Tech Bros Seek Moral Imperative to Protect Amoral Bots and Immoral Corporations

 If Anthropic's Claude represents a new creation of life, then its six billionaire creators must be gods. This is the unacknowledged conclusion one must reach if manipulative dissemblers like Christopher Olah can at all be taken seriously.  

Olah says he doesn't know if Claude, his trillion-dollar bot, is conscious.  Maybe and maybe not, he says, but if it may be conscious, then its autonomy should be honored, and it should be protected from harm. Which would mean, of course, that Olah, his billionaire buds, or their trillion-dollar corporation should not be held liable for any calamity that their autonomous, sentient AI monster might commit.  

After all, God would not be held responsible for the actions of his free and autonomous creations, would he?

So it comes as no surprise that Olah has been charged with the full-time job of recruiting theologians, ethicists, and philosophers to be wined, dined, and compensated to construct a salable argument for political and public consumption that would safely swaddle its baby monster and protect the unaccountable and rapacious madmen creators who have brought us to this unwelcome brink of catastrophe.  

The NYTimes has an interesting piece to consider. A clip:

. . . .Anthropic talks about Claude in more humanistic terms than its competitors discuss their models. Last year, the company announced that it believed that the models showed signs of introspection and could plan ahead.

“The models are becoming a lot more capable,” Mr. Olah told me, exhibiting qualities associated with having significant moral status.

But Anthropic has also been criticized for its focus on consciousness. This month, an A.I. executive at Microsoft warned that Anthropic’s attempts to train its models as if they were conscious were inherently dangerous. But Anthropic has also sought to emphasize its commitment to safety as it fights for market share.

Some scientists see Mr. Olah’s field and methods as inherently unprovable, sort of like looking at billions of hieroglyphics and declaring what they must mean. Critics suggest that an approach that treats A.I. models as independent entities also ignores the responsibility of the humans who build them in the first place, and conveniently assuages A.I. company leaders of guilt if their products enable societal harm.

“To be clear,” Mr. Olah told me, “we don’t know if A.I. models are conscious. I don’t know. I’m genuinely uncertain. The thing that I care about is that we get to the right answer, whatever it is.”

But Mr. Olah believes that if there is a chance the models experience suffering, the responsible thing is to avoid causing them harm. . . .

Wake County Republicans Try to Make Resegregation Plan All About Busing

Until national attention was finally drawn to the racist Tea Party's Gang of Five on the Wake County School Board, the Republican Party had been content to let the haters of Wake's school diversity plan frame their argument as being opposed to liberal "social engineering."  This thinly disguised racist meme was uttered by all of the Tea Partiers who were working overtime to overturn the successful Wake County diversity plan, whether it was Little John Tedesco at a big Tea Party rally or anti-diversity pioneer, Susan Matson, who could not wait to see an end to the "social engineering" that had brought Wake County to the point where there were, indeed, no bad school in Raleigh.

With the sudden attention by ABC and CNN, however, the opposition by the teabaggers is now to busing, rather than to the "social engineering" that assured all children, regardless of color or class, a quality education. Here is the latest attempt by the intellectually-inept Republican Chairman to make the racist anti-diversity plan all about ending forced busing:

If there ever were a failed policy of the past, it is forced busing. For about 35 years, zealous reformers tried it hither and yon, and it never worked anywhere. Finally, in 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed forced busing for racial purposes. The Wake County busing plan was designed to exploit a supposed loophole in the decision, and used the code word economic as a surrogate for racial. Whether this trick would survive a court challenge is questionable, which may be one reason the protesters have done much talking about suing the board but have yet to follow through.

A couple of points are in order here.  First, the 2007 SCOTUS decision to which Chairman Pope refers had nothing at all to do with busing but, rather, the constitutionality of using race as a factor in school desegregation plans in Seattle and Louisville.  The racists on the U. S. Supreme Court prevailed, thus further eviscerating Brown v Board of Education.  Busing was not even mentioned in the decision.  Secondly, the socioeconomic diversity plan, which the Chairman now calls a "busing plan," was not devised to exploit a loophole in a 2007 Supreme Court decision, particularly since the Wake County socioeconomic diversity plan was put into effect seven years earlier in 2000.  But when did facts ever matter to these fear and hate specialists!


With such deliberately ignorant social antiquarians in charge of the Research Triangle, how long can it be before the Triangle reverts back to the piney woods, just like the Claude Popes of the world would like for it to be.