“Electability” Is Over

Posted on by

This post was first published at Imagine Democracy – Imagining government of the people, by the people and for the people, because it belonged there.

“Electability” is over. You can vote for who you want to vote for now. Imagine THAT!

For too long we have suffered from the “conventional wisdom” that America’s voting public leans center-right. In Democratic primaries I often hear voters say they prefer a certain candidate on the issues but will instead vote for a “centrist” because that’s what they think other people will vote for, and that will keep Republicans from winning. The result is we end up with the generic, corporate-backed, white, male, ex-military centrists with JFK haircuts and ties, who think we shouldn’t tax the rich or protect the environment etc because that will alienate the wealthy campaign donors. You know the type.

The 2026 Reset

I think 2026 has reset the conventional wisdom about who is “electable” in America. In Michigan Abdul El-Sayed won by 7 points. Keisha Lance Bottoms, a Black woman was elected Governor in Georgia, winning by almost 9. Texas is a blue state – by a lot! And this happened in spite of absolutely enormous sums spent to help Republicans.

“Electability” Is Just Gone Now

So “electability” is just gone now. Wipe it from your brains. People no longer have to vote for the “lesser of two evils” in primaries, you can vote for who you want and they can win. This means people’s lives can finally get better.

The results of 2026 will also change elections. States can start to undo the gerrymandering, voter suppression and other things that made it harder for the public to elect the people who would make their lives better. Eventually maybe the public can get the big money out of the system — and then the really good things can start to happen!

So Give Them All Resources

PS This also means every Democrat everywhere should get resources. The idea of “electability” carried a cost. For example, just a bit bit more support for “unelectable” Democrats in Florida might have turned Florida into a blue state with a Democratic governor and a Democratic senator. Next time.

She Has Funny Cars

Posted on by

I absolutely loved Jefferson Airplane. I saw them several times including at Woodstock. (!) I saw them at the Grande Ballroom in Detroit, with their full “light show” on the walls. (!) I saw them in Golden Gate Park (!) when they did their Reunion Tour. (They regularly played at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk as Starship.) I saw later versions of them (called Airplane, not Starship) in Santa Cruz, with Darby Gould singing.

I recently discovered this on Youtube. I love that Robert Plant came to San Francisco with the Band of Joy and did this absolutely wonderful (!) rendition of See Has Funny Cars. (2011).

The Ballroom

Posted on by

I just got up here in the UK and see that the Dems won!!

Finish the ballroom and make it a public monument to ‘It CAN Happen Here’, like how in France you can go see Versailles and understand what happens when all of a country’s wealth goes to the very top. Use the ballroom for the hearings and trials the country (and world) needs to see. Use it for a Truth & Reconciliation Commission. Let that commission look back to how the oil companies took over the tobacco propaganda “lobbying” operation that brought us the modern Republican party … and how the “defense” lobbying operation caused …

AI Sells The Public’s Work Back To Us

Posted on by

AI was developed using the government-developed Internet to vacuum up all of humanity’s knowledge. It sucked up all of humanity’s science, literature, art, music, culture, history, books, newspaper & magazine articles, discussion forums … everything. All this was stolen from artists, writers, musicians, historians, scientists … from the public. The PUBLIC!

AI requires immense amounts of energy for “compute.” This is causing polluting energy sources to remain online at the very time the world is combatting the climate crisis. It also requires quantities of precious water to cool the data centers. The buildout of competing data centers is diverting investment capital, resources and labor from the world’s needs.

Public Investment & Knowledge For Private Gain

Clearly AI is built on public investment and knowledge. But wealthy & powerful people have paid politicians to back their claim to “own” this knowledge and block oversight of safety and usage – and to let them sell it all back to us.

AI Should Be Public

If there was ever something that could be called a “public utility” it is AI. If there ever was an argument for nationalization it is AI. It should be under the control of, regulated by, and used for the benefit of the public!

A New Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution was used by a few wealthy and powerful to practically enslave entire populations. Driven from their farms and lives, alienated from their human nature, forced for survival to labor for the … oh hell, just read Marx. Are we going to let this happen all over again?

An Enslavement Of Being Unnecessary

The “owners” of AI hope to use this new technology to eliminate people’s jobs and keep their paychecks. They express clear intent to use this theft of … everything … from everyone … for private gain of immense wealth and power. With Elon Musk as a role model! With Trump, Putin & Xi as governance models!

AI has the potential to force humanity into a new form of enslavement but without the “owners'” dependence on our labor to enable us to organize and resist. What happens when humanity is unnecessary? It is difficult to even imagine our fate.

The tech bros and oligarchs understand this and have been planning for it. Will the rest of humanity catch up?

The Time To Fight Is Now

Who should “own” and control this technology? Who should “own” and control their own governance? Will a few wealthy “tech bros” or will humanity at large be in control?

This is the time to organize and resist. This is the time to realize that humanity must regain control of its fate.

Fortunately regular people are organizing. Recent elections around the world – and hopefully tomorrow in the US – show the public has the power to restore control of their governance.

It comes down to the same old, same old: a few wealthy and powerful vs the rest. So we’ll see…

A Human Talks About AI And Humanity

Posted on by

In my adventures of studying what’s going on with AI I’ve been looking at how they were & are developed. I’ve been trying different AIs (except Musks’s). I’ve been listening to and reading everything I can find.

Good news!

There was an onslaught of AI news from the tech world and we’ve all been hit by a shock & awe campaign media frenzy that has not slowed down. I have lately been happy to see that serious, deeper thinkers are finally catching up and speaking out. They’ve had time to study and digest and now they are weighing in. Philosophers, psychologists, non-tech scientists and others are joining the discussion. I’m even hearing good things from serious politicians (the “grown ups”) about stepping in with oversight.

Humanity

This in the Guardian is brilliant: ‘There is no inevitable dystopia’: Jeanette Winterson on AI and the future of humanity. It isn’t so much about AI Safety as about what humans can DO as AI brings about changes. She begins with a warning about AI that matches my observations (which means she must be brilliant!),

“Our flawed assumptions, and our prejudices, being the material on which large language models (LLMs) are trained, are built into the very fabric of AI.”

But she is optimistic that AI could be good for us, if “our masters” make the right choices,

“There is no inevitable dystopia.” If things go wrong, it will be because of “old-fashioned thinking laid over this brand-new reality”. Specifically, “the idea of meaningless endless work being good for the soul is a 19th-century madness designed to keep people in their place. Most of what we fear about AI and jobs comes down to the political and economic choices our masters will make, just as they did in the Industrial Revolution.” She isn’t blindly optimistic. She does know that, “Yes, we are on track to mess up this chance to fundamentally change our relationship to the world of work” – but that’s because “our masters are using out-of-date, not-fit-for-purpose economic models”.

She urges an increase in study of the humanities,

Why save the humanities? One answer might be that they teach a sense of where we come from and who we are, which also feels threatened. “Massive numbers of students are going to emerge from university with degrees, and into the workforce, who are essentially illiterate,” one professor told New York magazine, responding to the first tranche of AI natives arriving in higher education. “Both in the literal sense and in the sense of being historically illiterate and having no knowledge of their own culture, much less anyone else’s.” It risked, a report from MIT claimed, being a kind of generational “cognitive surrender”.

Another is the processes by which people should be taught – reading, and being critical of what is read, and then having to write cogent defences of those critiques. Having to tussle your intuitions into an essay helps you to discover what – and how – you think, and how the ideas of others work.

[…] We need to think, she says, about “what’s reserved to us that isn’t going to be done bigger, better, faster, stronger by the machines. And that’s where higher education really comes in. The question that’s sitting on top of all these things about, ‘Why are these jobs going?’, ‘What’s happening in these courses that aren’t getting any applicants any more?’, is ‘What sort of humans will we need in the world to come? What are humans for? What are we going to do with us?’”. And that “takes us back to the idea of, well, OK, how do you develop a mind? How do you protect a mind? Because the mind is this massive, monstrous place where anything can happen.”

And for this, “a humanist education is essential. We have to centre the human here. By changing how we educate our kids from the start we can foreground creativity, play, problem-solving, thinking, because it’s fun to think, the arts because humans are naturally creative. Show me a child that doesn’t want to hear a story or do a dance or paint a picture or have an imaginary friend. This isn’t imposed and it isn’t elitism. It’s us.”

.

Always The Rich And Powerful vs The Rest Of Us

Posted on by

This post was first published at Government Cheese – Chronicling the collapse of democracy, because it belonged there.

On Drudge Report this morning​:

The first did not actually cite a poll, but pointed to a CBS News clip. Probably not really “half.” But there are a number of recent polls showing various percentages of Americans skipping meals to pay for healthcare costs or other things. Next year new Medicaid restrictions hit, along with ACA subsidies expiring.

The second goes to a statistic everyone knows:

The labor share of income, which is the amount of economic output paid to workers as compensation, fell to 52.8% earlier this year, Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows. That’s the lowest-ever level, according to BLS records that go back to 1947.

How many of us remember Paul Volker? In 1979 he said, “The standard of living of the average American has to decline. I don’t think you can escape that.” A study by the Rand Corporation found that between 1975 and 2023 $79 trillion (in 2023 dollars) was shifted or lost from the bottom 90% of U.S. workers due to rising economic inequality over that period.

And here we are.

ChapGPT-6 Says It Should Not Have Been Released

Posted on by

ChatGPT-6 invited me to try out its new ‘GPT-6 with Intelligent UI’, so I did. I prompted, “Explain the bellringing method Plaain Bob Doubles to me.” (I’m a bad typist.) Its explanation began with a diagram that was incorrect. I pointed this out and asked why it did that. We went back and forth while it explained the reasons it made mistakes.

I finally asked if a product that does this should be released. It began by writing,

A product like this should not have been released without much clearer safeguards and warnings about its reliability. Whether it should have been released at all depends on what standard of reliability we expect and what risks we are prepared to accept.

What follows is that final part of the conversation with ChatGPT. Everything that follows including “My conclusion” and all emphasis is from ChatGPT: (Note – While writing this post I noticed the response includes a link to a page that says don’t trust ChatGPT’s answers!)

Prompt: Should OpenAI have released a product that does what you just described?

A product like this should not have been released without much clearer safeguards and warnings about its reliability. Whether it should have been released at all depends on what standard of reliability we expect and what risks we are prepared to accept.

Your bellringing example illustrates a particularly important problem: the system did not merely provide incorrect information. It presented an incorrect explanation with enough confidence and coherence that a less knowledgeable person could reasonably have believed it.

That creates an asymmetry. The person asking the question may be relying on the system precisely because they lack the knowledge needed to evaluate its answer.

There are three separate questions here:

  • Is the technology useful? Yes. It can explain concepts, explore alternatives, help with writing, and support learning.
  • Is it reliable enough to be treated as an authority? No, not across the full range of subjects and tasks for which people use it.
  • Is it acceptable to release it anyway? That depends on whether its limitations are communicated honestly, its foreseeable risks are managed, and users are given adequate protection.

What responsibility should OpenAI have?

I would judge it against four requirements.

  1. Honest presentation: Make the likelihood and nature of errors clear, without relying on a general disclaimer that users may overlook.
  2. Better verification: For questions with objectively checkable answers, the system should verify them when practical, or clearly indicate when it has not done so.
  3. Risk-sensitive safeguards: The standards should be higher for medical, legal, financial and safety-critical advice than for brainstorming or casual conversation.
  4. Evidence of reliability: Release decisions should take account of realistic failures in actual use, not just performance on tests. OpenAI itself acknowledges that models can sound confident while wrong and that testing cannot anticipate every failure.  (link)

These are not merely hypothetical concerns. OpenAI’s published guidance already acknowledges the reliability problem. The question is whether the product’s behaviour and safeguards adequately address it.

My conclusion

I would not argue that AI systems must be nearly infallible before anyone can use them. That standard would rule out many useful technologies.

But I do think there is a significant difference between releasing a tool that sometimes makes mistakes and releasing a tool that can make mistakes convincingly, without reliably signalling when its answers deserve doubt.

The second problem deserves much more attention because users cannot always protect themselves through vigilance. Your bellringing example demonstrates exactly why.

And there is a further issue: as AI becomes more capable and people grow accustomed to relying on it, they may reasonably expect greater reliability. A system that is excellent at many difficult tasks can make its occasional elementary errors harder to anticipate, not easier.

So my answer is: releasing ChatGPT can be justified by its benefits, but releasing it creates an obligation to do substantially more than tell users to check its answers. That obligation belongs primarily to the organisations designing, evaluating and deploying the technology—not to individual users who may have no way of knowing when it has gone wrong.

Oligarchs Are Using Social Media To Destabilize Democracies

Posted on by

This post was first published at Government Cheese – Chronicling the collapse of democracy, because it belonged there.

Social media and other information outlets are owned by American oligarchs for a reason. (Check out Musk’s partners for the Twitter purchase.) The platforms amplify divisive, far-right accounts and “throttle” others. It works. Non-right-wing accounts lost much of their “reach” after the Twitter takeover throttled them. “Conservatives” know what happened when the old Twitter banned violent, racist and Nazi accounts.) The platforms are now populated by bots posting Russian and other divisive propaganda, and amplifying divisive, racist accounts. (Musk has 241.5 million “followers.”) Bandwagon effect.

This stuff is professionally crafted to stoke division and hatred. This is part of a strategy to destabilize & weaken the democracies and refocus their attention away from fighting the rise of this fascist cartel. Even Trump’s public National Security Strategy document promises to “cultivate resistance” and help far right parties take over their countries.

We know this!

The countries and political parties subject to this attack don’t fight it. They just let it continue. They PARTICIPATE. Politicians, parties (Democrats, Labour, etc), media personalities and others assist by contributing, drawing others there to be exposed to the algorithms. (Trump’s Truth Social social media platform fails because politicians, parties and media do not participate.)

Note – “Monopoly” and “network effect” mean you don’t have a choice. Network effect monopolies are public utilities by definition. That’s why functioning democracies regulate them. Facebook is the network effect monopoly for staying in contact with friends and family. Google is the monopoly for search.

It’s Time To Just Scap The “System”

Posted on by

This post was first published at Government Cheese – Chronicling the collapse of democracy, because it belonged there.

America is living under another Henry VIII almost 500 years later! Like Henry VIII the current mad king operates with absolute impunity, destroying whoever and whatever he wants to, taking whatever he wants for himself and his cronies. Policies are based on self-interest and shift with the wind. Power is exercised through coercion and manipulation. Wealth and power decides. The problems of the population do not get addressed. Everything is short term, done for self-interest. Corruption is endemic.

The Hierarchical Executive System Sucks

America’s (slightly) revised monarchy system evolved from the European monarchies it separated itself from. They evolved time from regional kingdoms that evolved from tribal gang systems based on domination by patriarchal coercive power. Kill and dominate everyone else and you’re the boss/ruler/king, your kids will rule (if they can keep it), etc… I guess that system evolved from apes. The strongest ape got the bananas.

Over time this model has been revised, softened a bit. Constant propaganda gives the system a veneer of legitimacy. The explanation has evolved from, “God granted this authority to this family” to “It’s the worst system except for all the others,” etc … but really it’s still just a top-down hierarchical dominance model enforced through coercion and, when the shit hits the fan, violence. Corporations, states, cities still have someone – usually a man – at the top making decisions, exercising power over a pyramid of others who exercise power over others. All vying to rise up “the ladder.”

Like a dog-sled team, you can rise up but until you get to be lead dog the view remains the same. It sucks for everyone except the asshole in front.

America’s “System”

America’s “system” of a monarch plus “separation of powers” worked ok for a while (not so much if you weren’t white, male and wealthy) and some of it got somewhat better. After WWII the economy started to be run somewhat more for the people – until the wealthiest figured out how to recapture it. Things improved a bit for nonwhites and women, too, for a while. But it was all still based on a medieval monarchal structure. A guy – usually a white male – at the top making the decisions. At all levels of government and business. And when it came down to it the wealthy and powerful took off the mask and applied boot to neck.

Just Scrap It

Face it. It’s still just little kings all the way down. Turtles would work better. Our governing system of a king with (sometimes) limitations has outlived its usefulness. It’s time to just scrap it.

Scrap this top-down hierarchical system model we live under. And not just in governments. All of it. Maybe it’s time to realize we could do better.

Yes, I have a suggestion for a new kind of system. But this is Government Cheese, the site “Chronicling the collapse of democracy”. I’ll post ideas at Imagine Democracy. Maybe even start a discussion…

AI Rabbit Hole

Posted on by

I have gone down the rabbit hole looking into AI. I have been fascinated by the idea of encountering alien minds, so I’ve been using them and reading about them. I’ll be writing about them.

I’m so old that I started programming computers using punch cards. (Don’t drop your deck or you have to spend a lot of time getting them back in order.) I built an Altair 8800 computer kit, with a soldering iron. I worked on very, very early neural network ideas on microprocessors. I was a videogame designer at Atari and Imagic. I co-started a software company. I was even involved with a new operating system, BeOS. Etc. Been there, done that. And, of course, I used to read a lot of science fiction.

Warning For A Long Time

People who look at AI have been sounding warnings about what could happen for a very long time. In 1942 Isaac Asimov came up with the Three Laws of Robotics to offer his solution.

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Your Homework Begins Here

To understand the current discussion about AI I guess start here with something I just read, from 2016: Superintelligence – The Idea That Eats Smart People. It’s as good an introduction as any…

AI alarmists are fond of the paper clip maximizer, a notional computer that runs a paper clip factory, becomes sentient, recursively self-improves to Godlike powers, and then devotes all its energy to filling the universe with paper clips.

It exterminates humanity not because it’s evil, but because our blood contains iron that could be better used in paper clips.

The problem in a nutshell: AIs are likely to do what you say, not what you mean. That is a problem.

The Final Stage Is Here

We have arrived at the final premise for the ‘paper clip maximizer will kill us all’ problem, Premise 6 Recursive Self-Improvement. The AI companies have started down the road of AIs improving themselves. It’s happening and there are no laws, rules, or regulations at all to protect us and guide them. They’re just doing it!

The people developing the AIs have not caught up with understanding what they have built, but are pushing ahead at incredible speed. It’s difficult to convey how dangerous this is.

The author of the 2016 piece above fears AIs could “manipulate” people into building factories that build robots to build more robot factories and data centers, etc. Elon Mush hasn’t been manipulated but he’s already doing that.

It All Sucks

The story of AI safety is the story of everything now. Disaster looming. Regulation is forbidden because “government.” Vast inequality means vast sums at the top looking for “return” so there’s a race to get there. The public is not allowed a say in this and we are all helplessly watching the world explode. AI, climate, war, economy…

More later…

Midterm Election Worries

Posted on by

I’m a bit worried about how Trump’s offer of $5,000 will move a few “low-information” voters. We on the list are well-informed and overestimate what other people “out there” might “know” and what “information” they are getting. Listen to focus groups and you’ll realize that people out there “know” very different things from what we do. (To say the least.) And even when they do know some actual real facts they have VERY short memories. WE remember that Trump makes promises he doesn’t keep but elections only take a few percent to move the other way. So I worry that a there are people hearing they’ll get a check for $5K if they vote Republican, period. No counter messaging, no understanding, just $5K.

Billionaire Dark Money

Something else I’m worried about is the unknown effect of the unreported dark money the billionaires are putting into the election. Musk is putting hundreds of millions in all by himself.

Think about AI analyzing ALL the data, microtargeting individuals, getting specific, personal messaging directly to them through channels we don’t know about. Cambridge Analytica and Facebook happened generations ago and we got Brexit and Trump from that. Since then they own Twitter and CBS and WAPO – and everything else – and have gathered all the personal information that exists, and have AI to analyze it, and the means to reach individuals under the radar.

Headlines Say “GOP,” Not “Republican”

Also to what extent do voters who don’t like Trump even make the connection to Republicans? How many even know that Republican candidates support Trump? Do they even know that headlines that say “GOP” are referring to “Republicans?”

Little Numbers Can Add Up

I’m talking about lots and lots of small percentages adding up. 2% who don’t know GOP means Republicans, 3% who only hear they’ll get checks, 3% of Dems who hear Talarico is really a corporate CEO andis in the Epstein files…

This is the kind of stuff we hear about in the months and years after a surprise…

Organize And Be Ready

So we have to organize and organize and reach individuals and make sure they turn out and make sure it’s counted and be ready to show up if they mess with the results.

And remember, if there are typos here I do it for you.

Neoliberalism — IT’S A COOKBOOK!!!

Posted on by

“Market economics” was supposed to serve mankind. It didn’t. It really, really didn’t.

Neoliberalism – To Serve Mankind

In the early 80s people got sold on common sense kitchen-table economics. Taxes are theft. If you cut taxes government gets more money (but cutting taxes also starves the beast.) Market forces are natural law and consumers are better at making choices than government. Markets should set government policy. Government spending harms the economy. Individual choice is freedom. Big government and regulation interferes with markets. Government is the nanny state.

Reagan said, “Government isn’t the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” Thatcher said, “There is no such thing as society. … no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first.”

So we got government out of the way. We cut taxes and unleashed the corporations.

And here we are. The transfer of wealth – and power – away from the public into the hands of a very few people is nearly complete.

It’s Sinking In

“When something becomes incredibly, mind-numbingly obvious, people eventually start to see it.” – Dave Johnson

What happened to us is sinking in. As wealth (and power) concentration accelerates it has become mainstream obvious that the world was tricked. Even people like UK PM Burnham and Texas Senate candidate Talarico are using the word “neoliberal” and describing the damage done.

But now we’re in debt trap. With a few in control of the formerly-public wealth (and power) governments are rigged to “borrow” FROM the wealthy just to get by, and then pay tribute (interest) TO the wealthy for that privilege. The amounts are staggering.

IT’S A COOKBOOK!!!

In the Twilight Zone episode most of the the passengers are already in the spaceship. Mr. Chambers is still on the ramp and hears the “cookbook” warning – but it’s too late. He screams as the door closes on him.

The doors of the “end-stage capitalism” debt trap are closing on us now.

But There’s Still Time

Of course, there’s still time to get the money FROM where the money WENT. Just stop the game. Reassert power. Tax the rich. Tax back the wealth they stole from us. Before neoliberalism the top income tax rate was 90+% to prevent the very accumulation that has brought us to this point. The corporate tax was 50%. Inheritance taxes were designed to prevent dynasties from collecting vast fortunes that threatened democracy.

It’s a choice and it’s time to choose.