concerns are–once again–focused on the information environment we inhabit. I will readily admit that, given my own political orientation, I simply accepted the accuracy of the allegations contained in those emails. (In my own defense, until I came across the linked article, I hadn’t seen reason to doubt them.)

Any fair-minded observer of America’s current political scene will conclude that most misrepresentations come from the Right. There’s Fox “News,” the Big Lie, the various conspiracy theories, QAnon insanity, the all-out war on a “wokeness” its enemies can’t define...but those of us who are waging our own war against propaganda need to acknowledge that not everything that emerges from “our side” of the political spectrum is worthy of uncritical acceptance.

Until I have evidence that Time Magazine disseminates misinformation, I am inclined to trust its reporting, and revise my opinion of DeJoy. But the larger and far more troubling conclusion to be drawn from this clash of “alternative facts” is that it is increasingly difficult for Americans to know who and what to believe and who and what to discount.

Social cohesion requires trust. A fundamental problem of our times is that we don’t know who or what we can trust. No wonder conspiracy theories are so rampant.

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Explaining The Fury

I routinely hear from people who are pissed off by the essays I post here, but–hey!–I’m retired, so I don’t have an employer’s reaction to worry about, and my long-suffering family members tend to agree with me. So let me set off the critics with today’s politically-incorrect post.

I think a lot of the problems we face (“we” being humans, not just Americans) are rooted in bad religion.

Religion developed as a method of dealing with two very human needs: first, as a way to understand the world we live in–why did stuff happen?– and later as a way of wrestling with the nature of morality. Science has undermined that first purpose (it seems disease is caused by germs, not God’s disapproval…) The clergy I respect are focused on helping people grapple with moral responsibility –they aren’t the multiple pious scolds issuing prescriptive fatwas.

America’s nasty politics is largely driven by the reaction of White Evangelicals (the fatwa issuers) to social and demographic change.

They are throwing a tantrum.

Robert P. Jones recently shared five charts that explained White Evangelicals’ embrace of MAGA  politics. Jones is the head of the Public Religion Research Institute, and the author of The End of White Christian America.

He reports that White Christian Americans are facing a steep demographic decline.

As recently as 2008, when our first Black president was elected, the U.S. was a majority (54%) white Christian country. As I documented in “The End of White Christian America,” by 2014, that proportion had dropped to 47%. Today, the 2022 Census of American Religion shows that figure has dropped further to 42%.

All Christian denominations have experienced decline, but it has been especially pronounced among White Evangelical Protestants, who now comprise only 13.6% of Americans. The decline is likely to continue; 18% of seniors, compared with only 9% of young adults, identify as White Evangelical Protestant.

Hence the tantrum–what Jones calls  “a desperate corrective for their waning cultural influence.”

While I held out some possibility in “The End of White Christian America” that white evangelicals and other conservative white Christians might accept their new place alongside others in an increasingly pluralistic America, their steadfast allegiance to Trump’s MAGA vision — actually increasing their support for him between 2016 and 2020 — and their unwillingness to denounce either Trump’s Big Lie that the election was stolen or the violence on Jan. 6 have dashed those thin hopes.

The question isn’t whether these folks will ultimately prevail. They won’t. They can and do cause unnecessary social upheaval, but their zealotry is already beginning to sideline them.

Americans–and all humans–are far better served by religions that focus on how we should behave, on how we should treat the other people with whom we share the planet.

I’ve previously quoted Phil Gulley, a Quaker pastor who writes columns for Indianapolis Monthly and for his local small town newspaper. In a recent column, Gully writes that he had

decided long ago that my commitment to the way of Jesus was not predicated upon miracle, myth, or superstition. His teachings are so demonstrably true, I have no need to resort to religious parlor tricks to defend them. In history, virgin births and bodily resurrections served only one purpose—to persuade pre-scientific people of someone’s unique importance, in this case, Jesus. But if tomorrow the bones of Jesus were found in Palestine, the value of his principles would not be diminished. I would still believe in justice, in compassion, in sticking up for the underdog….

He went on to note that, in many congregations,

One can dot every theological i and cross every orthodox t, but scorn the poor, deny others their rights, lend their support to tyranny, and still be thought a “good” Christian, when all they have done is believe a certain thing, however farfetched. Beliefs have supplanted the weightier matters of justice, mercy, and faithfulness….

To accept the myths of religion as literal, historical fact is to insist our minds remain in their infant state, untouched by wisdom and insight. Religionists fear enlightenment and education, knowing the threat they pose to dictates and doctrines. They would rather keep us ignorant and compliant than intelligent and bold, which is always a threat to their power, since the uninformed and dim are not only easier to lead but also mislead.  Thus did Voltaire rightly warn us that anyone who can make us believe absurdities can make us commit atrocities. So I will forego the absurdities and embrace truth, which truly does set us free.

As I told him, these are sentiments with which this very Jewish atheist agrees.

At the end of the day, theological belief (faith) without more is irrelevant–it is behaviors (works) that matter.

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Dueling Overton Windows?

Wikipedia tells us that

The Overton window is the range of policies politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time. It is also known as the window of discourse.

The term is named after American policy analyst Joseph Overton, who stated that an idea’s political viability depends mainly on whether it falls within this range, rather than on politicians’ individual preferences. According to Overton, the window frames the range of policies that a politician can recommend without appearing too extreme to gain or keep public office given the climate of public opinion at that time.

That leads to a question: what happens when what is considered “mainstream” in the bubble occupied by people on the political Right is wildly at variance with what is “mainstream opinion” in the rest of America? 

Most Americans find assertions about deep-state elites running the world while drinking the blood of young children to be unlikely, to put it mildly, but on the MAGA right, a significant number of QAnon folks actually believe those things. Fervently.  A troubling number of MAGA “warriors” believe Jews and Blacks are trying to “replace” White Christian Americans. An even larger percentage has fully bought in to Trump’s Big Lie, despite overwhelming evidence that has led more rational Americans to find it preposterous.

I hadn’t really thought about the possibility of incompatible Overton Windows until I came across a report by ProPublica about the Right’s effort to brand The League of Women Voters as a leftwing–probably “woke”– organization.

The nonpartisan League of Women Voters has been facing a nationwide backlash after decades of going about its business of surveying candidates, registering voters, hosting debates and lobbying for its causes with little fuss.

ProPublica reported in August how the volatile political climate has caught up with the league, with conservatives increasingly portraying it as a decidedly liberal entity. Since that story was published, we’ve seen candidates reject invitations to debate and try to undermine the league’s work in registering new voters. In September in Illinois, then-Lake County Board member Dick Barr, a Republican, publicly apologized for a Facebook post in which he called the league “partisan hags.”

This week, the group found itself once again in the middle of a political controversy. This time it was in Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis has sought to reshape a wide range of discourse, including by making it easier for public officials to sue for defamation and restricting discussions of systemic racism in workplace trainings. The league revealed that it had been denied permission by the Florida Department of Management Services to hold an outdoor rally on the steps of the Old Capitol in Tallahassee under a new DeSantis administration rule requiring groups to first get sponsorship from a sympathetic state agency.

The League’s Florida president was asked about the “increasingly difficult environment” occupied by the 103-year old league, due to positions that it has long championed– positions that used to be seen as nonpartisan, and that have historically been considered entirely “mainstream” by both Republicans and Democrats.

As she noted, the League promotes civic discourse, freedom of academic thought, and ready access to the ballot box. It has never supported or opposed any political party or candidate. Which raises a question: when, exactly, did those positions make the organization “leftwing”? 

I think I know.

The website of the Indiana League opens with the following statement:.

The League of Women Voters is a nonpartisan civic organization
that encourages informed and active participation in government,
works to increase understanding of major public policy issues,
and influences public policy through education and advocacy.

There’s the evidence! Talk about an admission of “wokeness”! “Informed” participation? “Understanding” of major policy issues? Those goals are clearly part of the liberal-left effort to encourage knowledge and education (and–gasp!– maybe even respect for science and fact…).

Woke, woke, woke!

The League became Leftwing when “education is dangerous”  became an article of faith on the Right– when some 25% of the American public decided that teaching really is a subversive activity, that learning accurate American history is a commie conspiracy, that letting Black people vote– and for that matter, entertaining the very concept of “inclusion”–are signs of the Beast, or at the very least, anti-American.

How long have demonstrably untrue (and arguably insane) ideas been embraced as “mainstream” in the bubble inhabited by Fox “News” viewers, MAGA warriors and Christian Nationalists? 

And more consequentially, how do we repair a breach between irreconcilable world-views? How do we penetrate the information bubble that insulates a troubling number of our fellow Americans from reality– and produces a separate, manifestly delusional, Overton Window?

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