In a May 15 talk in Toronto, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called for a “global licensing and regulatory framework” for artificial intelligence (AI). As I write this, he’s preparing to offer similar recommendations in testimony before a US Senate subcommittee.

The whole idea of “regulating AI” fails on at least three levels.

Level One: Regulation wouldn’t prevent the development of AI to some notional “singularity” point beyond which it surpassed (and could, if it chose, control or even destroy humankind). If that’s going to happen, it’s going to happen no matter what we do.

Level Two: Even a “global” regulatory framework wouldn’t work — some regimes would openly ignore it, others would secretly evade it, and the regimes which did the best job of ignoring/evading it would enjoy the benefits of AI before, and to a greater degree than, other regimes.

Level Three: Regulation would be VERY effective at one, and only one, thing:  Protecting the current big players (like, say, OpenAI) from competition. Any set of government AI regulators would consist of “experts” in the field — “experts” on their way to or from lucrative jobs in the very industry they’d be regulating. If you don’t believe me, just look for yourself at any other highly regulated field (securities, aviation, and “defense,” to name three) and at the revolving doors between the regulatory authorities and the regulated industries.

If regulation won’t stop technological singularity — and the accompanying obsolescence or even extinction of humankind — what will?

Nothing.

“Unfortunately,” J. Mauricio Gaona writes at The Hill, “AI singularity is already underway. … the use of unsupervised learning algorithms (such as Chat-GPT3 and BARD) show that machines can do things that humans do today. These results, along with AI’s most ambitious development yet (AI empowered through quantum technology), constitute the last warning to humanity: Crossing the line between basic optimization and exponential optimization of unsupervised learning algorithms is a point of no return that will inexorably lead to AI singularity. ”

I’m not sure why Gaona considers that “unfortunate,” or why his recommendation is the same as Altman’s — ineffectual government regulation that won’t prevent it.

We’ve been hurtling toward the “singularity” for at least 3.3 million years, ever since one of our ancestor hominins  (probably Australopithecus or Kenyanthropus) started using tools to make their work easier.

Over those millions of years, we’ve continuously improved our tools … and our tools have continuously improved us. We’re not really the same animal we were before the automobile, let alone before the wheel. We can do things our grandparents, and those hominins, never dreamed of.

Once we started developing tools that could crack nuts better than us, speak across greater distances than us, travel faster than us, etc., it was inevitable that we’d eventually develop tools which could think better than us.

And having now done that, we’ll have to accept the consequences. Which may not be wholly negative. Maybe our AI descendants will like us and choose to assist us in continuing to improve our lives, instead of merely superseding us.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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I’m seeing a lot of back and forth lately on whether or not there’s a “crisis” at the border, with greatly increased migration and limited ability on the part of law enforcement to respond.

Personally, I don’t consider it a “crisis” at all. Immigration is just people moving from one place to another — maybe permanently, maybe temporarily — for any of various reasons.

Maybe they’re safer from criminal or government (but I repeat myself) violence in the new place than in the old place. Maybe there are more jobs. Maybe the jobs pay more.

Or whatever. Moving isn’t some kind of unnatural phenomenon. The average American does it 11 or 12 times in his or her life.

“Now, Tom,” I’ve been told many times, “if you think there’s no crisis at the border, you must not live near the border.”

In fact, I DO live near the border — fairly close to the US border in the form of the Gulf coast, and VERY close to the border separating Alachua County, Florida from Levy County, Florida.

On any given morning, I can watch literally hundreds of immigrants fleeing Levy County and crossing into Alachua County for better livelihoods on the other side of that border.

A lot of people live in Levy County, but work in Alachua County.

Why do they live in Levy County? Because it’s cheaper. Home prices are lower. Rent is lower. Taxes are lower.

Why do they work in Alachua County? Because wages are higher.

Is that a “crisis?” No.

Why isn’t it a “crisis?”

Because the meaning of “crisis” is “something politicians can use to make people fearful and demand bigger government.”

It’s hard to make Americans afraid of other Americans crossing city and town limits, county lines, and state borders, simply because hundreds of millions of us do that hundreds of billions of times per year. Most Americans can’t do their grocery shopping without crossing at least one or two “borders.”

The only way to make Americans afraid of “border” crossing is to pick a smaller subset of immigrants — the few million who cross the US-Mexico “border” on their way from Latin American countries each year — and make them sound like a threatening “other.”

Are those immigrants really any different than the Americans who do the same border-crossing stuff every day?

Well, they do tend to be more socially conservative, to commit fewer crimes, to pay more in taxes, and to consume less in government welfare benefits. But that’s not very frightening. Which is why the people who want you to stay frightened generally omit, or lie about, such facts.

If there’s a “border crisis” at all, it’s that so many Americans believe these demagogues’ scary “border crisis” stories.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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“Biden family members and business associates created a web of over 20 companies,” according to a May 10 memorandum from the US House Committee on Oversight and Accountability. Most of those companies, which “received over $10 million
from foreign nationals’ companies,” were “formed during Joe Biden’s vice presidency.”

The Biden family, according to the memo,  engaged in “complicated financial transactions,” apparently “to conceal the source of the funds and reduce the conspicuousness of the total amounts made into the Biden bank accounts.”

If all of that sounds pretty bad, it’s supposed to.

If any of it surprises you, welcome back to civilization after your hopefully refreshing 15-year nap. You can start catching up by punching the terms “Hunter Biden,” “laptop,” and “Burisma” into your search engine of choice.

Follow that with “Donald Trump” (you may remember him as a notoriously inept businessman and B-list celebrity) and “impeachments” (yes, plural).

We’ve been up to quite a bit of weirdness since you crawled into that cave for your long hibernation, haven’t we?

Over the last 25 years (going back to Bill Clinton in 1998), impeachment has become the go-to threat, and looking for grounds to impeach has become Congress’s constant obsession.

If Republicans maintain control of the House, we can look forward to impeachment proceedings against Joe Biden even if the allegations in that committee memorandum are false. If Democrats maintain control of more than 1/3 of the Senate, we can look forward to acquittal even if the allegations are true.

The last time presidential impeachment “worked” in America was 1974, when Richard Nixon resigned — because he knew that Republicans were about to join Democrats  in voting to impeach, and to convict, him for his role in the Watergate burglary cover-up.

While “bipartisanship” is usually a terrible thing, just horse-trading between both sides to give each other the worst of what each side wants, it’s really the only way to both give teeth to, and require real weight to invoke, impeachment proceedings.

If we want future presidential impeachments to manifest as anything more than political entertainment, it makes sense to start with something that gives Republicans a chance to burnish their “bipartisan” credentials and preempt Democratic whataboutism.

I refer, of course, to associate Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

Thomas is righteously caught. He’s been established, pretty much beyond reasonable doubt, to have accepted and willfully concealed hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes — some directly and some via family members and their employers — from a billionaire who also funds organizations with business before the court.

The GOP flack brigade has jumped in to whine that all this is all just a paperwork fuss, that poor Clarence is smart enough to serve on the Supreme Court but too dumb to fill out standard disclosure forms, but they know he’s bent, and they know he’s busted.

Why not move quickly to his impeachment and removal, as a “bipartisan” palate cleanser? He has to go in any case, and it might set the proper tone for whatever happens with Biden down the line.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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