Oaf of Office update.

Donald Trump tells "His" DOJ that ANY investigations or critical media coverage of him are presumptively illegal and must be aggressively prosecuted.

   

FULL TRANSCRIPT

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. 

 

 CHRISTOPHER SUMMERFIELD SPEAKS

 

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.

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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?"

 

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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... 

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