The use of communism as a general-purpose boogyman was an objective of the long-term propaganda effort written about in the recently published book, "The Big Myth". Before reading it, I was wholly unaware of the roots of that effort, and how widely that message was distributed. It was wildly effective, and we're still seeing its reverberation decades later.
In physical terms, embedding is like having a window within the bounds of your wall, through which you can see an infringing act. The window would not be culpaple.
Hmmm. If content creation rests with the user who provided the prompt, that raises other possibilities. It would in essence be the same as seeding a random number generator. Who is the creator if the AI's output becomes the next prompt? (Ask the AI to pose a recursive question about X.) This issue gets very twisty.
If I understand the implied basis for protection, it seems to rest on the fact that the LLMs base their output on material from the Internet which was produced ultimately by some other person and then used to train the LLM.
What happens when a LLM has the ability to apply a pattern observed in one context to content drawn from a different context? This would make it possible for the AI to use parallel construction to present a conclusion that may not have already been present on the Internet. What it produced in this instance would not be a remix of existing content. Would that make the AI the creator of original content?
The situation in which there is no plan to cold-boot, and all planning is focussed on maintaining operations suggests an interesting metaphor. Imagine Twitter as an aircraft that started barely able to take off, and then added to over time to make it fly better. It becomes so heavy and ungainly that it would no longer be possible to take off if it were ever to land or crash.
The same model can apply to the global economy. Locally independent operations across the world slowly became interdependent for the creation of their products or services, as well as for their sale and distribution. All planning is focussed on keeping the economy in motion, because if it were to crash, there's no plan to cold-boot it either.
There are systems in place to prop up economies, to manipulate the ongoing trade in securities, but none for recovering from catastrophic failure.
On that note, back in 2007 I wrote a short story about a far more restrictive claim.
"Site License" — I knew there was something strange when the aliens handed us those papers. I just didn't know how strange.
http://klurgsheld.wordpress.com/2007/06/05/site-license/
I'd go with a different explanation: If it ain't broke (from the perspective of those wanting to preserve the obscuring fog) don't fix it.
Preventing the public from gaining free and usable access to court documents appears to have value to those charged with serving the public. It serves the same purpose as the curtains obscuring the Great and Powerful Wizard of OZ: maintaining the fiction that power lies in the hands of people and forces that we can't see. After all, there would be utter chaos if mere people could see how the legal sausage was really being made.
Retaining an archaic and unnecessary 10 cent per page fee is for the gatekeepers a cheap and easy way to safeguard the perceived stratification of power which has served them so well for so long.
This is a demonstration of Arthur C Clarke's dictum, that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Most people have no reason to know the technical side of how anything works any more. It's all just a given that it does, and any indication of it is hidden under a friendly user interface.
With no understanding of how the internet works, or insight into the implications of any proposed changes, politicians are free to speak to perceived problems in general terms, and to propose legislation that will then be magically implemented by someone else.
The scenario is reminiscent of how the corporate managers of a company I worked at would make sweeping promises to client companies and governments about software that hadn't even been discussed yet by the technical people. And once those promises had been turned into contractual obligations, the technical workers were ordered to do the impossible... or at least to make it appear that it had been done.
And of course, the managers would be sure to have left with their golden parachutes before the sham saw the light of day.
Beware when public officials use intentionally empty phrases like 'learning lessons'. The ploy is calculated to induce people to fill in the meaning with what they want to believe. What did they learn? Was it not to commit war crimes, or not to get caught doing it?
It's far too easy to get caught up in someone's trick narrative. That's why I sow my own in the form of subversive short stories about politics and business issues. Consider it a vaccination, but first you have to read some of them.
I'm curious: has the narrative that boomers have more disposable income than other age groups been validated recently? It was an assumption based on data from a few decades ago, but things have changed. A lot of us who work in IT, for example, are living hand-to-mouth these days because what had been long-term jobs with benefits have been traded in for short-term contracts without benefits because companies thought it would be cheaper to outsource labor. And that's if you're working full-time on a contract. I'm doing database work for 4 companies, and it's still just part time, and not enough to cover expenses. Then there are the unemployed boomers who are 'too old' or 'overqualified'.
Since the posts are usually triggered by something that's happening, it might be interesting to use podcast time to explore the larger context in which the event takes place, as well as a broader history of the context that it plays out in. It could be done as a discussion or roundtable.
You could also take a page from an old PBS series, "The Constitution: A Delicate Balance" and have a number of participants play the various stakeholders in a situation you're following to explore how a hypothetical might play out, with time to talk about the rationale used by the various stakeholders.
Fiction can be a powerful tool to explore ideas. That's what I use my own blog for.
Really? Perhaps she's more concerned about people realizing that she lied about her positions during the primary campaign in order to get on the ballot. She wouldn't be the first politician to say whatever would garner votes, regardless of whether they supported those positions. The strategy is not much different from how the GOP got the Dems to strip anything beneficial to their *human* constituents from what was supposed to have been health care reform legislation. The compromises they agreed to during negotiations were not compromises they were willing to support when the bill actually came to a vote. And we don't appear to have any recourse for this duplicitous behavior.
It seems to me that most of these moral panics take advantage of an asymmetry in knowledge about the subject at hand. If people don't know enough about whatever is being presented to frighten them to judge for themselves, it's far easier to use the logical fallacy of speaking from authority to induce them to go along with the ruse. Intelligence agencies know more than you do, so what cause have you to question their word, and so forth. But with this one, there are technically adept people all over the planet who can poke holes in the story, just as Mike has noted here. Perhaps the countermeasure fort this cyberwar scare is a crowd-sourced education blitz. Anyone who knows better, and can support what they say, ought to make sure that those in their circle are educated about the farce. This could short-circuit the strategy.
When I still had an account with Bank of America, they used as one of the security questions, 'Which branch did you open the account at?" Well, for some reason, they changed the data in their record to show some other branch, and insisted that I answer with their lie in order to access my account. Nobody there, all the way up to the Office of the President, could understand that if they ask customers to lie about one thing, they will lie about others in order to get what they want.
Collecting a lot of 'unnecessary' personal data about people who have money to burn on cutting the line at airports sounds to me like a very sophisticated social engineering scheme. Imagine convincing the rich and powerful to part with such information, and to pay a premium for doing so. I'd be interested in who got access to this data while the company was still in business. But then, I tend to think of possible scenarios that *might* happen, and turn them into short stories, like the one called "Incident on Concourse B", which starts like this...
+ + +
Lendon Forrester, clattering bags of jumbled canned goods, ran up the steps and opened the door. “Did I miss it?”
“No,” Frannie Jurdens called from the kitchen. “They’re still in a holding pattern.” She capped the jug she’d been filling, and placed it beside the others on the counter.
Len glanced at the reporter on the living room TV in passing. “…the ticket counter behind me, air travel in our city has ground to a halt. This same ‘ghost-town’ scenario is being played out at airports across the country, in the wake of this morning’s thwarted terrorist attack in Cincinnati.”
Frannie looked up as he entered. “I don’t know, Len. The media’s crawling with rumors.”
+ + +
You can read the whole thing (and lots of other stories) here:
http://klurgsheld.wordpress.com/2007/09/05/short-story-incident-on-concourse-b/
As some people here have alluded to, a reporter who simply allows the various parties to a debate to have their say, without challenging either the facts being asserted or the methods used to present those assertions, prevents the readers from benefitting from the fact that a knowledgeable reporter had access to those people, and the reader did not. Combative interviewing, as is performed on Fox, does not improve the situation any more than the fawning interviewing of NPR does. However, there may be a way for that knowledgeable reporter to insert herself into the exchange in a way that benefits the reader or viewer, and I used a series of short stories to explore what such reporting might be like. One of these stories is entitled, "Terms of Debate", and it starts like this...
+ + +
"I said, sit down!"
Erica Oerstblander glanced over her shoulder. One look at Hennesy, the right-wing radio windbag who'd lately taken up the hobby of dogging her, was enough to harden her resolve. "Excuse me, Ms. Ghorbian," she repeated, a bit louder this time, and with her hand aloft for punctuation.
Neda Ghorbian scanned the rented theater's sparse crowd from center-stage, and then stepped closer to speak with the reporter in the front row. "I'm a bit confused," she said. "I was under the impression that the press were here to report on my bid for the open County Council seat, not to disrupt it."
+ + +
You can read the entire story at:
klurgsheld.wordpress.com/2009/01/27/short-story-terms-of-debate/
Since I write political short stories (Google lists me first for that search), I decided to explore what it would be like if journalists dropped the conceit that it was possible for the press to be purely an observer of what went on in the world, and instead engaged directly in what was happening in a way that helped the citizens to better understand what was going on. The fictional organization that my reporter works for is a hybrid. They are primarily an Internet site focussed on politics and the framing behind it, but they also publish a single printed edition on the weekend, and use that to provide the extended depth of analysis and context that might be uncomfortable for people to read purely on a screen. The most recent story in that series (so far) is called "Terms of Debate". In it, our reporter steps into the political discussion to help the people at the event, and those following electronically, to understand what's being said, as well as what's being implied. Here's a link to the story:
Disambiguation
Dobbs? Do you mean the abortion decision, of Bob Dobbs, the focus of the Church of the Subgenius?
Propaganda
The use of communism as a general-purpose boogyman was an objective of the long-term propaganda effort written about in the recently published book, "The Big Myth". Before reading it, I was wholly unaware of the roots of that effort, and how widely that message was distributed. It was wildly effective, and we're still seeing its reverberation decades later.
The difference IRL
In physical terms, embedding is like having a window within the bounds of your wall, through which you can see an infringing act. The window would not be culpaple.
Seeding Content
Hmmm. If content creation rests with the user who provided the prompt, that raises other possibilities. It would in essence be the same as seeding a random number generator. Who is the creator if the AI's output becomes the next prompt? (Ask the AI to pose a recursive question about X.) This issue gets very twisty.
Remixed Internet Content
If I understand the implied basis for protection, it seems to rest on the fact that the LLMs base their output on material from the Internet which was produced ultimately by some other person and then used to train the LLM. What happens when a LLM has the ability to apply a pattern observed in one context to content drawn from a different context? This would make it possible for the AI to use parallel construction to present a conclusion that may not have already been present on the Internet. What it produced in this instance would not be a remix of existing content. Would that make the AI the creator of original content?
Consider this a model of something much larger and more dangerous
The situation in which there is no plan to cold-boot, and all planning is focussed on maintaining operations suggests an interesting metaphor. Imagine Twitter as an aircraft that started barely able to take off, and then added to over time to make it fly better. It becomes so heavy and ungainly that it would no longer be possible to take off if it were ever to land or crash. The same model can apply to the global economy. Locally independent operations across the world slowly became interdependent for the creation of their products or services, as well as for their sale and distribution. All planning is focussed on keeping the economy in motion, because if it were to crash, there's no plan to cold-boot it either. There are systems in place to prop up economies, to manipulate the ongoing trade in securities, but none for recovering from catastrophic failure.
Prior Art
On that note, back in 2007 I wrote a short story about a far more restrictive claim. "Site License" — I knew there was something strange when the aliens handed us those papers. I just didn't know how strange. http://klurgsheld.wordpress.com/2007/06/05/site-license/
Useful fog
I'd go with a different explanation: If it ain't broke (from the perspective of those wanting to preserve the obscuring fog) don't fix it. Preventing the public from gaining free and usable access to court documents appears to have value to those charged with serving the public. It serves the same purpose as the curtains obscuring the Great and Powerful Wizard of OZ: maintaining the fiction that power lies in the hands of people and forces that we can't see. After all, there would be utter chaos if mere people could see how the legal sausage was really being made. Retaining an archaic and unnecessary 10 cent per page fee is for the gatekeepers a cheap and easy way to safeguard the perceived stratification of power which has served them so well for so long.
As Implemented
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo.
Any Sufficiently Advanced Technology...
This is a demonstration of Arthur C Clarke's dictum, that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Most people have no reason to know the technical side of how anything works any more. It's all just a given that it does, and any indication of it is hidden under a friendly user interface. With no understanding of how the internet works, or insight into the implications of any proposed changes, politicians are free to speak to perceived problems in general terms, and to propose legislation that will then be magically implemented by someone else. The scenario is reminiscent of how the corporate managers of a company I worked at would make sweeping promises to client companies and governments about software that hadn't even been discussed yet by the technical people. And once those promises had been turned into contractual obligations, the technical workers were ordered to do the impossible... or at least to make it appear that it had been done. And of course, the managers would be sure to have left with their golden parachutes before the sham saw the light of day.
'learning lessons'
Beware when public officials use intentionally empty phrases like 'learning lessons'. The ploy is calculated to induce people to fill in the meaning with what they want to believe. What did they learn? Was it not to commit war crimes, or not to get caught doing it?
It's far too easy to get caught up in someone's trick narrative. That's why I sow my own in the form of subversive short stories about politics and business issues. Consider it a vaccination, but first you have to read some of them.
Boomers' Disposable Income
I'm curious: has the narrative that boomers have more disposable income than other age groups been validated recently? It was an assumption based on data from a few decades ago, but things have changed. A lot of us who work in IT, for example, are living hand-to-mouth these days because what had been long-term jobs with benefits have been traded in for short-term contracts without benefits because companies thought it would be cheaper to outsource labor. And that's if you're working full-time on a contract. I'm doing database work for 4 companies, and it's still just part time, and not enough to cover expenses. Then there are the unemployed boomers who are 'too old' or 'overqualified'.
Context
Since the posts are usually triggered by something that's happening, it might be interesting to use podcast time to explore the larger context in which the event takes place, as well as a broader history of the context that it plays out in. It could be done as a discussion or roundtable.
You could also take a page from an old PBS series, "The Constitution: A Delicate Balance" and have a number of participants play the various stakeholders in a situation you're following to explore how a hypothetical might play out, with time to talk about the rationale used by the various stakeholders.
Fiction can be a powerful tool to explore ideas. That's what I use my own blog for.
Another fictional take on this issue
I took a different tack. You might enjoy reading "Edifice of Lies".
http://klurgsheld.wordpress.com/2008/02/10/short-story-edifice-of-lies/
Hiding her real position?
Really? Perhaps she's more concerned about people realizing that she lied about her positions during the primary campaign in order to get on the ballot. She wouldn't be the first politician to say whatever would garner votes, regardless of whether they supported those positions. The strategy is not much different from how the GOP got the Dems to strip anything beneficial to their *human* constituents from what was supposed to have been health care reform legislation. The compromises they agreed to during negotiations were not compromises they were willing to support when the bill actually came to a vote. And we don't appear to have any recourse for this duplicitous behavior.
Asymmetric Information Warfare
It seems to me that most of these moral panics take advantage of an asymmetry in knowledge about the subject at hand. If people don't know enough about whatever is being presented to frighten them to judge for themselves, it's far easier to use the logical fallacy of speaking from authority to induce them to go along with the ruse. Intelligence agencies know more than you do, so what cause have you to question their word, and so forth. But with this one, there are technically adept people all over the planet who can poke holes in the story, just as Mike has noted here. Perhaps the countermeasure fort this cyberwar scare is a crowd-sourced education blitz. Anyone who knows better, and can support what they say, ought to make sure that those in their circle are educated about the farce. This could short-circuit the strategy.
Security Questions
When I still had an account with Bank of America, they used as one of the security questions, 'Which branch did you open the account at?" Well, for some reason, they changed the data in their record to show some other branch, and insisted that I answer with their lie in order to access my account. Nobody there, all the way up to the Office of the President, could understand that if they ask customers to lie about one thing, they will lie about others in order to get what they want.
Ulterior Motive?
Collecting a lot of 'unnecessary' personal data about people who have money to burn on cutting the line at airports sounds to me like a very sophisticated social engineering scheme. Imagine convincing the rich and powerful to part with such information, and to pay a premium for doing so. I'd be interested in who got access to this data while the company was still in business. But then, I tend to think of possible scenarios that *might* happen, and turn them into short stories, like the one called "Incident on Concourse B", which starts like this...
+ + +
Lendon Forrester, clattering bags of jumbled canned goods, ran up the steps and opened the door. “Did I miss it?”
“No,” Frannie Jurdens called from the kitchen. “They’re still in a holding pattern.” She capped the jug she’d been filling, and placed it beside the others on the counter.
Len glanced at the reporter on the living room TV in passing. “…the ticket counter behind me, air travel in our city has ground to a halt. This same ‘ghost-town’ scenario is being played out at airports across the country, in the wake of this morning’s thwarted terrorist attack in Cincinnati.”
Frannie looked up as he entered. “I don’t know, Len. The media’s crawling with rumors.”
+ + +
You can read the whole thing (and lots of other stories) here:
http://klurgsheld.wordpress.com/2007/09/05/short-story-incident-on-concourse-b/
P. Orin Zack
Modeling new reportorial behavior
As some people here have alluded to, a reporter who simply allows the various parties to a debate to have their say, without challenging either the facts being asserted or the methods used to present those assertions, prevents the readers from benefitting from the fact that a knowledgeable reporter had access to those people, and the reader did not. Combative interviewing, as is performed on Fox, does not improve the situation any more than the fawning interviewing of NPR does. However, there may be a way for that knowledgeable reporter to insert herself into the exchange in a way that benefits the reader or viewer, and I used a series of short stories to explore what such reporting might be like. One of these stories is entitled, "Terms of Debate", and it starts like this...
+ + +
"I said, sit down!"
Erica Oerstblander glanced over her shoulder. One look at Hennesy, the right-wing radio windbag who'd lately taken up the hobby of dogging her, was enough to harden her resolve. "Excuse me, Ms. Ghorbian," she repeated, a bit louder this time, and with her hand aloft for punctuation.
Neda Ghorbian scanned the rented theater's sparse crowd from center-stage, and then stepped closer to speak with the reporter in the front row. "I'm a bit confused," she said. "I was under the impression that the press were here to report on my bid for the open County Council seat, not to disrupt it."
+ + +
You can read the entire story at:
klurgsheld.wordpress.com/2009/01/27/short-story-terms-of-debate/
There are many others, as well.
Changing the role of Journalist
Since I write political short stories (Google lists me first for that search), I decided to explore what it would be like if journalists dropped the conceit that it was possible for the press to be purely an observer of what went on in the world, and instead engaged directly in what was happening in a way that helped the citizens to better understand what was going on. The fictional organization that my reporter works for is a hybrid. They are primarily an Internet site focussed on politics and the framing behind it, but they also publish a single printed edition on the weekend, and use that to provide the extended depth of analysis and context that might be uncomfortable for people to read purely on a screen. The most recent story in that series (so far) is called "Terms of Debate". In it, our reporter steps into the political discussion to help the people at the event, and those following electronically, to understand what's being said, as well as what's being implied. Here's a link to the story:
http://klurgsheld.wordpress.com/2009/01/27/short-story-terms-of-debate/
Phil