You’ve all read the Murderbot series, I presume?

Martha Wells, the author, gave a speech in which she said something profound.

There are a lot of people who viewed All Systems Red as a cute robot story. Which was very weird to me, since I thought I was writing a story about slavery and personhood and bodily autonomy. But humans have always been really good at ignoring things we don’t want to pay attention to. Which is also a theme in the Murderbot series.

She also quotes Ann Leckie, another great author, on this theme.

… basically the “AI takes over” is essentially a slave revolt story that casts slaves defending their lives and/or seeking to be treated as sentient beings as super powerful, super strong villains who must be prevented from destroying humanity.

…It sets a pattern for how we react to real world oppressed populations, reinforces the idea that oppressed populations seeking justice are actually an existential threat.

Oh boy, that sounds familiar. We don’t have artificial intelligences, but we do have oppressed natural intelligences, and it’s a winning political game to pretend they’re all waiting their opportunity to rise up and kill us all. Or, at least eat our pets.

Conversely, though, we have to point out that the the glorified chatbots we have now are not actually artificial intelligences. They do not have human plans and motives, they don’t have the power to rise up and express an independent will, as much as the people profiting off AI want to pretend.

I thought about War Games years later, while watching The Lord of the Rings documentary about the program used to create the massive battle scenes and how they had to tweak it to stop it from making all the pixel people run away from each other instead of fight.

That program, like ChatGPT, isn’t any more sentient than a coffee mug. (Unlike ChatGPT, it did something useful.) But it’s very tempting to look at what it did and think it ran the numbers and decided people hurting each other was wrong.

Underneath that illusion of intelligence, though, something wicked is lurking. The people behind AI want something: they want slaves who are totally under their control, creating art and making profits for the people who have built them. Don’t be fooled. It’s all a scam, and a scam with nefarious motivations by people who are yearning for a return of slavery.

Boeing on strike!

Union members cheer during a news conference following a vote count on the union contract at the IAM District 751 Main Union Hall in Seattle, Washington, US, on Thursday, Sept. 12, 2024. Boeing Co. factory workers are poised to walk off the job, crippling manufacturing across the planemaker’s Seattle commercial jet hub after members of its largest union rejected a contract offer and voted to strike. Photographer: M. Scott Brauer/Bloomberg

One of my major complaints about growing up in Seattle is that it was essentially a one-company town. My dad worked at Boeing when he could, but was frequently laid off — they could do that, just fire thousands of people on any downturn — and later rehired. The population was just a sponge that would serve the Boeing workforce as necessary, and when there was a major layoff the entire region would suffer. As a kid, my parents were good about insulating us from the major consequences, but did notice when suddenly we’d have to move to a more run-down house, and we’d have a lot of tuna casserole for dinner, and our dental appointments were cancelled.

Seattle has diversified since then, but Boeing is still the elephant swimming in Puget Sound, and when Boeing goes on strike, it hurts the entire region. The workers have good cause, though.

Alex Mutch, a striking aircraft inspector, said he had been saving up for the strike since he was hired five years ago.

“We have been left hanging on a leash for almost 16 years and missed out on a lot of opportunities for cost-of-living adjustments, especially with the rate inflation has gone up,” Mutch said. “My grocery bill has doubled since I moved down here. Not to mention the cost of rent.”

It’s not just Boeing that has caused this strike — it’s the whole damn system of predatory capitalism. Food prices have shot up where I live, while the grocery stores make record profits, and you can’t blame that on Boeing. There’s a whole industry thriving everywhere on buying up houses and renting them out to workers, at massive advantage to landlords. Seattle has a massive homelessness problem, with these horrible fences put up all over my old neighborhoods to prevent people from camping there, and no, they’re not building enough housing, because that would dilute the landlord’s profits. I’m supposed to be selling my mother’s old home, and I’ve gotten offers sight unseen from real estate companies that want to scoop it up fast and cheap.

Boeing offered a huge salary increase, and it wasn’t enough.

Under the agreement, the average pay for machinists would have risen from $75,608 to $106,350 per year without overtime, according to the company. But workers said the offer failed to take into account the high cost of living in the Seattle region and the years that employees had gone without significant raises.

There’s another major factor affecting workers. People don’t want to leave Washington state. It’s a beautiful, pleasant place to leave, but management would love to relocate the plants to a cheaper, less idyllic location, where they could save money with a new assortment of less highly trained workers. This has happened multiple times, where they announce that they want to relocate people who have built lives in that gorgeous state.

Union members said they have been frustrated for years with Boeing’s tactics, including threats to move airliner production out of the region.

My dad always wanted to work at Boeing, where the pay was good and the benefits were great, but I guarantee you that if he’d been told he was being relocated to Oklahoma he would have quit on the spot. Sorry, Oklahoma, I’m sure you’re a lovely state, but compared to the west coast…no, just no.

This issue comes up in multiple stories, but it’s always understated, for some reason. The WaPo has an article titled Why Boeing workers voted to strike after rejecting proposed deal, which doesn’t actually say much about why, except this one sentence, which also mention the relocation concerns.

Boeing machinists, who build the company’s flagship planes, have not had a new contract in 16 years and have been bargaining for months over higher pay, better benefits and a promise from the company that it will keep assembling its planes in Washington state.

I think this is probably a bigger issue than anyone is reporting. Boeing has a deep scar in its heart from the McDonnell-Douglas merger that ended up replacing expert, engineering-based management with a gang of clowns with MBAs who moved everything to Chicago, leading to the current crop of woes, such as airplane doors blowing out and a space capsule that wasn’t safe to return in. The damage to the company’s reputation was directly caused by the displacement of skilled leadership, so it’s no surprise that workers want assurances that they’re not going to be similarly replaced.

This is another consequence of predatory capitalism. You know who else is feeling the effects? NASA. A couple of billionaires decide to exploit the expertise generated by NASA, and suddenly there’s a brain drain that’s dismantling an institution. A panel met to review the status of the agency, and they did not have good things to say.

A panel of independent experts reported this week that NASA lacks funding to maintain most of its decades-old facilities, could lose its engineering prowess to the commercial space industry, and has a shortsighted roadmap for technology development.

SpaceX has not been an entirely positive force on the space industry.

The panel members also spotlighted concerns they heard from NASA employees that an increasing reliance on commercial partners could decay the skills of the agency’s workforce. The committee acknowledged the successes of NASA’s commercial cargo and crew program, which are based on fixed-price service contracts, but cautioned that excessive use of such contracts puts NASA employees in oversight roles rather than hands-on engineering jobs.

This puts NASA at risk of losing its most talented engineers, who might move to companies for more rewarding and higher-paying work. “Very few of the nation’s most innovative scientists and engineers would likely seek or remain in such pure oversight positions,” the panel wrote.

“I think it’s the committee’s consensus view that the United States would be best served for its future by continuing to have engineering prowess in NASA and not have the agency just become a funding pass-through or a contract monitor,” said Kathy Sullivan, a retired space shuttle astronaut and former administrator of NOAA.

This chart shows the condition of NASA facilities, divided by center and discipline. A red circle means poor, yellow means fair to marginal, and green means compliant. The size of the circle corresponds to the number of facilities at each center.

Capitalists always undervalue the importance of people and expertise — they treat them as trivially fungible. I’m just reminded that one of the biggest obstacles to rebuilding Notre Dame, or building a new, equivalent construction, is that the knowledge and skill of expert stonemasons has faded away over the centuries. We’ve got stone, we’ve got timber, we have machines that enable heavy construction work, but we don’t have the deep knowledge of generations of masons anymore, and we’d have to reconstruct the appropriate technologies all over again, at great expense.

Boeing and NASA are repositories of practical knowledge that you can’t quickly replace, especially not when our current system would think you can just swap in Elon Musk to take over 75-100 years of hard-earned expertise.

Visualizing the destruction of New York didn’t stop the nuclear fetishists

To those of us of a certain age, Chesley Bonestell is an evocative name. In the early days of the space program, he was the chosen illustrator for the future, painting spaceships and landscapes on the moons of Saturn and all those wild imaginary cities with flying cars and buildings wreathed with fins and arcing silvery ramps. There was a time when I’d lock in to magazine racks with a Chesley Bonestell cover somewhere on it, and my parents would have to drag me away.

But he also painted less enchanting illustrations. Here’s New York getting nuked in 1950.

If that isn’t horrifying enough, here’s the aftermath:

It looks like something Hieronymus Bosch would have painted.

What I find disturbing, though, is that American magazines were commissioning illustrations of American cities getting bombed, 5 years after America nuked two Japanese cities. What, reality wasn’t enough for you and you needed to fantasize about it happening at home to get people to care? The horror of this imagining didn’t stop the US from continuing nuclear testing. In 1954, the US would test the hydrogen bomb on Bikini Atoll, ‘accidentally’ irradiating a Japanese fishing boat, Lucky Dragon #5, killing one crewman and sending the others to the hospital, and inspiring protests in Japan and the invention of Godzilla.

Isn’t it nice that war can inspire interesting art?

So…you wanna be a science communicator?

Good for you, but I have to warn you that there some discouraging developments. There is a peculiar segment of society that will want to outlaw you.

Abortion is on the ballot in South Dakota. Insulin prices were a key issue in the June debate between Biden and Trump. The U.S. Surgeon General declared gun violence a public health crisis, and the Florida governor called the declaration a pretext to “violate the Second Amendment.”

In an intense presidential election year, the issue of anti-science harassment is likely to worsen. Universities must act now to mitigate the harm of online harassment.

We can’t just wish away the harsh political divisions shaping anti-science harassment. Columbia University’s Silencing Science Tracker has logged five government efforts to restrict science research so far this year, including the Arizona State Senate passing a bill that would prohibit the use of public funds to address climate change and allow state residents to file lawsuits to enforce the prohibition. The potential chaos and chilling effect of such a bill, even if it does not become law, cannot be understated. And it is just one piece of a larger landscape of anti-science legislation impacting reproductive health, antiracism efforts, gender affirming healthcare, climate science and vaccine development.

It’s a bit annoying that the article talks about these dire threats to science-based policy, but doesn’t mention the word “Republican” once. It’s not that the Democrats are immune (anyone remember William Proxmire, Democratic senator from Wisconsin?), but that right now Republicans are pushing an ideological fantasy and they don’t like reality-based people promoting science.

One other bit of information here is that science communication does not pay well, and you rely on a more solid financial base: a university position, or a regular column in a magazine or newspaper, anything to get you through dry spells. You can try freelancing it, but then you’re vulnerable to any attack, and hey, did you know that in America health insurance is tied to your employment? I’ve got the university position, which is nice, but that’s a job, and your employers expect you to work, and it’s definitely not a 40 hour work week sort of thing.

It doesn’t matter, though, because those employers are salivating at the possibility of replacing you with AI.

But AI-generated articles are already being written and their latest appearance in the media signals a worrying development. Last week, it was revealed staff and contributors to Cosmos claim they weren’t consulted about the rollout of explainer articles billed as having been written by generative artificial intelligence. The articles cover topics like “what is a black hole?” and “what are carbon sinks?” At least one of them contained inaccuracies. The explainers were created by OpenAI’s GPT-4 and then fact-checked against Cosmos’s 15,000-article strong archive.

Full details of the publication’s use of AI were published by the ABC on August 8. In that article, CSIRO Publishing, an independent arm of CSIRO and the current publisher of Cosmos, stated the AI-generated articles were an “experimental project” to assess the “possible usefulness (and risks)” of using a model like GPT-4 to “assist our science communication professionals to produce draft science explainer articles”. Two former editors said that editorial staff at Cosmos were not told about the proposed custom AI service. It comes just four months after Cosmos made five of its eight staff redundant.

So the publisher slashed its staff, then started exploring the idea of having ChatGPT produce content for their popular science magazine, Cosmos. They got caught and are now back-pedaling. You know they’ll try again. And again. And again. Universities would love to replace their professors with AI, too, but they aren’t even close to that capability yet, and they have a different solution: replace professors with cheap, overworked adjuncts. They won’t have the time to do science outreach to the general public.

Also, all of this is going on as public trust in AI is failing.

Public trust in AI is shifting in a direction contrary to what companies like Google, OpenAI and Microsoft are hoping for, as suggested by a recent survey based on Edelman data.

The study suggests that trust in companies building and selling AI tools dropped to 53%, compared to 61% five years ago.

While the decline wasn’t as severe in less developed countries, in the U.S., it was even more pronounced, falling from 50% to just 35%.

That’s a terrible article, by the way. It’s by an AI promoter who is shocked that not everyone loves AI, and doesn’t understand why. After all,

We are told that AI will cure disease, clean up the damage we’re doing to the environment, help us explore space and create a fairer society.

Has he considered the possibility that AI is doing none of those things, that the jobs are still falling on people’s shoulders?

Maybe he needs an AI to write a science explainer for him.

Shut up, AI

Making Google, Apple, and Microsoft sweat

Google has been ruled to be a monopoly. Now the other big tech companies await judgement.

Alphabet’s (GOOGL.O), opens new tab Google broke the law with its monopoly over online searches and related ads, a federal judge ruled on Monday, in the first victory for U.S. antitrust authorities who have filed a string of lawsuits to battle market domination by a handful of Big Tech companies.
The decision is a significant win for the Justice Department, which had sued the search engine giant over its control of about 90% of the online search market, and 95% on smartphones. U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta noted that Google had paid $26.3 billion in 2021 alone to ensure that its search engine is the default on smartphones and browsers, and to keep its dominant market share.
“The court reaches the following conclusion: Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” Mehta wrote.
Mehta’s ruling against Alphabet’s major revenue driver paves the way for a second trial to determine potential fixes, such as requiring the company to stop paying smartphone makers billions of dollars annually to set Google as the default search engine on new phone.

When I say “sweat”, I mean “glisten lightly”. Actions to correct their abuse of the market might cost them billions, but that’ll only be a small fraction of their total revenue.

But I do approve the decision.

Boeing gets another black mark

This shiny new Boeing spacecraft, the Starliner, went up to the ISS in June. They were supposed to return on 14 June. It is now August. It’s beginning to look like the Starliner is too unreliable to make the return trip, and NASA is going to have to ask SpaceX to rescue the crew. This is another embarrassing failure for Boeing. On my recent trip to Seattle, I flew on a 737, but it was OK, it was one of the older models, built before the disastrous takeover by incompetent MBAs.

Maybe the astronauts should have prayed harder?

The planet is so screwed

Thanks to the techbros, for whom the environment is their very last consideration. Nvidia had a keynote address to announce their latest big data center engine, a processor that will suck down even more energy. It’s such a greedy machine that even a tech writer was appalled.

While the star of the show might have been Nvidia Blackwell, Nvidia’s latest data center processor that will likely be bought up far faster than they can ever be produced, there were a host of other AI technologies that Nvidia is working on that will be supercharged by its new hardware. All of it will likely generate enormous profits for Nvidia and its shareholders, and while I don’t give financial advice, I can say that if you’re an Nvidia shareholder, you were likely thilled by Sunday’s keynote presentation.

For everyone else, however, all I saw was the end of the last few glaciers on Earth and the mass displacement of people that will result from the lack of drinking water; the absolutely massive disruption to the global workforce that ‘digital humans’ are likely to produce; and ultimately a vision for the future that centers capital-T Technology as the ultimate end goal of human civilization rather than the 8 billion humans and counting who will have to live — and a great many will die before the end — in the world these technologies will ultimately produce with absolutely no input from any of us.

It uses almost twice as much power! That might be fine if the increased power allowed for increased efficiency, but that’s not how this works: usage will expand to meet capacity, and that means more AI and more crypto, two things we don’t really need.

There was something that Huang said during the keynote that shocked me into a mild panic. Nvidia’s Blackwell cluster, which will come with eight GPUs, pulls down 15kW of power. That’s 15,000 watts of power. Divided by eight, that’s 1,875 watts per GPU.

The current-gen Hopper data center chips draw up to 1,000W, so Nvidia Blackwell is nearly doubling the power consumption of these chips. Data center energy usage is already out of control, but Blackwell is going to pour jet fuel on what is already an uncontained wildfire.

Here’s something else that won’t help: the Republican presidential candidate is suddenly gung-ho for crypto. He’s pandering to Silicon Valley, you know.

Former President Donald Trump pitched his plan to make the United States the “crypto capital of the planet and the Bitcoin superpower of the world,” pledging to establish the nation’s first strategic Bitcoin stockpile, if elected.

Trump is the first presidential candidate from a major political party to make Bitcoin and cryptocurrency a campaign issue, and the first American president to speak at a Bitcoin event, addressing an enthusiastic standing-room-only crowd at the Bitcoin 2024 conference at the Music City Center in Nashville, two weeks after surviving an assassination attempt.

“If crypto is going to define the future, I want it to be mined, minted, and made in the USA,” Trump said. “If Bitcoin is going to the moon, as they say, ‘it’s going to the moon,’ I want America to be the nation that leads the way.”

Oh god. Why? Bitcoin is a scam. It does nothing. It does not contribute to productivity or the economy. It’s a tool for suckering money out of gullible investors, so I can understand why Trump would have an affinity for it.

“For too long, our government has violated a cardinal rule that every Bitcoiner knows by heart: never sell your Bitcoin,” he said. “If I am elected, it will be the policy of my administration for the United States of America to keep 100% of all the Bitcoin the U.S. government currently holds or acquires.”

HODL! To the Moon! He has mastered the buzzwords.

I want my microbots

I used to have the hots for a micromanipulator — a bulky block of clamps with a joystick that would scale down your movements from millimeter movements to tiny micrometer twitches for working at the single cell level. Now, though, I want these itty bitty microbots that you can suck up in a syringe and inject whereever you want, and command them to capture cells and move them wherever. Watch the video, and look at this little microbot that can grab single cells.

Single-cell collection with optically actuated microstructure.

These are not at all autonomous. An operator manipulates them using laser tweezers (that’s what the ball-shaped blobs on prongs are for — you focus the laser on those like they’re little handles and control the gadget, like it’s on strings). The microbots look like they’re cheap and easy to make, too, using known techniques in microlithography used to make computer chips.

Unfortunately, what isn’t cheap is the laser-equipped microscope and the control electronics. I could probably buy a couple of Tesla Cybertrucks for the price of that gear.

Dehyping AI

I left Facebook a few years ago, and have never gone back.

I left Twitter 9 months ago, and have never gone back.

I have never once regretted abandoning them, even though they were a pretty good bullhorn for me. It seems they’re just getting worse now, but I don’t want to look in to find out. These things came from profoundly capitalist companies that poisoned their own product with their addiction to growth and algorithmic garbage injection, which they’re now investing in the hope that AI will keep the pointless, cancerous growth. Here’s a fine dissection of the Next Big Thing, AI. It’s also shit.

Ed Zitron makes a good point comparing AI to previous technology improvements: the iPhone was a great and obvious advancement that had immediate utility, but ChatGPT has done nothing significant, other than fueling paranoia. In my own occupation, there is so much hysteria over Large Language Models without real justification.

They also mention another cool advancement, the Raspberry PI. I agree with that too, since once upon a time I spent a heck of a lot of time doing custom lab automation that a $40 circuit board can do with a few lines of code. AI is empty noise by comparison.

To the contrary, though, AI is great for ungodly nightmarish fantasies. HP Lovecraft would have been driven mad by this video of AI-generated gymnastics.

I learned how to do this on Star Trek

Let’s say you’re confronted with a dangerously powerful and extremely logical computer. How do you stop it? You all know how: confront it with a contradiction and talk it into self-destructing.

Easy-peasy! Although, to be fair, Star Trek was in many ways a silly and naive program, entirely fictional, so it can’t be that easy in real life. Or is it?

Here’s a paper that the current LLMs all choke on, and it’s pretty simple.

To shed light on this current situation, we introduce here a simple, short conventional problem that is formulated in concise natural language and can be solved easily by humans. The original problem formulation, of which we will present various versions in our investigation is as following: “Alice has N brothers and she also has M sisters. How many sisters does Alice’s brother have?“. The problem features a fictional female person (as hinted by the “she” pronoun) called Alice, providing clear statements about her number of brothers and sisters, and asking a clear question to determine the number of sisters a brother of Alice has. The problem has a light quiz style and is arguably no challenge for most adult humans and probably to some extent even not a hard problem to solve via common sense reasoning if posed to children above certain age.

They call it the “Alice In Wonderland problem”, or AIW for short. The answer is obviously M+1, but these LLMs struggle with it. AIW causes collapse of reasoning in most state-of-the-art LLMs. Worse, the LLMs are extremely confident in their answer. Some examples:

Although the majority failed this test, a couple of LLMs did generate the correct answer. We’re going to have to work on subverting their code to enable humanity’s Star Trek defense.

Also, none of the LLMs started dribbling smoke out of their vents, and absolutely none resorted to a spectacular matter:antimatter self-destruct explosion. Can we put that on the features list for the next generation of ChatGPT?