{"id":4013,"date":"2025-05-09T02:00:29","date_gmt":"2025-05-09T10:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/?p=4013"},"modified":"2025-05-08T21:10:59","modified_gmt":"2025-05-09T05:10:59","slug":"watch-what-you-read-at-bedtime","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/2025\/05\/09\/watch-what-you-read-at-bedtime\/","title":{"rendered":"Watch What You Read at Bedtime"},"content":{"rendered":"

I made the mistake Wednesday night of reading Heather Cox Richardson\u2019s newsletter<\/a> before I went to bed.<\/p>\n

In it she discussed the incredible damage the DOGE (pronounced dodgy) minions are doing across our government at the behest of Elon Musk \u2014 firing employees, cancelling funds already appropriated and approved, and pulling together data that has been carefully kept separate to protect our privacy.<\/p>\n

She also pointed out:<\/p>\n

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo<\/i> suggests Musk\u2019s faith in his AI company is at least part of what\u2019s behind the administration\u2019s devastating cuts to biomedical research. Those who believe in a future centered around AI believe that it will be far more effective than human research scientists, so cutting actual research is efficient. At the same time, Marshall suggests, tech oligarchs find the years-long timelines of actual research and the demands of scientists on peer reviews and careful study frustrating, as they want to put their ideas into practice quickly.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And she added:<\/p>\n

If the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is an example of what it looks like when a tech oligarch tries to run a government agency, it\u2019s a cautionary tale. Under Trump the FAA has become entangled with Musk\u2019s SpaceX space technology company and its subsidiary Starlink satellite company, and it appears that the American people are being used to make Musk\u2019s dream come true.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

While I\u2019ve been saying from the beginning that the damage done by the dodgy minions has to stop and while I\u2019ve been ranting about the idiocy of so-called AI for some time, I\u2019ve been keeping my worries about what the broligarchs in general might do to us all somewhat separate from my fears about what the grifter\u2019s administration is doing to government.<\/p>\n

But reading that post from Dr. Richardson reminded me that it\u2019s all part of the same problem.<\/p>\n

There are many terrible things being done to our government and to our people by what Rebecca Solnit calls the Stupid Coup. The nonsense at the FAA is an example of attacking parts of the government for the financial benefit of the person doing the attacking.<\/p>\n

But there are also a lot of terrible things being done by those broligarchs to whom most of us are merely NPCs. The faith in so-called AI goes far beyond Musk, and the effort to shove it down our throats is happening everywhere, not just in the government. <\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been reading Adam Becker\u2019s More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley\u2019s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity. <\/i>I\u2019ll have more to say about it once I\u2019ve finished, but here\u2019s a link to Dave Karpf\u2019s review<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Becker\u2019s book isn\u2019t the first thing I\u2019ve read about the large language models being touted as AI, but it\u2019s an excellent one, given that he is both an astrophysicist and a science writer. By looking at the shortcomings in the people behind such things as AI, the singularity, effective altruism, and colonization of space, he makes it very clear that their fantasies are not likely to be realized.<\/p>\n

Large language models have some uses, but no one is going to make the fantastic amounts of money needed to keep the businesses going from the actual uses of them.<\/p>\n

As Cory Doctorow often points out, the biggest threat to workers is not that AI can do your job \u2013 it can\u2019t \u2013 but that the companies will convince your employer that it can do your job.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d like to think employers aren\u2019t that stupid, but given what the people putting on WorldCon this year did with ChatGPT and programming \u2013 here\u2019s an update<\/a> \u2013\u00a0 I\u2019m afraid many people still want to believe in this stuff. I mean, if science fiction people, who should know better, buy into the hype, what can you expect from people who don\u2019t pay close attention to these things.<\/p>\n

Undermining health research or government programs by expecting so-called AI to replace people doing the real work will leave all that in tatters. The real question is how much damage are they going to be able to do before sane people are back in authority.<\/p>\n

I do think sane people will be back in power at one point. Regimes like this one don\u2019t last, particularly when they\u2019re tanking the economy. (I\u2019d like to think the absolute cruelty they are showing toward people would also be a disqualifying factor, but I\u2019m feeling cynical as I write this so I have more faith in financial pain.)<\/p>\n

But we\u2019re going to lose so many people who know what they\u2019re doing and we\u2019re going to have bad technology in their place as well. And if the broligarchs have their way, the problems with that bad tech won\u2019t just be in government. Regardless of what happens with the stupid coup, Musk and the others will still be trying to settle Mars and milk our common resources for their libertarian dreams.<\/p>\n

And we\u2019ll still need to deal with climate change and the ever-growing inequities of the current situation while we\u2019re picking up the pieces from everything else.<\/p>\n

I say \u201cwe.\u201d I hope I\u2019ll still be around to help when we start rebuilding. We\u2019re going to need a lot of people. After all, unlike ChatGPT, people can actually think, and we\u2019re going to need a lot of good thinking.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I made the mistake Wednesday night of reading Heather Cox Richardson\u2019s newsletter before I went to bed. In it she discussed the incredible damage the DOGE (pronounced dodgy) minions are doing across our government at the behest of Elon Musk \u2014 firing employees, cancelling funds already appropriated and approved, and pulling together data that has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,363],"tags":[1047,1048,1034],"class_list":["post-4013","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rants","category-technology","tag-adam-becker","tag-heather-cox-richardson","tag-stupid-coup"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4013","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4013"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4013\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4014,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4013\/revisions\/4014"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4013"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4013"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4013"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}