July 2024

Last Friday night, Donald Trump told a gathering of religious conservatives that if they elect him, they’ll never have to vote again.  This wasn’t hyperbole. It was a stark repeat of Trump’s intention to stay in office for the rest of his life.

I listened to his remarks preceding and following this statement. It wasn’t a joke. He didn’t say that he really meant that he would be elected again. Of course, that’s illegal; a president can only serve two terms. Reporters asked Stephen Cheung, Trump spokesman, to clarify:  “President Trump was talking about uniting this country and bringing prosperity to every American, as opposed to the divisive political environment that has sowed so much division and even resulted in an assassination attempt.”

This statement doesn’t walk back Trump’s promise that if he’s elected, there will be no more elections for president. He still insists that he won the 2020 election. Every time he speaks, he tells easy-to-discover lies. If he were some kind of diabolical would-be dictator, I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t be so obvious in stating his desire to derail democracy.

I’m convinced that he is unhinged. If the stakes weren’t so high, I would say he’s a sitcom star. No sane person would say the sort of things Trump delivers. During the debate with President Biden, he lied 34 times. No, he wasn’t exaggerating. He lied 34 times during the debate. His fans insist that he didn’t lie; he only exaggerated to make a point. That’s stupid.

Every time he’s given a chance to explain, he goes off on another long tirade filled with more lies and exaggerations. I can understand that his supporters like the intelligible things he says he stands for. The biggest is immigration. Trump and the Republican party want to deport illegal aliens and seal our southern border. The bipartisan immigration bill called for that. Trump asked his supporters in Congress to vote against it. His reason was to keep immigration on his agenda. The fact is that both parties want the same thing. Trump, not his party, wants to deport illegals no matter how long they have been in the US. That would be over ten million people. Sane Republicans understand that such a broad sweep would drive illegals further underground and create new problems. Both parties favor a more gradual approach that includes both deportation and naturalization.

I can’t believe any American would vote for a candidate that wants to abolish our democracy. i don’t care how distasteful the Democratic platform may be. First and foremost must preserve our democracy. I don’t particularly like Kamala Harris. But I will vote for her. I will also hope that Congress will pass laws to limit presidential power and immunity. The choice isn’t whether you like what Harris stands for. It isn’t how you feel about either candidate’s platform. We need to keep Trump out of office. If you want the Republican platform, just vote Republican in the down-ticket elections for House and Senate seats. But please don’t help put that lunatic back in office.

 

You’ve probably been hearing about generative artificial intelligence (AI). Applications like chatgpt seem almost magical in their ability to answer questions, generate stories, and analyze images. It’s fun to play with them. Julie of Strict Julie Spanked posts lots of fiction created with the help of AI. She’s managed to get around the guard rails that are supposed to keep content free of sex and violence.

Generative AI is a very interesting area of computer science. It’s based on a model of how we think the human brain works. An algorithm called Neural Network simulates how we learn. We learn through experience, essentially trial and error. Each time something happens, good or bad, the neural path of that memory gets stronger.

A neural network operates the same way. The idea is simple, but the implementation is complex. Generative AI uses a neural network to try to predict the next word (or two in the case of chat gpt). This is where your mind may bend a bit. First, all the web sites selected (millions of them, including ours) are stored. Also the digital content of millions of books and periodicals is also added. Essentially, it’s everything ever written. The process isn’t discriminatory. It contains items in many languages, including programming languages.

The learning program grabs the first item and notes the first word. It then tries to predict the next word. If right, it increments a counter between the pair of words. If it’s wrong, it doesn’t add one. The program is building a map with paths bgtween words. Now that it has found the first two words, it tries to predict the third, fourth, etc. This goes on for the millions and millions of documents and the trillions of individual words.

In the end, it has what’s called a model. The model,, when presented with a query, finds the strongest path(s) for the request. I don’t understand how that works. All I know is that the model delivers sensible results. No one is sure exactly how a generative model works. It is capable of doing amazing things. It can also hallucinate.

The model can be asked a question, and it will answer, along with citations for sources that support its answer. When checked, however, the answer and the authorities are false. Somehow, the model created a rational but completely untrue answer. Computer scientists are trying to figure out how this happens and how to fix it.

When I put in the first chapter of a book I started, I asked what would happen next, It came up with plot twists I never considered. It was useful!

Generative AI is only possible because the cost of computing has dropped so much. Clouds like AWS or Google have millions of CPUs and virtually unlimited memory and storage. Since generative AI requires a huge brute-force effort to build the model, massive computing resources are needed. The model itself doesn’t need that power to execute. When you ask ChatGPT a question, you are interacting with the model.

Generative AI has started to bump into some very scary issues. These models have been created using virtually all human knowledge. They execute on computing resources large enough to let them “think.” Well, they don’t think, at least not yet. They do something close. I don’t know if there is a word for what they do.

New versions of these models can store how each user reacts to the responses delivered and change output to suit the way it “thinks” the user wants it to respond. The ultimate version of this sort of customization is for the model to be changed dynamically, learning the same way we do when we relate to another person. This is another step close to giving computers consciousness.

While this may seem very cool (It is!), it is also very scary. Did you read any sci-fi stories about computers taking over the world? Armed robots fighting wars? Well, if AI continues to advance, autonomous war robots will be possible in the near future. Computers, with the ability to think and act, could decide humans aren’t “logical” and declare war on us.

If this sounds farfetched, try cchatgpt and see how scary its ability to seem human is. I have an advanced degree in computer science. I got my Masters in 1996. There was no such thing as generative AI. We did look at neural networks and built small ones. I never guessed that one day (now!), we would be able to build a model using all human knowledge.

Is computer takeover inevitable? It’s possible unless we take action now. I’m not advocating outlawing neural networks, but I do think we need international treaties against autonomous war robots and laws limiting what computers can control autonomously.

When I was in school, we firmly believed that humans could never build a machine smarter than us. Alan Turing seemed to demonstrate this. We could build machines that manage data faster than us, but it was said, we couldn’t build a machine smarter than its creator. It looks like we may have been wrong. So far, we haven’t seen any limits on what generative AI can do.