The Sanity Project

The expropriation of creativity   Recently updated !

This entry was posted in Commentary and tagged censorship liberty socialism on by

Socialist Bernie Sanders has proposed that the federal government seize 50% of the stock of businesses that are heavily involved in AI. It’s the classic socialist line that all creation comes out of “the people” and not specific people. It aims to expropriate not just wealth but credit for achievements.

Artificial intelligence was not created out of thin air. The data and language used by generative A.I. tools didn’t just pop into Sam Altman’s head or Elon Musk’s imagination. A.I. is built on our collective intelligence: our books, songs, artwork, journalism, computer code, scientific research, videos, conversations, images and ideas spanning generations. That is not just the opinion of Bernie Sanders.

 
For the most part, tech oligarchs have fed this knowledge into their A.I. models without permission, without acknowledgment, without compensation. In other words, the creative work of millions of people — writers, artists, musicians, journalists, teachers, scientists and ordinary citizens — has essentially been stolen by some of the wealthiest people in the world. It’s time for us to reclaim it.

 
Since A.I. is built on the collective knowledge of humanity, the wealth it generates must benefit humanity.

Face of a Borg of Star TrekThe first sentence is definitely true. AI software wasn’t “created out of thin air.” Nor was it created by some Borg-like “collective intelligence.” AI code, like any other, is created by people putting in long hours to turn abstract algorithms and data flows into code.

The term “artificial intelligence” is a vague one. Any software that does things that we previously thought only a human mind can do counts as AI. But eventually we get used to things like speech recognition, grandmaster-level chess, and self-driving cars and forget to call them AI. The current fad is large language models (LLMs), a brute-force technique that ingests vast amounts of information and spews it back out in new combinations. It’s encountered hostility because it’s shoved in our faces so much and isn’t especially reliable. Companies brag that they put “AI first,” which means that users are second at best.

There are legitimate concerns about LLMs grabbing up people’s research and creative work without credit or compensation. Many lawsuits have been filed over the matter. But the work they’re grabbing up isn’t the product of the collective hive mind either. It’s specific creations by specific people. When Sanders says “us,” he means the federal government, the monster which Trump currently exercises broad control over. Having the US government splitting the take with the companies doesn’t compensate creators or grant them credit. It especially ignores creators outside the US border. Advocates of the collective-mind hypothesis often regard the government as its embodiment, but a quick look shows how absurd that claim is.

Maybe Sanders thinks AI wasn’t invented till last year, consists only of LLMs, and works by stirring large amounts of information in a cauldron. Even assuming all those things, the pieces which go into software like ChatGPT are the products of individual efforts, not of the mythical mass mind.

Oh, and does the Borg mind exist only within the United States? How does the US grabbing companies help authors and artists in Europe, Asia, or Africa? Sanders’ proposal is really about giving the government control of information in the US. A government with 50% control of a business won’t have trouble censoring anything it doesn’t like.

The collective-mind claim expropriates not only creative work but the credit for doing it. It lets people who haven’t done anything special feel special.

Note on the LPNH   Recently updated !

This entry was posted in Commentary and tagged liberty New Hampshire on by

Just a quick note to say that the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire is a misnamed organization that I definitely don’t support. I call myself a libertarian or classical liberal, I live in New Hampshire, and I used to be involved with the LPNH when it was a much better organization. It got taken over by some people who don’t comprehend or don’t care about libertarian principles.

It’s been in the news because the national LP has revoked the state party’s affiliation. Carla Gericke, one of the founders of the Free State Project, described the state organization’s actions as “self-destructive, counterproductive, and increasingly unhinged.”

Several years ago, I was involved with LPNH Seacoast, a regional affiliate of LPNH. It has good people, with an emphasis on supporting everyone’s rights. It slipped away, and I lost contact with the people involved.

It would be nice if someone would start a new organization in the state. There are a lot of good libertarians and classical liberals in the state who are now homeless. I lack the skills to make it happen. Someone must have them.

The road to Trump 4

This entry was posted in Commentary History and tagged history liberty on by

Donald Trump is the culmination of many years of growth in presidential power. As Congress increasingly surrendered its role and the Supreme Court invented new presidential privileges, it was inevitable that someone would take full advantage of their deference and pursue one-man rule. While many of his actions are unprecedented, many build on the powers explicitly or tacitly granted to his predecessors.

According to Wikipedia, 51 national emergencies are currently in effect. Each one says the situation is so desperate that the president must have powers beyond the normal scope of the law. When Trump says that measures outside normal restraints are necessary, he’s just agreeing with what Congress has always said. The Patriot Act, passed as an emergency measure in response to the 2001 terrorist attacks, is still in effect a quarter century later.

Let’s take a walk backward in time to see how previous administrations paved the road to Trump.

Just before leaving office, Biden issued blanket pardons to many people, including members of his family. Most of these people had not been formally charged or convicted of anything; the pardons applied to anything they might have done. One of them had killed two FBI agents. Trump has built on this precedent, pardoning the people who assaulted the Capitol and even creating a slush fund for them.

Biden wrote off billions of dollars in student debt, an expenditure of money without Congressional authorization and a wealth transfer from those who didn’t go to college to those who did. The ACLU took the president’s side.

Barack Obama got a Nobel Peace Prize and then bombed seven countries without Congressional approval in 2016. He and other presidents relied on AUMF’s that in practice have let presidents attack pretty much anyone they feel like.

Before that we had George W. Bush, who presided over the panic-motivated creation of the Patriot Act, authorized torture, and fraudulently brought the US into an undeclared war with Iraq.

Richard Nixon issued a decree forbidding most wage and price increases, allegedly to fight inflation. That’s like fighting global warming by banning thermometers. It caused all kinds of dislocations. People couldn’t get raises, but they could get a better offer with a new job, so job-hopping skyrocketed. Nixon told David Frost, “When the president does it, it is not illegal.”

John F. Kennedy, aided by his brother the Attorney General, wiretapped journalists.

Truman was the first president to send the US into a major undeclared war.

Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered all banks in the US closed, using the World War I Trading with the Enemy Act as an excuse. He ordered Americans of Japanese descent into concentration camps. He urged Congress to pack the Supreme Court with new judges who would approve his unconstitutional actions. Congress handed him vast economic powers with the National Industrial Recovery Act and other legislation. He regularly intimidated the news media and called freedom of the press a “greatly overworked phrase.” Radio stations, subject to federal licensing, were highly subservient.

How far back can we go? To Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus? Perhaps even to Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase? How long have people been claiming the president is the commander in chief of the nation (not just of the armed forces), as if we were a military dictatorship?

In some ways, FDR remains worse than Trump, but he had twelve years to Trump’s five. No candidate before Trump tried to overturn an election result after losing, and he tops his predecessors in using the office for personal aggrandizement. Either way, it’s not as if we couldn’t have seen it coming.

Gene Healy’s The Cult of the Presidency was helpful in researching this post.

Alternate mental worlds 4

This entry was posted in Commentary and tagged psychology SanityProject on by

On Nextdoor I often run into MAGA thinking, which I need to look at occasionally in order to understand it. These people seem to inhabit an alternate reality in their minds. They think that the mainstream news coverage of Trump, ICE, immigration, and similar topics is fictional. The fantasy extends to their neighbors, claiming that all of us who attend protests against the government’s outrages are paid to go.

I find myself bouncing among different explanations for them. Are they brainwashed by podcasters? Has journalism gotten so bad that many people completely disbelieve the news? Do they lie to show off to their peer group? Is it to con everyone else? Have they surrendered their personal identity, and with it any concept of truth and falsehood?

There are other groups that show similar patterns. On the left side, there are the people who claim as established fact that Trump has sexually abused children. When Biden announced the novel economic theory that inflation is caused by greed rather than government policies, a lot of people quickly adopted it. Some groups, like flat Earthers, are weirder but less harmful. Some flat Earthers spin elaborate arguments that supposedly prove our world is pizza-shaped, even though hiding that “fact” would require a massive conspiracy. Other people believe that the position of stars in the sky when we’re born has a significant influence on our lives.

Most of these people seem to live otherwise normal lives, though I wonder if flat Earthers ever fly to other continents or use satellite-based devices. MAGAs, though, have a more thorough alternate reality. They believe that the election results and the reports of MAGA brutality are fictions delivered by a vast conspiracy. They think the tens of thousands of people across the country engaging in protests are all getting paid by George Soros. If they’re consistent, they’d have to think that whole court documents ruling against improper prosecution are being forged and posted. It’s a cult mindset, and the White Queen is a realist by comparison.

All of these groups have a worldview to which facts are required to conform. They’d rather throw out mountains of evidence than discard their belief. Maybe we can imagine what this is like by thinking what we’d do if something contrary to the normal, common-sense, scientific worldview happened. Suppose the events of Ghostbusters really occurred and a giant marshmallow man rampaged through the streets of New York while a hole opened in the sky. Most of us would brush it off as a hoax. Even reporting and videos by a major news outlet would leave me skeptical.

Having doubts would be reasonable. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Members of these groups just have different ideas of what’s “extraordinary.” For flat Earthers, it’s extraordinary for the world to be round. For MAGAs, it’s extraordinary that immigrants who have fallen behind on their paperwork or have seen their status arbitrarily revoked might not be killers and rapists. How they got to that state of mind is the harder question.

I’d best leave that question for another post, or for someone else to answer.

Update: Aaron Ross Powell posted a piece on the same day as this article, on treating history as a kind of fannish lore. This part struck me: “They enjoy feeling like the worldbuilding they’ve done is coherent, and they hate the incoherence introduced by critical examination or diverse perspectives. It’s not about veracity.” An invented world can feel more consistent than reality, because people are often inconsistent. Myths often are simple and neat, the way we wish the truth would be.

Unveiling the Ona Judge Mural

This entry was posted in News and tagged history liberty New Hampshire on by

On Saturday, May 23, I went to Portsmouth to see the unveiling of the mural of Ona Judge. The crowd was huge, spilling over onto Court Street so the police had to close the street for a block. I’d say a couple of hundred. Various speakers had their say. Some were politicians who showed up to look important, others were actually involved with the project, and one was the artist. Unfortunately, I couldn’t hear any of them very well from where I was.

The main point of this post is to let you see the pictures, so I’ll leave it at that.

Ona Judge mural with crowd around it