Algorithmic News in Fits
"The Society of Professional Journalists must be rolling over in its digitally-dug grave."
Telling myself I needed to know from where and by whom I am about to be pwned, regardless of my insignificant place in the grand scheme, I watched the entire Joe Biden standup routine at the White House Press Corps annual roast. I admit, my expectations were low and easily exceeded, but I came away impressed. Not only did the old man deliver the punchlines pretty well, but his content also had real bite. In 21 minutes and 32 seconds, Joe’s routine went beyond what the format required.
For those who may not be familiar with the ritual, every year various bigwigs and a comedian-for-hire take turns at the Correspondent’s Dinner making unflattering jibes at the President of the United States, who sits at one end of the dais grinning, blushing, and politely applauding the way a royal might wave from a gilded carriage. POTUS then gets his turn to make a few unflattering jibes at his critics and deliver his own self-deprecating repertoire of B-grade jokes.
Some are better than others. Barack Obama slayed. Bill Clinton had a large stockpile of material from which to self-deprecate. President Cobblepot boycotted for four years. Self-deprecation was not in his repertoire.
Biden ran through his stock of “Ol’ Joe” jokes but then turned serious. We got to see a side of him that was, dare we say? statesman-like. I don’t know if he won over the audience — they are professionally noncommittal — but he sure surprised me.
“I know your commitment to be a free and fearless press and that’s what we honor tonight. This is not hyperbole. You make it possible for ordinary citizens to question authority and yes even to laugh at authority without fear or intimidation…. I know a lot’s changed in the press. I’ve had a lot of conversations with a lot of you. This is not your father’s press from 20 years ago. I’m serious and you all know it better than I do, but still it is absolutely consequential and essential. I believe in the First Amendment, and not just because my good friend Jimmy Madison wrote it.”
After sneaking in that Ol’ Joe zinger, he ran on a bit about imprisoned journalists and his Administration’s record, before returning to the free press theme.
A poison is running through our democracy and parts of the extreme press: truth buried by lies and lies living on as truth; [his voice rises to a shout] lies told for profit and power; lies told for conspiracy and malice, repeated over and over again, designed to generate a cycle of anger, hate and even violence — a cycle that emboldens history to be buried, books to be banned, children and families to be attacked by the State, and the rule of law and our rights and freedoms to be stripped away; where elected representatives of the people are expelled from State houses for standing for the people. I made clear that we know in our bones and you know it too — our democracy remains at risk. But I’ve also made it clear [voice softens to a stage whisper] as I’ve seen throughout my life, it’s within our power — each and every one of us — to preserve our democracy. We can. We must. We will.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
I’ll readily admit that perhaps one reason this resonated with me was that my father was involved in the formative years of the Society of Professional Journalists, then called Sigma Delta Chi. During a fire that destroyed the Chicago headquarters in 1929, he rushed in through the flames to rescue the Society’s only account books and membership rolls. A few months before his death in California in 1989, he related a part of that story in a letter to my family in Tennessee:
SDX’s prime purpose is to raise the ethical standards of professional journalism. It was born at DePauw University in the era of yellow journalism. Today’s journalism, except for the tabloids sold in supermarkets, is far above the sensationalized reporting of yesteryear. British journalism, most of it, is still in the dark ages and could use the constructive influence of a Society of Professional Journalists.
He wrote that in a time when parents wanted their children to grow up to be Woodwards and Bernsteins. All the President’s Men had won four Oscars for exposing the corrupt Nixon presidency. The UK controversy he referred to may have been Rupert Murdoch’s purchase of The Times after tabloidizing The Sun. Dad would be shocked at the influence Murdoch was to have in the USA, not only on print media, but on talk radio, TV, cable, and elections — the whole era of fake news and insane, lying politicians that Fox ushered in.
Today the Society of Professional Journalists must be rolling over in its digitally-dug grave. Savvy reporters are migrating from print to Substack. Artificial intelligence will soon be changing newsrooms into banks of blinking servers. Gateway-guardian editors like my dad are the first to go. Flesh and blood reporters won’t be far behind. Geoffrey Hinton, often referred to as “the godfather of AI,” told The New York Times, the risk AI poses is that people will “not be able to know what is true anymore.”
If you are building the AI database from all human knowledge and the average human is an idiot you are going to get more idiots.
— Tyler Crowley
It is easy to see in Ol’ Joe’s remarks about “MAGA Republicans” — as opposed to the Normies — the skeleton of next year’s stump speeches. In his heartland visits he’ll be stage whispering for a return to the days of journalistic integrity, when trusted sources in the mold of Huntley/Brinkley and Walter Cronkite will make America gr… oops, never mind.
Honestly, the old power of singular spokespersons in a few mainstream outlets was never a great model to begin with. Huntley Cronkite urged us to believe Martin Luther King was too extreme, until he wasn’t; that the Vietnam War was righteous, until it wasn’t; and that corporate takeover of nonprofit media was a good thing (it isn’t).
In a recent piece for The Guardian, Naomi Klein challenged the idea that AI was the best invention since Al Gore discovered the internet.
Generative AI will end poverty, they tell us. It will cure all disease. It will solve climate change. It will make our jobs more meaningful and exciting. It will unleash lives of leisure and contemplation, helping us reclaim the humanity we have lost to late capitalist mechanization. It will end loneliness. It will make our governments rational and responsive. These, I fear, are the real AI hallucinations and we have all been hearing them on a loop ever since Chat GPT launched at the end of last year.
***
As with the climate claims, it is necessary to ask: is the reason politicians impose cruel and ineffective policies that they suffer from a lack of evidence? An inability to “see patterns,” as the BCG paper suggests? Do they not understand the human costs of starving public healthcare amid pandemics, or of failing to invest in non-market housing when tents fill our urban parks, or of approving new fossil fuel infrastructure while temperatures soar? Do they need AI to make them “smarter”, to use Schmidt’s term — or are they precisely smart enough to know who is going to underwrite their next campaign, or, if they stray, bankroll their rivals?
Believe this: the majority of our news content will soon be scripted by bots. Will they be friendly and serve the ends of social cohesion, environmental responsibility, and distributed governance, or will they sow seeds of chaos, racism, and destruction? There is likely very little that Ol’ Joe can do about it other than gripe.
Truth is merely the first victim, because once AI marries quantum computing, the future does not need us anymore. Cure for cancer? Not a problem. Life everlasting? Done. Abolition of work? Done. Food? Provided. Air and water? Curated. Just keep that plutonium core fed in the petawatt reactor.
In the year 2020, Elias van Dorne (John Cusack), CEO of VA Industries, the world’s largest robotics company, introduces his most powerful invention — Kronos, a super-computer designed to end all wars. When Kronos goes online, it quickly determines that mankind, itself, is the biggest threat to world peace and launches a worldwide robot attack to rid the world of the “infection” of man.
— promo for Singularity (2017)
Twenty-three years ago, computer pioneer Bill Joy, co-author of Java script, tried to imagine the moment we now find ourselves in.
[W]e are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines’ decisions. As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.
On the other hand it is possible that human control over the machines may be retained. In that case the average man may have control over certain private machines of his own, such as his car or his personal computer, but control over large systems of machines will be in the hands of a tiny elite — just as it is today, but with two differences. Due to improved techniques the elite will have greater control over the masses; and because human work will no longer be necessary the masses will be superfluous, a useless burden on the system. If the elite is ruthless they may simply decide to exterminate the mass of humanity. If they are humane they may use propaganda or other psychological or biological techniques to reduce the birth rate until the mass of humanity becomes extinct, leaving the world to the elite. Or, if the elite consists of soft-hearted liberals, they may decide to play the role of good shepherds to the rest of the human race. They will see to it that everyone’s physical needs are satisfied, that all children are raised under psychologically hygienic conditions, that everyone has a wholesome hobby to keep him busy, and that anyone who may become dissatisfied undergoes “treatment” to cure his “problem.” Of course, life will be so purposeless that people will have to be biologically or psychologically engineered either to remove their need for the power process or make them “sublimate” their drive for power into some harmless hobby. These engineered human beings may be happy in such a society, but they will most certainly not be free. They will have been reduced to the status of domestic animals.
Naomi Klein says pretty much the same thing.
[A]s companies like Coca-Cola start making huge investments to use generative AI to sell more products, it’s becoming all too clear that this new tech will be used in the same ways as the last generation of digital tools: that what begins with lofty promises about spreading freedom and democracy ends up micro targeting ads at us so that we buy more useless, carbon-spewing stuff.
***
Many lives and sectors have been decimated by earlier iterations of this playbook, from taxi drivers to rental markets to local newspapers. With the AI revolution, these kinds of losses could look like rounding errors, with teachers, coders, visual artists, journalists, translators, musicians, care workers and so many others facing the prospect of having their incomes replaced by glitchy code.
Maybe Joe could ask his old buddy, Jimmy Madison, whose early drafts of the First Amendment were much more expansive than what later came out of committee, at what point should AI be regulated for public safety? These are big questions, and likely beyond the ability of a presidential candidate, whose tools are 15-second soundbites, to think about. His advisors are likely telling him that if we don’t advance to self-sustaining, supersmart, artificial general intelligence, then the Chinese will. Or Coca Cola.
I guess the best we can hope for is to demand the truth but that is not a very robust solution, so here is a better takeaway. The slippery slope into fake news and Truth Social was not accidental. It was engineered by profit-seekers backed by centuries of accumulated capital who threw their vast wealth at new media to reap the long tail of web real estate, pharmaceutical dependence, and low-wage workers that the dumbing down of nonartificial intelligence brought into being.
Open-source, fact-checked, reality-based news can just as easily disrupt that, and it doesn’t need a Silicon Valley Bank to get there. It just needs to be more enticing and addictive, something blog and vlog creators are already learning, faster than AI. Will truth out-compete lies? Watch this space.
- 88 houses were restored
- 33 wells were restored
- 32 wood heating stoves in houses were restored
- water was supplied to 34 houses
- 5008 euros were spent on gardens, orchards, and animals
- 17,448 euros were spent on food
- 19,045.70 euros went to household and kitchen items
- 12,558.80 euros provided schoolbooks, musical instruments and hand tools.
For most of the children refugees, this will be their first experience in ecovillage living. They will directly experience its wonders, skills, and safety. They may never want to go back. Those that do will carry the seeds within them of the better world they glimpsed through the eyes of a child.
Those wishing to make a tax-deductible gift can do so through Global Village Institute by going to http://PayPal.me/greenroad2022 or by directing donations to greenroad@thefarm.org.
There is more info on the Global Village Institute website at https://www.gvix.org/greenroad or read this recent article in Mother Jones. Thank you for your help.
As the world emerges into pandemic recovery (maybe), there is growing recognition that we must learn to do better. We must chart a pathway to a new carbon economy that goes beyond zero emissions and runs the industrial carbon cycle backward — taking CO2 from the atmosphere and ocean, turning it into coal and oil, and burying it in the ground. The triple bottom line of this new economy is antifragility, regeneration, and resilience. We must lead by good examples; carrots, not sticks; ecovillages, not carbon indulgences. We must attract a broad swath of people to this work by honoring it, rewarding it, and making it fun. That is our challenge now.
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