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

“Is school choice bankrupting Arizona?” Jason Bedrick and Corey DeAngelis dispute claims to that effect by governor Katie Hobbs and State Representative Andrés Cano; their own viewpoint is in the title of their Wall Street Journal op-ed “School Choice Saves Arizona Money” (June 5).

It will come as no surprise that Hobbs and Cano are Democrats, or that Bedrick and DeAngelis are conservatives, fellows at the Heritage Foundation and the American Federation for Children (affiliated with the American Legislative Exchange Council rather than a youth brigade of the American Federation of Teachers).  But how closely do the predictable lines on the issue really align with the sides’ averred principles?

After all, liberals trace their philosophical roots to John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, which suggested that government “leave to parents to obtain the education where and how they pleased, and content itself with helping to pay the school fees of the poorer classes of children.”  Mill’s observation that exceeding such a relatively modest involvement in schooling does “now convert the subject into a mere battlefield for sects and parties, causing the time and labour which should have been spent in educating to be wasted in quarrelling about education” sounds like it was written this week rather than in 1859.

And if modern liberals have shed the scruples about government spending of even moderate classical liberals like Mill, it’s hard for them to object to it being misspent.  If they agree with George Lakoff that “taxation is paying your dues, paying your membership fee in America,” then America — or a part of it like Arizona — gets to spend it as foolishly as its members allow it to, until they give up their membership. Some being spent via nominally private means doesn’t change the underlying caveat emptor.

Meanwhile, heavy subsidization has long become the status quo in education, crowding out more innovative approaches — as well as, ironically, more traditional parochial schools (and homeschoolers on both extremes). Bedrick and DeAngelis tout the partial control granted to parents over “a portion of their child’s state education funds” by so-called “Empowerment Scholarship Accounts.”  Yet wouldn’t the truly fiscally conservative way to empower scholarship be simply not taxing that money away from parents in the first place?

It was far-leftists like Alexis Ferm who foresaw that schools might only be truly public if they were “sponsored by the groups that want to use them.” Joel Spring notes in Education and the Rise of the Corporate State that such self-funding was “precisely how the Modern School was organized” by Ferm’s comrades in the early twentieth century as “a model for the type of education center the radicals were to create as an alternative to the existing system.”

Their discoveries — and the rediscoveries of Spring’s generation of New Leftist scholars — have been ignored.  Yet the way forward out of today’s education quagmire may be indicated by the meeting of Freedom Avenue and Justice Street in Piscataway, New Jersey on the forgotten site of the Modern School.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “Spending or Saving, Only Free Choice Can Make School Choice a Real Choice” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, June 8, 2023

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