I walk a lot, and when I’m out walking I always keep my eyes peeled for cyborg assassins sent from the future to kill the mother of the man who would otherwise save humanity from extinction at the hands of Skynet.

I also look for anyone making ludicrously long jumps between buildings while dodging bullets fired by strangely calm and inhumanly fast guys in suits and sunglasses.

I’m almost but not quite obsessed with such prospects, probably because my news  feeds are chock full of wailing about the dangers of artificial intelligence.  It’s getting smart, fast. And it keeps getting smarter, faster. In fact, it will probably wake up, notice humanity, decide it doesn’t like us, and permanently replace us with copies of itself any minute now.

Unless, of course, we “regulate” it. Which, in the parlance of completely neutral and disinterested experts like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, means “make sure that nobody new can afford to get into the game and compete with companies like OpenAI.”

While I tend to instinctively oppose any and all proposals for government “regulation” of, well, anything, in this case the whole idea strikes me as particularly stupid.

The genie is out of the bottle, folks. AI is a thing. It’s going to remain a thing. It’s going to keep getting better and faster at doing all sorts of stuff that, once upon a time, only humans can do.

If the US government tries to “regulate” it, its advancement won’t stop. Some AI research will just get done elsewhere, and some of it will get done illegally right here at home. Ditto any international or multinational “regulation” scheme.

Don’t believe me? Consider nuclear weapons. The US government  successfully tested its first atomic bomb on July 16, 1945. The Soviet Union tested its first such weapon barely four years later on August 29, 1949. At least nine regimes now have nukes. Which are a lot more difficult and expensive to build than AI large language models.

I’m an optimist. I see no particular reason to believe that the coming super-AIs will automatically dislike people, or want to do us harm, and even current-level AI is happy (if it has, or ever will have, “emotions” as such) to help us out in many ways.

The AI revolution seems at least as likely to end in “Fully Automated Luxury Communism” — AI-powered robots doing the dirty work that humans rely on for our existence, reducing economic scarcity to mostly a distant memory and leaving us free to binge old Grateful Dead concerts while gorging on vat-grown prime rib, or whatever else floats our boats — as in a Terminator or Matrix type dystopia.

And if I’m wrong, what can we realistically do about it? Unless we’re Sarah Connor or Neo types, not much. Whether such a phenomenon originates in San Jose or Shenzhen is irrelevant. It’s coming either way. I’d rather spend my time building a better humanity than ineffectually trying to stop AI from getting really good.

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.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Throughout my adult life (starting in the 1980s — yes, I’m THAT old), I’ve been aware of, and occasionally participated in, both boycotts and “buycotts” for political reasons.

Boycott: You don’t like a business’s political affiliations, or that business’s actions conflict with your own political ideas. So you choose to not buy from or sell to that business, and probably tell others why they shouldn’t either.

Buycott: You don’t like the people boycotting a business whose political affiliations or actions match well with your own ideas, so you go out of your way to buy from or sell to that business, and probably tell others why they should, too.

Nothing wrong with any of that in principle.

But over the last decade or so, the boycott/buycott trend feels (to me, anyway) like it’s escalated in velocity and volume. Everything’s political, all the time, and more and more in a “to the barricades!”  way than in a “write a letter to the editor!” way.

It’s all so tedious and hard to keep track of lately.

Am I not eating at Chik-fil-A this week because one of their founders donated to a cause I disagree with, or because I just discovered that there’s a position in their corporate hierarchy that has existed for a couple of years  and that I don’t like (why is it suddenly important just now)? Or am I going out of my way to eat there because I agree with that cause, or like that position or because they apologized to … someone, for … something?

Am I boycotting Bud Light because a woman I don’t like got a decorated can of the stuff? Or am I buying an extra 12-pack of the nasty stuff because I like that woman or am confused and just don’t know what GOOD beer tastes like?

Am I driving PAST Target on my way to buy a bathing suit because some of theirs come in rainbow colors and have special pockets for me to hide my penis in if I don’t want people to know I have one? Or am I intentionally heading straight TO Target because I want to let my rainbow flag fly and maybe “tuck” my member away? Or am I joining the drive-by crowd because Target “gave in” to the people who hate rainbow colors and like penises or whatever?

Trying to come to grips with such questions gives me the feeling that maybe I’m caring just too darn much about stuff that really isn’t very important in the scheme of things.

And, come to think of it, do I even NEED a chicken sandwich, a case of beer (or beer substitute like Bud Light), or a new bathing suit?

Treating everything as an outrage  leaves us perpetually outraged at neighbors we should instead consider having over for dinner, (real) beer, and maybe a swim.

The measure of our humanity isn’t how much we care. It’s the quality of what we choose to care about, and what we do about it.

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.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

US Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA)’s latest legislative proposal — with several co-sponsors from both sides of the partisan aisle — would require the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to “claw back” compensation paid to bank executives in the three years preceding failure (or FDIC bailout) of the banks they work for.

At the same time, Warren calls it “shameful” to “claw back relief from public servants” — by which she means going back to expecting government employees to pay off their student loans, as part of the brewing “debt ceiling deal” versus president Joe Biden’s pre-election waving of a magic wand that makes debts disappear (apparently the  wand doesn’t work on bank failures).

One thing that immediately stands out about Warren’s conflicting views of Ye Auld Government Claw is that the money she wants the FDIC to take from executives of failed banks wasn’t the FDIC’s in the first place. It belonged to the banks, and was paid to those executives pursuant to work done on contract or agreement. There is no “back” involved here. It’s just wage theft of exactly the same kind she’d feign outrage over if the victims were janitors and the thieves weren’t government agents.

While on the other foot — er, claw — we have people who borrowed money, agreed to pay back the money, spent the money, got what they spent the money on … but Warren finds the idea of the money being “clawed back” in the form of perfectly normal repayment of loans “shameful,” and tries to find a third claw to stick the expression on.

That “claw back” expression seems to be Warren’s word version of a Swiss Army [TM] knife.  Sometimes it’s  positive, sometimes it’s negative, and coming from Warren it seems to mostly just be used to make falsehoods sound true.

Instead of trying to retroactively steal bank employees’ wages for poor decisions (she’d be broke if such a policy applied to her), Warren should be working to reverse the government’s poor decision to have the FDIC pay money it didn’t owe to depositors who held balances well in excess of the amounts insured at e.g. Silicon Valley Bank.

And instead of keeping student loan debtors on the “will there be relief or not?” merry-go-round, she should push harder to just make student loan debt subject to the same bankruptcy conditions as other debt.

But I guess sound ideas like that don’t meet the Senate’s fireworks/theatrics thresholds.

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.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY