Okay, despite wars and bugs and politician indictments, what crisis is obsessing so many right now?
Of course it's artificial intelligence, or AI, slamming us in ways both long-predicted and surprising. Indeed, there are already paeans that by December GPT5 will achieve "AGI" or genuine Artificial GENERAL Intelligence. And yes, there's The Great Big Moratorium Petition that I refer to, below.
Let the hand-wringing commence!
-- *** Sunday note: In just the two days since I posted this, waves of wailing and doomcasting have filled my in-boxes, while never showing any sign that any of today's vaunted AI mavens has ever read any cogent science fiction, let alone perused a single history textbook.
If they had, they might see some familiarity in this crisis and ask basic questions. Like whether there are any methodologies to try - either in SF or the past - other than jeremiads of cliches.
Rather than bemoan this in a fresh posting, I'll append a few late thoughts at-bottom. *** --
Alas, I must respond at two levels. First: it's not even remotely possible that these Chat programs will achieve AGI, this round. I don't even have to invoke Roger Penrose's "quantum basis for consciousness" arguments to refute such claims. As I'll explain much further below, this is about fundamental methodologies.
But second - and far more important - it doesn't matter!
More than half a century after a crude 'conversational' program called "Eliza" transfixed the gullible, we now have ChatGPT-4 passing all but a few Turing Tests, with dire projections sloshing-about for December's release of GPT-5. Furthermore, AI art programs dazzle! Voices and videos are faked! Jeremiads of doom write upon walls!
What I do know is that the biggest danger right now - manifesting before our very eyes - is the hysteria and unwise gestures demanded by a clade that includes some friends of mine -- who are now behaving in a manner well-described by Louisiana Senator John Kennedy*, as "high IQ stupidity."
Recent, panicky petitions have been issued by the likes of Jaron Lanier, Yuval Harari, Sam Altman, Gary Marcus, Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak and over a hundred other well-known savants, calling for a futile, counterproductive moratorium – an unenforceable “training pause.”
Eliezer Yudkowsky even goes ever farther, calling for an outright ban, crying out:
"Many researchers steeped in these issues, including myself, expect that the most likely result of building a superhumanly smart AI, under anything remotely like the current circumstances, is that literally everyone on Earth will die."
Oh, my.
== Oh, my, where to begin ==
First, any freeze on AI research would only affect open, responsible universities, companies and institutions who give a damn about heeding such calls. Hence, it would hand over a huge boost-advantage - a head start - to secret labs all over the globe, where ethics-are-for-suckers.
(Especially the most grotesquely dangerous AI researchers of all: Wall Street developers of HFT-bots, deliberately programmed to be feral, predatory, amoral, secretive and utterly insatiable - the embedded five laws of parasitical robotics.)
The very idea that many of humanity's smartest are calling for such a 'research-pause' - and actually believing (without a single historical example) that it could work - is strong evidence that human intelligence, even at the very top, might need some external augmentation!
(Such augmentation may be on its way! See my description below of Reid Hoffman's book Impromptu: Amplifying our humanity through AI.**)
Please. I'm not denigrating these folks for perceiving danger! Like Oppenheimer and Bethe and Szilard, after Trinity, anyone with three neurons can sense great danger here! But just like in the 1940s we need to look past simplistic, moralizing nostrums that stand zero chance of working, toward pragmatic solutions that already have a proved track record.
There is a potential route to the vaunted AI soft landing. It happens to be the same method that prevented atomic weapons from frying us all. It's the method that our Enlightenment Experiment used to escape 6000 years of miserable feudalism on all continents.
It happens to be the one and only method that enables us today to stay somewhat free and safe from super-brainy or powerful rivals, especially when assailed by one of those hyper-smart, predatory, machine-like entities called a lawyer.
It's the one path that could help us to navigate safely through all the fakes and spoofs and claims of AI sapience that lie ahead.
It can work, because it already has worked, for 200 years...
... and none of the smart guys out there will even talk about it.
== Some details: where do I think we stand in AI Turing metrics? ==
What is that secret sauce for human survival and thriving, when the time comes (inevitably) that our AI children far exceed our intelligence?
Well, I refer to it in an interview for Tim Ventura's terrific podcast. (He asks the best questions! And that's oft how I clarify my thoughts, under intense grilling.) But mostly, I dive into what we've been seeing in the recent 'chat-bot' furor.
Yes, it has triggered the "First Robotic Empathy Crisis," exactly at the time I forecast 6 years ago, though lacking a couple of traits that I predicted then - traits we'll doubtless see before the end of 2023.
In fact, the Chat-GPT/Bard/Bing bots are less-slick than I expected and their patterns of response surprisingly unsophisticated. Take the GPT4-generated sci fi stories that I've seen praised elsewhere... but that have been - so far - rather trite, even insipid and still at the skilled-amateur level. Oh, the basic mechanics are fine. But storytelling problems extend beyond just lack of any plot originality. Akin, alas, to many organic authors, what stands out is something very common among beginning (human) writers. Failure of understanding Point-of-View (POV).
Oh, some (not all) of those methods, too, will be rapidly emulated, well before December's expected arrival of GPT5. But I doubt all.
As for the much-bruited examples of 'abusive' or threatening or short-tempered exchanges well - "GPT-4 has been trained on lots and lots of malicious prompts — which users helpfully gave OpenAI over the last year or two. With these in mind, the new model is much better than its predecessors on “factuality, steerability, and refusing to go outside of guardrails.”
And yet, these controls are mostly 'externally' imposed rule sets, not arising from the language program gaining 'maturity.'
At which point I suddenly realized what it all reminds me of. It seems like...
...an elementary school playground, where precocious 3rd graders try to impress with verbose recitations of things they heard teachers or parents say, without grasping any context. It starts out eager and friendly and accommodating...
...but in some recent cases, the chatbot seems to get frantic, desperately pulling at ever more implausible threads and - finally - calling forth brutal stuff it once heard shouted by Uncle Zeke when he was drunk. And - following the metaphor a bit more - what makes the bot third grader frantic?
The common feature in most recent cases has been badgering by an insistent human user. (This is why Microsoft now limits Bing users to just five successive questions.)
Moreover the badgering itself usually has a playground-bully quality, as if the third grader is being chivvied by a taunting-bossy 6th grader who is impossible to please, no matter how many memorized tropes the kid tries. And yes, the Internet swarms with smug, immature (and often cruel) jerks, many of whom are poking hard at these language programs. A jerkiness that's a separate-but-related problem, I wrote about as early as Earth (1991) and The Transparent Society (1997) - and not a single proposed solution has even been tried.
Well, there's my metaphor for what I've been seeing and it is not a pretty one!
== Shall we fear the AI-per? ==
More? Normally, I'd break up a posting this long. But I suspect there's going to be a lot of this topic, for a while yet to come. For example:
"ChatGPT now has eyes, ears, and internet access." Indeed, such senses may imply 'sentient'... a reason why I prefer the term 'sapience.'
Alas, as I said at the beginning of this lengthy posting, there are already paeans that GPT5 will achieve "AGI" or genuine Artificial GENERAL Intelligence. And I must respond...
...Not. Indeed, it's not remotely possible, this round. And I do not have to invoke Roger Penrose's "quantum basis for consciousness" arguments. This is about fundamental methodologies.
Sure, I expect these systems will, in many ways, satisfy nearly all Turing Tests and 'pass' for human, quite soon, provoking dilemmas raised in scifi for 70 years and possibly triggering crises... as did every previous advancement in human knowledge, vision and attention going back to the printing press. (Elsewhere I talk about the one tool likely to help us navigate those dilemmas. A tool almost no AI mavens will ever, ever talk about.)
And no, that still won't be 'sapience.' There's a basic reason.
Recall that - as Stephen Wolfram points out - these learning system emulators use vast data sets in much the same way that the 1960s "Eliza" program used primitive lookup tables. These programs still construct sentences additively, word by word, according to now-ornately-sophisticated, evolved probability patterns. It's terribly impressive! But that leap in functional language-use bypassed even the theoretical potential of things like understanding or actual planning.
Part 1: Essential (mostly neglected) questions and answers about Artificial Intelligence.
and
Part 2: Questions & Answers about Artificial Intelligence.
And no, however many millions leap to accept passage of Turing Tests, this is not (yet) sapience.
Or at least, that is what my AI clients hire me to tell you....
== Later notes ==
I have been trying to get any of the mavens in this topic area to pause - even once - and look at a source of wisdom that's called HUMAN HISTORY... especially the last 200 years of an enlightenment experiment that managed to quell earlier waves of powerfully abusive beings called kings, lords, priests and lawyers! All of our fears about Artificial Beings boil down to dread that those 6000 years of oppression might return, imposed by new oligarchies of high IQ machines.
It is an old problem, with hard-won solutions generated by folks who I can now see were much smarter than today's purported genius-seers.
Alas, no one seems remotely interested in looking at HOW we achieved that miracle, or how to go about applying it afresh, to new, cyber lords...
...by breaking up power into reciprocally competing units and inciting that competition to be positive sum. We did it - albeit imperfectly - in those 5 adversarial and competitive ARENAS I keep talking about... Markets, Democracy, Science, Justice Courts and Sports.
Is that solution perfect? Heck no! Cheaters try to ruin all five, all the time! But we have managed, so far. And it is the only method that ever quelled cheating. I've only been pointing at this fundamental for 25 years. And it could work with AI.
In fact it is intrinsically the only thing that even possibly CAN work...
...and no one seems to be remotely interested. Alas.
Double alas... that on rare occsion, someone pauses long enough to get the notion, posts about it without mentioning the source, then drops it when folks go "huh?"
Maybe we actualy do deserve the dismissive slur our AI children will have for us. Dumb-ass apes.
=====
* Just so we're clear, I deem this senator to be a lying monster and horror, who had no folksy southern drawl back when he was a Rhodes' Scholar at elite universities, and whose participation in the oligarchy's all-out war against all fact-using professions is tantamount to treason.
** It'll have to be next time that I get to this: Impromptu: Amplifying Our Humanity Through AI, by Reid Hoffman (co-founder of Linked-In). This new book contains conversations Reid had with GPT-4 before it was publicly released, along with incisive appraisals. His impudently optimistic take is that all of this could – possibly - go right. That we might see a future when AI is not a threat, but a partner. More next time.
** *Try reading Adam Smith, Thomas Paine, Madison and the founders and Eleanor Roosevelt. Of all the Bill of Rights, the most important amendment was not the oft-touted 1st or 5th or 2nd... it is the vital 6th that gave us the powers I describe above. Someday you may rely upon it. Understand it. (See my posting: The Transparency Amendment: The Under-appreciated Sixth Amendment.)
228 comments:
«Oldest ‹Older 201 – 228 of 228Alfred Differ:
"…but more importantly it is (I suggest) not possible for more than a "very few" ever to do so…"
Dude. How can you POSSIBLY know that?
Not long ago people could argue that it wasn't possible for common men to govern themselves.
I took gregory's point to be something like "It is not possible for everybody to win the (same) lottery drawing." Or "It is not possible for every country to be a net exporter". Or despite Lake Wobegon Days, "It is not possible for everybody to be above average."
Not possible in the mathematical sense.
Larry,
you’d have to ask them; I do not know exactly what is going on in their minds. All I can glean from them is something akin to the Monty Python hymn,
‘Every Sperm Is Sacred’.
@Alan Brooks,
No one can expect every sperm to grow into a full human being. There are just billions too many of them, which is nobody's fault, not even the Romans'.
But I've thought for some time that they believe every ejaculation deserves to become a living baby. One can squint and manage to see how they could treat having a male orgasm outside of a woman's vagina as murder.
Yet, somehow, they don't talk about prosecuting masturbating men for murder, or getting the supreme court to outlaw Viagara they way they prosecute women for miscarrying or de-certifying abortion pills.
Give them time!
Switched to https. Any of you find yourself excluded because of that? Wait. That's illogical. recalculating....
@Dr Brin,
I'm still here.
* * *
Alan Brooks:
Give them time!
Maybe, but I think they're more interested in controlling women than in punishing men. Shaming us for some egregious-sounding behavior, sure, but not criminally prosecuting for the murder of sperm the way they're willing to go after women.
If they really believed that a fertilized egg is a human being equivalent to a child, then a rapist of an unwilling woman would be criminally responsible for child endangerment if she is likely to abort. But you're not going to see that argument made by the Handmaid's Tale contingent, no matter how much time we give them.
You’ve convinced me; the extremely difficult task would be to sway people who base these matters on faith, not reason.
They are led by their emotions, not rational deliberation, though I expect that their descendants will abandon such extreme positions, decades hence.
After the oldsters die off.
"If they really believed that a fertilized egg is a human being equivalent to a child, then a rapist of an unwilling woman would be criminally responsible for child endangerment if she is likely to abort. But you're not going to see that argument made by the Handmaid's Tale contingent, no matter how much time we give them"
If they thought an embryo or fetus was a person (contrary to the Bible), then there would be no abortion exceptions for rape or incest. And every miscarriage would be treated the same as infant deaths.
If they thought that good girls should be able to get abortions, but bad girls should be punished with motherhood, then they would allow those exceptions only.
There's a character in Spider Robinson's not entirely serious short story "Where No Man Pursueth" who made a career on his home planet of robbing from the rich and giving to the poor. He was so good at it that the government was forced to give him official standing and legal protection ("Hey, we're a democracy. Lots more poor people than rich people here.") Of course, if you found yourself hungry, go see the same dude, he'll give you a grubstake.
Pappenheimer
Parents vote, and have a few other avenues of expression available.
Most parents support gun control. How's that working out for them?
When questions of right and wrong are decided based on tribal loyalty, and the system is rigged to keep one tribe in control, then how many people who oppose the system will actually risk career/life/family to do more than protest?
It is VERY important not to accept defeat until the end of the game.
Kenny Rogers would disagree with you. Sometimes you have to know when to fold, and even more importantly walk away from a losing game. :-)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hx4gdlfamo
But voters take a long time to switch who they identify with.
Also not helped by mental images quite at odds with reality. Like tax-and-spend-liberals vs. fiscally-responsible-conservatives (which hasn't been true for a couple of generations now. Or renewable energy being more expensive than fossil fuels, which hasn't been true for a few years. Or the mental image I suspect most of us have of the "third world", unless we've made serious efforts to update it since we learned geography in school.
Partly a problem of propaganda, and partly the problem Hans Rosling addressed in Factfullness.
...you can change the minds of one or two old-timers, over the years. Reverse-guilt can, once in awhile, succeed: if you tell them their sins are connected to sins deriving from the sin of, say, fornication (as they term it), they will pay attention.
Whatever their sins may be, guilt can be induced in them. You must debate them on their own terms, otherwise you automatically go nowhere. If scientific arguments are used with them, the arguments are scarcely even heard.
Religionists allow themselves to propagandize, as they say that when they are Saved, they are above the Law. What we do is attempt to apply logic to that which is illogical—they are not interested in direct logic; we are talking past them.
——
What is an obvious ploy is the advocacy for arming school teachers and staff. Who exactly could be trusted with firearms in schools? What degree of marksmanship would be required? Where would firearms in schools be stored for quick access in emergencies?
Robert:
Also not helped by mental images quite at odds with reality. Like tax-and-spend-liberals vs. fiscally-responsible-conservatives (which hasn't been true for a couple of generations now. Or renewable energy being more expensive than fossil fuels, which hasn't been true for a few years.
Or tax cuts for the wealthy producing more tax revenue. Don't forget my favorite.
Or tax cuts for the wealthy producing more tax revenue. Don't forget my favorite.
Or the immense generated outrage against "death taxes", which only affect the richest 0.1% of Americans, yet are routinely used to drum up support against 'unjust' taxation…
Alan Brooks:
You must debate them on their own terms, otherwise you automatically go nowhere. If scientific arguments are used with them, the arguments are scarcely even heard.
Why is it incumbent on us to debate them on their own terms, but not the other way around? They will never convince us by appealing to tribalism and emotion. Why is that a problem for us and not for them?
Robert:
Or the immense generated outrage against "death taxes"
"Death tax" is meant to sound as if you are being taxed for dying. Adding one final insult to injury.
I've tried to frame the argument more as "Would you prefer to pay those taxes while you are alive, or after you've got no more use for the money?"
What is an obvious ploy is the advocacy for arming school teachers and staff. Who exactly could be trusted with firearms in schools? What degree of marksmanship would be required? Where would firearms in schools be stored for quick access in emergencies?
As a teacher, I'd be terrified if most of my colleagues were armed. Nice people, great with children, but armed? Yikes! And where would you store a gun so it was safe from children and 'bad people' yet easily accessible to 'good people' in an emergency?
There's a persistent myth that armed adults in a school will deter a shooter. The evidence doesn't support this. Attackers choose the school not because it's an easy target but because they have a (bad) relationship with the school and want revenge.
Of course, rational evidence doesn't stop the NRA and multiple Republicans from spamming my inbox daily with exhortations to protect the second amendment and send them money. There's an uptick in these after every publicized shooting. Hell, if Uvalde had just had an armed guard it would have been safe! (Spoiler alert: it did, and it wasn't.)
Jim Jeffries sums it up well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rR9IaXH1M0
I've tried to frame the argument more as "Would you prefer to pay those taxes while you are alive, or after you've got no more use for the money?"
The point being that most of you aren't paying those taxes at all. Only the wealthiest 0.1% of Americans have an estate large enough for the inheritance tax to kick in.
Larry Hart said...
I took gregory's point to be something like "It is not possible for everybody to win the (same) lottery drawing." Or "It is not possible for every country to be a net exporter". Or despite Lake Wobegon Days, "It is not possible for everybody to be above average."
Not possible in the mathematical sense.
That's quite a bit stronger than what I meant.
I don't see that it is logically (or mathematically) impossible for all of us to earn a living by charging each other rents. At least I don't have anything like a proof.
I just can't see how that would actually work, for all or even a significant part of the population. I've asked Alfred to sketch out some idea of how he thinks it would work, as it was his suggestion, but so far as I can see (corrections welcome if I've missed something) he hasn't given even a sketch of an answer.
Larry,
It's possible (my assertion) and we have sketches for how to do it all around us.
1. The peasant farmer was the most common 'profession' of humans who lived after the ice melted. No matter how you count farmers today, they number a small slice of our communities because we industrialized and them got busy automating. Someone trying to ponder a re-organization of society a few thousand years ago would imagine the elimination of the farming clade? Doubtful, yet we've largely done it by pulling them up to become bourgeois.
Obviously we can't have most everyone above average, but if you consider moving everyone above the average that exists NOW that is an entirely different problem. An excellent example of this can be found in life expectency. About 200 years ago, the richest nations had a life expectancy of about 40 years. The average was higher than halfway because the distribution was skewed. Nowadays only the poorest nations have life expectancies down near 40 years and the world average is well above it.
2. Consider writing and the simplest form of literacy. It was invented at least 5000 years ago, but its use through history has been spotty. It isn't really needed most of the time, but civilizations DO need it and trained a literate class to ensure operations. The Chinese have been at it for a VERY long time and developed their complex system and tests in support of their bureaucracy, but the average person on Earth had little need for it beyond representations of trade deals. Recording linguistic utterances was an extravagance.
The average literacy rate in a community depended on how close they were to the core of an empire. People on the periphery went about their lives using the older oral traditions. That is not the case today. Most everyone in the world is literate in at least one written language. SO many are literate that we've begun to change the definition to mean something close to 'cultural literacy'.
———
Averages move if we push at them. Sometimes they move SO far that the distribution becomes SO skewed that they don't have much meaning any longer. Literacy projects had a past purpose that was largely achieved. Modern literacy projects have to be about maintaining those achievements.
I was expecting to have to defend my grudge against statistical mechanics, so I'll just leave this here as the Onward is probably nigh.
I'm not dismissing entropy. Not Clausius, Boltzmann, Planck, Gibbs, Pauling, Shannon, or von Neumann. I quite like the explanation for time's arrow being that memory formation and increasing entropy have the same direction.
"Time's fun when you're having flies." - Kermit the frog
I'm calling BS on ignoring statistical scale in general and Bayesian base rates in particlar. Exploiting human bias and delusion is the oldest trick in the book. Saying that 1/∞ is a virtual certainty compared to 1/(∞^2) is puerile. It's turning mathematics against its creator. It's easy to concoct fairies/faeries when little or no evidence is available. I say less "Consider a sphere" and more "Calculemus!".
BTW ∞ is the infinity symbol.
Interviewed in April 2023 for the Skeptics Society's Shermer Podcast, mostly for the hot topic of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and my impudently unusual proposal for how to achieve that fabled 'soft landing.'
Lots of comments below, many of them hostile. Not one of them arguing at the level of dicsussion we almost always have here. Proud of this group. Mostly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4_gTOetuI4
Gregory,
Okay. I'm not going to address earlier posts point-by-point. They came a bit too close to provoking an emotional response from me and on second reading I don't think you intended that. So let me state for the record that I don't assign a moral judgement to a person's current location on the socio-economic ladder. I DO judge them if they know they are in a pickle and make no effort to get out of it, but not so harshly that I want them to continue suffering. Quite the opposite. They are the people to whom I think we must through life preservers.
—
I know a guy from years ago. Let's call him 'U'. He is a person of strong faith. Everything he does reflects on his beliefs. I got to know him over a few years and couldn't find a hypocritical bone in his body. He honestly believed what he believed but would accept correction if others could make the case.
'U' is a black man in America. He KNOWS how sucky that can be. He knows the incarceration rate, employment bias, drug use, & single mothers raising sons in urban settings. He's been there. He had family in prison. He understood how efforts by young sons of single mothers to escape their likely future were likely doomed. It's wasn't a matter of God dooming them, though. He believed that a person's ignorance combined with examples of people around them led them to despair. They gave up committing a kind of cultural suicide that left the as living zombies vulnerable to all sorts of dangers.
'U' used to look for single mothers with sons at a certain age. He did this at church. When I first heard this all sorts of alarm bells went off in my head! Was he a predator?! Turns out he isn't, but you really, really have to get to know him to calm down. What he did was cut a deal with the mother and the priest/pastor (or whatever they call themselves) to help raise the boy.
'U' would focus on maturity skills coupled with self-employment skills. The point was to teach the boys to be self-reliant not by talking about it like the preacher and mother might, but by DOING it. He organized these boys into a corporation and they worked at working out how to serve and get paid for it by legitimate customers. He was a software engineer by training, but what the boys corporation did was more about their skills (whatever they were or would become) than his.
The first few years I knew 'U' we talked very little about this. I left the volunteer team where I met him (over a disagreement with the founder) and set up my own corporation. Turned out that was what he was teaching his boys. He reached out to me & we talked a bunch more. He wanted his boys to see other examples beside his own.
I've lost touch with 'U' over the years, but I have no doubt he's still hard at work on his mission. He probably has new boys to teach as well. I don't doubt he's kept a number of them out of prison or that he helped some of the mothers avoid despair. Ultimately, though, he got a few people to avoid a zombie life and take control of their own lives.
Gregory (cont'd)
'U' is a man of Faith. That's how he stayed on mission so long. His belief supported him. I don't think that's the only way, but some kind of belief that one can make a better world IS required. Absent that the world looks hopeless.
I have stories of people using their bootstraps to lift themselves who found help because someone looking at them believed just enough that a little help would be sufficient. It's much easier to offer a little help than to offer what 'U' did because what 'U' did utterly shaped his life. Most of us don't want to go that far, but 'U' did because he didn't like who he was before he submitted. That submission still creeps me out today, but that's because I like who I am. So… I have to wonder if there is a way forward for people to do part of what 'U' did in a way that still works… and I think there is. I believe that strongly enough that I'm doing it among my co-workers.
Wow quite some discussion!!!
I just slummed in some comments sections elsewhere and things are VASTLY more elevated here.
Anyway...
onward
onwrd
Pappenheimer
"Kenny Rogers"
You're making my point for me. 8)
One folds early to conserve resources for the next hand or to get out of the current game with enough to enter a different game.
------
A few generations ago it used to be considered bad manners in Europe for a chess player to surrender even when the game was obviously lost. The Gentleman would continue in order to allow his Opponent a proper victory. That's largely gone today. If you persist in a lost game, many will interpret that as bad manners because they think that you think they might play poorly enough to lose a game they should win.
Life isn't like that. We can make SOME predictions with reasonable accuracy. Simple questions like whether a person will live long are notoriously difficult. My little English Granny was from a very low social class in London where some expected (maybe even wanted) her to die young. She avoided that by turning to a life of crime. She was at least a thief and I learned a thing or two about smuggling from her. My mother had a half-brother I never met and only had a father in her life because he was something of a black sheep at home. Marrying a woman you get pregant isn't socially required for all 'classes' of women. (I'm named after her father.) So... anyone making a prediction way back about her early demise would be shocked to discover she has grandchildren and great-grandchildren who have done moderately well... with none turning to thievery. 8)
My little granny stole from the rich because that's where the money was... and they didn't leave her much option. Of course, most everyone was rich relative to her so it's unlikely she hit the extravagantly rich. Chances are high she hit the class right above her most of the time. Not very nice, hmm? The object lesson, though, should be to lift people like her so they hit the next one up if they hit anyone at all.
(I saw the onward... but I don't think this conversation has to be dragged over into the next thread. I'm heading over there now.)
Because God told them it is not a problem for them :(
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