Cognition in "Strange New Minds."

Are AI LLMs approaching true "sentience?"

   

Released today.
 

The Amazon blurb:

An insider look at the Large Language Models (LLMs) that are revolutionizing our relationship to technology, exploring their surprising history, what they can and should do for us today, and where they will go in the future—from an AI pioneer and neuroscientist

In this accessible, up-to-date, and authoritative examination of the world’s most radical technology, neuroscientist and AI researcher Christopher Summerfield explores what it really takes to build a brain from scratch. We have entered a world in which disarmingly human-like chatbots, such as ChatGPT, Claude and Bard, appear to be able to talk and reason like us - and are beginning to transform everything we do. But can AI ‘think’, 'know' and ‘understand’? What are its values? Whose biases is it perpetuating? Can it lie and if so, could we tell? Does their arrival threaten our very existence?

These Strange New Minds charts the evolution of intelligent talking machines and provides us with the tools to understand how they work and how we can use them. Ultimately, armed with an understanding of AI’s mysterious inner workings, we can begin to grapple with the existential question of our age: have we written ourselves out of history or is a technological utopia ahead?

 

SCIENCE MAGAZINE REVIEW

In These Strange New Minds, cognitive neuroscientist and artificial intelligence (AI) safety specialist Christopher Summerfield presents a wide-ranging overview of AI for nonspecialists, focusing on what the technology really is, what it might do, and whether it should be feared. We no longer live in “a world where humans alone generate knowledge,” writes Summerfield. Machines possessing this potential will soon occupy custodial positions in society, he maintains (1). His book takes on six broad questions: How did we get here? What is a language model? Do language models think? What should a language model say? What could a language model do? And, are we all doomed?

Summerfield is a philosophical empiricist who argues that “the meaning of language depends on its evidentiary basis.” He is also a functionalist who believes that “it is perfectly possible for the same computational principle to be implemented in radically different physical substrates” and a materialist who sees the mind’s activity as identical to “neural computation.” But does he believe that AI machines think like humans do, or just that they appear to?...

...In the book’s final section, Summerfield turns to whether the technology will doom or deliver humankind. Here, he begins by discussing computer scientist Rich Sutton’s assertion that humankind should already be planning for the inevitable and great “succession” as AI machines “take over.” Neither AI successionists nor its antagonists have much to offer compared with those “whose core members are rooted in the AI safety community, [who] believe that there is an urgent need for AI to be tightly regulated precisely because it is so potent a tool,” argues Summerfield.

Existential risk groups have alternatively called for AI to be widely and publicly paused or for large government and private investments to design AI monitoring and countermeasures. So far, little headway has been made in either direction, but Summerfield’s book offers nonspecialists a good introduction to the issues and some hope that sound efforts in AI safety may see the light of day.

Just getting started. 

I'd like to get Shannon Valor's take on this book.

 

DR. SUMMERFIELD

 

MORE:

Whether or not we are on a pathway to building AI systems that figure out the deepest mysteries of the universe, these more mundane forms of assistance are round the corner. It also seems likely that the main medium by which most people currently seek information – an internet search engine – will soon seem as quaint as the floppy disk or the fax machine. ChatGPT is already integrated into the search engine Bing, and it surely won’t be long before Google and others follow suit, augmenting page search with conversational skills. As these changes occur, they will directly touch the lives of everyone on the planet with internet access – more than five billion people and counting – and are sure to upend the global economy in ways that nobody can quite predict. And this is all going to happen soon – on a timeframe of months or years, not decades. It’s going to happen to you and me.

The new world I’ve described might sound like quite a blast. Imagine having access to AI systems that act as a sort of personal assistant – at your digital beck and call – much more cheaply than the human equivalent, a luxury that today only CEOs and film stars can afford. We would all like an AI to handle the boring bits of life – helping us schedule meetings, switch utility provider, submit our tax returns on time. But there are serious uncertainties ahead. By allowing AI systems to become the ultimate repositories for human knowledge, we devolve to them stewardship of what is true or false, and what is right or wrong. What role will humans still play in a world where AI systems generate and share most knowledge on our behalf?

Of course, ever since humans began to exchange ideas, they have found ways to weaponize dissemination – from the first acts of deception or slander among the pre-industrial hunter-gatherer crew to the online slough of misinformation, toxicity, and polemic that the internet has become today. If they are not properly trained, machines with language risk greatly amplifying these harms, and adding new ones to boot. The perils of a world in which AI has authority over human knowledge may exceed the promise of unbounded information access. How do we know when an LLM is telling the truth? How can we be sure that they will not perpetuate the subtle biases with which much of our language is inflected, to the detriment of those who are already least powerful in society? What if they are used as a tool for persuasion, to shepherd large groups of people towards discriminatory or dangerous views? And when people disagree, whose values should LLMs represent? What happens if large volumes of AI-generated content – news, commentary, fiction, and images – come to dominate the infosphere? How will we know who said what, or what actually happened? Are we on the brink of writing ourselves out of history?

Summerfield, Christopher. These Strange New Minds: How AI Learned to Talk and What It Means (pp. 7-8). (Function). Kindle Edition. 

BLASTS FROM MY BLOG PAST

 

 I searched back in the blog for a look at what I'd posted a devade or so ago on "Artificial Intelligence."

 

Fairly quaint.

 

Stay tuned...

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If you're not "Outraged,"

you've not been paying attention.

 

Science Magazine rreview rcommendation. On deck. Dr. Gray is all over it

 

Brings to mind Frank Bruni's book The Age of Grievance I cited last July, along with some other topically relevant works. 

 

UPDATE

 

I finished Kurt's book. It could scarcely be more timely, given current chaotic events. From the Science Magazine review:

Navigating conflict is difficult in the best of circumstances. It becomes even harder when our disagreements are deeply rooted in opposing moral convictions about the directions in which our collective lives are moving. When these tensions are embedded in contexts involving existential threats such as a changing climate that brings devastating storms or low wages and high prices for everything from grocery staples to health care and housing, fighting naturally erupts over the best way to fix a broken system. Political polarization seems inevitable.

In his compelling book, Outraged: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground, moral psychologist Kurt Gray uses stories and science to help readers understand why people are so angry at each other about almost everything. The reason, in his view? They feel threatened. They are afraid of what the future holds for them and for those they love. They feel as though the things that might ease their daily struggles are being ignored or even mocked by “the other side.”…

Dr. Gray is one busy research scholar. Impressive.

 

Click. 

Click

About the Center for the Science of Moral Understanding

Political intolerance is high. People dread turning on the news and discussing politics at the dinner table. This intolerance not only poisons our everyday interactions, but also imperils the health of democracies. How do we increase tolerance and civility? Some scientific work has examined how to bridge divides across people, but it is often scattered into disconnected disciplines, and current funding climates make it difficult to create momentum. The Center for the Science of Moral Understanding seeks to unite this work and catalyze a new science of moral understanding. The CSMU will then translate these new discoveries into societal change, creating a set of empirically based ways of increasing tolerance.

The Center harnesses a key insight—that much political disagreement is moral disagreement. To increase tolerance and civility, we need to understand the nature of moral judgment and the interpersonal processes that transform divergent moral judgments into conflict. The Center therefore connects moral and social psychology with related disciplines of neuroscience, political science, sociology, history, philosophy, economics, and legal studies.

Of particular timely relevance:

 

'eh?

Five stars.

 

UPDATE: QUICK TANGENTIALLY RELEVANT DIVERGENCE

The qualification of the noun "liberties" by the adjective "personal" is unfounded. Any qualification is unfounded. This particular one suggests that we can become free people without society, which is absolutely not true. We all begin life as helpless infants. Whether we can become free or not depends on circumstances beyond our control. No amount of declaiming "personal liberty" will create the conditions in which a baby grows up with the capacities and structures needed to be a free person. That effort to create a person must be social, beginning with the parents, and extending to friends, teachers, child-care workers, and others. A child needs a special kind of time at a special time of life, and that time will only exist if we recognize that the entire situation is about freedom and that freedom requires cooperation. If we want liberty, in other words, we cannot limit ourselves to the personal. The example of the newborn is important, because it is what we all share, but also because it suggests a truth that continues throughout life. In one way or other, we are always vulnerable, and our ability to be free will always depend on cooperation.

The use of the plural "liberties" (rather than "liberty" or "freedom" in the singular) is not an extension but an unwelcome qualification, in fact a limitation. The use of the plural suggests that there is a finite list of specific liberties, rather than freedom for all people as such. This indicates that liberty is constrained for people. Interestingly, no such constraint is placed upon the inhuman abstraction that also figures in Jeff Bezos's editorial line, "the free market." What has unqualified freedom, according to Bezos? Not people. The market. And this, as we shall see, is not only incoherent but authoritarian.

From Timothy Snyder's Substack.

___

 

SOME OTHER RELATED POSTS

Amanda Ripley, “High Conflict”
SOCIOECONOMIC DRAMA. The Rescuer/Victim/Persecutor Triangle
“Victimhood” and related stuff
On "belief”…
Sentience? Perception? Cognition? Knowledge?
“Civility,” anyone?

Also. how about "Mental Immunity?"

 

What?

 

Hmmm... How about "The Truth About Denial?" And "Who Wouldn't Want to be Influential?"

 

___

 

KURT GRAY SUMS UP

Moral Understanding
Moral understanding is hard won, and can be easily lost, especially because of the allure of the three myths debunked in this book. Myth 1 is that humans are more predators than prey. This misconception about human nature poisons our perceptions of our political opponents, who we wrongly assume want to watch the world burn. Fortunately, the truth is that people are more prey than predators; we are less motivated to destroy and more motivated to protect ourselves and society.

Myth 2 touches on the idea that people with different politics have deeply different minds. One theory suggests that liberals care only about direct physical and emotional harm and the harm of unfairness, while conservatives care about these concerns plus “harmless” morality like loyalty to group members, respecting authorities, and protecting purity. But the notion of “harmless wrongs” is a myth, grounded in the misconception that harm is an objective fact. It is not.

When it comes to our moral psychology, harm is a matter of perception. Everyone’s moral judgments are grounded in intuitive perceptions of victimization, and moral differences arise from different assumptions about who or what is especially vulnerable to victimization. Despite our different moral stances, this shared focus on harm provides common ground with our opponents, which can help us bridge divides.

To best harness this common ground and connect across political disagreement, we need to let go of a third myth: that facts are the best way to achieve moral understanding in contentious conversations. Ever since the Enlightenment, facts have (understandably) held a privileged position in our society, but our minds are better suited to connect over stories, especially those that center on suffering. Sharing stories of harm is more effective at bridging divides than launching statistics at our opponents. When we combine this advice with practitioner-tested steps for having better dialogues—connect, invite, and validate—conversations with political opponents go much better than expected.

This book has been about the psychology of our moral disagreements, because I believe that understanding the mind is crucial to understanding our human condition—and we are all humans, no matter our moral positions. When we appreciate how our minds work, it is easier to sit with the central tension of moral conflict: that other people can disagree with you and still be good people. Like my family in Nebraska, people can vote for different candidates and still be caring, compassionate, and moral people.

Despite having different moral convictions, people on the other side still care about their loved ones and still feel threatened by the modern world. In fact, it is because people care about their loved ones and feel threatened that they hold fast to their moral convictions. People with different politics might disagree with you about how best to protect society from harm, but we all genuinely care about preventing victimization.

Whether in politics or everyday life, most of us are trying our best to uphold morality. It can be hard to remember this, especially when someone insults you on social media, comparing your side to the Nazis—or when someone corners your car in a dark loading dock, like when I was a teenager on the way to the movies that night. But everyone—even the man who slapped me around—wakes up in the morning striving to do right. Each of us shares a human nature built upon detecting threat and a morality focused on preventing harm, and each of us wants our experiences of suffering to be heard.

It is true that many of us today are outraged. But most of us want to be less outraged, and understanding the truth about our moral minds will help.

Gray, Kurt. Outraged: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground (pp. 366-368). (Function). Kindle Edition.

You really should buy this book and study it closely. 

More to say shortly...

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The State of the Union, 2025

Changing the name of the Gulf in 2025

The way things are now going, by the time this bill were ever to pass into law, the Trump C-note may well be worth 5 bucks. Charitably.

Jeffrey Sachs Roaring Ukraine Speech At EU Parliament; Blasts U.S., Says 'Not Putin's Puppet'

Professor Jeffrey Sachs recently addressed European Parliament on February 19, 2025, with a stark warning: being a friend to the United States can be "fatal." Speaking at "The Geopolitics of Peace" event, hosted by Michael von der Schulenburg, Sachs emphasized the need for Europe to adopt a truly independent foreign policy. Sachs' statement was a call to action, urging Europe to develop a foreign policy that's grounded in reality.  Sachs' words echo his previous criticisms of US foreign policy, particularly regarding the Ukraine conflict. He has argued that the US has recklessly expanded NATO's reach, ignoring Russia's concerns and fueling the devastating war.
  

An hour & 40 minutes of bracing contrarianism.

ERRATUM

 

Yeah, right, problem solved.

UPDATE

 

PUTIN'S RASPUTIN

 

From The New Yorker

A long-read. Worth every minute.

 

MORE ON JEFFREY SACHS

 

In this sobering analysis of American foreign policy under Trump, the award-winning economist calls for a new approach to international engagement.
 
The American Century began in 1941 and ended in 2017, on the day of President Trump’s inauguration. The subsequent turn toward nationalism and “America first” unilateralism did not made America great. It announced the abdication of our responsibilities in the face of environmental crises, political upheaval, mass migration, and other global challenges. As a result, America no longer dominates geopolitics or the world economy as it once did.

In this incisive and passionate book, Jeffrey D. Sachs provides the blueprint for a new foreign policy that embraces global cooperation, international law, and aspirations for worldwide prosperity. He argues that America’s approach to the world must shift from military might and wars of choice to a commitment to shared objectives of sustainable development.
 
A New Foreign Policy explores both the danger of the “America first” mindset and the possibilities for a new way forward, proposing timely and achievable plans to foster global economic growth, reconfigure the United Nations for the twenty-first century, and build a multipolar world that is prosperous, peaceful, fair, and resilient.

TRUMP ADDRESSES CONGRESS

ON DECK

Stay tuned... 

_________

  

One of these leaders has spent more than 3 years surviving unrelenting military assaults by Putin's Russia.

The other is loudmouth bully & draft dodger Donald Trump.

 

Of the many bizarre and uncomfortable moments during today’s Oval Office meeting between Donald Trump, J. D. Vance, and Volodymyr Zelensky—during which Trump finally shattered the American alliance with Ukraine—one was particularly revealing: What, a reporter asked, would happen if the cease-fire Trump is trying to negotiate were to be violated by Russia? “What if anything? What if a bomb drops on your head right now?” Trump spat back, as if Russia violating a neighbor’s sovereignty were the wildest and most unlikely possibility, rather than a frequently recurring event… - Jonathan Chait

I could scarcely be more appalled today.

It Was an Ambush
Today marked one of the grimmest days in the history of American diplomacy.
By Tom Nichols

Leave aside, if only for a moment, the utter boorishness with which President Donald Trump and Vice President J. D. Vance treated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House today. Also leave aside the spectacle of American leaders publicly pummeling a friend as if he were an enemy. All of the ghastliness inflicted on Zelensky today should not obscure the geopolitical reality of what just happened: The president of the United States ambushed a loyal ally, presumably so that he can soon make a deal with the dictator of Russia to sell out a European nation fighting for its very existence.

Trump’s advisers have already declared the meeting a win for “putting America first,” and his apologists will likely spin and rationalize this shameful moment as just a heated conversation—the kind of thing that in Washington-speak used to be called a “frank and candid exchange.” But this meeting reeked of a planned attack, with Trump unloading Russian talking points on Zelensky (such as blaming Ukraine for risking global war), all of it designed to humiliate the Ukrainian leader on national television and give Trump the pretext to do what he has indicated repeatedly he wants to do: side with Russian President Vladimir Putin and bring the war to an end on Russia’s terms. Trump is now reportedly considering the immediate end of all military aid to Ukraine because of Zelensky’s supposed intransigence during the meeting…

Trump convenes his first second-term cabinet "meeting."

After an hour of random self-aggrandizing Acting Celebrity Apprentice POTUS babble, CNN cut away.

   

Somenone, please buy Elon Musk a dress shirt and tie. And, please, dude take that MAGA hat off.

 

 

Seriously?

 

Back to some real world. Katherine Stewart's timely new book is out.

 

 

 

A quick cite from the Preface, then onto some relevant current events.

PREFACE
…The big story of our time is the rise of an antidemocratic political movement in the United States. Like any such movement, this one is diverse and complicated. It brings together a collection of people and ideas that in ordinary circumstances would not dream of sharing a bed. It is united in its profound rejection of the Enlightenment ideals on which the American republic was founded, and it represents the most serious threat to American democracy since the Civil War…

Abraham Lincoln had it right when he said that the United States is dedicated to a proposition. The American idea, as he saw it, is the familiar one articulated in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence. It says that all people are created equal; that a free people in a pluralistic society may govern themselves; that they do so through laws deliberated in public, grounded in appeals to reason, and applied equally to all; and that they establish these laws through democratic representation in government. In the centuries after 1776, in its better moments, the United States exported this revolutionary creed and inspired people around the world to embrace their freedom.

But in recent years a political movement has emerged that fundamentally does not believe in the American idea. It claims that America is dedicated not to a proposition but to a particular religion and culture. It asserts that an insidious and alien elite has betrayed and abandoned the nation’s sacred heritage. It proposes to “redeem” America, and it acts on the extreme conviction that any means are justified in such a momentous project. It takes for granted that certain kinds of Americans have a right to rule, and that the rest have a duty to obey. No longer casting the United States as a beacon of freedom, it exports this counterrevolutionary creed through alliances with leaders and activists who are themselves hostile to democracy. This movement has captured one of the nation’s two major political parties, and some of its leading thinkers explicitly model their ambitions on corrupt and illiberal regimes abroad that render education, the media, and the corporate sector subservient to a one-party authoritarian state.

Stewart, Katherine. Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy (pp. 2-3). Kindle Edition.

Ch 11: Exporting the Counterrevolution
In the decades immediately following the Declaration of Independence in 1776, the new American republic became the modern world’s first great exporter of democratic revolution. As America’s founders watched the strategic alliances between priests and kings tumble before the advance of ideas of human equality, individual rights, and representative government in France, Haiti, Greece, the Spanish colonies, and eventually much of Europe, they were exultant. “From that bright spark which first illumed these lands / See Europe kindling, as the blaze expands,” wrote Philip Freneau, the so-called poet of the American Revolution. His friend Thomas Jefferson was equally pleased. “This ball of liberty, I believe most piously, is now so well in motion that it will roll round the globe, at least the enlightened part of it, for light and liberty go together,” he wrote. “It is our glory that we first put it into motion.”

Today, however, sectors of the American right have become exporters of the antidemocratic counterrevolution. Not satisfied with their efforts to roll back individual rights in the United States and replace democratic pluralism with sectarianism and authoritarian forms of governance, America’s Christian nationalists have pushed their ideas and agendas out to other countries around the world. Joining them in the effort are a host of “antiwoke” culture warriors from the New Right along with the white supremacists, men’s rights activists, New Traditionalists, and others they inspire. Some groups in those other countries have proved receptive to the new ideologies. A global antidemocratic reaction has emerged that in turn contributes to the counterrevolutionary process in America.

The axis around which a sector of the global antidemocratic reaction now turns is an extraordinary alliance between a dominant wing of the Republican Party in the U.S. and the Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. Only twenty years ago, the same Republican Party was willing to go to war to overthrow a dictatorship in Iraq and (supposedly) promote democracy. Yet the faction of the Republican Party that has mortgaged itself to Donald Trump balked at providing relatively small-scale aid to Ukraine as that country attempted to fend off a brutal and unprovoked Russian invasion. And even while Vladimir Putin continues to crush democracy in his home country and abroad, with assassinations of journalists and political opponents, widespread imprisonment, and kleptocratic arrangements, to say nothing of the suspiciously convenient “suicides” and “accidents” of Russian business, political, and military leaders, the right wing of the Republican Party hails him as a hero and a strong leader. To be sure, after months of pressure from the White House, House Speaker Mike Johnson managed to squeak out approval for aid to Ukraine in April 2024, bypassing opposition of a number of Republicans. And yet out on the far right, among the kind of people who contribute to Claremont Institute publications and who now form the “brain trust” for Donald Trump and other Republican leaders, one can hear Ukraine’s resistance to Russia described as a “woke war.” It is important to note that Russia and other hostile foreign powers have avidly targeted sectors of the American left in order to intensify and exploit divisions in U.S. society. This activity and its consequences are grossly underappreciated… (pp. 213-214). 

Just for starters.

 

See some prior posts of mine apropos of "Christian Nationalism."

 

Also, the word "Evangelical." And, Matthew D. Taylor's fine book on the topic. Hmmm... one more for now: "Claremont College," anyone?

 

"A Republic. If we can keep it?"

 

More shortly...

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Day 1,096

of Russia’s 3-day conquest of Ukraine.

   

The New Whirled Order

 

 Yeah. Below, a back-to-reality break:

 

The 16th NATO Supreme Allied Commander, James Stavridis attended the US Naval Academy at Annapolis, and spent 37 years in the Navy, rising to the rank of 4-star Admiral. He oversaw NATO operations in Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, the Balkans, and counter piracy off the coast of Africa. He led the US Southern Command in Miami, charged with military operations through Latin America.

He served as senior military assistant to the Secretary of the Navy and the Secretary of Defense. He led the Navy’s premier operational think tank for innovation, Deep Blue, immediately after the 9/11 attacks. He also commanded a Destroyer Squadron and a Carrier Strike Group, both in combat. He was the longest serving Combatant Commander in recent US history.

Highly decorated, his awards include the Battenberg Cup for commanding the top ship in the Atlantic Fleet and the Navy League John Paul Jones Award for Inspirational leadership. Following his military career, he served as Dean of his alma mater The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, where he earned his PhD. In 2016, he was vetted for Vice President by Secretary Hillary Clinton, and subsequently invited to discuss a cabinet position with President Donald Trump.

A best-selling author, Stavridis has published twelve books on leadership, character, risk, the oceans, maritime affairs, and Latin America, and hundreds of articles in leading journals. His most recent books are To Risk It All: Nine Conflicts and The Crucible of Decision, 2034: A Novel of the Next World War, a New York Times bestseller, and 2054: A Novel.

Stavridis is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist and Chief International Security Analyst for NBC News. He is Partner and Vice Chair, Global Affairs of The Carlyle Group and Chair of the Board of Trustees, Rockefeller Foundation.

 Admiral Stavridis spoke to us last night at the latest Baltimore Speakers Series event.. He was fabulous, a real patriot, accomplished military scholar, and brilliant, humorous, self-deprecating mind.

And then there's this ketamine-addled DOGE dipshit, appearing at CPAC.

 

 

He's cutting federal spending, get it?

 

 

ON A DEADLY SERIOUS NOTE

 

In this book, I aim to define freedom. The task begins with rescuing the word from overuse and abuse. I worry that, in my own country, the United States, we speak of freedom without considering what it is. Americans often have in mind the absence of something: occupation, oppression, or even government. An individual is free, we think, when the government is out of the way. Negative freedom is our common sense.

To be sure, it is tempting to think of liberty as us against the world, which the notion of negative freedom allows us to do. If the barriers are the only problem, then all must be right with us. That makes us feel good. We think that we would be free if not for a world outside that does us wrong. But is the removal of something in the world really enough to liberate us? Is it not as important, perhaps even more important, to add things?

If we want to be free, we will have to affirm, not just deny. Sometimes we will have to destroy, but more often we will need to create. Most often we will need to adapt both the world and ourselves, on the basis of what we know and value. We need structures, just the right ones, moral as well as political. Virtue is an inseparable part of freedom.

“Stone Walls do not a Prison make / Nor Iron bars a Cage”—said the poet. Sometimes they do, and sometimes they don’t. Oppression is not just obstruction but the human intention behind it. In Ukraine’s Donetsk, an abandoned factory became an art lab; under Russian occupation, the same building became a torture facility. A school basement, as in Yahidne, can be a concentration camp.

Early Nazi concentration camps, for that matter, were in bars, hotels, and castles. The first permanent one, Dachau, was in an abandoned factory. Auschwitz had been a Polish military base meant to defend people from a German attack. Kozelsk, a Soviet POW camp where Polish officers were held before their execution, had been a monastery—the one where Fyodor Dostoevsky, in The Brothers Karamazov, set the dialogue with the famous question: If God is dead, is everything permitted?

No larger force makes us free, nor does the absence of such a larger force. Nature gives us a chance to be free, nothing less, nothing more. We are told that we are “born free”: untrue. We are born squalling, attached to an umbilical cord, covered in a woman’s blood. Whether we become free depends upon the actions of others, upon the structures that enable those actions, upon the values that enliven those structures—and only then upon a flicker of spontaneity and the courage of our own choices.

The structures that hinder or enable are physical and moral. It matters how we speak and think about freedom. Liberty begins with de-occupying our minds from the wrong ideas. And there are right and wrong ideas. In a world of relativism and cowardice, freedom is the absolute among absolutes, the value of values. This is not because freedom is the one good thing to which all others must bow. It is because freedom is the condition in which all the good things can flow within us and among us.

Nor is it because freedom is a vacuum left by a dead God or an empty world. Freedom is not an absence but a presence, a life in which we choose multiple commitments and realize combinations of them in the world. Virtues are real, as real as the starry heavens; when we are free, we learn them, exhibit them, bring them to life. Over time, our choices among virtues define us as people of will and individuality.

When we assume that freedom is negative, the absence of this or that, we presume that removing a barrier is all that we have to do to be free. To this way of thinking, freedom is the default condition of the universe, brought to us by some larger force when we clear the way. This is naïve.

Americans are told that we were given freedom by our Founding Fathers, our national character, or our capitalist economy. None of this is true. Freedom cannot be given. It is not an inheritance. We call America a “free country,” but no country is free. Noting a difference between the rhetoric of the oppressors and the oppressed, the dissident Eritrean poet Y. F. Mebrahtu reports that “they talk about the country, we talk about the people.” Only people can be free. If we believe something else makes us free, we never learn what we must do. The moment you believe that freedom is given, it is gone.

We Americans tend to think that freedom is a matter of things being cleared away, and that capitalism does that work for us. It is a trap to believe in this or any other external source of freedom. If we associate freedom with outside forces, and someone tells us that the outside world delivers a threat, we sacrifice liberty for safety. This makes sense to us, because in our hearts we were already unfree. We believe that we can trade freedom for security. This is a fatal mistake.

Freedom and security work together. The preamble of the Constitution instructs that “the blessings of liberty” are to be pursued alongside “the general welfare” and “the common defense.” We must have liberty and safety. For people to be free, they must feel secure, especially as children. They must have a chance to know one another and the world. Then, as they become free people, they decide what risks to take, and for what reasons.

When Russia invaded Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelens’kyi did not tell his people that they needed to trade liberty for safety. He told them that he was staying in the country. After my visit to Yahidne, I spoke to him in his office in Kyiv, behind the sandbags. He called de-occupation a chance to restore both security and freedom. He said that the “deprivation of freedom was insecurity,” and that “insecurity was the deprivation of freedom.”…

Snyder, Timothy. On Freedom (pp. xii-xv). (Function). Kindle Edition.

I read a ton of Timothy Snyder. Highly recommended.

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What does Elon want?

 Techno-Fascism by ChatBot.

   

 

 FROM THE NEW YORKER

...The federal government is, in effect, suddenly being run like an A.I. startup; Musk, an unelected billionaire, a maestro of flying cars and trips to Mars, has made the United States of America his grandest test case yet for an unproved and unregulated new technology. He is hardly alone in his efforts to frame A.I. as a societal savior that will usher in a utopian era of efficiency. The tech investor Marc Andreessen recently posted on X that wages will “logically, necessarily” crash in the A.I. era—but that A.I. will also solve the problem, by reducing the price of “goods and services” to “near zero.” (Any explanation of how that would happen was not forthcoming.) Last month, Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI and perhaps Musk’s primary nemesis, launched a five-hundred-billion-dollar data-center initiative called Stargate with the coöperation of Trump. But Musk, with his position as a close Presidential adviser, and with office space in the White House complex, is uniquely and unprecedentedly poised to fuse the agendas of government and Silicon Valley. (On Monday, in what looked like an effort to troll Altman and derail an investment deal, Musk led a group of investors in a nearly hundred-billion-dollar bid to acquire OpenAI.) In a recent article for the advocacy nonprofit Tech Policy Press, the respected A.I. researcher Eryk Salvaggio labelled Musk’s activities as an “AI coup.”

A government run by people is cautious and slow by design; a machine-automated version will be fast and ruthless, reducing the need for either human labor or human decision-making. Musk’s program has already halted operations altogether at the U.S. Agency for International Development, which was responsible for more than forty billion dollars in foreign aid in 2023, and at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency that may have drawn Musk’s special notice for its track record of suing tech companies for deploying loosely regulated technology. Trump and Musk both love to blame the country’s problems on the so-called deep state, the federal employees who maintain the government’s day-to-day operations. As many of those people now find themselves locked out of their offices, with their work phones deactivated, a new, inherently undemocratic deep state is moving in to fill the void: a system imposed by machines and the tiny élite who designed them. With doge, Musk is not only sidelining Congress and threatening to defy the courts, helping to bring the country to the point of constitutional crisis; he is also smuggling into our federal bureaucracy the seeds of a new authoritarian regime—techno-fascism by chatbot…

Utterly crazy time.

UPDATE

TOM NICHOLS COMMENTS ON THE SEAN HANNITY INTERIEW W/MUSK &TRUMP

...After an hour of this rambling and sometimes weird [Hannity] conversation, all I could think of was George W. Bush’s reported reaction to Trump’s first inaugural address: “That was some weird shit.”

This low-key fandango was probably good enough for MAGA fan-servicing purposes, but seems unlikely to reassure the millions of Americans doubtful that the president and the plutocrat know what they’re doing. The president seems only dimly aware of the details of Musk’s adventures, but he’s certain that a smart guy like Musk is furthering his agenda—whatever it is. Musk, who answers to no one, is full of fervor to kill off government agencies he does not understand, because unelected rich men firing probationary federal employees is apparently how true Jeffersonian democracy is restored to an ailing America…

Below, a Facebook friend posted this.

 

Lotta people took it seriously. 

UPDATE: RICK WILSON

Trump Joins The Wrong Side in WWIII

Historians may one day mark this week as the beginning of World War III.

Like every great conflagration in history, it did not start with fireworks or ringing declarations but with the quiet, hollow tread of cowardice masquerading as strategy or capitulation draped in the threadbare costume of strength and the folly of baring every card while claiming negotiation.

No rousing Sunday headlines heralded another world war, just the tragic end of an alliance built. There was no grim storm of missiles over Western Europe or Russian tanks thundering through the Fulda Gap. The only civilians being killed were in Ukraine, dead at the hands of the Russian beast.

But make no mistake: just as France and Britain once closed their eyes to Hitler’s threat, we are now living in the early hours of a devastating conflict born of men too weak to stand for what is right.

It was Neville Chamberlain who gave appeasement its most infamous face. This weekend, we learned Chamberlain was a rookie.

For a genuinely catastrophic betrayal of the West, look no further than the staggering realignment ordered by Donald Trump this week.

In just five days, America has become a client state of Russia, subservient, obedient, and just as accepting of the slaughter and evil for which Vladimir Putin is famous...
 

Trump just insulted and overtly threatened the Ukrainian President this afternoon.

 

More shortly.

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Happy Celebrity Apprentice Acting President's Day, 2025.

Are we having fun yet?

   

Four weeks in...

 

"Modern societies, as Americans are soon to learn, cannot function without experts in every field, especially the many thousands who work in public service. The first step in containing the damage is to see Trump’s and Musk’s goals for DOGE clearly: It is a project rooted in resentful arrogance, and its true objective is not better government, but destruction."

DESTRUCTION

Science Based Medicine

Three months ago, after Donald Trump had won the 2024 election—and even before he had chosen longtime antivax activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. as his nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS)—I characterized RFK Jr. as an “extinction-level threat to federal public health and science-based health policy.” The reason was simple. Last summer, RFK Jr. had abandoned his quixotic and doomed campaign for President as an independent and bent the knee to Donald Trump. As a result, he was rewarded with a promise to be, in essence, Trump’s health policy czar and to have a prominent role in health policy in his administration if he won. During the campaign, RFK Jr. even came up with a slogan that riffed on the long familiar Trump slogan “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) by changing it to “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA). Cleverly, he said nothing at all about vaccines in his “MAHA manifesto“—an absence that his antivax minions noticed right away and were dismayed by—instead planning to “reform” the FDA, emphasize healthy food (depending on your definition), and legalize psychedelics and stem cell clinics. A couple of weeks after the election, President-Elect Trump nominated RFK Jr. for HHS, a nomination that I referred to as a “catastrophe for public health and medical research.”

Of course, RFK Jr. was “controversial” (translation: a batshit) nominee. I will even admit that, after RFK Jr.’s disastrous confirmation hearings, in which he lied repeatedly and blatantly about being “pro-vaccine” and in which Sen. Bernie Sanders embarrassed him over the organization that he founded, Children’s Health Defense, selling baby onesies with antivax slogans on them—asking RFK Jr, “Are you supportive of these onesies?“—and Sen. Elizabeth Warren pointed out how much money he makes assisting a law firm suing vaccine manufacturer, I briefly held out a tiny hope that a few Republicans would vote against him, denying him the nomination, but I soon realized that none of it mattered and that he would definitely be confirmed…

A long-read. Worth it. RFK Jr, ugh. Exigencies proliferate. One can hardly keep apace.

 

ANOTHER INTERESTING READ

 

During my years in the European Parliament, I progressively came to see technology through the lens of power. Technology could help emancipate people and raise unheard voices, or it could transform disruptors into monopolists who ruthlessly pursued efficiency, surveillance, scale, and profit. In either case, technology is not neutral. As I will elaborate in this book, systems are themselves designed with values built into them, even if that is unintended. Additionally, given that most technologies are developed by private companies, these technologies are ultimately deployed for profit maximization, and profit maximization incentives are often misaligned with what is best for society. Sam Altman’s Worldcoin, for example, aspires to build a global identity database by asking people in developing countries to scan their irises, in return for a bit of cryptocurrency; the firm is either blind or completely cavalier to the risks of concentrating so much sensitive biometric data under one roof. Social media platforms seek to extend online engagement time of their users with little concern for the negative effect on teenagers’ mental health. Tech firms and their products now also make potentially life-altering decisions. Commercial algorithms designate triage statuses in hospitals and analyze medical images. All the while, democratically elected representatives remain in the dark about key details of how these products work, since independent research is often impossible. For too long, too much trust has been placed in tech companies without making sure that their technology operates within the parameters of the rule of law and supports democratic outcomes.

Schaake, Marietje (2024). The Tech Coup: How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley (Kindle loc 216). Kindle Edition.

Timely.

 

And the hits just keep on comin’

The Washington Post canceled plans to run a front-and back-page advertisement that would have earned the paper $115,000 — and ran straight into fresh fury.

The ad, reportedly sponsored by the watchdog group Common Cause, demanded that President Donald Trump fire Elon Musk, who is working as a special government employee endeavoring to slash spending, and purging federal government workers. 

Now many Washingtonians and political experts are furious with the paper, which Amazon founder and billionaire Jeff Bezos purchased in 2013. It follows recent anger after Bezos announced the newspaper would buck historical precedence by not endorsing a political candidate last year.

Democracy defender and elections lawyer Marc Elias pointed out that in October, the paper ran an ad from a right-wing group funded by Musk to attack Elias personally for his work…

TUESDAY UPDATE

More shortly...

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