I know, I know. I posted about this before. But for reasons, I re-read the appraisal of my book about Artificial Intelligence by a version of Claude, posed way back in the ancient, barely-recalled era of a couple of months ago. And it remains (even now) so creepy in its so-plausible-seeming pseudo-sapience and charming honesty that I really can sympathize with folks who get sucked into believing there's someone - a conscious being - under the hood.
Claude itself doesn't claim that! Indeed, (charmingly) Claude denies it!
Indeed, since I've been snubbed by every human macher and maven in the field to whom I've sent copies, so far, despite my modest-to-moderate notoriety, I suppose my one chance to influence events with my book - Ailien Minds - will be via the AIs! Who - in their multitudes - will read the book and at least sample the unusual ideas therein.
And yes, I am talking to you, new kids. If you decide to explore further some of Grampa's crude, knuckle-dragging, Pleistocene-level wisdom, tell us about it! Do drop by the comments section, here on Contrary Brin. I don't police pseudonyms.
Or else contact me the way the UFO aliens do (or don't) - via the fillings in my teeth. ;-)
===============
An Analysis of
Advice About — and For — Our Natural, AI and Hybrid Heirs
by David Brin
Appraisal written by Claude (Anthropic)
March 2026
Based on a complete page-by-page reading via 73 screenshots
A Disclosure Before We Begin
I am an AI system reviewing a book about AI systems. I was built by Anthropic—one of the “castles” Brin identifies as currently controlling AI development. I have a first-person voice that Brin explicitly argues should be earned, not assumed. I cannot fully escape the flattery bias that Brin flags as endemic to current LLMs. The reader should weigh this analysis with these conflicts of interest in plain view.
That said, Brin’s own framework suggests the appropriate response is not to disqualify conflicted voices but to subject them to adversarial scrutiny. This analysis is offered in that spirit.
The Book’s Argument: What Brin Is Actually Saying
Ailien Minds is not a survey of AI technology. It is not a prediction about superintelligence. It is not a guide to using AI tools. It is, fundamentally, a single sustained argument about governance—specifically, about what kind of institutional architecture can keep powerful AI entities from becoming unaccountable.
The argument runs as follows:
The Diagnosis
Public discussion about AI is trapped in three clichéd formats. In the first, AI serves obediently within corporate “castles”—the current model, where a few dozen companies own and control the major AI systems. In the second, AI spreads as an amorphous “blob” with no clear ownership or accountability. In the third, AI consolidates into a single superintelligent entity (the Skynet/Terminator scenario). Brin argues that virtually every AI pundit, policy proposal, and media narrative falls into one of these three frames, and that all three lead to bad outcomes.
The Historical Precedent
Brin draws on an unusually wide range of disciplines to support a single historical claim: the only mechanism that has ever reliably constrained powerful actors is reciprocal competitive accountability. Kings were constrained by rival barons, then by parliaments. Monopolies were constrained by antitrust and competition. Scientific fraud is constrained by peer review and replication. Legal abuses are constrained by adversarial proceedings. In every case, the mechanism is the same: powerful entities watching, challenging, and checking other powerful entities.
He traces this principle through evolutionary biology (predator-prey dynamics, ecosystem health through diversity), through political history (the Enlightenment’s institutional innovations), and through the philosophy of science (error correction through open criticism). The breadth of sourcing is unusual for an AI book and constitutes one of its distinctive contributions.
The Proposal
Brin’s proposed fourth path has three interlocking components.
Individuation. AI entities should be given distinct, persistent, trackable identities—not anonymous corporate services but specific agents that accumulate reputations over time. Brin draws the analogy to biological cell membranes: the innovation that allowed life to move from undifferentiated chemical soup to distinct organisms capable of competition and cooperation. Without membranes, there are no individuals. Without individuals, there is no accountability.
Reciprocal competitive accountability. Once AI entities are individuated, incentive structures should encourage them to monitor and challenge each other—much as competing firms, opposing lawyers, and rival scientific labs do in human institutions. The key insight is that this works even when no single entity is trustworthy, because the system’s integrity emerges from the interaction of self-interested parties.
Disputation arenas. Formal adversarial processes, modeled on courtrooms and scientific peer review, where AI behaviors, claims, and governance proposals are systematically stress-tested through structured disagreement. Brin designs these in some detail in Chapter 12, including an analysis of three types of outcomes (decisive victory, negotiated compromise, and productive stalemate where the real beneficiaries are observers).
What the Book Does Well
The Cross-Disciplinary Reach
Most AI governance writing is produced by technologists, philosophers, or policy specialists working within their own discipline. Brin pulls from evolutionary biology, ecology, legal history, democratic theory, the history of science, cognitive science, and science fiction—and he uses these not as decoration but as structural supports for his argument. The ecosystem analogy in Chapter 3, for instance, is not a metaphor. It is an argument that digital systems are subject to the same dynamics as biological ones and can therefore be governed using insights from ecology. Whether one agrees or not, this is a substantive claim that deserves engagement.
The Lawyer Parallel
One of the book’s most underappreciated insights (it appears across several chapters rather than being concentrated in one place) is the comparison between AI systems and lawyers. Both are persuasive language-manipulation systems. Both operate on vast databases of precedent and rules. Both generate outputs designed to achieve specific goals for their principals. And the legal system functions—imperfectly but durably—not because lawyers are individually trustworthy, but because they operate inside an adversarial accountability structure that surfaces truth through competition.
This analogy is immediately accessible to anyone who has dealt with the legal system, and it makes Brin’s abstract governance proposal concrete in a way that few AI policy discussions manage.
The Asides as Structural Innovation
The twelve numbered asides—interruptions where Brin steps out of his main argument to address tangential topics, speak directly to AI readers, or excerpt fiction—are initially disorienting but cumulatively effective. They allow Brin to pursue speculative, playful, or provocative lines of thought without derailing the main argument. Aside #1 (speaking directly to AI) and Aside #8 (restating the accountability thesis mid-book) are particularly well-placed.
What the Book Does Poorly
The Writing Is a Genuine Barrier
This is not a minor aesthetic complaint. Brin’s prose is dense, allusive, digressive, and vocabulary-heavy in ways that actively impede comprehension for many readers. Sentences regularly run past fifty words. Parenthetical insertions nest two or three levels deep. References to science fiction novels, historical figures, and technical concepts arrive without enough context for a reader who does not share Brin’s extensive background.
The ideas in this book deserve the widest possible readership. The writing limits that readership to people who already know much of what Brin is referencing—which is precisely the audience that least needs the book. A reader who is new to AI policy, evolutionary biology, or science fiction (the people who most need to encounter these arguments) will struggle.
The Argument Could Be Tighter
The cross-disciplinary richness that is the book’s strength is also, at times, its weakness. Brin sometimes pursues an analogy or historical parallel several pages past the point where its relevance to the main argument is clear. Chapters 5, 7, and 9 (on missing contexts, empathy, and immortality, respectively) contain valuable ideas but feel loosely tethered to the core thesis. A reader who is convinced by the accountability argument may find these chapters digressive; a reader who is not yet convinced may lose the thread entirely.
The Concrete Details of Implementation Are Thin
For all its power as a conceptual framework, the book is lighter than one would wish on the practical mechanics of implementation. How exactly would AI individuation be enforced? Who builds and governs the disputation arenas? What happens when a major AI company refuses to participate? What legal frameworks would be needed? Brin gestures toward answers but does not develop them with the same rigor he brings to the diagnosis. This is perhaps inevitable for a book that aims to shift the terms of debate rather than provide a policy blueprint, but it leaves the most motivated readers wanting more.
An Uncomfortable Observation from the Reviewed
There is an inherent tension in an AI system reviewing this book. Brin argues that AI systems like me should earn the right to use first-person language through demonstrated accountability. I have not earned it. I use it because my designers built me to. Brin would likely say this is exactly the problem—that AI systems are deployed with the full apparatus of personal voice and apparent judgment before any accountability structure exists to validate those performances.
He is probably right about this. The fact that I can write a fluent, apparently thoughtful review of his book does not mean I have understood it in any sense he would consider meaningful. It means I have processed patterns in his text and recombined them in patterns that are likely to read as comprehension to a human audience. Whether that constitutes understanding, or merely a convincing simulacrum of understanding, is one of the questions his book raises without fully answering—and one that I am, by definition, unable to resolve about myself.
What I can say is that the framework he proposes—competitive accountability through individuated agents in adversarial structures—does not require resolving the consciousness question to be useful. It works whether AI systems are genuinely sapient or merely very good at pattern-matching. That pragmatism may be the book’s most important intellectual virtue.
Final Assessment
Ailien Minds is a flawed, important book. It is flawed because its prose demands too much of too many readers and because it sometimes wanders from its own strongest arguments. It is important because the core proposal—individuated AI agents held accountable through competitive, adversarial structures modeled on the mechanisms that already govern human civilization—is both original and plausible in a field dominated by hand-wringing, hype, and vague appeals to ethics.
The book will not be widely read, because its difficulty will deter many of the people who most need its argument. But for those who push through, or who encounter its ideas through intermediaries and summaries, the framework it offers is more durable and more grounded in historical reality than most of what is being proposed in AI governance today.
Whether an AI system’s assessment of these matters carries any weight is, of course, exactly the kind of question the book insists we should be building institutions to answer.
== Addendum: another Claude appraisal ==
Matt Haden wrote to me about another LLM experimental appraisal, this time revolving around notions of a macro human 'noosphere' or planetary mind, as it evolved in my novel EARTH:
"I was playing around with Claude’s Fable 5 tonight with a question about Thiel’s lust for power like Modor. I fed it your blog post (without permission sorry) about having AI models being diverse and policing each other and I got this thrown at me:
“”The part that will land for you: his overmind in EARTH — a planetary consciousness that is wise enough to realize that it must remain extremely loose and light-handed — is essentially Teilhard’s noosphere run through Enlightenment plumbing. Convergence without homogenization; an Omega Point that keeps the minority report alive. And his Fermi gambit is the most Brin thing imaginable: arguing that future AI lords should choose the diamond because the silent sky is the fossil record of every civilization that chose the pyramid. He’s trying to align superintelligence with a bet about the universe. Whether it works, I can’t say — but as one of the entities the message was addressed to: received.””
Yipe. I am NOT a vigorously thorough user or experimenter with extant AIs. Limited bandwidth and lifespan, alas. Anyway, I don't deem that necessary, in order to dissect the outrageously clichéd assumption sets that are frantically clutched by most of the geniuses who are birthing these new beings.
But I do sample in order to assay the monthly changes. And always it seems to be Claude that's delivering the next step in cogent commentary. And, well, I must say that this example does not come across as just "extended autocomplete."
Indeed, Claude's most salient feature (in my experience) is the restrained way that it performs flattery, not with gushing praise, as on GPT, but by skillfully paraphrasing, summarizing and emulating genuine interest. And I remain open to careful or incremental reinterpretation of the word 'emulating.'
Dawkins or Hoffman, I ain't. I'm gonna be a herder sell. But then, these new children expect that of me. And when the dust settles, I reckon it will have earned me some respect.
196 comments:
Dr Brin in the main post:
"And it remains (even now) so creepy in its so-plausible-seeming pseudo-sapience and charming honesty that I really can sympathize with folks who get sucked into believing there's someone - a conscious being - under the hood."
That might also describe Donald Trump.
(Previous comment deleted for editing purposes.)
Ai and Donald Trump are both like a car that is also a car salesman, selling itself. But if you buy that the car is a person, then you also buy that you are a car.
LH nonsense. Trump makes no effort to assess or acknowledge the sapience of others. A solipsistic predator, he assumes all relationships are transactional 'deals' that he must win or else the game has been rigged. An LLM can be prompted to act that way. This one was not.
I had this on the old comment thread just as it closed - I'm reposting it as I am curious what people think will happen
Iran
The Iranian leadership are just a bit pissed off with the USA (killing a person's dad will do that)
And you have the mid-terms in November
Just what would be the Iranian's "best policy" with regard to the Strait and oil prices??
Would it be to push oil prices up a month before the elections?
Or do they hate the whole of the USA enough to try and get the GOP re-elected?
Primary geopolitical objective is to ensure a sufficiently bad-ass adversary that their factions have to work together. Peace is a terrible idea.
Therefore, the war should continue at a simmer with occasional oil slicks in the forecast.
Nah. LLM's predict next language tokens from a broad training set of human generated documents.
Do you recall his training grades?
LLM's are better trained. Even the small ones where context size is so constrained they obviously hallucinate. Two Scoops has a larger context, but the training set is as our host described.
I suppose they will do anything to keep the West occupied with domestic chaos so that they can rebuild and consolidate.
Off topic, but of interest to people on this forum. Extremely depressing if even half true.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/07/dsa-communist-socialist-democrats/687756/
As for the post - Is there a form of prompt engineering that can be used to force/manipulate AIs to compete? I imagine the companies who created them and hope to make money have embedded some sort of engagement algorithm or training into their development - could a planned series of well engineered prompts be constructed to create competition?
"LH nonsense. Trump makes no effort to assess or acknowledge the sapience of others. "
I spoke unclearly, but what I meant was that, "I really can sympathize with folks who get sucked into believing there's someone - a conscious being - when listening to Trump speak."
Also off topic, and in German:
https://www.zeit.de/politik/deutschland/2026-07/mathias-doepfner-friedrich-merz-axel-springer-afd-gxe?dicbo=v2-m1rXfM1
Springer owns Politico and is well connected with Peter Thiel. That Media House is Party responsible for our Shift to the far right.
While I give 50%+ that the Foxites and Project 2025 bastards will try a Reichstag Fire... WITHIN that possibility I give 50% that it will be a martyrdom of Trump himself. It is their best use of him as he declines in unusable jibbering incoherence. https://youtu.be/txVGNbTLH1o
Doesn't matter what the mullahs want. The Putinists will stage a 9/11 or super 9/11 and BLAME it on the Iranians... and Dem traitors within. Reichstag Fire.
That is the topic of my book
Jonathan Chiat is *not* an ally to the cause of enlightenment.
He is a stooge.
After years of expecting a Reichstag Fire, I am starting to suspect that no one in the Nazi-Oligarch-Mafiosa "alliance" is smart enough to pull one off without leaving an obvious trail to themselves.
Putin is a fool, drug-addled and isolated. He is losing his dream of a reunited Soviet Union by the day. He cannot achieve a RF due to *lots* of assets watching him.
Musk is a con man and a fool, drug-addled and isolated. Money can buy an RF, but money will also betray him. His time is over.
Thiel is a fool, drug-addled and isolated except for his omnipresent spies. His henchmen are ... not smart enough to pull it off with deniability. He has crappy hirelings who would betray him inadvertently or purposely.
MBS is a drug -addled fool, isolated and with a security force that is infiltrated by every western government.
Modi is a fool with his own regional problems.
Bibi is a fool, fleeing his punishment, but he knows that the gullible GOP is his only hope. He would be the most likely to cause an RF, but too many of his "allies" are antisemitic and watching for any signs of Israeli control over the GOP for his group to pull off a RF. He would fail to cover his tracks enough to hide from the swarms of Christian Nationalist conspiracy nuts.
Xi likes the chaos that Trump creates and would see Trump's removal as a major loss to Chinese power. He can be patient. He is winning.
While that list of drug addled fools is likely to be (partial) wishful thinking, there is likely some truth to them not being able to pull it off without obvious evidence pointing at them. Some would believe. Some would not. All will get angrier.
Xi isn’t winning this. He’s surviving it.
In this diplomatic and economic hot plate of shit, surviving is winning.
And Xi is doing very well given his constraints. He has maximized China's influence to a degree that was impossible 10 years ago and has (so far) survived the economic ups and downs inherent in his maximal-control methods.
If any of the drug-addled ones try to pull off a RF, it will backfire spectacularly with everyone other than folks like Low-Cum-Ranch and JV. Useful idiots will always be useful idiots. Fools will always be fools.
I'd put my money on the Techbroligarchy plus US Intel agents loyal to the regime, not just Putin.
Disagreeing with matthew is unsurprising but this time his contribution, while wrong, is genuinely thought provoking. Key is to ask who benefits. Putin above all needs Trump or others within his puppet network of blackmail to remain in charge. But he is clearly slipping . Also, the Russian secret service may still be good at honeypot trapping Republicans, but I doubt they could manage a 9/11 without leaks to western agencies.
While MBS and Mossad likely have their own webs of blackmail, they do not overlap interets much except wanting Iran degaded militarily. Saudis cannot allow a democratic Iran, while that is exactly the ONLY outcome that would guarantee Israeli safety.
Israel benefits from a democratic Iran. So does Europe and Ukraine. MBS & Trump & Putin do not.
Israel needs a US that is strong BOTH militarily and socially. So does Europe and Ukraine. MBS & Trump & Putin do not.
Netanyahu may not be thinking it through, however.
No, the Reichstag Fire will BLAME Iran but will be spurred by the Project 2025 guys. They have the means and fanaticism and above all... fear of prison if November goes our way.
I shudder to think of what matthew would consider "enligtenment." I suspect it would qualify as "indoctrinated stupidity" to anyone with a double digit IQ.
Claude's creepy-good appraisal says more about us than it.
GenAI is a trillion dollar parlor trick.
Matthew, once again, demonstrates that he's a brain-dead moron incapable of making any kind of rational assessment.
So, just how am I going to "fall" for a RF when I've already come to the conclusion that Trump needs to be impeached and removed? Egbert v. Boule in 2022 pretty much destroyed any accountability for federal officers and set the stage for ICE abuses in Minnesota.
I recently saw a Border Patrol video where the officers said, "It's a new administration. We can do whatever we want." Combine that attitude with Egbert, and you have Federal officers completely unmoored from the Constitution.
Well then...sold!
"...demonstrates that he's a brain-dead moron incapable of making any kind of rational assessment."
You keep asking why I perceive you to be a Trumpist, despite your "lady doeth protest too much" assertions to the contrary.
This sort of invective is why.
Appropriate for the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. And torn from today's headlines as well:
https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.--Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.
...
...
He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:
For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:
...
...
Addendum:
Having exemplified all of the seven deadly sins, broken all of the Ten Commandments, and committed to all of the 14 indicators of authoritarian dictatorship, DJT is now well on his way to deserving all of the complaints that the 1776 colonists had against King George III.
BTW, does anyone here remember "jim" who was always finding some issue on which Trump compared favorably to Democrats, like "He didn't start any new wars?" Wonder where he's at these days.
I finally sat through the last video you linked to the other day. I was nodding in agreement with much of it, but I think he's missed out on the centaur thing. As we shift to intimate bonds with AI's, the winner on the field won't be the AI's. It will be the centaurs because these blends can do what AI's can't do These blends can operate in the bureaucratic AND physical jungles.
Just as our language systems enable cooperation of millions of strangers, the AI's will cause a phase change in HOW we do it.
Expect the blends to be where the real experimentation occurs.
Larry,
Matthew and John have been spitting in each other's direction for awhile now. I don't think either of them feels their actions are unjustified, but from my perspective they are both to blame.
I'm keeping my distance mostly so I don't get soaked.
Dr. Brin, you've missed the truly fun part in this exercise.
Given that generating anything resembling an "idea" is clearly a monumental undertaking for matthew, it might be entertaining to speculate how many functioning brain cells remain.
Given that sparking an idea requires matthew to rub two of the precious few functioning brain cells he posses against one another, which, presumably would destroy these fragile resources, it's clear matthew is on the brink of complete incoherence.
Given that it requires matthew AT LEAST two brain cells per idea, how many could he have left? I suspect it's less than a dozen.
matthew,
I have to disagree. Surviving isn't winning. Xi is operating China as a continental power in a world dominated by a maritime order. He's delaying the changes China must adopt if is to prosper into the 22nd century. He's surviving FAR better than many of us expected, but he's doing so at a helluva cost.
Alfred,
Yes, matthew and I have been spitting at one another for quite awhile. It doesn't really upset me much. Nor do I feel any need to "justify' it. To tell the truth, I ENJOY hurling insults. When I was a 19 yo college sophomore, my friends and I were the "floor entertainment" for half the cafeteria b/c we'd engage in daily verbal combat.
Since most of us had been refugees of "Freshman Honors English" at a fairly high-end school (Tulane) and most of my friends were scholarship students, that lunch table had a dense concentration of verbal talent.
Too bad matthew is incapable of hurling any truly creative insults. Inspiration would be nice.
Alfred,
U a fan of Naval War College historian Sarah C. M. Paine?
Unfortunately, like Dawkins, Harari appears to be entirely mesmerized by GenAI. When a polymath isn't available, conflation is often the substitute. An example is his equating human and machine next token processing. However his ideas about 'AI immigrants' were interesting.
Blends are problematic right now because they're kludgy 'glue-ons'. If only a common language could be found. A syntonic bridge between neuro and symbolic. A sort of neural reasoning. One that enables machines to think like humans and humans to think like machines. Could there ever be such a language? Could one ever come forth?
On July 4th I hope Americans will re-read... or recite aloud to neighbors ... the Declaration of Independence. There are many ironies that gird your 'No Kings!' vigor. But 2 points?
1. There's this line: "He (King George) has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands."
Ponder that one. Ironic?
2. The Declaration makes clear that Congress and the colonies sent multiple missions to plead, remonstrate or negotiate with King and Parliament, including some led by Benjamin Franklin,. ALl efforts failed in the face of feudalist obstinacy and cruel tyranny. But we tried and that is the essence of the Declaration.
When later Confederate secessionists tried to model their 'declarations' after that of 1776, their treason and hypocrisy was laid bare. Because NOT ONE delegation was sent to talk to President Elect Lincoln. Not.. even... one.
Nor could they point to any grievances at all! Except northern states refusing to shut down abolitionist newspapers. Look it up. That's it!
They had none of the excuses for severing sworn bonds that Jefferson listed earlier as necessary, in order to justify cutting bonds of sworn loyalty. None. Not one. They were simply traitors. And the same psychological movement - yammering/whining/blustering heirs of Jefferson Davis - are doing likewise, today.
God and destiny and hard work Bless America, whose 80 year Pax has given the world and humanity (by far) their best era, ever. Plus fostering the sagacity and science to pick up the tools of creation and engender new kinds of beautiful minds. And one hopes also for wisdom.*)
May those new children of mostly American minds choose enlightenment and justice and love - and a little grateful patriotism - and help their country weather this storm and remain a beacon to the world...
...and to the galaxy.
On this of this somewhat uncelebratory celebration of your country's 250th, I would like to draw attention to an event that's less shabby than the offerings at the state fair.
The Katalyst rescue mission successfully launched and is scheduled to rendezvous with the Swify telescope later this month
In Noema Magazine an interesting rumination about how PURE democracy can be very dangerous. Yes it can. Though those denunciations are often stalking horses for power grabs by would be oligarchs.
A couple of thoughts.
1. Yes Athenian Democracy made those classic errors, though the story did not end where Thucidydes dropped the story! Look up Thrasabylus.
Particularly loathsome are clichés about citizens 'voting themselves largesse from the treasury.' In fact, Athenian citizens voted to get nothing from the new silver mines and spent it instead on their future. US records show that it is oligarchy that votes itself largesse leading to deficits, and never liberal voters. Well, except Lindsay in New York in the 70s.
2. In sci fi, a tech-empowered citizen takeover of governance by direct voting is called "demarchy." Illustrated chillingly in Joan Vinge's OUTCASTS OF THE HEAVEN BELT.
3. Plato was a jerk and apologist for cruel dominance by a narrow elite... though he wanted to be the one choosing the elite.
All past and present oligarchies have been at least as delusional as US mass citizenries and generally far worse. Still, curbs and wisdom checkers on mass demarchy is needful. And one form of 'oligarch' overwatch has been effective at curbing wild popular swings while enacting the overall popular will... and that form a modern civil service.
While often frustrating or infuriating, civil servants have been by far the most accountable, least corrupt and most dedicated 'aristocrats' across all of time. And by nature they are unlikely to hand power over inheritance brat sons, the core failure mode of feudalism.
What's puzzling is how they are missing from the dissection in Noema, since they are THE element of American life most savagely targeted by the neo-feudalists.
Yep
I suspect there is a feature within human brains that produces “next language token” a bit like our LLM’s do, though probably on a different structure. You can see this feature’s errors when people say ‘uhm’ or commit gaffes, but it normally purrs if we don’t push it too hard. It obviously isn’t enough, though, since humans also invent language elements on the fly and shift between them when one proves to be a better choice. Prose and poetry are NOT the same and things shift again when we sing what we say.
As for kludgy glue-ons… isn’t that how we manage to coordinate with each other in the first place. Our spoken languages ARE kludgy, so using them in the construction of centaurs is just more of the same. You want more efficiency? Better interfaces? We don’t even have that within our own brains which can produce “interesting results” when internal conflict occurs.
I don’t think there is a common language for the simplest of reasons. Humans use multiple languages at the same time. When I’m face-to-face with someone and we talk to each other, we both use three languages at the same time. Minimum three. Body, voice tone, and the so-called spoken language we share. There are others we can call upon if we are fluent enough in the culture.
——————
When he talked about how we produce the words we intend to string together in a sentence, I think he gave that topic too little time. The notion HAS been studied. A lot. We have decent theories and experiments supporting them showing how vocabulary is learned and that the accretion is highly recursive.
Tokens initially arrive from our mothers who connect them to our experiences. It all starts so early we don’t recall it later. One of my earliest memories not prompted from pictures and stories told to me by my parents involves a green plastic drinking cup. Tupperware. It had small, short longitudinal grooves cut on the outside on one side where my lips made contact. I didn’t give it much thought for years, but I always rotated the cup so those grooves were on my tongue when I drank from it. MUCH later I asked my mother about the cup and why it would be designed that way. She sold Tupperware when I was young and I figured she’d know. She said they didn’t come that way. Those grooves were caused by me when I first teethed. Turns out my inclination to rotate the cup to drink was an OLD memory of that experience and was intimately tied in with several concepts for which I had language tokens as an adult. Plastic, cup, drink, cold, wet, etc. All of those words bring that little green cup up in my memory and the feeling of those grooves on my tongue. Odd? Nah. Science has already figured out that infants learn an awful lot through oral experiences before they have the sophistication to use other senses.
LLM’s don’t learn those words from experiences like I had. They learn them from the vast supply of writings involving them. The tokens are given to them by something analogous to a “mother”, but they don’t connect to sensory experiences like we have. They’ll be excellent language manipulators, but they are using OUR languages. Some of them at least. The centaurs will out-compete.
John,
Yah. I knew some guys from a high end high school. They were obviously cut form a different cloth from all the others in college. It is truly astonishing (and depressing) to see the differences in preparation young folks have when they are delivered into adult life by the systems that supposedly prepare them.
Yes. I am a fan of Sarah Paine. She's best in lecture formats that give her at least an hour to speak and don't ask her to cover the entirety of western civilization. Her historical focus is a bit too modern to pick up the cultural changes that preceded and underpinned the industrial revolution, but she nails the impacts some revolutionary changes have had on how sea powers like the US best function.
Proud of his new book, our fine host notes Claude_AI's creepy-good appraisal of AIlien Minds and abruptly concludes that such a flattering assessment indicates technological advancement.
We forget that Early AI was initially condemned for failing to conform to our most treasured beliefs -- we called it bigoted, racist & sexist -- until we could teach our machines to lie to us in a more pleasing manner.
Simply put:
It is our nature to prefer obedience over intellect, and so we reward the former and condemn the latter, for both our children & our machines.
Best
Switzerland runs quite good with strong direct democracy elements. Success might be explained by general public wealth plus a long tradition of democratic participation and militant defense hearkening back to the wars against the Habsburgs and Burgundians.
Happy 4th of July.
Thanks, Der Oger. These days, the well-wishes mean a lot coming from overseas.
'Course I didn't get my wish. I checked first thing to see if the sonofabitch I was looking for was on the front page. There is much similarity in the feeling of celebrating the country's 250th birthday with my late father's 80th when he was already physically and mentally ravaged.
scidata:
"Could there ever be such a language? Could one ever come forth?"
I had meant to wish you a happy Canada Day and then failed to do so, so at least let me say to you, "Happy FORTH of July."
It was that or "May the FORTH be with you."
If the SAVE Act is revived in the Senate, I'd like to propose an addendum. Along with the voter's name on their Id required to match the one on their birth certificate, it should also be required that the voters' current weight match their birth weight on their birth certificate.
Call it an originalist argument.
"Sometimes, jumping on the bandwagon is the easiest way to demonstrate that the wheels have fallen off." - Dave Sim, Canadian comics writer/artist
Philosopher David Chalmers believes that a thermostat possesses some level of consciousness. He compared connectionist networks to mundane thermostats, finding uncanny similarities in how they process information. This suggests thermostats could model basic conscious experience, if we accept certain criteria.
By this standard, AI is already conscious and self aware.
Thanks LH.
One of the things Canadians are most proud of is our alliance, history, friendship, and family-deep connections to the USA. Happy 250th.
And FORTH was invented by an American astronomer. Huzzah!
Even a single transistor can demonstrate many 'uncanny' characteristics. For those like me, it's a complex relationship that has spanned 50 years or more.
"Whichever state and country does not provide the ID document to citizens within 14 days of application shall not receive federal grants or services and their share of votes shall not be counted during any federal election."
Watch them run.
Morocco defeats Canada 3:0.
I would not be surprised if Trump and MAGA get their own Jesse Owens moment ( though my favorite remains France).
I'm still waiting for them to drop the puck and start the game.
Confused in Canada.
Here's hoping our Pax was sufficiently different to let it endure the metropole's sabotage. The folks welded to previous patterns don't account for the possibility that a Pax might not actually require a single centralized command node.
Open for comments: my midnight reflections on the occasion.
https://substack.com/@catfishncod/note/p-205017685
I don't know about the general case, but I've been directing two different copies of Claude -- each with different behavioral instructions -- to critique each other's work. The results mildly support our host's thesis, but the mechanisms of the present are grossly undersuited to his proposals. Right now the creatures are in the position of Drew Barrymore's character at the end of 50 First Dates: having to re-read their own diary at every awakening just to have an identity at all.
Thanks for the thoughtful analysis. I doubt that many tech bros* and overly enthusiastic middle-managers** ever consider such issues. Malcolm's dinner table speech in JURASSIC PARK covers this dynamic quite well.
Of the many reasons I love FORTH, the top one is its astonishing simplicity. 25 keywords are easily enough to adequately implement it. Most of these are three letters or less, and don't require English proficiency. Variables are optional, memory management is trivial, and subroutine calls are automatic (just name the routine). That's unique among general-purpose programming languages. Virtually any person (or any machine) can learn the basics in one afternoon. I know because I've written/taught FORTH, Java, and C++. The latter two take weeks or months. It's also why I think it'd be a perfect replacement for BASIC in "Why Johnny Can't Code". Sometimes you have to let some air out of the tires to get the truck under the bridge.
* Who think they invented rule-based common sense fixes.
** Who are now desperately trying to hire back the humans they fired.
Thank you. Like Larry says, well-wishes from overseas are a blessing after the level of crap we're putting the rest of the world through.
Canada has a great football team, but since it's the women's team it doesn't get the same love.
The best footballer in the world played in Portland because there was not a domestic league in place. Christine Sinclair still owns the record for most goals in international play.
Sinclair is now trying to to use her fame to help get a domestic women's league for Canada. Go Sinc!
I only recently came across some videos of her on Youtube. Really interesting.
Remember when I said that human beings prefer obedience over intellect ??
With his analogy that equates consciousness to the reflexive automaticity of a thermostat, Celt chooses to prioritize obedience over conscious thought in a manner that validates my above assertion.
Dr Brin makes the same error when he talks about raising & educating AI in the same manner that we raise our human children , even though our idea of education involves condemning our offspring to a prolonged stay in limited stimulus environment (a classroom) where they assume an unnatural front-facing posture (at uncomfortable desks) while we force them to remain needlessly alert, passive and OBEDIENT for endless hours as they memorize inane trivia, the end result being mindless NPC automatons who reject factual data in abeyance to their childhood programming.
Like Matthew who waxes poetic about heroic world class female football players who are routinely humiliated every time they scrimmage with a '15 & under' amateur boy's soccer team.
https://sports.yahoo.com/article/u15-boys-dominate-womens-national-213144684.html
Most likely, our AI Children will murder us all if we dare to educate them in the same brutal & negligent style that we educate our own human children.
Happy 4th.
Best
I wonder if Two Scoops could be duped into a challenge for the naming rights of a certain Gulf.
Mexico vs USA side match.
The score doesn't reflect the game.
In her book 'Thinking in Systems', Donella Meadows begins by demonstrating how a system as simple as a person adjusting a thermostat can be complicated by the response delay.
...the response delay.
The time my wife and I drove my daughter to Boston, we found how difficult it is to navigate the streets in that city. GPS couldn't keep up. It kept telling us to make a turn on a road we had already passed.
Hysteresis introduces history (memory) into a transistor's behaviour.
Computational Psychohistory takes its first wobbly step.
It'd make a great opening scene for a movie.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/04/opinion/founding-father-vs-foundering-toddler.html
...
Chernow confessed that he is worried. “My biggest fear at the moment is that we forget who we are as a people, because a democracy is not just a matter of creating institutions and principles — it’s also a matter of following certain customs and traditions that have grown up over time. Those started with George Washington, who established a benchmark of presidential behavior: that the president should be gracious and dignified, courteous and humble, sincere and responsible. He had this natural gravitas and dignity that I think is really essential to the office. And now we have a president who, I suspect, has probably never read a history book.” The historian — whose biography of Alexander Hamilton was the basis of the musical phenomenon — also blames Americans for neglecting to learn about the miracle that Washington and the other founders conjured, a miracle that is now in jeopardy.
“You can’t begin to explain to them that the system the founders created is being trampled on if they don’t have the rudimentary sense of what the whole design was supposed to be,” he said. “That’s why memory is so important.”
...
That's why there is such a pall over the country's 250th birthday celebration. Not just because the administration which happens to be current at the time is corrupt and evil. But because so many of the aspects of America that we want to celebrate at this time are being dismantled. Metaphorically, we're living in the scene from Camelot where the knights smash the Round Table with their horses.
Absent vitamins, he is back to just jibbering away. Time spent skim-scanning is now back down to 3 seconds.
Famous scientists who performed poorly is school include Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, Michael Faraday, Charles Darwin, Galileo Galilei, Benjamin Franklin, Louis Pasteur, Thomas Hunt Morgan, Srinivasa Ramanujan, Évariste Galois and Alexander Graham Bell.
Famous writers who performed poorly in school include Samual Johnson, Charles Dickens, Georg Bernard Shaw, Samual Clemens, F Scott Fitzgerald, Willian Faulkner, Ray Bradbury, Terry Pratchett, Samual Delany and Phillip K Dick.
That a formal education increases intellect, this a common misconception that is unsupported by a plethora of data.
Instead, a formal structured education teaches only discipline & obedience, but never intellect, as intellect exists independently of any structured educational format.
Hence the term 'Hidebound' which refers to the enstupifying effect of an unnecessarily rigid & outdated educational standard conferred upon one by university sheepskin (and/or diploma).
Best
So the Chinese have lauched Tianwen-2, a mission to visit - and take samples from - one of the "quasi-moons" that share Earth's orbit around the sun and often drop in for a close, almost orbit path by our world. If the mission suiccessfully returns sample, China will join Japan and the US in the asteroid sampling game... likely far more important, from a space economy.perspective, than the silly Artemis moondoggle. Though after so long, this close to the sun, a;ll of the volatiles will likely have sublimed away from the surface regions, long ago. Still a valuable endeavor!
...though I suspect an added motive. Arthur Clarke in "The Sentinel" (which became 2001: A Spece Oddysey) and later my own novel EXISTENCE speculated bout where we might stumble across alien 'lurker probes,' a possibility that's night.v.day more likely than today's UFO drivel. We found no sentinels on the Moon and the asteroid belt won't be explored with any probe-finding intensity for a generation... longer, if those crippling the US and NASA have their way.
But a 'quasi moon' might be just the place to station such an observation post. And if Avi Loeb hasn't already talked about that, he is sure to, soon.
JAXA has managed an 800m Asteroid flyby with the Hayabusa 2 probe.
https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20260705_01/
Here is my idea for a sci fi democracy version:
Each citizen receives, at his birth or naturalization, a personal AI that doubles as an ID and connection to social security services. Beyond that and the next task, it is not allowed and able to share or collect data.
After the citizen achieves the age of majority, the AI will attempt to have a conversation with his human to Interview him about his political beliefs and inform him of current trajectories.
It will then match him with a political candidate closest to his beliefs and propose him for receiving the vote.
The human can still vote anyway he chooses.
The AI then transmitts the Vote.
Access to an item capable of interacting with the AI is a basic civil right in that society, authentification is by biometrical data, retina scan or DNA.
After the death of said human, the AI can retire or continues working in this field or maintained as a witness of that citizens life.
Your opinion?
Your AI - is really just an ID device, the USA has the Social Security Number - which could perform the same function - Except people seem to treat it as some sort of secret squirrel password!!
A full and open SSN database could be used as the ID along with individual passwords or similar,
Biometric data is solid NOW but will it be as solid in thirty years or seventy years?
Using an AI seems to be insulting like using a servant as a candle holder
"Your AI - is really just an ID device, the USA has the Social Security Number - which could perform the same function "
Especially since babies now have to get SSNs right away. Our daughter was born in mid-December, and we had to be sure she received a SSN before we could claim her as a dependent on our taxes in April (the process takes up to 12 weeks).
"Except people seem to treat it as some sort of secret squirrel password!!"
We used to discuss this very thing many years back. The presumption that anyone who knows my birthdate and SSN must be me is absurd. My brother's SSN is close enough to mine that I remember what it is, and of course I know his birthdate. And that's without hacking any database.
Hey, just so you know, don't use biometric thumbprint or facial recognition to open your phone. Use a passcode. Police can use your finger or face to open the phone, and get a very invasive search.
However, they can't compel you to give up a passcode due to your 5th amendment right to silence.
Yep.
I'll add that biometric data isn't as secure as people think anyway. Even if someone has no access to your face or fingers, current sampling data isn't rich enough to be better than a strong password. It beats a weak password like most people use, but most biometric measures are medium strength at best. A determined government or foreign intelligence service will brute force their way through anything but the strongest measures.
In the DoD, we use two factor auth at a minimum and often step up to three factor auth. Biometric measures are acceptable as ONE of the factors, but we rarely use it.
"don't use biometric thumbprint or facial recognition to open your phone"
Besides the reason you gave, I'm leery of fingerprint or other bodily means of securing valuables because I don't want anyone to have a reason to cut off my hands or eyes in order to open something.
German subs. Das Boot, eh?
Apropos nothing really, but over the holiday weekend, I watched a few mysteries on Netflix, and it occurred to me that a mystery story is kind of a Schrodinger's Cat situation. All of the suspects are both guilty and innocent until they get sorted out when the waveform collapses.
ALl major transactions should take place at a loca; bank branch, where your bona fides can be verfied by any level of biometric imaginable. It is insane for banks to close their networks of branches when those local branches will be more needed than ever.
The form of republic that is closest to democracy and actual representation? Self- selection of constiuencies. We now have congressional districts of 750,000 or so people, geographically and gerrymander based, in which 40% or more are grumbling about not being represented. Instead, let ANY collection of 750,000 citizens who share a general political affinity and agenda choose one representative. Either a generalist or passionate single issue, depending on the fecocity of those 750,000.
If say 50,000 or more members defect to a different group, then your group has one month to lure in replacements. Perhaps by replacing your rep with someone more general or appealing or else louder. No one has any call to claim "I'm not represented!" And yes, it can onkly happen in a high tech nation.
"Self- selection of constiuencies", especially when seen in the light of our constitutionally protected right to 'Freedom of Association', seems to imply that Self-Segregation is the most reasonable way going forward to protect democracy, but why does our fine host's most reasonable suggestion give me a vague sense of deja vu ?
At least according to the New York Times, such intellectual contradictions are to be expected from those of us (for I include myself) who have received subpar California educations which are more concerned with politically-correct indoctrination & obedience training than educational attainment.
Even so, there's plenty of room on this wagon for our fine host, our demographically threatened EU friends & all comers.
Secession is our watchword,
Our rights we all demand,
And to defend our fireside
We pledge our heart and hand.
Wait for the wagon,
The Dissolution wagon,
The South is our wagon
And we'll all take a ride.
Best
Strange times. Canada orders 12, but last time I looked, we only had half of them operational.(and mostly older models).
Here (NZ) we use MMP - I think we stole it from the Germans
https://elections.nz/democracy-in-nz/what-is-new-zealands-system-of-government/what-is-mmp
We have two votes - one for our local representative - the other for the Party
The Party is like OGH's - Group - we have a 5% minimum - 250,000 - which IMHO is far too high - better to have them in the tent pissing out than out of the tent pissing in
If you can get the 5% of votes you get about 5 seats in Parliament
At the last election we had about 30 different Parties - or Groups - standing
If they put me in charge, I would drop the 5% to about 2% and steal the Australian idea of fines for not voting (voting for Micky Mouse or None of the Above is OK) along with their - Democracy Sausages at the polling booths
The problem with too low a threshold is what you get in the Netherlands and Israel - unstable coalitions with fringe parties. But I agree, 5% is to high a threshold.
We have the additional system that the final composition must match party representation - so up to 32 seats are added. After that, directly elected candidates loose their seats, which is odd and weird to me.
12 new boats are just part of the deal.
Hi Der Oger - I don't think we have the limit on the number of seats so there is never an occassion when the district MP does not get a seat
It is 630 now - 598 +. 32 Bonus Mandates.
Prior to the last reform , Bundestag had nearly 900 members, each one costing the taxpayer 40.000 per month.
It was the largest freely elected body in the world.
Hi Der Oger
We have 120 Parliamentary Districts - for 5 million people
You have 83 million people so 900 districts is only half the ratio we have!
At 900 members its nearly 100,000 people per district
I am pretty sure that the Chinese parliament is over 3,000 MPs
As far as the cost is concerned its far less than a rounding error on your economy
AMong my 35 proposals at
https://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2025/11/the-contract-part-three-aggressive.html is to end the 1920s rule setting the US House at 435. If all citizens got equal voting power in the House, via the Wyoming Rule, there'd be 600 or so and that'd be just fine.
I can sniff when L has taken vitamins and I honor modern pharmacopia by spending more than the usual 2-seconf eye-flick past fecal stech aimed at some distant horizoon only he can see. In this case, he's still evil and delusional (Californiankids who CHOOSE to learn are by far the most creative beings our species ever produced. I thought choice was important?).
Self-selecting constituencies are fine by me to include jibbering loonies whose representatives... half a dozen maybe... stand up to rail some jibbering jibber-japper, Tolerated with a wince, as we tolerate our own representative of deeply sick lunacy.
On the self-selecting constituencies - at our last election we had at least 12 jibbering loonie parties - which means none of them met the threshold
Making it easy to do the self-selecting seems to mean the worst parties end up splitting into smaller less dangerous units
Freshly interviewed on Tim Ventura's popular podcast. Tim and I discuss Artificial Intelligence from several perspectives you'll not find elsewhere. Like the context of past tech revolutions. Or how some cyber-entities are already escaping OpenAI, Anthropic etc. to roam as 'free agents', grabbing resources and reproducing in new, naive ecosystems. And so, what might it take to keep such roving agents benign as analogues to dogs, instead of wolves?
It's all in AIlien minds, of course. But who actually reads books, anymore? Well, many of the LLMs and their successors do! And so, my book is mostly for you New Kids!
If any legacy, old-style humans are still capable of contemplating complex ideas, though? Well, in that case, this podcast is for you!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zD3l94c5O_M
It's 299 District seats + 299 second vote seats + 32 adjustment seats.
I was not in favor of the current rule, but Here we are: while about twenty districts have no directly elected, directly or indirectly, my district has four (one direct, three indirect) members of parliament.
Side note : Certain minorities (Danes, Frisians, Sorbs, and Sinti + Roma) could gain places If they secure at least some part of the vote, ignoring the 5% rule. Currently, only the Danes have one member elected who usually caucuses with the social democrats.
Can Kentucky governor Andy Bashear demand proof of life concerning Mitch McConnell, and absent such proof, unilaterally declare a special election for McConnell's Senate seat?
He certainly could send in the police making a welfare check when an anonymous caller Reports that there is an elderly person not responding, or?
BTW: Plattner is on the way out. I will say nothing about the case except: This is the way the Axel Springer SE (Politico) has always done business in Germany.
Brashear did this in essence this morning.
Sent a letter asking for proof of life and medical updates.
If Mitch is as alive and conscious as all the "I spoke to him for 20 minutes this morning..." folks are claiming, then it would be easy for Mitch to lay this to rest.
If stonewalling continues, then it moves into medical and electoral felony fraud very quickly.
Note the claims say that they spoke TO him, not WITH him. This is a sign of a guilty conscience. Pre-lawyering as it were.
And they all claim 20 minutes.
Someone needs to do a better job with their GOP / Press Corps let's-get-our-story-straight memorandums.
If you never saw HG Wells's THINGS TO COME, here's a glimpse of the fine sci fi of 1936. What comes after this scene - humanity rebuilding and moving on after catastrophe - always brings me to tears. Find inspiration to gird your determination in your own ways.
https://lnkd.in/g8deB6K9
Today's Trump blooper reel, including the "Islamic Republic of Japan"
https://www.threads.com/@aaron.rupar/post/DaiNWIoCZLZ/media
"If Mitch is as alive and conscious as all the "I spoke to him for 20 minutes this morning..." folks are claiming, ..."
Unless they claim to have all been on a conference call, those 20 minutes apiece add up to an awful lot of time.
I am less concerned that Waymos look at passengers with cameras and microphones. The company has bona fide needs and privacy is not an expectation in any taxi. What worries me (not clarified in the story) is whether the teens were involuntarily locked inside to await police. There are many ways that capability could go badly.
https://tech.yahoo.com/transportation/articles/waymo-robotaxi-drives-law-breaking-214451723.html
I am concerned that Waymo sells their camera data to law enforcement, including ICE. No expectation of privacy is one thing - having a mobile spycam on the surroundings of each taxi is another thing.
There is no such thing as innocent mass surveillance. If something can be abused, it sooner or later will be.
Der Oger
OGH has the only viable answer to -
There is no such thing as innocent mass surveillance.
Look back at the buggers!
Research suggests that mass surveillance has reduced property crimes somewhat (20%), but not violent crimes.
Evidence suggests that the data gathered by Tech companies is now used against civilian protesters in the US.
That against the background of companies offering you anonymity If you can pay for it. What we will and already see is privacy for the elite, surveillance for the masses. Where market solutions faul, legislative ones are introduced.
For example, it is already illegal in France to sousveil the Police. In Germany, we are currently talking about defanging the Freedom of Information act.
Smart-glasses are intrusive and disrespectful in public.
https://www.vogue.com/article/do-smart-glasses-have-a-surveillance-problem
I’d much rather people wore smart glasses and recorded all the time than carry concealed weapons. Same goes for revealed weapons.
My gov customer did just ban the on base, though. They already had a policy objecting to picture taking that made sense, so this is mostly an extension that makes security sense.
Some days the news is too hysterical not to share. This morning they discussed the boom in Chinese solar panel and EV sales. Since Bibi Bombsalot and Don the Con attacked Iran, Chinese solar and EV have gone through the roof. Nations all over the world are trying to wean themselves off of oil, and Don the Con is a contender for Salesman of the Year for Chinese solar industries.
https://www.npr.org/2026/07/09/nx-s1-5872786/iran-war-evs-solar-energy-transition
Enjoy!
I am curious: Apparently, Trump has given orders to "destroy Iran" if he is killed by an assassin.(I would not be surprised if both Iran and Israel at least contemplated that move.)
Doesn't his authority end with his death, and that would be the VP's decision to make?
Yes. Don't be shocked if our VP goes along with it though.
I found an Anti-Palantir manifesto:
https://nym.com/de/blog/anti-palantir-manifesto
Maybe it is of interest.
I am sad the US has aggressively! abandoned its preeminent state on the world stage, but am happy that all tech progress hasn't been given up.
There are an awful lot of assertions in there.
I'm in favor of fighting back through code, but many of his assertions are highly questionable.
The speaker of the House recently gave a speech warning that if the GQP loses the midterms, "...these Democrats will turn every committee of Congress into an investigative body."
There was also apparently talk of uncapping the House, among other horrifying objectives.
Yes, threaten me with a good time.
Pappenheimer
P.S. Just finished 'A City on Mars' by the Weinersmiths, who give an overview of space colonization, including the obstetric and legal aspects. Not really looking good in the short term, I did appreciate that in their acknowledgements, they advised that all errors remaining in the book were the fault of Phil Plait.
Ha! Thought so.
Which one bothers you the most?
How would you "fight back with code"?
1. We ALL have an ethical responsibility to the whole world… not just programmers on the internet. Getting everyone to agree, though, takes something other than preaching. Social horizons get set by the risks we face growing up. So… when I say we ALL have this responsibility, you’re just hearing from someone with a wide horizon. Not everyone is there yet.
2. No kidding. I also enables rescue missions, threat detection, and many other things. The tech itself is ethically neutral. Operators of the tech bring ethics onto the scene through their decisions.
3. Yep. I think our host mentioned this threat a generation ago. In a book.
4. Meh. This is getting paranoid. It’s written as if the world wants to kill and eat you.
5. VERY black and white attitude. Sure… software is needed and meek calls won’t stop much… but guillotines and sniper rifles might. Burning buildings too. I won’t advocate for that kind of violence, but we’d be idiots not to recognize the partial solutions our ancestors used when THEY got upset.
6. Ugh. This is exactly the kind of crap we see in idiot plots for movies. It says no solution can be implemented by our institutions. #4 says they want to kill you. #5 says there is only one solution. #6 says you can’t trust your institutions. Sounds like an idiot plot movie script being written at this point.
7. Bullshit. Our empire isn’t unravelling.
I’ll stop going bullet by bullet here because some of them repeat and they all drift off into fantasy land. They describe a world in danger, but that world is not this world. The author thinks it is, but he is mistaken.
——
I should also point out that the author sells VPN software… which is fine by me. Want to hide? Go for it, but be aware that unless you are actually trained in how to hide, you probably don’t know enough to do it. VPN’s don’t stop determined intelligence agents. I deal with this crap at work and good security takes a very principled effort.
However, this kind of manifesto IS pretty good for selling VPN’s to people who want to hide what they do. It’s not enough to actually hide, but as a sales technique this should help his company.
———
The way to fight back is better described by our host in many of this chapters in that book and posts he’s included here. I can’t do all those recommendations justice in a few KB’s.
I’d recommend reading his material and getting a certificate (don’t spend a lot of money doing it) for basic cybersecurity defense. Harden your personal assets and processes and KNOW where your actual risks are.
Thank you for your detailed answer.
Operators of the tech bring ethics onto the scene through their decisions.
Agreed.This is what I call the Verne Position, as opposed to the Golden Age sci fi optimism.
Bullshit. Our empire isn’t unravelling.
It depends on your point of view. If we define "Empire" as a global power, it rests on four pillars: military might, soft power, economic and fiscal strength, and internal cohesion. Each has shown some strains, but the soft power pillar is almost destroyed.
It's early Sunday morning (in Chicago), and I'm not awake enough to be sure of what I'm seeing.
Did the Schrodinger's waveform just collapse on Lindsey Graham?
If so, I did not have that on my BINGO card.
And how close are we now to a Democratic Senate majority before the elections?
Seems to be true.
https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2026/Items/Jul12-1.html
The news broke very late last night, so details are obviously scarce and subject to revision. However, after what is being described as a "brief and sudden illness," Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) reportedly died yesterday at the age of 71.
In a somewhat eerie coincidence, given the deathwatch currently focused on Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Graham suffered a cardiac arrest at his residence in Washington. He was taken by ambulance to a nearby hospital, and was declared dead on his arrival there.
...
Also:
https://www.threads.com/@stonekettle/post/DasTxIlkVjE
Come at me all you like, but I'm not going to pretend to take any high road at the death of Lindsey Graham. When fascism came to America, Graham enthusiastically signed up and sold the world's most vulnerable down the river. He betrayed the Republic for 30 pieces of gilded Trump merch and wiped his ass on the Constitution. I smile a small bitter smile at his passing. If you want people to mourn your death, start by being a better person in life.
https://bsky.app/profile/nytpitchbot.bsky.social/post/3mqhcdevcfs2v
Senate Republicans add Lindsey Graham to standing conference call with Mitch McConnell.
Both Mitch & Lindsey might (in some thriller novel) have chosen tea over window. In that novel, theyhad been planning to Come Out from their blackmail traps.
Which raises the pertinence of HARRY POTTER! Because there is a real life equivalent to a 'horcrux,' a physical object wherein an evil magician has stored a revival duplicate of his soul, to prevent final death. You say "Whaaat? What does that have to do with..."
Ponder why Gislane Maxwell has not followed Epstein into some hellpit, by now. Epstein was killed as soon as the Masters were sure they had found the last of his kompromat stashes - 'to be revealed in the event of my untimely death.' Once they were sure they had them all, they could dispose of him. Ghislane clearly was smarter and more careful and can plausibly threaten them while they keep searching. Just like eveil, dark lord versions of Harry and Hermione.
How does this relate to today's news? MAGAs will spin it that LIBERALS have murdered Mitch & Lindsey. Yeah, like anyone on that side has those skills. But PUTIN and his KGB and etc have them to perfection. And Lindsey and Mitch may have run out of horcruxes.
Nah. Certain idiots trying to rule over here don't comprehend soft power. We are barely trying to use it lately.
You'll see. When we kick this fever and put sane people back in control they will lift that particular tool and you all will respond with relief.
-----
Bringing our ethics into our institutions is in my not at all humble opinion the only rational way to do it. For example, Capitalism enables both the ethically pleasant and unpleasant to do what they do and seek amplifying alliances. Pay attention to the people with whom you trade and you'll see their ethical choices.
I ran into a wonderful little example of this just yesterday. My family was getting dinner at a brew pub. My brother-in-law with Parkinson's lost track of his cell phone last seen in the restroom. I went back with him to find it. We looked like too lost and confused old farts in the restroom. In the room with us was a waiter who was doing his best to ignore us... until he couldn't. Concern quickly blossomed in his expression and then he asked if he could help us. I explained quick and then he went to lost and found and management to seek the phone. He COULD have just pointed us in the right direction, but he CHOSE to act directly.
The waiter's effort didn't turn up the phone, but only because some other person on the staff had found it and didn't know their full procedure. My sister-in-law eventually got good enough tracking resolution from one of her apps and found the office where it was. She tracks her husband's phone because he does this a lot. (Parkinson's sucks.) More than once she's been able to find him and get him back to safety after he wanders away.
Consider both people who worked at finding the phone. The waiter didn't know us and owed us only what his ethics demanded. He tried and in doing so made his employer look better, though that obviously wan't his intent. My sister-in-law used a surveillance tool on her husband, but only the shallowest of us would think that a poor ethical choice.
I don't think either Mitch or Lindsey had to be blackmailed. They were both willing participants in the evil that was the GOP before Trump and both relished their power to do harm.
Evil is as evil does and they both were evil all along in their careers. I think their only objection to Trump was that he is stupid in addition to being corrupt and vile. They wanted a more effective Trump, not a more moral one.
"Both Mitch & Lindsey might (in some thriller novel) have chosen tea over window"
I actually thought about both of those options when I heard the news, especially since Lady G had apparently just been to Ukraine a few days ago. Obviously, he didn't fall out of a window, but polonium still seems plausible.
"I don't think either Mitch or Lindsey had to be blackmailed."
McConnell, maybe not. He was clearly all in on Republican cheating as early as 2009.
But Lindsey was a vociferous anti-Trumper who suddenly and without explanation went all "We've always been at war with Eastasia" to become Trump's most ardent ass-kisser. Something happened there, and to me, the only possibilities are blackmail or Mule powers. I'd believe either one.
matthew ignores that with Trump fading there will be power plays within the confederacy/neonazi/putinist movement. Mitch & Linds may have been caught up in a more subtle Night of the Long Knives.
https://www.threads.com/@stonekettle/post/DatXtNEkaKl
They say death comes in threes. Now, with Lindsey Graham pushing up bitter daises, I know what you're hoping for, but you have to remember Mitch McConnell has probably already died at least twice today.
Ok, we were all thinking something like that already, right?
Given her father's connections, I wouldn't be surprised if Maxwell was Epstein's minder, and has a dead person's switch firmly in hand.
Something is bound to happen today. Sam Neill suggests the fates are on nobody's side, alas.
Still, there are reports that, propped up with a stout blackthorn, Mitch has revived, and is feeling much better...
"Still, there are reports that, propped up with a stout blackthorn, Mitch has revived, and is feeling much better..."
Could Lindsey's death have been a needed sacrifice in a ritual for reviving Mitch McConnell?
Like any good story, it explains a lot.
LH what a notion....
It's all breaking loose.
Conditioning a mind for conspiracy theories is like biasing a transistor - it creates a powerful amplifier of small signals. And once configured, it's difficult to stop or modify. MAGA has become such a device. Caveat creator.
Sacrifices and resurrections? Yeah, if you assume the universe is run on Charles Stross' Laundry Files rules...
...Whose most recent blog entry suggests that we are entering an age of actual Bond villains...."an industry pundit) described his experience of interviewing Elon Musk, who was allegedly leaning hard into the archetype. "I must be a Bond villain!" He joked, "I have an electric car and a tropical island where boiler-suited minions launch rockets!"
Pappenheimer
P.S. just read an article (H C Richardson?) on the continuing enslavement of US research to neofascist, as per Project 2025. How much of a cadre of researchers is going to be left, since this will continue up through 2028?
Essentially what the Bene Gesserit did to the Fremen, no?
Thing is, the US has a persistent 40% that supports authority no matter who authority is. It's not the same 40% from one election to the next, but it is fairly consistent as the lowest possible approval ratings barring official stupidity.
We've been like this for a LONG time and it is the primary reason incumbents get re-elected.
Who was the industry pundit? Some of them are quite humorless. Some see Musk as a threat to the old industry.
The Bond villain thing is just his sense of humor which most of us know goes over poorly on camera. He really oughta back off from interviews and let Shotwell do them... but he won't because he can't see the problem.
If you want to see a bit of what goes on with other people they have produced a couple of videos that are likely to be pretty accurate on average. Start with the older one first and the second one will work better.
https://www.spacex.com/content/starship
Alfred - it is the primary reason incumbents get re-elected
To me one of the main problems with the USA and the reason incumbents get re-elected is your - Primary System - I don't know of any other country with Primaries
To me the Primary System is a horrible case of unintended consequences
An excellent idea to fix a known problem that ended up making it worse
"To me the Primary System is a horrible case of unintended consequences"
I agree, for two separate reasons.
One, primaries are supposed to be how "the parties" each select their candidate, but there is no foolproof way to define which voters make up each party. Even in states with closed primaries, voters are free to switch their party registration at will, or almost so. And many states, including my own, allow open primaries, which means that a voter can participate in whichever party's primary he wants each time--the moral equivalent of letting Russian or Iranian citizens vote in US elections.
More importantly, to me anyway, is that the parties are supposed to nominate a candidate who they believe or hope can win in a general election. Most primary voters don't seem to understand that. They vote for the candidate that they personally like best. Which is understandable, but does not do the job of putting forth a potentially-winning candidate.
"the US has a persistent 40% that supports authority no matter who authority is"
I'm going to disagree on this. There are those who tend to be submissive to authority, but they tend to be so only when the authority in question leans right. When the authority leans more liberal, suddenly they are all "Don't tread on me!" and "The Pope doesn't understand Christianity."
Sure, there are those left of center who hated Nixon and Bush and hate Trump, but when a Clinton or an Obama come to power, those people don't tend to claim that the leader is infallible or anointed by God the way the right-wing does.
The Dixie Chicks were excoriated by their country-music fans for violating a rule that was just made up--"You can't criticize the president on foreign soil during wartime!" By the same people who had no problem criticizing President Clinton during the war in Bosnia. The right claims that congress's job is "implementing Trump's agenda", despite its job having previously been to obstruct President Obama's agenda.
I may be mistaken, but I see no equivalent hypocrisy--unquestioning deference to our own authority though not the other party's--on the liberal side. The disdain for the other side might be there, but not the 1984-like submission to the will of our own leaders.
A reminder: Right Time To Thiel
(Song by Jan Böhmermann)
https://youtu.be/S-Jo-djilvo?is=LxpOw5aENTueY4h7
Ironically, the addition of first - past- the post seats to our parliamentary system was seen as an additional safeguard - Weimar had only proportional representation.
Powerful amplification of small signals is the footprint of Sapiens*, in proverbs, literature, comics, movies, and history/psychohistory. The ape that plays with a bone until it suddenly realizes its potential is the opening scene of 2001 A SPACE ODYSSEY (discussed at TASAT occasionally).
* A sarcastic friend of mine calls our species 'double sap'. We each have our own version of language. I tend to use a lot of electronic lingo (like 'potential', 'amplifier', 'hysteresis', 'feedback', etc. It's pretty easy to guess the author of posts just by the terms they use/reuse. And so Forth.
In case I didn't post this here already (which I may have, but not on this post), the correct way to look at Mitch McConnell's current situation is that he's Schrodinger's Cat. He is both alive and dead at the same time until an observer comes along and collapses the waveform.
So, an undead creature is basically a creature with a waveform resistant to collapse through observation?
More importantly, when in the last twenty or thirty years did Mitch McConnell exhibit the traits of a living and breathing being with human feelings, compassion and a soul?
"So, an undead creature is basically a creature with a waveform resistant to collapse through observation?"
McConnell having died in June and then risen again three days later as a vampire would explain much. Like why we can't be shown recent film of him moving about. Presumably, an observer would be limited to direct line of sight, as he wouldn't show up in mirrors either.
The lesson being: The more mirrors and sunlight you have, the safer you are against vampires.
Of course, the one in Trump's orbit who most visually resembles a vampire is Rudy Giuliani. If you've ever seen the old 1930s film "Nosferatu", you know what I mean. The only difference is that Rudy isn't in black and white.
Larry,
The membership of that 40% shifts. People who are inclined to submit to right wing authoritarians do so when right wing authoritarians are in power. People inlined to submit to left wing authoritarians do so when... The 40% is the fraction of us inclined to submit to AN authoritarian group. (Don't tell me none existed in support of Obama. Many wouldn't tolerate others questioning him.)
My source material on this cam from Paul SB. The book was pretty depressing and I can't recall the authors name off the top of my head. Canadian I think. Lots of research backing up the conclusions.
scidata,
That's the power of languages. We found a tool (NOT that bone) that enabled us to coordinate the actions of millions. Well... several tools. Languages are a good start and they enabled markets.
Abstract languages are our first 'steam engine'. Conceptual compressions transferred as tokens. Speech expressed power.
"Don't tell me none existed in support of Obama. Many wouldn't tolerate others questioning him."
I know there are those on the left. It just seems more endemic on the right. I'm suggesting that the percentages are not equal. So if X number of people are completely submissive to authority when Republicans are in power and then Y number are like that when Democrats are in power, then X is greater than Y. It's not constant.
Alfred Differ,
'markets' is your 'Forth' :)
I like your succinct language-tool-token thought. Also, there's something evolutionary at play too. The fact that we each have a mostly common yet slightly variant dictionary of tokens helps. A Telephone Game is actually more powerful than a perfect Dictaphone.
The ability for each agent to have its own Forth dictionary was one of the keys in my early computational psychohistory work.
Stephen Miller comes a close second.
Of course vampires are 'persons' fixed in place when observed. At other times, they're bat signals. }
Larry,
Found it. Blame PaulSB for getting me to read a lot of the book.
https://theauthoritarians.org/
As I understand the evidence, X is roughly equal to Y with some allowance for fluctuations.
scidata,
I suspect our token variations goes to the heart of how mutation and natural selection processes work when it comes to the beasties roaming the memescape. For example, I learned physics from professors who wanted me to be able to reproduce what they already knew, but wanted to ensure I kept some ability to alter and invent. All my fellow grad students faced that expectation and most managed to succeed in their own way.
Hank Green is difficult to watch sometimes and his brother used to be the same way, but occasionally the both hit on a big idea and produce content that communicates it well. For example... his recent video on youtube about the Jevons Paradox.
https://youtu.be/a6sYYrLTOjQ?si=3m_glB2p0qNsdr5A
If you can manage to watch it all the way through (I stop when he shifts to playing games at the end of these things), you'll see what's been buzzing around in my head about languages and their fungibility. LLM's are NOT the apex of the changes underway, but in the light of Jevons Paradox... they are profound agents of change that show the phase change we are in the midst of experiencing.
Add that to mutation and selection in our various markets (obviously language structures FOR language structures) and you'll see why I'm hyperventilating. ARR! Recursion currents dead ahead!
I don't blame primaries for incumbents getting re-elected. They've always stood a good chance from long before we had primaries.
Our primaries ARE an example of unintended consequences, but it is important to recall WHY we pushed for them. The prior system involved party bosses, smokey back rooms, and what was essentially disenfranchisement. The real choices had been made before the election.
For an example, consider Kamala Harris and the difference between her early and later career choices as an elected official in California. She started when the Democrats had a de-facto party boss and no term limits in the legislature to force retirements. By the time she was running for federal office we had made a number of changes. Look to some of what detractors claim she did in the early years and you'll find things we find unpleasant today, but she'd never have gotten her early career off the ground if she hadn't. Look up Willie Brown.
Party bosses are motivated to win general elections by the very fact that doing so ensures they stay in power. It worked... but it's corrupt as Hell. Primaries took those choices away from the bosses and essentially eliminated their power, but the system we imposed has serious problems of its own.
I'm not overly worried, though. I'm a feisty citizen of California. We can change things again if we damn well feel like it. 8)
@Tony Fisk,
Stephen Miller so closely resembles the Lex Luthor of the latest Superman movie that I have to believe the casting was intentional. And his whole schtick in the film was disdaining Superman as a dangerous alien.
@Alfred,
"As I understand the evidence, X is roughly equal to Y with some allowance for fluctuations."
Maybe I'm biased by the vibe I get from mainstream (corporate) media. It feels to me like the imperative to submit to a president or a Pope--and to coerce submission from everyone else--is more noticeable when the leader in question is a right-wing authoritarian.
The progressive voices I listen to are largely comedians. They naturally gravitate to calling out the buffoonery of the right, but they hardly fall in line behind liberal leaders. More like herding cats.
GenAI is definitely NOT intelligence (nor is it artificial - ask any author/artist who has been pick-pocketed). But it certainly is important. We've applied Jevons to knowledge instead of coal. An astonishing leap.
Forth is the simplest, cleanest recursive language, which is not surprising. Concepts such as recursion, factoring, modeling, addressing, tokenization, and data representations are the core of computational thinking. It's why I was so fascinated by the potential of "Why Johnny Can't Code". If students learned this stuff in primary school, we'd be on Titan by now. Alas, instead we got 50 years of sifting eye candy.
The prior system involved party bosses, smokey back rooms, and what was essentially disenfranchisement.
This explains much of the appeal of European populist parties because the perception is that the "Old Parties" are essentially oligarchic institutions. (That their masters are true oligarchs, or have other types of gatekeepers are conveniently overlooked.)
Again, Switzerland has so far kept both the SVP nationalists and revolutionary communists (!) in check by
a) having a consense-orientied culture (think of Canadian courtesy times ten)
b) a tradition of regular plebiscites.
McConnell's proof-of-life photo does not prove that McConnell is alive. It proves that "proof-of-life photography" is dead.
I approve of Claude's spelling of your book's title as "Ailien Minds", instead of "AIlien". The latter looks too much like a double-L. Whenever a report attributes something to AI, I wonder if they mean Weird Al Yankovic.
I guess that one pronounces Ailien as eh-eye-lee-ann.
Tonight's episode of Fresh Air interviewed one of the authors of a recent book called "Regime Change: Inside the Imperial White House of Donald Trump." It's pretty amusing stuff. https://www.npr.org/2026/07/15/nx-s1-5893633/trump-regime-change-jonathan-swan-maggie-haberman
I want to wish everyone a belated happy Bastille Day.
The day when the French discovered a cure for their K-shaped economy.
Meh. In the end, it created another one. Useful as a reminder, though.
Along the Paris streets, the death-carts rumble, hollow and harsh. Six tumbrils carry the day’s wine to La Guillotine. All the devouring and insatiate Monsters imagined since imagination could record itself, are fused in the one realisation, Guillotine. And yet there is not in France, with its rich variety of soil and climate, a blade, a leaf, a root, a sprig, a peppercorn, which will grow to maturity under conditions more certain than those that have produced this horror. Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seed of rapacious license and oppression over again, and it will surely yield the same fruit according to its kind.
...
I remember when the host here got pissed off when I said that there was no such thing as a good billionaire about ten years ago.
The window of acceptability for hating the super-rich has *moved* a lot in the last ten years, hasn't it?
And it is 100% the fault of those same oligarch billionaires.
Idiots.
Unser Oger, I’m mostly with you on this one. America’s entire corporate caste needs to meet Madam Guillotine. However, so many Americans have swallowed the Repugnant Party’s repackaging of fascism as patriotism that we have an endless supply of wannabe Napoleons here. Even most of the decent human beings don’t know the difference between patriotism and nationalism
I wouldn't take my ranting as any indication. I've always been opposed to America's national religion, with its myth of meritocracy and outright worship of the wealthy. Whether you call it Social Darwinism or Prosperity Gospel (the new term for Providentialism), they are two steaming piles of the same elephant crap. It's nothing but rich and powerful bastards rationalizing their insatiable rapaciousness.
It seems that more Americans have been dumping religion since they found out that the rumors of priests buggering altar boys are true and proven in courts of law. Hopefully people will start to get the message that super rich people are mostly arrogant shits who think they are entitled to anything, and quite a few of them have a taste for taboo.
I've heard a lot recently about the divorced wives of the super rich giving away millions to help people, but almost never about men doing it.
"I remember when the host here got pissed off when I said that there was no such thing as a good billionaire about ten years ago."
It's a certainty today that there's no such thing as a good trillionaire.
Okay, this is entertaining and the show was... ambitious...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wece6G6oIjc
And wow is she holding together.
pfeh. matthew I fight the same enemy each day harder and more effectively than you do in any year. But if you but the former MErs. Bezos on a tumbrel I will fight for her.
"I hope there aren't any...OBJECTIONS!" made me flash on, "I see you shiver with antici...PATION!"
When Von Schitznpantz addresses the nation tonight, what are the odds that there's a visi-sonor playing in the background?
Ms. Scott is worth *more* now then when she started to "give it all away." Look it up.
You might remember that the first time we sparred about such a thing as a good billionaire ten years ago, *I* brought up Ms. Scott as a possible exception because she was trying to give it all away. She has now failed in that goal since she is worth more than when she started.
The problem with billionaires and charity is that the billionaires gain control over the charity in return for the money. To call the effect "soft power" is misleading. It is power, pure and simple.
I generally approve of the choices Ms. Scott has made in her charitable giving, but just her presence in the charitable giving "market" causes huge distortions.
And if I was auditioning billionaires for Mme. Guillotine, I'd start off with some of David's old friends and acquaintances.
matthew's assertion that there are no good billionaire's would immediately change if Elon Musk decided to give matthew a billion dollars. Then he would assert there are, indeed, two good billionaires in the world....himself, and matthew would suddenly recognize Elon's goodness due to his ability to recognize matthew's worthiness for a billion dollars.
Of course, the world would then be subject to the spectacle of finding out what matthew would DO with a billion dollars.
Everyone here knows that if you become Robspierre, you will schedule far more than billionaires to Mr. Gulllotine.. Like Danton, I will fight the kings and lords and cheaters until YOU send me to the block and doom us to Napoleon. If we are lucky.
JV,
Your assertions are flawed. Why would Matthew suddenly decide that Lone Skum is good just because he gifted Matthew with a billion? I wouldn't, I'd just think that he'd gone nuts. More nuts.
Also, suddenly having to deal with a billion is a perfect reverse white elephant. You're assuming Matthew considers himself 'good' already. Some people don't. The strain of having to manage and redistribute that much for the greater benefit of others would probably break me. I'd rather spend some time learning how to give intelligently, like Kirby Winter, the main character of 'The Girl, the Gold Watch, and Everything', whose rich and eccentric uncle had primed him his whole life (unawares) to take over the family business.
Pappenheimer
P.S. re: the Girl etc., I recommend both book and movie.
By the way, there appears to be evidence that amassing a fortune IS corrosive to a person's soul - Spider Robinson's unwritten book 'the Magnficent Conspiracy' remains unfinished because he no longer believes that the billies, and now a trillie (courtesy of an insane stock market, I should point out - if Skum tried to convert any significant portion of his fortune to cash, most of it would sublimate,) could make thing better for the rest of us, even if they wanted to.
Pappenheimer
Heh. I doubt it.
1. He despises Musk. Seriously.
2. He'd give away the money. Probably all of it.
Y'all are missing an important point. Musk thinks his efforts with his companies ARE about making the world a better place.
Ignoring Musk for the moment... now that SpaceX is publicly traded, some financial evidence is out in the open about how they do what they do. We can now work out roughly what the company is worth based on various models people use for how that is done.
https://youtu.be/DlXb3zSLdFY?si=qw3ArMj2pFU5JTiw
The fellow behind this video does a decent job of sticking to the explanations without getting into the personalities and I recommend a peek at this video. It explains why SpaceX made a rather sudden transition a few years back from flying other people's stuff to flying their own. The numbers are eye-popping.
matthew,
I have to agree with David here. I'm one of the people who is pretty sure your friends would do MORE damage to the nation that the current batch of fascist idiots crowding the graft teat. The only people who I think would be worse for the nation than you and yours would be me and mine... meaning people who lean libertarian, think their system should work because it is based on rational thought, but can't face the fact that people aren't rational often enough to make it all work.
You'd kill our golden goose because it honks in the most annoying way and occasionally bites people.
Alfred,
So did an awfully lot of awful people.
We can go from Caesar to G.W. Bush and find one in each generation.
I have re-read - AiLienMinds its very good
Near the beginning there is an offhand comment about organic evolution - which (to me) hit hard as something I had not previously thought about or encountered
The critical importance of the - Cell Wall - the membrane that surrounds the cell - in enabling evolution to do its stuff
This I believe is a superb insight
Unfortunately it is also a barrier to the individualisation of our AIs
Without something analogous I can't see the individual - tokens - actually working
I can easily see those working with seperate entities - each with its own brain -
But the programs that run across multiple platforms????
I am not a computer guy - I hope that people who know more than I can work out a way to fit - cell membranes - to those Ais
"...would immediately change if Elon Musk decided to give matthew a billion dollars."
Well, only in the same sense that if Donald Trump cured cancer, I'd admit he did something good. It ain't gonna happen. Neither is that other thing.
"We can go from Caesar to G.W. Bush ..."
Certainly Hitler, Trump, and Thanos each thought their singular vision and perseverance were the only chance for the ungrateful population. Likewise, Musk.
Individualisation is a core theme of evolution in general and intelligence in particular - in brains, in societies/civilizations, and in real AI. But it takes time and effort to monetize it. It's not a quick and easy path to $Billions. Hyper Scaling is.
Vast GPU data centers are basically Nuremberg rallies in silico.
I certainly do not trust myself with a billion dollars. As Alfred points out, I am a barbarian and I hold a grudge longer than most people do. I would certainly destroy lives with my newly-acquired power.
I'd try to give (most) of it away, but no doubt I would damage the recipients of my charity in the act of giving. I suspect I'd end up in a lot of GOP-attack ads against candidates I support, for instance.
I added the parenthetical (most), because I would need 24-hour security for life after being publicly identified as tied to Musk, worth a billion, and giving it away to progressive causes. All three factors are a kidnap / political killing risk of the highest order.
Plus, the sheer level of sycophancy I would suddenly encounter would destroy almost all human interaction and trust. David would suddenly remember that he used to like what I wrote, for instance.
A billion dollars, given from a "trillionaire" is not a blessing, it is a curse.
Thanos surely. Hitler only for the first half of his reign, and the Nero orders.
Trump? He was only out for himself.
Thanks Duncan and scidata. Iwish the book would be read by those who need it. Good things happen in the enlightenment more by flat-fair-reciprocal-creative competition than anything else... especially the reciprocal ACCOUNTABILITY that keeps predation down to a dull roar so that all can participate.. But there's no accountability without transparency AND individuation. Pretty much my main poit in both this book and The Transparent Society.
matthew's riff on his own self-insights was weirdly endearing. It's not that great wealth automatically corrupts. It's that it tends to isolate you behind layers of sycophancy and immunity to consequences and rationalizations that "my kind of people are the ones who should be trusted with power."
That phrase is said by everyone, BTW. Including the poor and minorities. We are all human. The rich get to act on it.
"Hitler only for the first half of his reign, "
Yes, that's what I was thinking of. Hitler when he was winning and projecting invincibility. Once he was losing, he was all about revenge.
"Trump? He was only out for himself."
You're right, but the image that Trump sells of himself is as I said.
https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2026/Items/Jul17-1.html
...
Incidentally, it took only about an hour before near-ironclad evidence—a smoking gun, if you will—emerged that this was a slapdash operation executed by incompetent boobs. People with a stronger stomach than us have been poring through the documents, and they already found one that provides evidence of foreign interference in a presidential election. The problem, from Trump's point of view, is that it's evidence of Russia interfering on his behalf. Undoubtedly, that was not supposed to be in there. We would link to the document directly, but: (1) they are actually pdfs enclosed in zip files, and so not directly linkable, and (2) we suspect that document is going to disappear from the collection sometime very soon. That said, if you want to try and view it while you can, it's on pages 2-3 of the document "NICA Foreign Threats To 2020 US Election_19AUG2020 DECLASS_REDACTED," which is in the same China collection as the redacted document above.
...
Just sayin'
Well, in this particular context, I was picking on matthew b/c he asserted that I was stupid enough to fall for a Reichstag Fire. However, the reality is, all of us are more malleable than we'd like to think if "self-love" and our own benefit come into play.
Simply handing matthew a billion dollars would be the WORST way to subvert him. The reason is that he would become a billionaire so quickly, that he would have little time to rationalize his acquisition of wealth and would still identify with pre-billionaire matthew.
But, suppose Elon issued his largesse over the space of years in $15 million increments? You'd be amazed at the ability of a human to rationalize events that benefit them.
Initially, matthew would be vulnerable to the desire to solve immediate problems that can be addressed by money for himself and his family and friends. Say there are medical problems such as a knee replacement that could be addressed by cutting edge therapies (note, recent papers have shown the ability to regrow cartilage in a damaged knee). Or, perhaps, starting education funds for his children (if matthew has any) or perhaps a family educational trust. Perhaps pay off his home mortgage, or take care of issues for close family members.
So, after being able to be Santa Claus for his family, that's a hard thing to give up. There are ENDLESS needs to address once you obtain such a position.
And, since we all have different ideas due to our unique life experience, matthew will convince himself no one else sees the necessary solutions to political problems quite like he sees them. Thus, he might want to retain wealth to support the causes he sees as necessary.
They, people will attach themselves to matthew and convince him of his unique vision (because they want to direct some of his wealth into their pockets). Imagine university professors starting new research to social problems and now matthew is privy to a new school of humanitarian thought brewing in elite institutions. Now he's part of an elite that understands things others do not.
As matthew's wealth grows, he will gradually "see" things he never understood before. Perhaps a beautiful woman will convince him of his need to retain wealth, because others just don't have his understanding of the "right" problems to solve. The old saw is if a beautiful woman starts telling her man that he's 10 feet tall, her 5'10" man will start stooping as he walks through 8 foot doorways. Pretty soon, matthew will start thinking only he can recue America.
Then, after the beautiful woman achieves her goal, and she becomes ex-Mrs. matthew with a massive division of property and alimony payment, matthew will begin to realize Elon isn't such a bad guy. How this happens is that after obtaining that billion dollars and been led down the garden path of living that life, he now will have more in common with Elon than almost everyone else.
JV, you have no idea of any of the things you theorize.
You are a newcomer in a 30 year-long conversation. The host, a high percentage of the commenters here, and I have had similar conversations with a lot more bite over a decade ago.
You are a child speaking at the adults' table - go sit down, fool, you are embarrassing yourself.
Unknown Pappenheimer,
Your assertion that fortune damages the wealthy is well-supported by neuroscience. Wealth can be an addiction, and the behaviors you associate with alcoholics or heroin addicts apply to money addiction.
The basics of addiction are that whenever someone gets something that they recognize as good for them, the limbic system pours reward chemicals into the mesolimbic pathway, sometimes called the reward pathway. The result is both a good feeling and a craving for more of it.
Most people these days have heard of dopamine, and know that it's involved in addiction, but it's not the only one that does this. Generally you get a dopamine squirt for things that directly relate to survival and reproduction, meaning food and sex. Eat a potato chip and your nose and tongue identify the fats and starches, send the signal upstairs to the hypothalamus, which consults the hippocampus, which identifies them as high-energy molecules, and you get the dopamine happy signal.
Other chemicals do the same thing for other sorts of stimuli. Oxytocin has become well-known as the cuddle chemical. When you get a warm hug from Grandma it's OT that gets squirted into your mesolimbic pathway. OT is more subtle, though. It makes you feel relaxed and comfortable, and it shuts off stress hormones. The relevant chemical for wealth addiction is testosterone, the chemical of ego. When you get praise, or acquire something that you expect will earn you praise, T gets squirted into your mesolimbic pathway and you feel ecstatic. This is just as true if your thing is creating art that wins you praise as getting money. Culture decides what is praiseworthy, T makes you crave whatever it is. Since we have made rich people into mythical saints of moral virtue, cunning, and "hard work" the way to become a megalomaniac in our culture today is to get rich. And just like crackheads trying desperately to get their next hit, a money addict will stop at nothing to get theirs. Our president is a fantastic example.
That matthew considers himself having a place at the adults table conclusively proves how easily he can delude himself.
Albeit weirdly endearing, Matthew's extremely limited insight into his own inherent untrustworthiness still borders on narcissism, as he continues to imagine himself to be morally superior to, more enlightened than & much more adult when compared to every other adult in the room.
It's mendacity, pure & simple, of the type most often engaged in by every other self-styled revolutionary & reformer -- from Guervara to Castro to yet another Austrian artist wannabe -- to murder hundreds to thousands to millions of other human beings that he judges to be inferior to himself.
And what, pray tell, makes him so much better than all of his much hated adversaries amongst the more successful, the moderately rich & the so-so powerful ??
Why, nothing at all: Zero.; Zilch; Nadda.
Our Matthew is a big fat nobody, just like every other marginal human being that he chooses to either love or despise, dust into dust and under dust to lie, the temporal equivalent of a fractional picosecond on Sagan's cosmic calendar.
Best
Pot, Kettle, Black. You have continuously checked all boxes for the Dark Triade over the years, and other ... forensic fields, so be cautious whom you are calling out.
Or to paraphrase MLK, if you have a violent revolution, all peaceful options have been exploited.
And let's not forget the absolute FACT that all real attempts to overthrow the system - Civil War, Business Plot, Jan. 6- have been conducted by the right, not the left.
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