John Oliver on the state of AI

He uses the current buzz around the use of AI in ChatGPT and Google and Bing search engines to look more broadly at the current state of AI and where it might be headed.

I had a list of four things that always seemed to be ten years away: AI, fully self-driving cars, sustainable fusion energy, and quantum computers. It is not that there have been no advances in these areas. Each field has advanced considerably but the delivery date for the fulfillment of all they promised keeps moving back as new difficulties aree encountered.

Recently I have been wondering whether AI has advanced far enough to be removed from the list. This judgment depends of course on what criteria one uses. The highest criterion for AI, that it achieves sentience (similar to HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey) hasn’t been reached yet though it is getting close to where we might not be sure if it has reached it (by passing some version of the Turing test) or not.

I think I will keep it on the list for now.

The Havana Syndrome is still a mystery

The Havana Syndrome is the name given to the set of symptoms first reported by American diplomats in Havana that then spread to those working in other countries around the world, and even affecting Canadian diplomats. The symptoms included dizziness, headaches, and painful sounds in their ears. There were two questions. What was causing it? Was it due to the actions of a foreign governments? This issue was studied extensively by the US government and scientific researchers.

The US government has now released a report that says that they do not think it was caused by a hostile act by a foreign government.
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Wanda Sykes on the abuse of speeding tickets

Sykes is one of the rotating hosts of The Daily Show and she had a good segment about how some local communities use speeding tickets as a source of revenue, by adding all manner of other fees to the fine itself. They even put poor people in jail for inability to pay the fines, and then add on more costs to pay for their incarceration.

She says that these fines are hardly a deterrent for rich people and recommends the model of some countries like Finland where the penalty is proportional to a person’s income, and where a Nokia executive got hit with a $103,000 speeding ticket.

The Roald Dahl books controversy revisited

There have been some interesting followups to the controversy over the decision of the Roald Dahl’s estate and publishers to revise his books to remove some language and ideas that are now seen as offensive.

One item that emerged was that Dahl in his own lifetime was willing to change his books in response to opposition and to accommodate the changing cultural ethos so that his books would continue to sell and be adapted to other media.

Amid the outcry over Dahl’s books being edited, many seem to have forgotten that the author previously edited his work himself to make it less offensive. He edited his book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory 1973, just shy of a decade after its initial publication. Meanwhile, the edits took place just two years after the film adaption, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, was released. In his initial book, the Oompa Loompas were depicted as African Pygmy people who were snuck out of Africa in crates by Willy Wonka and basically forced into servitude in his factory.
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Hasan Minhaj on the lab leak and Dilbert stories

Minhaj returns as this week’s rotating host of The Daily Show where he was a correspondent for five years.

He argues that rich people like Scott Adams end up saying awful things because they are bored with their lives.

Minhaj said Adams is a prime example of “a certain type of rich person.” They have no problems of their own, so they invent new ones just to make their own lives interesting.

“I can guarantee you: J.K. Rowling had zero opinions about trans people when she was on welfare,” he said. He suggested a wealth tax would solve the problem.

“Rich people, this is for your own good,” he said. “The wealth tax is actually a shut-the-fuck-up tax.”

“Spend more time working, kissing your loved ones, getting groceries ― y’know, being a normal person,” he said. “Because normal people don’t hate Black people. We’re all too busy hating that one squeaky wheel on the shopping cart.”

The myth of the free market and the rising popularity of The Communist Manifesto

The radio program On The Media had an excellent show where host Brooke Gladstone talked with two authors about their recent books.

The first interview was with Naomi Oreskes about “The History of Free Market Fundamentalism in the US”.

For decades the so-called “free market” has been seen as a fundamental part of American society, often lauded in debates about the success of capitalism. But with wealth inequality in the U.S. at an all-time high, debates about capitalism have ramped up.  This week, Brooke sits down with Naomi Oreskes, professor of the history of science at Harvard University and the co-author with Erik M. Conway of “The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market,” to trace the evolution of what Oreskes calls “free-market fundamentalism” back to a century-old public relations campaign that still impacts American politics.

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Dilbert comic being canceled all across the country

Dilbert creator Scott Adams has long been known to have racist and homophobic views but his recent tirade about Black people was even more extreme than in the past. As a result, newspapers across the country have decided to stop publishing the daily and Sunday strip.

Its creator, Scott Adams, recently denigrated Black people as a “hate group”, advising white people to “just get the hell away” from them.
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The strip was founded in 1989, and at its peak about 2,000 newspapers across 70 countries carried it. Adams lit a fuse under the success of his own work in a recent episode of his YouTube show Real Coffee with Scott Adams.

In the course of the show, Adams misinterpreted a Rasmussen poll that asked people whether they disagreed with the statement “It’s OK to be white”. As the Anti-Defamation League has pointed out, the phrase originated with the extremist online forum 4chan as a trolling campaign and was then seized upon by white supremacists – but Adams took it literally.

On the back of it, he declared Black people “a hate group” and expressed his relief that he had managed to flee them by living in a neighborhood with a “very low” African American population.

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Encouraging increase in wind and solar power generation

It is encouraging that energy from wind and solar sources are increasing at a rapid rate in the US.

National wind and solar capacity grew 16% compared to 2021. All told, renewables generated enough electricity to power 64m American households. The report comes as the Biden administration starts to make billions of dollars available for renewable energy projects. The administration has committed to decarbonizing the grid completely by 2030 and getting the US to net zero emissions by mid-century.
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In the past five years, the share of wind energy more than doubled from 15% to 34%. Over that same time, gas production has fallen from 49% to 34%.
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The US generated 683,130 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of electricity from solar and wind last year, according to Climate Central’s findings, up from 588,471 GWh in 2021. The report shows that solar generation is understandably highest in the summer, while wind energy peaks in spring and fall.

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Combating junk science as evidence

Prosecutors in the US are notorious for trying to obtain convictions at the expense of justice. In doing so, they will resort to all manner of dubious methods and what has come to be known as ‘junk science’, evidence that seems scientific but has not been shown to be reliable or consistent, is one such technique, using such methods to persuade judges and juries to convict. These junk science theories are advanced by people who pose as expert witnesses in cases, usually on the side of the prosecutors, while judges and juries are not made aware that these methods are unreliable. These so-called experts make a living by being ‘expert witnesses’ in cases and providing ‘training’ to police and police officers.
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Some political news

The special election that was held in Virginia to fill the House of Representatives seat that had been held by Donald McEachin, who died soon after winning re-election in November, was won by Democrat Jennifer McClellan who becomes the first Black woman to be elected to Congress from Virginia. The district is strongly Democratic so the result was not a surprise. This means that the House of Representatives has no vacancies (until George Santos is kicked out for some or all of the many reasons that we have learned about) and is now split 222-213 in favor of Republicans.

Meanwhile, Republicans continue to purge their party of anyone seen as deviating from the extreme right wing direction that the party has taken under Donald Trump. Take, for example, Mark Racicot, who would once have been considered to have sterling Republican credentials.

Former Republican Gov. Marc Racicot said over the weekend that the Montana Republican Party recently informed him of a resolution voted on and approved by party leadership declaring he is no longer considered a Republican.

Racicot was elected governor on the GOP ticket twice in Montana, and also was the chair of the Republican National Committee until he was appointed to chair the re-election campaign for former Republican President George W. Bush.

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