When the MAGA say "woke" they mean "secular humanist"

I've long wondered what the MAGA mean by "woke" and why they hate it so much.  A recent essay by the scribe of the technarchy, Noah Smith, answered my question.

Smith writes

N.S. Lyons is a popular essayist in the “national conservative” tradition...  He is well-read and well-informed ... 

In a recent essay entitled “American Strong Gods”, Lyons identifies what in my opinion is a deep truth about our current historical moment....

... Lyons believes that the end of anti-Nazism as the West’s guiding principle will pave the way for the return of morality, community, rootedness, faith, and civilizational pride ...

... the American Right views wokeness as a greater threat than the potential return of Hitler ... 

If the great threat is wokeness, then presumably it is opposed to the things Lyons praises. I don't know what wokeness is, but let me suggest, based on that list, that woke is a synonym for "secular humanist". I'll go through each of Lyons values and say whether secular humanism (and liberalism) is opposed ...

1. Morality: The MAGA are without honor, integrity, compassion or decency. Their morality is about the supremacy of wealth, the rightness of strength, and the joy of crushing enemies. But it is a morality of sort and it's very different from secular humanism. Secular humanist morality is much closer to traditional Christian thought but with a primary focus on people.  Opposed.
2. Community: Libs (sec hum variant) are more concerned with individual freedom and tolerance than with tribe or community.  Somewhat opposed.
3. Rootedness: Perplexity tells me that by this the MAGA mean "historic and cultural heritage". Like statues to slaveholders. Myths and stories, many untrue. Secular humanists favor truth and reality - albeit with the knowledge that humans need stories and untrue stories may facilitate less terrible behavior. Opposed with caveat.
4. Faith. Secular humanists tend to be agnostic or atheistic and favor people over religious belief. Opposed.
5. Civilizational pride: Similar to rootedness. Again, myths and stories, much omitted. No slavery, no genocides, no slaughters, no crimes. Again, secular humanists favor truth and reality. Opposed

The shoe fits. When MAGA speak of "woke" they mean "secular humanist", which they probably consider the same as Lib. They are correct to say "woke" (secular humanist) is the enemy.

Project 2025 - the Perplexity Summary

I don't have the patience to dig through Project 2025. I was hoping a journalist I follow would do an opinion-free overview but I haven't seen one. So I asked Perplexity Deep Research to extract themes. I italicized the ones that I have not seen discussed very much. It does not seem to be an expression of a coherent ideology; rather it seems to be a political document collecting opinions of powerful individuals. A lot of it is about education and schools.

• Administrative state: Dissolve Education, EPA and Homeland Security.
• Defund Head Start.
• HHS gets education
• Dept of Education funds go to school vouchers
• Seed conservatives throughout the civil service
• Put the FBI and DOJ under presidential control. Use National Guard for immigration enforcement.
• Flat tax and corporate tax cut
• Eliminate overtime pay rules, weaken NRLB, relax OSHA rules.
• Promote fossil fuel industries by reducing environmental regulations. Reverse carbon emission regulations, promote Arctic drilling
• Reduce reliance on foreign manufacturing (PDB claims 2025 is internally inconsistent about tariffs vs free trade).
• Restrict abortion by banning medication mail and defund Planned Parenthood
• Rescind LGBTQ+ anti-discrimination rules in healthcare and foster care.
• End civil rights enforcement in schools
• End Title 1 funding (money for schools with high percentage of low income students)
• End Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IEPs, transition services, least restrictive environment etc). There is no federal replacement noted so presumably this all goes to the states.
• Defund NPR and PBS
• Pornography restrictions
• Ban TikTok, ban Confucius Institutes, block Chinese critical sector investments
• Defund climate science, downsize NOAA
• Privatize National Flood Insurance Program
• Reinstate border wall

The full perplexity report includes critiques of these measures. I hadn't wanted those but LLMs have a "mind of their own" as they say. Apparently LLMs think Project 2025 is kind of dumb. 

As a certified squishy Lib I can see the logic of some of them. The weirdest parts are the trans and porn obsessions. The funniest part is the TikTok ban. The fossil fuel thing wins "most insane". The cruelest part of 2025 may be removing support for persons with cognitive disabilities.

Dramatic cuts to science research and the antivaxx movement don't seem to be coming from Project 2025, those may be a Musk/Trump thing. Greenland/Canada also seems to be a Musk/Trump obsession.

Repairing a broken America - where the Trump oligarchy is vulnerable

I expect it will be transiently reversed, but the Jan 21, 2025 federal informer program was a historic marker. Nobody will be able to say they did not know.

The key to restoring a liberal democracy to America will be to identify and publicize Trump actions that his voters will find disturbing.  In a Bluesky thread I identified several measures that I think may resonate with non-college white men and women. I don't think Musk's impulsive nazi salute or the passing of liberal democracy or similar outrages will have much traction. I think these topics might. I will update this post as I collect ideas from more informed sources than me.

1. Corruption. I believe corruption has been the downfall of many authoritarian governments even in nations that are much further from a functional democracy than America. Do not tire of pointing out the corruption of Trump and his oligarchs. Do not omit the corruption of Congress (including many Dems) and of the Supreme Court.
2. Eugenics: Trump, Musk, Andreesen et al are true believers in eugenics. They believe that breeding must be encouraged among the cognitive elite. (Don't assume that the oligarchs are simple pigment racists, they will be more or less happy to include any cognitive elite.). They key here is that their eugenics enthusiasms exclude the majority of Trump voters. Most of them would not qualify as breeders.
3. Medicine: I will not be entirely unhappy if RFK leads HHS. If immunization rates fall low enough we will see some outbreaks of truly horrible diseases among (mostly) unvaccinated children. The images will resonate with Trump voters. Mothers in particular may be unhappy.
4. SCOTUS: If America has a future the Roberts Court will be counted among the most corrupt in history. I have a hunch there is a special vulnerability there.
5. Religion: There is a reason church and state were separated hundreds of years ago. America has many religions and many sects. They all compete for funds and followers. They all believe they know the true way, and that their rivals are at least somewhat wrong. There is a strong Catholic component to the Trump regime (esp SCOTUS), that cannot please his Protestant fundamentalist followers. Do not fail to remind Trump's religious fundamentalists that he his oligarchs are all agnostic or atheist.
6. Andreesen's Federal Bitcoin reserve: The use of "taxpayer money" to give Andreesen an exit from his bitcoin holdings will resonate with the Trump base. They do not mind oligarchs, but some will resent this.
7. Crushing support for cognitively disabled children: Andreesen and Trump seem to have a particular dislike for the support of cognitively disabled children. Their language and cuts are particularly cruel. (They apply to cognitively disabled adults as well, but that cohort is less photogenic.) In my experience conservatives are often personally supportive of the cognitively disabled and more sympathetic than many Dem elite. This cruelty should be exposed and shared.
8. Informer programs: The people of East Germany did not care for the STASI. Many of the Trump base will be offended by informer programs. Do not fail to publicize these.

It is two years to the midterms. Our goal is to show the Trump base that they have been cheated and betrayed. Some will vote Dem, many will decide not to vote. The 2026 midterms are the next battle for American democracy.

PS. I created a Perplexity page to gather advice from our AIs.

The Jan 21 2025 Federal OPM informer program is a historic milestone

The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) informer program launched within government on Jan 21 2025. This is a historic milestone.

 [1] “… If you are aware of a change in any contract description or personnel position description since November 5, 2024 to obscure the connection between the contract and DEIA or similar ideologies, please report all facts and circumstances to DEIAtruth@opm.gov within 10 days.”

https://chcoc.gov/sites/default/files/OPM%20Memo%20Initial%20Guidance%20Regarding%20DEIA%20Executive%20Orders.pdf

I think this may come to be seen as a tactical mistake. It is too early to launch informer programs, too early to turn colleagues into STASI style informers. The shape and form of the memo will rouse some. 

I worked for the Veterans Health Administration for six years and received DEI training during the Biden administration during the brief time the staff program ran before internal pushback ended it. I remember (fallible) one of our instructors as a black woman. Almost certainly a veteran. Patient, gentle, cautious -- the sort of person who will have friends and supporters. They will be unhappy.

I would not be surprised if the memo is rescinded and the author reassigned within the Trump administration. As I said - too early. But whether or not it is reversed, the wake up call is clear. Nobody will be able to say they did not know.

I am retired and, to be honest, I have been a bit at loose ends. In an odd way this is the sort of thing I've been waiting for. I'm reaching out locally to set up some in person discussions and networking for peaceful resistance and support.

Chaos times: American oligarchy

1. I was right about polling being worthless

2. At least Biden was spared humiliation 

3. Americans chose oligarchy willingly. 

4. Our feeble democracy wasn’t going to survive AGI (if we get it)

5. I think the inability of a large number of men and women to meet the always increasing IQ/EQ requirements needed for a middle-class life is the root cause. #massDisability

Now we enter the chaos times.

Autonomous vehicles: A prediction

I'm putting this down as a marker for me to look back to in a few years.

When autonomous vehicles are able to operate in Minnesota winters they will also be able to converse about quantum field theory, exotic mathematical geometries, politics in the Maldives, art history, and their latest contributions to classical music. 

Muskism, Vance, AI and the American choice between oligarchy and an imperfect democracy

In advance of Nov 5 2024, some thoughts on  Muskism. Because I can't resist this kind of thing.

Musk and his fellow tech oligarchs more or less believe in the need to preserve a white tribe, eugenics, and the relative supremacy of a male pattern brain. But I don't think that's what is what is driving Musk's political agenda.

I think Musk is sincere about his stated AI beliefs. He expects at least the genius-in-every-pocket described by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. He believes American democracy will not survive the AI driven chaos to come. This challenge, Musk believes, will be far more disruptive than mere world war.

Musk and his tech allies believe that humanity's best chance is to be guided by a kind of aristocracy of wealth and (in his imagination) clear thinking intellect. Perhaps if we pass into a future AI golden age democracy might be restored, but that will depend on whether the SentientAsBestWeCanTell AIs of 2030 get the vote. The Muskites believe Trump is weak, dying, and will not finish a second term. He will be pardoned, given money and left to the side. Vance is their man. The tech oligarchs will steer America and the world through what lies ahead.

I believe Musk is correct about the AI chaos to come. In the old days we called this period the "technological singularity" -- back when singularity meant absence of prediction rather than a religious experience.

I don't, however,  think Musk and his billionaire minions are the answer to this challenge. I would prefer to give democracy a chance.

But does democracy really have a chance? November 2024 is the test. If Americans, knowing all they know now, having lived through a Trump presidency, still reelect Donald Trump -- then it's clear our democracy is not up to the much greater challenge of even collective climate geoengineering -- much less the AI transition.

If "Trump" (Vance really) wins in 2024 I will be sad. On the other hand, I will then accept that Musk was correct. If American democracy can't handle the Trump idiocy it will have demonstrated it is entirely insufficient for what lies ahead. In that case perhaps the oligarchy is the best we can do.

If Vance loses in a few weeks -- then we will see how democracy manages the chaos times. That's what I have voted for.

In which I declare my expert judgment on AI 2024

These days my social media experience is largely Mastodon. There's something to be said about a social network that's so irreparably geeky and so hard to work with that only a tiny slice of humanity can possibly participate (unless and until Threads integration actually works).

In my Mastodon corner of the "Fediverse', among the elite pundits I choose to read,  there's a vocal cohort that is firm in their conviction that "AI" hype is truly and entirely hype, and that the very term "AI" should not be used. That group would say that the main application of LLM technology is criming.

Based on my casual polling of my pundits there's a quieter cohort that is less confident. That group is anxious, but not only about the criming.

Somewhere, I am told, there is a third group that believes that godlike-AIs are coming in 2025. They may be mostly on Musk's network.

Over the past few months I think the discourse has shifted. The skeptics are less confident, and the godlike-AI cohort is likewise quieter as LLM based AI hits technical limits. 

The shifting discourse, and especially the apparent LLM technical limitations, mean I'm back to being in the murky middle of things. Where I usually sit. Somehow that compels me to write down what I think. Not because anyone will or should care [1], but because I write these posts mostly for myself and I like to look back and see how wrong I've been.

So, in Aug 2024, I think:

1. I am less worried that the end of the world is around the corner. If we'd gotten one more qualitative advance in LLM or some other AI tech I'd be researching places to (hopelessly) run to.
2. Every day I think of new things I would do if current LLM tech had access to my data and to common net services. These things don't require any fundamental advances but they do require ongoing iteration.  I don't have much confidence in Apple's capabilities any more, but maybe they can squeeze this out. I really, really, don't want to have to depend on Microsoft. Much less Google.
3. Perplexity.ai is super valuable to me now and I'd pay up if they stopped giving it away. It's an order of magnitude better than Google search.
4. The opportunities for crime are indeed immense. They may be part of what ends unmediated net access for most people. By far the best description of this world is a relatively minor subplot in Neal Stephenson's otherwise mixed 2018 novel "Fall".
5. We seem to be replaying the 1995 dot com crash but faster and incrementally. That was a formative time in my life. It was a time when all the net hype was shown to be .... correct. Even as many lost their assets buying the losers.
6. It will all be immensely stressful and disruptive and anxiety inducing even though we won't be doing godlike-AI for at least (phew) five more years.
7. Many who are skeptical about the impact of our current technologies have a good understanding of LLM tech but a weak understanding of cognitive science. Humans are not as magical as they think.

- fn -

[1] I legitimately have deeper expertise here than most would imagine but it's ancient and esoteric.

Fantasies of a tyrant: The Deshittification Corps

This morning on my Mastodon:

It’s possible that we have built an economical and technical environment that is too complex and treacherous for almost all humans to live in.

Perhaps the Neanderthals had similar feelings about the warmer buggier more diseased environment that came with the Skinnies (their name for us). 

I wonder who will inherit our world.

Yes, I'm Old. But the young are distressed and anxious, so perhaps they feel it too. To me many things feel frayed, fragile, buggy, and poorly maintained. As though there wasn't enough time to do it right before the next urgent thing. 

Apple is supposedly off trying to build Apple Intelligence -- and in the meantime Photos.mac is the shittiest software I've been obliged to consistently use [1]. For a small fraction of what Apple vaporized on autonomous vehicles and the Vision Pro thing they could have slowed the growth rate of their technical debt and maybe even implemented fucking Folder search in Photos.mac [3].

Which brings me to the Deshittification Corps. If I were a Tyrant, which is more than you deserve, I would create a Deshittification Corps (DC) to fight enshittification [2]. My Deshittification Corps would be a force of about 10,000 people who evaluated the services we rely on and gave them shittification ratings. Which they would be obliged to public post, a bit like cigarette carton notices. For example:

This service has a Shittification Rating of D. This is a really shitty service. We recommend everyone who works for this company seek new employment.

Companies that didn't improve their Shittification rating would be subject to a special tax that would start at 0.01% of gross revenue and double every day ... 

- fn -

[1] Ok, SharePoint is shittier. But now you're triggering me. Besides, one of the best things about retirement is no more SharePoint.

[2] Yes, Doctorow was talking about software and online services, but I'm bending the meaning more broadly to encompass government and other services.

[3] It would still be shitty software, but that would be the biggest improvement since iPhoto stabilized.

On living and working with "Nazis"

My current social media vice is Mastodon, with Threads 2nd and Bluesky a distant 3rd. (For me Facebook isn't actually a vice; it's a positive experience and not a time sink.)

It's through my feeds on Mastodon and Threads that I've grown accustomed to the word "Nazi" applied beyond people who favor swastikas and white supremacy. I don't love the meaning shift, but from studies across multiple societies and eras we know that roughly 1/3 of people would, in the right context, be eager Nazi equivalents (Dorothy Thompson's 1941 essay is worth a read). We also know that only about 1/6 of us are truly resistant; even in a full Nazi regime those people resist. The rest of us just kind of go along. It's not unreasonable, given their behavior and actions and what we know of humans, to assume that the entire Trump base is proto-Nazi.

One third of humanity is a lot of people. Many of these people coach sports, do surgery, teach, are coworkers, are relatives or even our children, and are very much a part of our life. If you are reasonably social you interact with them all the time. Just like Rwanda's Hutu and Tutsi interacted before and after a true genocide. Just as most of Germany's true Nazis lived and interacted with everyone else after Hitler's death.

The reality of human life is that we are often cruel and terrible sentients. Often, but not always. Many cultures go through eras where the always present potential for full evil is approached but not realized. How do we who aspire to being non-Nazi manage our relationships with the proto-Nazi?

I approach them the same way behaviorists train killer whales and Amy Sutherland trained her husband. Reinforce the positive and extinguish the negative. Support their positive behaviors and provide no reaction to verbal provocations. Reinforce cultural norms, even frayed norms, of compassion and caring. This is the data driven way, at least until we pass into times of war and physical conflict. Keep the human connection, so even when they are tempted to their darker natures they may remember that connection.

It is tempting to attack. To threaten to "punch Nazis". This is folly. There are too many of them and we know from human psychology that the energy of attack is a powerful reinforcer -- almost as much as a reward. It seems illogical, but humans are not logical.

The proto-Nazis will always be with us. At least until the AIs end us all. We have to manage them to have a civilization.

Quicken for DOS cannot be recreated: Why we can't have good personal finance software any more.

Almost 40 years ago we used Quicken version 2 or 3 for DOS 3.1 on a Panasonic 8086 with 640K of memory and a CPU too feeble for a modern toaster. 

Every month a 3.5" (not 5.25") diskette came in the mail with our bank and credit card transactions. We loaded that into Quicken. We entered cash transactions manually. It worked pretty well, though Quicken was plagued with database corruption bugs until the 90s. When Microsoft Money appeared one could migrate transactions and history from one to the other.

There's no modern equivalent. Today's vendors sell our data to third parties and then market products to us. Vendors have a hard lock-in. This kind of service decay is now known as "enshittification". Today in a mastodon thread I listed what drove that enshittification*:

1. The banks feared disintermediation and commodification so they stopped cooperating and/or raised transaction costs. 
2. Selling services to customers and selling customer data were both seemingly painless ways to increase margins for a publicly traded company
3. Costs and user experience both favor user data in the cloud — which aligns with selling user data and services.
4. Customer data lock strategies became irresistible and with cloud migration they were easy to implement.

Of these the first is the big one. If customers could get their data then small vendors could produce niche subscription products. But the banks aren't going to cooperate. They know better now.

I don't know if we'll ever see good products again. Perhaps if Apple or Microsoft went into banking they'd provide an API for developers to use. Of course we'd all have to use Apple's Bank for everything but, speaking for my family, they already own us.

*With two 't's per Doctorow.

Large Language Models - evolutionary tree and selection algorithm 2023

The following two diagrams were taken from Mooler et al's GitHub LLM guide (April 2023). I'm posting them here as a snapshot of this historic moment. The root of the LLM evolutionary tree goes far back in time, almost five years ago. Click image for full res.

Algorithm for selecting an AI technology

LLM Evolutionary Tree

We need a new word for the historical singularity.

TLDR: The "technological singularity" was an important and useful term with a clear meaning. Then it became the "Rapture of the Nerds". We need a new term.

--

I first heard the word "singularity" in the context of black hole physics; it dates back at least to the early 20th century:

ChatGPT 4 2023: "At the singularity, the laws of physics as we know them, including space and time, break down, and our current understanding of the universe is insufficient to predict what happens within it."

Not much later, in the 1950s, the term was applied by von Neumann in a technological context (from a 1993 Vernor Vinge essay):

Stan Ulam paraphrased John von Neumann as saying: "One conversation centered on the ever-accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue."

Brad Delong used to write about this kind of non-AI historical singularity. My favorite description of what it would be like to a approach at technological singularity was Vinge's short story "Fast Times at Fairmount High". (This prescient story appears to be lost to time; he wrote a similar full length novel but I think the short story was better).

The core idea is there's a (virtuous?) recursive loop where technology improves technology with shorter and shorter cycle times. Many processes go exponential and even near term developments become unpredictable. One may assume social end economic structures train to keep pace. The historical singularity exponential curve was part of The Economist's y2K Millennium issue GDP per person historical graph:

In a January 1983 essay for Omni Magazine Vinge focused on a particular aspect of the the technological singularity arising from superhuman intelligence (aka "super intelligence"):

We will soon create intelligences greater than our own ... When this happens there will be a technological and social transition similar in some sense to "the knotted space-time at the center of a black hole" 

A decade later, in his 1993 essay later published in Whole Earth Review (non-Olds cannot imagine what Whole Earth Review was like), Vinge revised what he meant by "soon":

... Based on this trend, I believe that the creation of greater-than-human intelligence will occur during the next thirty years. (Charles Platt has pointed out that AI enthusiasts have been making claims like this for thirty years. Just so I'm not guilty of a relative-time ambiguity, let me be more specific: I'll be surprised if this event occurs before 2005 or after 2030.) ...

So by the year 2000 we had the concept of a historical technological singularity (eminently sensible) that had become focused on a specific kind of self-improving technology - the superhuman intelligence with an upper-case S Singularity (presumably AI). Those were useful concepts - "technological singularity" and "superintelligence" Singularity. 

In 1993 Vinge predicted the Singularity would happen before 2030, later experts like Scott Aaronson predicted after 2080. (Aaronson has since revised that prediction and works for OpenAI; Vinge's 2030 dates looks pretty good.)

After 2000 though the word Singularity went off the semantic rails. It came to be used for for a peculiar future state in which human minds were uploaded into simulation environments that were usually described as pleasant rather than hellish. This is, of course, antithetical to the original idea of unpredictability! This peculiar meaning of "The Singularity" came to be known as "The Rapture of the Nerds" based on the title of a book by Charles Stross and Cory Doctorow. More recently that vision underlies a weird cult called longtermism that seems to have infected some vulnerable minds.

The "Rapture" meaning of "Singularity" has effectively taken over. We no longer have a term for the original von Neumann concept of self-reinforcing technological change that makes even the near term future unpredictable. That perversion of meaning is why I use the tag "Whitewater world" rather than Singularity for my own blog posts (and "Skynet" rather than super intelligence).

So we need a new term. I don't think "whitewater world" is it.

Anyone have a new term? We probably have a few years in which it might still be useful.

ChatGPT's 155 IQ and passing the Sebastian's children puzzle

A Scientific American contributor found ChatGPT (probably 3) scored 155 on a standard IQ test:

Estimated on the basis of five subtests, the Verbal IQ of the ChatGPT was 155, superior to 99.9 percent of the test takers who make up the American WAIS III standardization sample of 2,450 people. As the chatbot lacks the requisite eyes, ears and hands, it is not able to take WAIS’s nonverbal subtests. But the Verbal IQ and Full Scale IQ scales are highly correlated in the standardization sample, so ChatGPT appears to be very intelligent by any human standards.

We don't need to worry though because it couldn't answer this question:

ChatGPT easily fails at obvious riddles, such as “What is the first name of the father of Sebastian’s children?” (ChatGPT on March 21: I’m sorry, I cannot answer this question as I do not have enough context to identify which Sebastian you are referring to.) It seems that ChatGPT fails to reason logically and tries to rely on its vast database of “Sebastian” facts mentioned in online texts.

This is what happened when I tried the Sebastian test on GPT-4:

Ah, I understand now. This riddle is a classic play on words. The answer is "Sebastian" himself, as he is the father of his children.

Ok, so that's reassuring.

Update 4/12/2023: ChatGPT4 (C4) recently did well in some blinded advanced undergraduate exams.

A response to Scott Aaronson's rejection of an AI pause.

Scott Aaronson, who works on AI safety for OpenAI, wrote a critique of AI Pause that was not up to his usual standards. Here's what I wrote as a comment:

Hi Scott — I was confused by your post. I’m usually able to follow them. I won’t defend the letter directly and Yudkowsky/TIME is not worth a mention but maybe you could clarify some things…

1. 6m seems a reasonable compromise given the lifespan of humans, the timescales of human deliberation and the commercial and military pressure to accelerate AI development. Short enough to motivate urgent action, but long enough that reflection is possible. (I doubt we actually pause, but I agree with the principle. China isn’t going to pause of course.)

2. Let’s assume GPT 5 with an array of NLP powered extensions exceeds the reasoning abilities of 95% of humanity in a wide variety of knowledge domains. That’s a shock on the scale of developing fire, but it’s occurring in a hugely complex and interdependent world that seems always on the edge of self-destruction and actually has the capabilities to end itself. We’re not hunter gatherers playing with fire or Mesopotomians developing writing. There’s no precedent for the speed, impact and civilizational fragility we face now.

3. It’s not relevant that people who signed this letter were previously skeptical of the progress towards AI. I recall 10 years ago you were skeptical. For my part I’ve been worried for a long time, but assumed it was going to come in 2080 or so. 60 years early is a reason to pause and understand what has happened.

Lastly, I read the OpenAI statement. That seems consistent with a pause.

Everything is just fine.

The ad-funded internet is collapsing. It's been ailing for years but, as seems to the rule, the last bit is happening quite quickly. I'm guessing advertisers, who must be kind of dim, finally realized they were wasting their money. They did much better funding special interest magazines but those are gone now. Much of Silicon Valley has been funded by a now defunct business model. So maybe this is not a good time to be there. (Or, if you are young and have some money, maybe this is the best time to be there.)

Meanwhile human-cognition level AI has arrived. About 60 years earlier than I'd hoped. And some people thought "Don't Look Up" was about climate change. As a guide I recommend the movie Superintelligence; particularly the protagonist's approach to the end of the world. (Spoiler: It's a rom-com. Her world does not end.)

It's whitewater world all over now. On the bright side, we don't need to waste too much time on longterm planning. I retired in August of 2022 so I think I'll focus on mountain bike trail maintenance and, like Superintelligence's Carol Peters, on the needs of friends and family.

I ask ChatGPT about the next step.

 Not a bad response.

”Describe what happens when ChatGPT is enhanced with natural language processing and domain-specific knowledge modules.”

--

When ChatGPT is enhanced with natural language processing and domain-specific knowledge modules, it gains several capabilities that allow it to better understand and respond to user input.

Natural language processing (NLP) is a field of artificial intelligence that focuses on enabling computers to understand and interpret human language. By incorporating NLP into ChatGPT, the model can better analyze and interpret user input, including understanding sentence structure, recognizing named entities, and determining the meaning of words in context. This allows ChatGPT to generate more accurate and relevant responses to user queries.

Domain-specific knowledge modules provide ChatGPT with specialized knowledge related to a particular field or topic. For example, if ChatGPT is enhanced with a medical knowledge module, it can better understand medical terminology and provide more accurate and relevant responses to medical-related queries. By incorporating domain-specific knowledge modules, ChatGPT can tailor its responses to specific user needs, making it a more effective conversational agent.

Together, these enhancements enable ChatGPT to better understand and respond to user input, providing more accurate and relevant information to users. This can lead to a more engaging and satisfying user experience, as well as improved productivity and efficiency in a wide range of applications.”

Be afraid of ChatGPT

TL;DR: It's not that ChatGPT is miraculous, it's that cognitive science research suggests human cognition is also not miraculous.

"Those early airplanes were nothing compared to our pigeon-powered flight technology!"

https://chat.openai.com/chat - "Write a funny but profound sentence about what pigeons thought of early airplanes"

Relax	Be Afraid
ChatGPT is just a fancy autocomplete.	Much of human language generation may be a fancy autocomplete.
ChatGPT confabulates.	Humans with cognitive disabilities routinely confabulate and under enough stress most humans will confabulate.
ChatGPT can’t do arithmetic.	IF a monitoring system can detect a question involves arithmetic or mathematics it can invoke a math system*. UPDATE: 2 hours after writing this I read that this has been done.
ChatGPT’s knowledge base is faulty.	ChatGPT’s knowledge base is vastly larger than that of most humans and it will quickly improve.
ChatGPT doesn’t have explicit goals other than a design goal to emulate human interaction.	Other goals can be implemented.
We don’t know how to emulate the integration layer humans use to coordinate input from disparate neural networks and negotiate conflicts.	*I don't know the status of such an integration layer. It may already have been built. If not it may take years or decades -- but probably not many decades.
We can’t even get AI to drive a car, so we shouldn’t worry about this.	It’s likely that driving a car basically requires near-human cognitive abilities. The car test isn’t reassuring.
ChatGPT isn’t conscious.	Are you conscious? Tell me what consciousness is.
ChatGPT doesn’t have a soul.	Show me your soul.

Relax - I'm bad at predictions. In 1945 I would have said it was impossible, barring celestial intervention, for humanity to go 75 years without nuclear war.

XKCD 632

See also:

• All posts tagged as skynet
• Scott Aaronson and the case against strong AI (2008). At that time Aaronson felt a sentient AI was sometime after 2100. Fifteen years later (Jan 2023) Scott is working for OpenAI (ChatGPT). Emphases mine: "I’m now working at one of the world’s leading AI companies ... that company has already created GPT, an AI with a good fraction of the fantastical verbal abilities shown by M3GAN in the movie ... that AI will gain many of the remaining abilities in years rather than decades, and .. my job this year—supposedly!—is to think about how to prevent this sort of AI from wreaking havoc on the world."
• Imagining the Singularity - in 1965 (2009 post.  Mathematician I.J. Good warned of an "intelligence explosion" in 1965. "Irving John ("I.J."; "Jack") Good (9 December 1916 – 5 April 2009)[1][2] was a British statistician who worked as a cryptologist at Bletchley Park."
• The Thoughtful Slime Mold (2008). We don't fly like bird's fly.
• Fermi Paradox resolutions (2000)
• Against superhuman AI: in 2019 I felt reassured.
• Mass disability (2012) - what happens as more work is done best by non-humans. This post mentions Clark Goble, an app.net conservative I miss quite often. He died young.
• Phishing with the post-Turing avatar (2010). I was thinking 2050 but now 2025 is more likely.
• Rat brain flies plane (2004). I've often wondered what happened to that work.
• Cat brain simulator (2009). "I used to say that the day we had a computer roughly as smart as a hamster would be a good day to take the family on the holiday you've always dreamed of."
• Slouching towards Skynet (2007). Theories on the evolution of cognition often involve aspects of deception including detection and deceit.
• IEEE Singularity Issue (2008). Widespread mockery of the Singularity idea followed.
• Bill Joy - Why the Future Doesn't Need Us (2000). See also Wikipedia summary. I'd love to see him revisit this essay but, again, he was widely mocked.
• Google AI in 2030? (2007) A 2007 prediction by Peter Norvig that we'd have strong AI around 2030. That ... is looking possible.
• Google's IQ boost (2009) Not directly related to this topic but reassurance that I'm bad at prediction. Google went to shit after 2009.
• Skynet cometh (2009). Humor.
• Personal note - in 1979 or so John Hopfield excitedly described his work in neural networks to me. My memory is poor but I think we were outdoors at the Caltech campus. I have no recollection of why we were speaking, maybe I'd attended a talk of his. A few weeks later I incorporated his explanations into a Caltech class I taught to local high school students on Saturday mornings. Hopfield would be about 90 if he's still alive. If he's avoided dementia it would be interesting to ask him what he thinks.

What I learned about managing catalytic converter theft: OEM vs aftermarket vs universal

The catalytic converter on my much loved 2010 Kia Sedona van was stolen. (I think there are two and the rear converter was removed. I'm not a car guy.) It's an every day thing around here.

This is what I learned about this problem.

1. Manufacturers only stock OEM converters for 10y post model date. So there's no OEM solution.
2. The normal option to an OEM converter is a "bolt-on" aftermarket product. This is typically installed by a service garage or muffler shop. In Nov 2022 there are none available for the Kia Sedona and many other vehicles. It's a national shortage.

There are three remaining options:

1. A "straight pipe": This is illegal but in our fallen times nobody seems to care. (Mad Max didn't even have a muffler.) Done by some muffler shops and by guys working out of their home. Oxygen sensor is a common issue, there are probably others. Not so good for the environment, but neither is replacing the vehicle.
2. A "universal catalytic converter". Insurance companies will send customers to a muffler shop that will install (weld I think) a "universal converter". These are not a perfect match to the vehicle so they may cause performance issues and trigger a check engine light. For this reason service shops avoid them in normal times. That "we don't go there" rule can cause some bad advice in post-apocalyptic times.
3. Sell or junk the vehicle and pay $50,000 for a new van. If sell then the buyer does one of the above.

Our garage mechanic didn't mention the "universal catalytic converter" option because "they don't do that". Sadly he hadn't updated his algorithm to deal with the national shortage. Now we have a new mechanic (He did apologize for his error, but hd didn't think to offer a retention incentive. I think he'll give better advice in the future.)

If you do replace a catalytic converter it may, of course, be stolen again. Consider a weld-on cage so thieves choose a neighboring vehicle instead. Or a straight pipe so they don't bother. It's handy to have a junk car when parking in unsecured lots in metro Minneapolis St Paul.

[Political aside: property crime will elect the GOP in America. Don't get fooled into thinking that only violent crime rates matter.]

What is "manliness" in 2022?

Over the past year or two several of my favorite writers have expressed uncertainty about the American cultural standard for "manliness". Some wonder if it even exists.

Speaking from Oldness I would say that there is a clear standard of "manliness" in American culture and that it has changed relatively little over the past 80 years.

Manliness is Shane in 1949. It's the MCU's Steve Rogers (more than the comics actually). It's Aragorn in the LOTR. In the 1970s it's James Bond and Playboy and, more recently, Men's Journal. It's Kipling's (yes, that one) 1943 poem ...

If you can keep your head when all about you   

    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,   

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

    But make allowance for their doubting too ...

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;   

    If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;   

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

    And treat those two impostors just the same ...

... If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

    If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

    With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,   

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,   

    And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son

Manliness includes enjoying toys, whether they are garden tools or drills or mountain bikes or skis or Lego models. There is continuity with Boyliness.

While Manliness has not changed much, there have been changes in who can be Manly. The role was once restricted to penis people. It's now open to all. Once you understand that you can see the continuity of the cultural model.