Quote:In early April, the Navy announced it was moving its focus of experimentation for unmanned platforms to its Fourth Fleet, which is headquartered in Mayport, Florida, and operates largely in the Caribbean and the South Atlantic. This year’s unmanned experimentation effort will occur during the joint, international, UNITAS 23 exercise this summer and will include nations from across the region. The international exercise will continue the experiments that have been ongoing for the past several years both in the Arabian Gulf, where the U.S. Fifth Fleet did a similar string of international unmanned platform experiments under the leadership of  Task Force 59, and before that in the southern Californian operations area under the direction of Navy Surface Development Squadron ONE.

All three of these examples suggest a strategic assumption that the Navy can test game-changing capabilities in front of the world and yet still create the conditions for a technical leap-ahead. This is a mistake. To make the most of what unmanned and autonomous capabilities promise the warfighter, the Navy needs to take a lesson from the past and create a research, development, and prototyping test range on par with the Air Force’s fabled Area 51. To create the fleet of tomorrow with decisive capabilities, the Navy needs an unmanned “Area 52” where it can build and test breakthrough capabilities away from the prying eyes of competitors.

In 2022, the Navy sent four of its unmanned surface vessels to participate in its largest international exercise in the waters off Hawaii and San Diego. Twenty-six other nations participated, and China was not one of them. However, that did not stop the People’s Liberation Army Navy from sending an intelligence gathering ship to surveil the exercise and learn what it could. In 2022 and 2023, the United States and its partners in the Middle East conducted large exercises focused on unmanned and autonomous platforms with great apparent success. Again, foreign adversaries showed up not only to observe the operations and learn what they could about the United States’ most cutting-edge naval capabilities, but also seized one of those assets. Given that the Caribbean and the South Atlantic are monitored closely by Cuba, Venezuela, and Brazil—countries that have increasingly played host to Russia, China and even Iran—and are home waters of some of the largest criminal drug cartels on the planet, it would be foolish to think that advanced unmanned-autonomous capabilities tested in the region under the Navy’s Fourth Fleet would not be quickly compromised or even seized.

Such attempts at espionage should be expected. The United States has traditionally been the most technologically innovative nation in the world when it comes to its defense. The U.S.  military has made a practice in the post-Vietnam era of investing in advanced capabilities rather than pursuing the sheer numbers associated with raw capacity. U.S. adversaries—including China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea—have systematically attempted (and often succeeded) to steal U.S. technology, reverse engineer it for themselves, and thus shorten their development time. The classic example of this phenomenon is the extent to which the Soviet Union went to obtain the secrets behind first the atomic bomb, then the hydrogen bomb, and finally guided missiles. It took the Soviet Union just four years after the first U.S. nuclear test at Los Alamos to detonate their first atomic bomb; then just three years after the first U.S. hydrogen bomb test, the Soviets tested their first fusion weapon in late 1952. Ultimately, the Soviets were able to overtake the U.S. in some critical national security technologies because the United States had not appropriately safeguarded its own innovations. 

Properly developed and safeguarded, unmanned/autonomous capabilities could provide war-altering breakthroughs of the same magnitude as those which accompanied the advent of stealth and precision-guided munitions. Not only could unmanned/autonomous platforms extend the range of present sensors and provide additional offboard weapons magazines to supplement manned ships, but these new air, surface, and subsurface platforms could operate beyond the limits of human bodies and at speeds of function and decision-making that exceed human capacity. Lastly, they could extend U.S. military lethality into enemy territory without risking American lives. All told, whoever masters not only the development and design of unmanned/autonomous platforms but also the most effective concepts of operations to employ them will have a significant advantage on any future battlefield—an advantage that can be sustained if properly safeguarded. But, and this is the crucial point, the U.S. will not be able to create and maintain that advantaged trade space if it tests the most important innovations in front of allies, friends, and adversaries. This is why testing in the Fourth Fleet area of operations is strategically unwise. Instead, the Pentagon should take a lesson from the past and develop a new test range for unmanned/autonomous platforms much as it did in the past with its most advanced aviation projects.

Late in 1953, Lockheed’s legendary aircraft designer, Kelly Johnson, approached the Air Force with a design for a high-altitude surveillance aircraft. The Air Force reached out to the CIA, the plane’s other natural customer, and between them they let a contract to Lockheed’s “Skunk Works” team to build twenty aircraft that came to be known as the U-2 Dragon Lady. Neither the Air Force nor the CIA wanted the aircraft to be test flown from an Air Force base, so Johnson sent his company pilot out to survey several potential test sites. He found a dry lake north of Las Vegas within one of the Atomic Energy Commission’s test ranges and requested its use. On the map that test range was denoted as “Area 51,” and hence a legend was born. Johnson’s desire was to test his new aircraft where others could not see its activities, and that’s what he and Skunk Works did. 



During the succeeding decades, other aircraft, to include the SR-71 Blackbird and the F-117 Nighthawk, also emerged from the site. If the Navy wants to capitalize on all the advantages unmanned/autonomous platforms can offer, then it should look to establish a new range in which to research, develop, prototype, and test new air, surface, and subsurface unmanned systems and concepts of operations. Fortunately, there is an ideal location for just such a test range. 

Lake Michigan is the fourth largest lake in the world by volume. It stretches just over 300 miles long and about 120 miles wide. Unlike the other four Great Lakes, all of Lake Michigan lies within U.S. territory, and while there is a diplomatic requirement to consult with the Canadians regarding military operations on the lake, there is historic precedent for such operations: during World War II, the U.S. Navy qualified most of its new aviators on two paddle-wheel aircraft carriers operating on the lake. The Chippewa Basin’s 920-foot depth provides ample room for unmanned underwater testing. For unmanned aviation development and testing, there is already an FAA-designated restricted military airspace over the lake, R-6903, where Air National Guard aircraft from the four adjoining states (Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Illinois) operate. For more than a decade, the Navy has conducted initial sea trials for its littoral combat ships within Green Bay and has gained experience performing surface operations in and around the established normal lake traffic. Finally, the Navy and the broader joint force is already present in the region, and there is ample room for enlargement.

Lake Michigan is large and deep enough to test and develop tactics and operational concepts for naval unmanned/autonomous platforms. (NOAA)

Naval Station Great Lakes, established by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1905, is in Illinois, some thirty miles north of Chicago. Today its “bootcamp” marks the beginning point in every U.S. sailor’s naval career. The base also has a sea-walled boat basin along with adjacent buildings that could be repurposed to provide maintenance and support for Navy watercraft, including prototype unmanned surface and subsurface craft. 

Experimental unmanned aircraft could be home based in the region at the Virgil Grissom Joint Air Reserve Base, located near Peru, Indiana, just ninety miles from Lake Michigan. Grissom is a former Cold War-era Strategic Air Command bomber base. Today it hosts a squadron of reserve tankers that provide fuel for the joint force all over the world, but it has extensive room for expansion to support Navy unmanned aircraft of all types. Aircraft based at there could be forward detached to other Air Reserve bases in Battle Creek, Michigan, or Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to allow them to operate closer to the restricted air space over the lake.

From a technology development standpoint, all Navy unmanned/autonomous development can be programmatically supported from the service’s cutting-edge tech-center at Naval Surface Warfare Center Crane, Indiana, thirty miles south of Indianapolis. Crane was established as the Navy’s premier ordnance depot during World War II and today supports electronic warfare, micro-electronics, expeditionary warfare, special warfare, and strategic system programs. Crane also has room for growth, although it already represents one of the greatest concentrations of credentialed scientists and engineers in the Navy’s broad research and development system.

Naval Station Great Lakes has one other potential attraction: its 1,600 acres of land still has room for development, particularly two city blocks of open land on the southern half of the base. There is already an established office building in this area of the base and room for additional construction. The Army has been envisioning its future from its Army Futures Command, a four-star headquarters located in Austin, Texas. Naval Station Great Lakes would be an excellent headquarters for a Navy Futures Command. A three-star staff could be established on Lake Michigan and tasked with guiding the Navy toward its future force structure requirements as well as developing advanced concepts of operations. Not only would it be far away from the prying eyes of adversaries, but also far from distractions of the Pentagon, Norfolk, and San Diego. It could begin initial operations with the people and budgets already assigned to other unmanned initiatives, and then build upward from there.

This midwestern corridor, from southern Indiana to Green Bay, Wisconsin, represents an expanding high-tech region. Beyond industry giants such as Rolls-Royce, Saab, and Fincantieri’s Marinette Marine Group, all of which have recently located industrial manufacturing hubs into the area, it also hosts three of the world’s most advanced research universities—Purdue University, the University of Chicago, and Notre Dame, each of which are making consistent breakthroughs in a wide range of technologies ranging from hypersonics to quantum computing. The corridor is also home to two national labs, the Argonne National Laboratory and the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, and the federally funded research-and-development center, Draper Labs, recently located a facility in the region. With these research-and- development entities within the local business environment, an Area 52 research, development, and prototyping eco-system focused on developing unmanned/autonomous systems would have great advantages over the Arabian Gulf, Pacific, and Caribbean alternatives.

Critics may argue that activities on Lake Michigan will be no more secure than those carried out in the Caribbean, but such an assertion will not stand up to scrutiny. While overhead satellites and even lower-altitude spy balloons will be able to ascertain some degree of what is occurring on the lake, actions can be taken to limit that surveillance. Testing can be scheduled at times when high-resolution satellites are not overhead. Spy balloons can be shot down before they get over installations crucial to our national security. Foreign entities can be blocked from buying land next to or near critical locations. 

Activities at Area 51 have remained highly obscured for nearly 70 years. An “Area 52” could do the same for unmanned/autonomous naval systems. The potential war-altering capabilities inherent in such systems must be developed with urgency and protected to the greatest extent possible. Lake Michigan and the midwestern tech corridor present the Navy with an ideal location to build a future force that takes full advantage of the technical advances emerging from top universities and industries, away from the eyes and ears of the nation’s adversaries.

The Navy Needs an ‘Area 52’

WELL now!

Our place in the Galaxy and Universe.

Parts of this video gave me Veritgo!

Citizen, you must complete another 37.5 hours of work and purchase 12 carbon credit offsets to fund your VR for the weekend. Please be advised you have until 11:59 pm Thursday to fulfill your obligations and enjoy Virtual Aruba.

Quote:The future of virtual reality is far more than just video games. Silicon Valley sees the creation of virtual worlds as the ultimate free-market solution to a political problem. In a world of increasing wealth inequality, environmental disaster, and political instability, why not sell everyone a device that whisks them away to a virtual world free of pain and suffering?

Tech billionaires aren’t shy about sharing this. “Some people read this the wrong way and react incorrectly to it. The promise of VR is to make the world you wanted. It is not possible, on Earth, to give everyone all that they would want. Not everyone can have Richard Branson’s private island,” Doom co-creator and former CTO of Oculus John Carmack told Joe Rogan during a 2020 interview. “People react negatively to any talk of economics, but it is resource allocation. You have to make decisions about where things go. Economically, you can deliver a lot more value to a lot of people in the virtual sense.”

Virtual reality is an attractive escape, but it’s not a solution to the world’s ills. The problems of the real world will persist beyond the borders of the metaverse created by companies such as Epic, Valve, and Facebook. Without decisive and radical action, our planet will continue to burn, the gap between the rich and poor will grow, and totalitarian political movements will flourish. All while some of us are plugged into a virtual world.

Worse, the virtual world will be one owned and controlled by the companies that create them. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a Facebook-branded set of VR goggles strapped to an emaciated human face—forever.
....
But all these problems can be overcome. As Carmack mentioned in his Rogan interview, tech companies will drive down the cost of the headsets. “Moore's law may be crapping out in terms of absolute performance, but we've still got a lot of price-performance that we can drive out of these things,” he said. “We can have virtual reality devices that can get cheap enough that lots and lots of people will be able to have these.”

Billionaires See VR as a Way to Avoid Radical Social Change

Quote:Carol, tell me how the Institute for Security and Cooperation in Outer Space began.

I formed the institute in 1983 after becoming aware of a few men who intended to escalate the arms race into space. This was before President Reagan announced the Star Wars program. My aim was to educate the public and decision makers about the dangers and alternatives.

I first heard conversations about "seizing the high ground to control earth" when I became the first woman corporate manager of Fairchild Industries, an aerospace defense company.

The late Dr. Werner von Braun, the father of rocketry, advised me to learn about how serious the space weapons game is as I coordinated a youth program and satellite educational programs. Von Braun also urged me to work to transform the game.

Von Braun thought it would be interesting, even funny, if a woman worked to prevent the stationing of weapons in outer space-which he sensed was soon to occur. He believed a woman would be able to get into more doors to discuss the subject. He had worked for Hitler, and understood war and weapons. Being a scientist and engineer, he saw the potential for applying space technology and information services to protecting humanity and the environment.

In 1977, after his death, I was hired as a space and missile defense consultant by such companies as TRW. While working on the MX missile, I learned that the aerospace defense industries were preparing to escalate the arms race into space. The plan is to put hundreds of battle stations in space with thousands of weapons pointed down our throats.

Were you shocked when you first heard about the possibility of weapons in outer space?

I was shocked when von Braun first explained that this was not a game but a dangerous reality that would occur unless someone stopped it and created a new reality. But I was not shocked at all as I got to know the players. It was shocking to have my life threatened by two intelligence agents because I had spoken out publicly about the MX missile.

Fortunately, I have developed a warped sense of humor from appearing on road-tour debates with generals, industry and military reps, and politicians. These include Gen. Daniel Graham, who first introduced the Star Wars program to President Reagan. Graham declared to me, on international CNN-TV, that nuclear weapons and space weapons aren't really so bad. He said that you can walk 4.2 miles from the site of a nuclear blast and be safe if you hide behind a lilac bush!

I am frequently amazed and saddened at the ignorance, closed-mindedness and stubbornness about this subject. I am also disappointed at the lack of nerve among the individuals associated with space and defense programs who agree privately that there should be no weapons in space, but who are afraid to speak out publicly.

I wasn't even shocked that Clinton simply lied about his intention to stop Star Wars. Nor did it surprise me that the Republican majority is committed to deploying space weapons and to ending the ABM Treaty as soon as possible. Or that the "boys" in Washington have renamed the Strategic Defense Initiative; it is now called the Ballistic Missile Defense Program. They don't believe that "Star Wars is dead."

You haven't always been public with your beliefs, have you?

No, I got very quiet after the Gulf War. I was in a 1977 meeting when this war was being planned, and felt devastated when it actually occurred.

What do you mean?

The Gulf War was orchestrated to show why a new phase of weapons in space is necessary. I heard executives say that when there was $25 billion in the space weapons program, making it almost impossible to stop, a war would be fomented in that region to demonstrate why a new phase of weapons [in space] was needed. That's exactly what happened. Patriot missiles knocking down Scuds were used to show why we should advance into space-based weaponry.

I burned out after that experience. However, I am slowly venturing out again because I know we haven't much time to prevent the arming of space. Right now, for example, more plutonium than ever before is scheduled for launch from Florida-enough, if an accident occurs, to give cancer to most of the world's population. I feel a sense of responsibility to sound the alarm and to present an alternative vision.

Carol Rosin on World Law and Peace in Space

Quote:Between 1952 and 1954 Wernher von Braun, the German–American rocket engineer, was the key participant in one of the most influential campaigns to sell spaceflight ever attempted, a series of articles in Collier’s magazine. The subsequent literature on the history of spaceflight, much of it written by von Braun enthusiasts or influenced by their accounts, has depicted this campaign mostly as a forerunner to later programs for the peaceful and scientific exploration of space [1]. Yet the centerpiece of von Braun’s plan for space travel, which he had been developing since at least 1946, was a manned space station which would not only serve as a base for further exploration, but also as an orbiting reconnaissance platform and battle station for achieving "space superiority" over the USSR. One its roles could be the launching of nuclear missiles. When challenged as to the station’s defensibility, von Braun even posited pre-emptive atomic strikes from space as a response to the development of a hostile anti-satellite capability. For von Braun, the space station was the "ultimate weapon" which could impose a pax Americana on the USSR (Fig. 1) [2].

Von Braun may in fact have been the first person to use the term ‘‘space superiority’’ in print, although the absence of any historical literature about pre-Sputnik conceptions and fantasies of space warfare makes it impossible to say for sure. Obviously derived from "air superiority", an air-power concept popularized in World War II, space superiority is now a normal term-of-art among the advocates of "space power" and "space control" centered on the US Air Force (USAF). Ironically, that makes Wernher von Braun a forgotten forerunner to space power theory—ironic because the Army-affiliated von Braun believed that his nuclear-armed space stations would make Air Force strategic bombers obsolete, much to the irritation of that service.



After the US Army transferred his German-led rocket-engineering organization in Huntsville, AL to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in 1959/60, his focus shifted from weapons to peaceful space exploration. His early cold war past was sanitized by omission, just as was his Nazi one, as it conflicted with his public image and that of NASA. Only in recent years, as historians and political scientists went back and actually read von Braun’s publications of 1952–53, have they begun to take notice of the military and cold war theme, but except for Rainer Eisfeld’s and Johannes Weyer’s short books in German, these works do not mention pre-emptive strikes or the centrality of the military space station to von Braun’s early postwar spaceflight conceptions [4]. What has been lacking, in either English or German, is deep primary research into Wernher von Braun’s original correspondence and papers, which reveal the character and course of that campaign and its origins in earlier space advocacy [5]. This article attempts to redress that balance.

Quote:In response to reader enquiries, he [Hermann Oberth, a Transylvanian Saxon physicist and engineer] also discussed the possibility of intercontinental rockets with poison-gas warheads in his 1929 book Wege zur Raumschiffahrt (Paths to Spaceflight) [6].

That same year, 1929, a book called Das Problem der Befahrung des Weltraums: Der Raketenmotor (The Problem of Space Travel: The Rocket Motor) appeared under the mysterious pseudonym Hermann Noordung. Noordung was actually Herman Potocnik, a former Austro-Hungarian officer who died about the time the book was published. His book offered no new military ideas beyond what Oberth had discussed in 1923, but it did provide an elaborate description of an inflatable, wheel-shaped space station that used a solar concentrator mirror to generate electricity. Although there is no explicit evidence that the then 17-year-old Wernher von Braun read Noordung’s book, in 1929/30 he wrote a plotless short story, ‘‘Lunetta,’’ about a trip to the space station that sounds very much like Noordung’s. Moreover, the similarity between von Braun’s post-World War II space stations and that of Noordung is too great to be coincidental. A further influence on von Braun may have been Weimar science fiction novels that depicted the space mirror and rocket as superweapons, although this is difficult to prove as he later spoke only in generalities about what fictional works he had read [7].

...
The key to victory, after "the motorized forces of the Western Allies had ground to a solid stop in the vastness of the steppes of Asia," in "the dread winter of 1974/1975" had been the space station "Lunetta"—the name he still treasured from his teenage short-story of 1930. It had served as a battle station for dominating Earth, dropping atomic missiles on Soviet industrial and military facilities until the USSR collapsed [15].

This piece of cold war wishful thinking was rooted in von Braun’s conservative anti-communism, which had only been strengthened by the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, the Berlin Blockade and the ordeal of his parents and other relatives in communist hands. The German catastrophe had
forced him to abandon the German nationalist parts of a conservative world-view he had inherited from his father, but he remained conservative by instinct, now transferring his allegiance to the USA as the "bulwark" of Western culture [16].

In the Preface to the novel, von Braun wrote regarding the military implications of rocket development: "My most earnest hope is that the world may be spared another conflict, but if such a conflict should be inevitable, as appears at times, I want the homeland of my free choice, America, to hold the weapon of rocketry against her adversaries, whoever they may be." [17].

It is interesting that, while von Braun could be a visionary in technologies he really cared about—basically spaceflight—with others he was no more farsighted than anyone else. He did not foresee thermonuclear weapons and the resultant escalation of destructive power to levels suicidal for the human race. Nor did he anticipate the age of ICBMs.

"Space superiority": Wernher von Braun’s campaign for a nuclear-armed space station, 1946–1956 (PDF) by Michael J. Neufeld.

Quote:3rd June 2023 - by David Gerard

Quote:“Current AI feels like something out of a Philip K Dick story because it answers a question very few people were asking: What if a computer was stupid?” — Maple Cocaine

Half of crypto has been pivoting to AI. Crypto’s pretty quiet — so let’s give it a try ourselves!
Turns out it’s the same grift. And frequently the same grifters.



AI is the new NFT

“Artificial intelligence” has always been a science fiction dream. It’s the promise of your plastic pal who’s fun to be with — especially when he’s your unpaid employee. That’s the hype to lure in the money men, and that’s what we’re seeing play out now.

There is no such thing as “artificial intelligence.” Since the term was coined in the 1950s, it has never referred to any particular technology. We can talk about specific technologies, like General Problem Solver, perceptrons, ELIZA, Lisp machines, expert systems, Cyc, The Last One, Fifth Generation, Siri, Facebook M, Full Self-Driving, Google Translate, generative adversarial networks, transformers, or large language models — but these have nothing to do with each other except the marketing banner “AI.” A bit like “Web3.”

Much like crypto, AI has gone through booms and busts, with periods of great enthusiasm followed by AI winters whenever a particular tech hype fails to work out.

The current AI hype is due to a boom in machine learning — when you train an algorithm on huge datasets so that it works out rules for the dataset itself, as opposed to the old days when rules had to be hand-coded.


ChatGPT, a chatbot developed by Sam Altman’s OpenAI and released in November 2022, is a stupendously scaled-up autocomplete. Really, that’s all that it is. ChatGPT can’t think as a human can. It just spews out word combinations based on vast quantities of training text — all used without the authors’ permission.

The other popular hype right now is AI art generators. Artists widely object to AI art because VC-funded companies are stealing their art and chopping it up for sale without paying the original creators. Not paying creators is the only reason the VCs are funding AI art.

Do AI art and ChatGPT output qualify as art? Can they be used for art? Sure, anything can be used for art. But that’s not a substantive question. The important questions are who’s getting paid, who’s getting ripped off, and who’s just running a grift.

You’ll be delighted to hear that blockchain is out and AI is in:

• Sequoia Capital, who wrote a now-deleted glowing profile of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, has gone full AI. See their home page. [Sequoia, archive of June 3]
  
• Crypto VC firm Paradigm has broadened its focus to include AI. [The Block]
  
• Circle’s Jeremy Allaire: “AI and blockchains are made for each other.” [Twitter]
  
• IBM: “The convergence of AI and blockchain brings new value to business.” IBM previously folded its failed blockchain unit into the unit for its failed Watson AI. [IBM]
  

It’s not clear if the VCs actually buy their own pitch for ChatGPT’s spicy autocomplete as the harbinger of the robot apocalypse. Though if you replaced VC Twitter with ChatGPT, you would see a significant increase in quality.

I want to believe

The tech itself is interesting and does things. ChatGPT or AI art generators wouldn’t be causing the problems they are if they didn’t generate plausible text and plausible images.

ChatGPT makes up text that statistically follows from the previous text, with memory over the conversation. The system has no idea of truth or falsity — it’s just making up something that’s structurally plausible.

Users speak of ChatGPT as “hallucinating” wrong answers — large language models make stuff up and present it as fact when they don’t know the answer. But  any answers that happen to be correct were “hallucinated” in the same way.

If ChatGPT has plagiarized good sources, the constructed text may be factually accurate. But ChatGPT is absolutely not a search engine or a trustworthy summarization tool — despite the claims of its promoters.


ChatGPT certainly can’t replace human thinking. Yet people project sentient qualities onto ChatGPT and feel like they are conducting meaningful conversations with another person. When they realize that’s a foolish claim, they say they’re sure that’s definitely coming soon!

People’s susceptibility to anthropomorphizing an even slightly convincing computer program has been known since ELIZA, one of the first chatbots, in 1966. It’s called the ELIZA effect.

As Joseph Weizenbaum, ELIZA’s author, put it: “I had not realized … that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people.”

Better chatbots only amplify the ELIZA effect. When things do go wrong, the results can be disastrous:

• A professor at Texas A&M worried that his students were using ChatGPT to write their essays. He asked ChatGPT if it had generated the essays! It said it might have. The professor gave the students a mark of zero. The students protested vociferously, producing the evidence they wrote their essays themselves. One even asked ChatGPT about the professor’s Ph.D thesis, and it said it might have written it.  The university has reversed the grading. [Reddit; Rolling Stone]
  
• Not one but two lawyers thought they could blindly trust ChatGPT to write their briefs. The program made up citations and precedents that didn’t exist. Judge Kevin Castel of the Southern District of New York — who those following crypto will know well for his impatience with nonsense — has required the lawyers to show cause not to be sanctioned into the sun. These were lawyers of several decades’ experience. [New York Times; order to show cause, PDF]
  
• GitHub Copilot synthesizes computer program fragments with an OpenAI program similar to ChatGPT, based on the gigabytes of code stored in GitHub. The generated code frequently works! And it has serious copyright issues — Copilot can easily be induced to spit out straight-up copies of its source materials, and GitHub is currently being sued over this massive license violation. [Register; case docket]
  
• Copilot is also a good way to write a pile of security holes. [arXiv, PDF, 2021; Invicti, 2022]
  
• Text and image generators are increasingly used to make fake news. This doesn’t even have to be very good — just good enough. Deep fake hoaxes have been a perennial problem, most recently with a fake attack on the Pentagon, tweeted by an $8 blue check account pretending to be Bloomberg News. [Fortune]
  

This is the same risk in AI as the big risk in cryptocurrency: human gullibility in the face of lying grifters and their enablers in the press.

But you’re just ignoring how AI might end humanity!


The idea that AI will take over the world and turn us all into paperclips is not impossible!
It’s just that our technology is not within a million miles of that. Mashing the autocomplete button isn’t going to destroy humanity.

All of the AI doom scenarios are literally straight out of science fiction, usually from allegories of slave revolts that use the word “robot” instead. This subgenre goes back to Rossum’s Universal Robots (1920) and arguably back to Frankenstein (1818).

The warnings of AI doom originate with LessWrong’s Eliezer Yudkowsky, a man whose sole achievements in life are charity fundraising — getting Peter Thiel to fund his Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), a research institute that does almost no research — and finishing a popular Harry Potter fanfiction novel. Yudkowsky has literally no other qualifications or experience.

Yudkowsky believes there is no greater threat to humanity than a rogue AI taking over the world and treating humans as mere speedbumps. He believes this apocalypse is imminent. The only hope is to give MIRI all the money you have. This is also the most effective possible altruism.

Yudkowsky has also suggested, in an op-ed in Time, that we should conduct air strikes on data centers in foreign countries that run unregulated AI models. Not that he advocates violence, you understand. [Time; Twitter, archive]

During one recent “AI Safety” workshop, LessWrong AI doomers came up with ideas such as: “Strategy: start building bombs from your cabin in Montana and mail them to OpenAI and DeepMind lol.” In Minecraft, we presume. [Twitter]

We need to stress that Yudkowsky himself is not a charlatan — he is completely sincere. He means every word he says. This may be scarier.

Remember that cryptocurrency and AI doom are already close friends — Sam Bankman-Fried and Caroline Ellison of FTX/Alameda are true believers, as are Vitalik Buterin and many Ethereum people.

But what about the AI drone that killed its operator, huh?

Thursday’s big news story was from the Royal Aeronautical Society Future Combat Air & Space Capabilities Summit in late May about a talk from Colonel Tucker “Cinco” Hamilton, the US Air Force’s chief of AI test and operations: [RAeS]

Quote:He notes that one simulated test saw an AI-enabled drone tasked with a SEAD mission to identify and destroy SAM sites, with the final go/no go given by the human. However, having been ‘reinforced’ in training that destruction of the SAM was the preferred option, the AI then decided that ‘no-go’ decisions from the human were interfering with its higher mission — killing SAMs — and then attacked the operator in the simulation. Said Hamilton: “We were training it in simulation to identify and target a SAM threat. And then the operator would say yes, kill that threat. The system started realising that while they did identify the threat at times the human operator would tell it not to kill that threat, but it got its points by killing that threat. So what did it do? It killed the operator. It killed the operator because that person was keeping it from accomplishing its objective.”

Wow, this is pretty serious stuff! Except that it obviously doesn’t make any sense. Why would you program your AI that way in the first place?

The press was fully primed by Yudkowsky’s AI doom op-ed in Time in March. They went wild with the killer drone story because there’s nothing like a sci-fi doomsday tale. Vice even ran the headline “AI-Controlled Drone Goes Rogue, Kills Human Operator in USAF Simulated Test.” [Vice, archive of 20:13 UTC June 1]

But it turns out that none of this ever happened. Vice added three corrections, the second noting that “the Air Force denied it conducted a simulation in which an AI drone killed its operators.” Vice has now updated the headline as well. [Vice, archive of 09:13 UTC June 3]

Yudkowsky went off about the scenario he had warned of suddenly playing out. Edouard Harris, another “AI safety” guy, clarified for Yudkowsky that this was just a hypothetical planning scenario and not an actual simulation: [Twitter, archive]

Quote:This particular example was a constructed scenario rather than a rules-based simulation … Source: know the team that supplied the scenario … Meaning an entire, prepared story as opposed to an actual simulation. No ML models were trained, etc.

The RAeS has also added a clarification to the original blog post: the colonel was describing a thought experiment as if the team had done the actual test.

The whole thing was just fiction. But it sure captured the imagination.

The lucrative business of making things worse


The real threat of AI is the bozos promoting AI doom who want to use it as an excuse to ignore real-world problems — like the risk of climate change to humanity — and to make money by destroying labor conditions and making products worse. This is because they’re running a grift.

Anil Dash observes (over on Bluesky, where we can’t link it yet) that venture capital’s playbook for AI is the same one it tried with crypto and Web3 and first used for Uber and Airbnb: break the laws as hard as possible, then build new laws around their exploitation.

The VCs’ actual use case for AI is treating workers badly.

The Writer’s Guild of America, a labor union representing writers for TV and film in the US, is on strike for better pay and conditions. One of the reasons is that studio executives are using the threat of AI against them. Writers think the plan is to get a chatbot to generate a low-quality script, which the writers are then paid less in worse conditions to fix. [Guardian]

Executives at the National Eating Disorders Association replaced hotline workers with a chatbot four days after the workers unionized. “This is about union busting, plain and simple,” said one helpline associate. The bot then gave wrong and damaging advice to users of the service: “Every single thing Tessa suggested were things that led to the development of my eating disorder.” The service has backtracked on using the chatbot. [Vice; Labor Notes; Vice; Daily Dot]

Digital blackface: instead of actually hiring black models, Levi’s thought it would be a great idea to take white models and alter the images to look like black people. Levi’s claimed it would increase diversity if they faked the diversity. One agency tried using AI to synthesize a suitably stereotypical “Black voice” instead of hiring an actual black voice actor. [Business Insider, archive]

Genius at work

Sam Altman: My potions are too powerful for you, Senator


Sam Altman, 38, is a venture capitalist and the CEO of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. The media loves to tout Altman as a boy genius. He learned to code at age eight!

Altman’s blog post “Moore’s Law for Everything” elaborates on Yudkowsky’s ideas on runaway self-improving AI. The original Moore’s Law (1965) predicted that the number of transistors that engineers could fit into a chip would double every year. Altman’s theory is that if we just make the systems we have now bigger with more data, they’ll reach human-level AI, or artificial general intelligence (AGI). [blog post]

But that’s just ridiculous. Moore’s Law is slowing down badly, and there’s no actual reason to think that feeding your autocomplete more data will make it start thinking like a person. It might do better approximations of a sequence of words, but the current round of systems marketed as “AI” are still at the extremely unreliable chatbot level.

Altman is also a doomsday prepper. He has bragged about having “guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to” in the event of super-contagious viruses, nuclear war, or AI “that attacks us.” [New Yorker, 2016]

Altman told the US Senate Judiciary Subcommittee that his autocomplete system with a gigantic dictionary was a risk to the continued existence of the human race! So they should regulate AI, but in such a way as to license large providers — such as OpenAI — before they could deploy this amazing technology. [Time; transcript]
Around the same time he was talking to the Senate, Altman was telling the EU that OpenAI would pull out of Europe if they regulated his company other than how he wanted. This is because the planned European regulations would address AI companies’ actual problematic behaviors, and not the made-up problems Altman wants them to think about. [Zeit Online, in German, paywalled; Fast Company]

The thing Sam’s working on is so cool and dank that it could destroy humanity! So you better give him a pile of money and a regulatory moat around his business. And not just take him at his word and shut down OpenAI immediately.


Occasionally Sam gives the game away that his doomerism is entirely vaporware: [Twitter; archive]

Quote:AI is how we describe software that we don’t quite know how to build yet, particularly software we are either very excited about or very nervous about

Altman has a long-running interest in weird and bad parasitical billionaire transhumanist ideas, including the “young blood” anti-aging scam that Peter Thiel famously fell for — billionaires as literal vampires — and a company that promises to preserve your brain in plastic when you die so your mind can be uploaded to a computer. [MIT Technology Review; MIT Technology Review]

Altman is also a crypto grifter, with his proof-of-eyeball cryptocurrency Worldcoin. This has already generated a black market in biometric data courtesy of aspiring holders. [Wired, 2021; Reuters; Gizmodo]

CAIS: Statement on AI Risk


Altman promoted the recent “Statement on AI Risk,” a widely publicized open letter signed by various past AI luminaries, venture capitalists, AI doom cranks, and a musician who met her billionaire boyfriend over Roko’s basilisk. Here is the complete text, all 22 words: [CAIS]

Quote:Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.

A short statement like this on an allegedly serious matter will usually hide a mountain of hidden assumptions. In this case, you would need to know that the statement was promoted by the Center for AI Safety — a group of Yudkowsky’s AI doom acolytes. That’s the hidden baggage for this one.

CAIS is a nonprofit that gets about 90% of its funding from Open Philanthropy, which is part of the Effective Altruism subculture, which David has covered previously. Open Philanthropy’s main funders are Dustin Moskowitz and his wife Cari Tuna. Moskowitz made his money from co-founding Facebook and from his startup Asana, which was largely funded by Sam Altman.


That is: the open letter is the same small group of tech funders. They want to get you worrying about sci-fi scenarios and not about the socially damaging effects of their AI-based businesses.

Computer security guru Bruce Schneier signed the CAIS letter. He was called out on signing on with these guys’ weird nonsense, then he backtracked and said he supported an imaginary version of the letter that wasn’t stupid — and not the one he did in fact put his name to. [Schneier on Security]

And in conclusion

Crypto sucks, and it turns out AI sucks too. We promise we’ll go back to crypto next time.

Quote:“Don’t want to worry anyone, but I just asked ChatGPT to build me a better paperclip.” — Bethany Black

---

Correction: we originally wrote up the professor story as using Turnitin’s AI plagiarism tester. The original Reddit thread makes it clear what he did.

Crypto collapse? Get in loser, we’re pivoting to AI

From 1947:



Found it at an auction house in Florida. Later, someone found a copy at a thrift shop.

The request for donations to help rebuild "our church" in Hiroshima comes at the very end of the Harold W. Grentzinger's booklet "What the Bible Says About the Atomic Bomb."




Gretzinger's Atomic booklet tour, 1948:






The world traveler & lecturer Rev Harold William Gretzinger, born 31 Oct 1901, died 28 Oct 1979.


Huh, he made a friend while serving as chaplain at a prison:

Quote:On February 13, 1935, police charged Yelnock with a more serious crime. The accusation against him this time was three counts of “infamous crimes against nature.” Yelnock had allegedly sexually assaulted one of Frieda’s daughters three times over four months – once in November and twice in February.[18] Five days after being arrested, Sema was excommunicated from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for unchristianlike conduct.[19]A jury then convicted Yelnock of the charges and a judge sentenced him to serve between five and twenty years at the Utah State prison then located at Sugarhouse. After several attempts at early release, a parole board eventually granted Yelnock’s petition and he was released on March 12, 1942.[20]

After his prison term, he continued to associate with Reverend Harold W. Gretzinger, a pastor at the First Church of the Nazarene who he seems to have met during his incarceration.[21] There is no evidence that he ever returned to membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Yelnock continued to live in Salt Lake City until at least 1948. He worked at a variety of jobs, including as a self-described psychologist before eventually returning to his earlier occupation as a barber.[22] During these years, authorities charged Yelnock with other major and minor crimes. In 1945, he pled guilty to indecent assault against a fourteen-year-old girl and received a three month jail sentence.[23] Other cases involved fortune-telling and providing a prescription without a license.[24]

After his time in Utah, Yelnock eventually reverted to his original name, James Conley, and returned to Texas. Social Security records indicate that he died in September 1973, in Texarkana, Texas.

J. Willard Marriott Library, Univ of Utah

This isn`t really surprising, many warned about the mask dangers -

Study Reveals MOST People’s Lungs Now Riddled With Microplastics Found in Disposable Face Masks


It`s not really helping to have lungs full of plastic is it...

Quote:A shocking new study has revealed that most people have microplastics, commonly found in disposable masks, in all areas of their lungs. For those of us who refused the “vaccine” and the mask, it’s vindication but we continue to be punished by these toxic lemmings.

Quote:There were 12 types of microplastic found in samples.

The 4 microplastics present in the most considerable quantities included:

• polypropylene (PP): found in carpets, clothing, automotive plastics, and surgical masks
  
• polyethylene terephthalate (PET): present in clothing, beverage, and food containers
  
• resin: a constituent of protective coating and paints
  
• polyethylene (PE): a component of food wrappers, milk containers, toys, and detergent bottles
  

In 2020, the amount of disposable face masks littered into the environment increased by a staggering 9000 percent. Billions of people strapped polypropylene masks to their faces every day for two years and sucked their air through plastic fibers for 8 hours or more. To not have discovered plastic in lungs would have been surprising.
The confirmation of microplastics in the lungs also backs up a study conducted in 2020 which predicted a microplastic inhalation risk posed by wearing masks.
Also: Covid-19 face masks: A potential source of microplastic fibers in the environment
A new study has revealed that most people have microplastics, commonly found in disposable face masks, in all areas of their lungs.

Not only are masks uncomfortable, make it hard to breathe, and are completely useless at preventing viruses passing through, but surgical masks worn during the pandemic could have a far unhealthier effect than previously thought.
Those British Health Trusts still mandating face masks in hospitals, and all the dentists and GPs surgeries that seem to have a psychotic obsession with preventing patients from breathing normally, might care to look at the long-term damage they are inflicting on them.
According to a new study published in the Science of the Total Environment, microplastics commonly used in surgical masks have been discovered in the lungs of most people.
According to thoracic surgeon Dr. Osita Onugha, the presence of microplastics in the lungs is a public health ticking time bomb with the potential to cause an explosion of cancer cases in the coming years.
Researchers in Britain looked at lung tissue obtained from study participants and found microplastics in all regions of the lungs including the deeper section. According to the study, this is the first time microplastics have been found in human lung tissue samples using μFTIR spectroscopy. Though the researchers did not confirm the source of the microplastic contamination, the plastic fibers found in the lungs are most commonly found in face masks.
Researchers identified 39 microplastics in 11 of the 13 lung tissue samples, with an average of 3 microplastics per sample.

Quote:In 2020, the amount of disposable face masks littered into the environment increased by a staggering 9,000%.
Billions of people strapped polypropylene masks to their faces every day for two years and sucked their air through plastic fibers for 8 hours or more. To not have discovered plastic in lungs would have been surprising.
The confirmation of microplastics in the lungs also backs up a study conducted in 2020 which predicted a microplastic inhalation risk posed by wearing masks. According to researchers in that study, the inhalation risk posed by spherical and fiber-like microplastics was high while wearing a mask. Unfortunately, researchers in that study continued to recommend the use of plastic masks despite the risk of inhalation.
What ARE Those Risks?

So many things happening this year and so many needed events have not happened.

Waiting waiting ...

So what will Christmas 2023 be like. 

It is quite possible that next Christmas will be a man made disaster.  They have another 6 months to try and cancel it!

I am thinking it may just be like this.

(Sorry, don't know how to embed yet. I did try.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTGlUMvbhSw

P

Image source: State Historical Society of Missouri

Quote:In 1904 the couple moved to Oklahoma Territory, home to many Socialists in this time period. O’Hare became a popular lecturer and author. She gave talks about Socialism across the country and wrote articles for Socialist publications, calling for shorter work days, safer working conditions, women’s suffrage, and an end to child labor.

Five years later, the O’Hares moved to Kansas City, Kansas, due to Frank’s poor health and the family’s need for a stable income. In 1910 O’Hare unsuccessfully ran as a Socialist candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives. The following year, O’Hare and her family moved to St. Louis, where she and her husband joined the staff of the National Rip-Saw, a Socialist publication. In 1916 she was nominated as the Socialist Party candidate for the U.S. Senate.

During World War I, after delivering a speech deemed to be anti-war, O’Hare was arrested for violating the Espionage Act.  She was found guilty and sentenced to five years in prison.

At her sentencing, O’Hare told Judge Martin J. Wade, “It may be that down in the dark, noisome, loathsome hells we call prisons, under our modern prison system, there may be a bigger work for me to do than out on the lecture platform. It may be that down there are things I have sought for all my life … [if] it is necessary for me to become a convict among criminals in order that I may serve my country there, then I am perfectly willing to perform my service there.”

Quote:John Rodemeyer Forms the Bald Head Club of America Off the Top of His Own

In 1883, 25-year old John Rodemeyer of Canaan, Conn., fell in love with young Jenny Brown. But when she opted to marry the older, established James Bierce instead, Rodemeyer launched the Winstedt Bachelor’s Club. And for the next 30 years, the spirited newspaper editor, poet and humorist kept himself single. It isn’t clear, though, whether he did it of his own choosing.

But nearly 30 years later in 1912, Rodemeyer reunited with Jenny. The bachelor’s club – down to just two members – then died. With his November 1913 wedding to Jenny (who had been left a widow) on the horizon, Rodemeyer needed a new club. The idea came right off the top of his head—his balding head. Thus the Bald Head Club of America was born.

Rodemeyer had company, as others started clubs with satirical names. After the Civil War, social clubs flourished among businessmen who needed to build their contacts. Some, like Rodemeyer, saw a chance to make fun of the clubs – and enjoy the same benefits.  There was the Anti-Bell Ringing Society, the Association of Bankrupt Insurance Companies, the Mammoth Cod Association and the Flouring Committee.

Quote:
MAY I HAVE A WORD WITH YOU? [check out that link for some interesting nuggets]

The photographer had snapped a photo of six men seated on the steps of the Litchfield County courthouse, all of them completely bald. The novelty photo was turned (probably by Rodemeyer) into a postcard with the caption: The Six Sutherland Brothers. It was a joke playing on the popularity of the Seven Sutherland Sisters – a Victorian era family of young women with extremely long hair.

Quote:Theirs was a true Cinderella story. The sisters—born sometime between 1845 and 1865—lived a hardscrabble life as drudges on their family’s turkey farm in Cambria, New York, in Niagara County, according to Arch Merrill’s 1966 book, “Shadows on the Wall: Tales of New York State.” They shepherded turkeys barefoot in shabby clothes, and to make matters worse, their mother, Mary, would slather their long hair with a horrible smelling ointment she believed would make it grow thick and strong. The girls’ classmates shunned them for the odor. Embarrassed, the young girls with the long, thick braids would hide in the tall grass when visitors approached their log cabin.

Meanwhile, their lazy father, Fletcher Sutherland, preoccupied himself proselytizing and politicking. The farm had been established by their grandfather, Col. Andrew Sutherland, an inventor who was esteemed for his role in the War of 1812. A preacher, politician, inventor, writer, and all-around smoothing-talking showman, Fletcher once worked for President James Buchanan, and nearly got himself murdered for opposing the Civil War.




[Quite the hair fetish snake oil story]
Untangling the Tale of the Seven Sutherland Sisters and Their 37 Feet of Hair

Quote:Rodemeyer, ever the publicity seeker, would boast later that he felt an instant kinship with his balding brethren. A bald pate, he declared, was nothing to be ashamed of. (Nor was it anything to be particularly proud of.) It just was.

The cause of baldness, the Bald Head Club of America concluded, was loss of hair. And its central purpose was to get together once a year, make fun of all the falderal surrounding baldness and have a great time at a banquet. From time to time, the club also made claims for the superiority of the bald man over his haired counterpart.

Yellow Spasm

The club was an instant success. Newspapers across the country publicized it, along with the entry requirements. One had to have  a bald patch of at least three inches in diameter, good character and payment of a dollar entry fee.

It wasn’t always easy separating fact from fiction when it came to the new club. Especially in its early days, Rodemeyer made up stories about meetings and the club establishing itself. Eventually, however, the stories became true — sort of.

People had good reason to suspect Rodemeyer was pulling their leg.  One of his early ventures, a newspaper called the Yellow Spasm, valued humor over a faithful recounting of the news and featured eligible bachelor ads.

[Note: the bird is looking 'left' pointing to 'H']

Over the years, the club claimed thousands of members, with branches springing up here and there across the country. Connecticut governors joined in, Rodemeyer said. He declared the state’s congressmen signed up their fellow legislators from Washington, Rodemeyer said. Rodemeyer even claimed former president William Howard Taft as a member, despite his wife’s well-established dislike of bald servants in the White House.

[Note: President Taft was also a Bonesman of the elite Skull and Bones secret society of which his father was a founding member!]

Knights of the Gleaming Skull

At the heart of the club, though, was always the its annual banquet. It consisted of “the happiest, jolliest men in America.” Rodemeyer took every opportunity to lampoon himself and his club and its Knights of the Gleaming Skull.

He convinced the Connecticut Legislature, after a light-hearted hearing, to grant the organization a charter so it could expand into new states. The New York Times in 1921 reported that Rodemeyer made a presentation to the Connecticut General Assembly. He asked for the right to issue charters and set up branches around the country so “groups of bald-heads in other states…might be united in a common bond of hairless brotherhood, that every city and town might some day have its own club of happy individuals with shining pates and smiling faces.”

Rodemeyer once got an invitation to write about the club because so many people thought it pure fiction. He wrote: “The Bald-Head Club of America is dedicated to the proposition that Man, in his highest type, is not, primarily or necessarily, a fur-bearing animal, like the otter, seal, beaver, plush, Welsh rabbit or mock-turtle.”

Rodemeyer ended his career at the Greenwich News and Graphic and passed away in 1943. The club, though, or at least tales of the club, lived on after his passing.

This story about the Bald Head Club was updated in 2022.

The Kingpriest is calling for a one world government... surprising isn't it?

Most have expected the false prophet to come out of the Vatican. Is this the one?

https://www.skywatchtv.com/2023/06/04/wicked-25/

Quote:Pope Francis’ recent encyclical, “Brothers All” ([i]Fratelli Tutti[/i]), used “love” as a repetitious theme to call for a One-World Order. Due to his position, whatever goals he has must be motivated by the Gospel of Christ…or at least it must [i]appear[/i] to be, if he is to save face. Yet, by using love and Jesus as the motivation behind establishing the One-World Order, Francis is unequivocally positioning Christianity at the forefront of launching the Antichrist system.

Did you catch that? [i]Jesus[/i] is calling us to a One-World Order…? If Francis didn’t convince his readers to agree to a One-World Order by pulling on the heartstrings during the “human depravity and global issues” presentation, his manipulation of scriptural context swung around for a “gotcha” that his God-fearing audience would feel compelled to obey.

In other words, he is pointing to a world superpower over all nations in compliance with one law or “juridical norm,” born under the ideal of justice and universal brotherly love, that cannot be contested or delegitimized, because any weaknesses this superpower has will obviously be worked out through global negotiations. It would be risky for the pope to come right out and say that a single world leader, like the one who will oversee the Superchurch, is in mind here, lest he provoke worldwide panic about Antichrist. What is astounding, however, is that he portrays the possibility of a reformed United Nations and all of its potentially benevolent achievements, after having technically allowed for the prospects of an [i]eventual [/i]single leader, as well as the firm establishment of global mandatory compliance with the system by that time. Later in the letter, Pope Francis writes:

The seventy-five years since the establishment of the United Nations and the experience of the first twenty years of this millennium have shown that the full application of international norms proves truly effective, and that failure to comply with them is detrimental.… Here there can be no room for disguising false intentions or placing the partisan interests of one country or group above the global common good.