I’m quoted in a nicely written LifeWire article as an expert dismissing the latest AI Warnings made by a huge number signatories (including 23 people at Google, 14 at OpenAI including Anthropic, and… Grimes). I didn’t sign the overblown statement, obviously, and would never.

…experts point to more mundane risks from AI rather than human extinction, such as the possibility that chatbot development could lead to the leaking of personal information. Davi Ottenheimer… said in an email that ChatGPT only recently clarified that it would not use data submitted by customers to train or improve its models unless they opt-in.

“Being so late shows a serious regulation gap and an almost blind disregard for the planning and execution of data acquisition,” he added. “It’s as if stakeholders didn’t listen to everyone shouting from the hilltops that safe learning is critical to a healthy society.”

I also really like the comments in the same LifeWire article from Adnan Masood, Chief AI Architect at UST.

Masood is among those who say that the risks from AI are overblown. “When we compare AI to truly existential threats such as pandemics or nuclear war, the contrast is stark,” he added. “The existential threats we face are tied to our physical survival—climate change, extreme poverty, and war. To suggest that AI, in its current state, poses a comparable risk seems to create a false equivalence.” …these risks, while important, are not existential,” he said. “They are risks that we can manage and mitigate through thoughtful design, robust testing, and responsible deployment of AI. But again, these are not existential risks—they are part of the ongoing process of integrating any new technology into our societal structures.”

Well said.

Myself being a long-time, many decades, critic of AI (hey, I told you in 2016 that Tesla AI was a lie that would get many people killed)… I have to say at this point that the Google and OpenAI signatories seem to not be trustworthy.

Grimes? LOL.

The experimental pop singer, born Claire Boucher, 33, posted her bubbly, enthusiastic rant on Wednesday and left viewers baffled as she described how A.I. could lead to a world where nobody has to work and everyone lives comfortably. ‘A.I. could automate all the farming, weed out systematic corruption, thereby bringing us as close as possible to genuine equality,’ she says. ‘So basically, everything that everybody loves about communism, but without the collective farm. Because let’s be real, enforced farming is not a vibe.’

First she says AI is “nobody has to work… everything that everybody loves about communism”, not even close to any definition of communism, and then soon after she signs a statement AI will destroy the world.

OK.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t believe all these big corporations (and a horribly confused artist) who run around and cry wolf about AI, but that we should have the intelligence to recognize patently false statements about “existential threat” as being made by organizations with unclear (tainted and probably selfish) motives.

I doubt I could explain the real threat to society better than Sir Tim Berners-Lee in 2017:

…its reassuring that today, robots of course do not have legal rights like people. That was always my watch-point. That is not even on the horizon. Of course where the intelligence is a corporation rather than a robot, then we should probably make sure that the day never comes when a corporation has the same rights as a person. That, now, would be a red flag. That would allow humanity to be legally subservient to an intelligence — not wise at all. Let’s just make sure than day never comes.

Oops!

Watch out for those corporations. Such a highly centralized unaccountable model that Google/OpenAI/Microsoft/Facebook want to use to deliver AI says more about them, than it does about risks from the technology itself. Aesop’s boy who cried wolf most importantly was attention seeking and completely untrustworthy, even though a wolf does indeed come in the fable.

Who should you listen to instead? Integrity is seen in accountability. Hint: history says monopolist billionaires, and their doting servants, fail at integrity required for societal care in our highly distributed world. It’s the Sage Test, which I would guess not a single one of the signatories above has ever heard of let alone studied. Maybe they’ve heard of Theodore Roosevelt, just maybe.

Would we ask a factory manager surrounded by miles of dead plants for their advice on global water quality or healthy living? Of course not. Why did anyone take a job at the infamously anti-society OpenAI, let alone an evil Microsoft, if they ever truly cared about society?

Perhaps by now it has become common knowledge Tesla pay is illegally far below market, work benefits are in dangerous unhealthy decline, and staff are particularly screwed should they dare to invoke basic ethical concerns (e.g. discuss customer or worker safety).

He Died Helping Build Tesla’s Gigafactory. Tesla Didn’t Tell Local Officials.

It’s like reading what a car company would be if Queen Isabella came back from the dead to prove her ruthless deadly Inquisition was a business model.

Torture is so cruel, it is so dehumanizing to both the tortured and the torturer, that it is always wrong, unconditionally. “If torture is evil,” [Ron Gassner] writes, “its efficacy is irrelevant. Those who know it to be evil should reject torture outright, regardless of how efficacious it may or may not be.”

What if Tesla’s work culture is always wrong, unconditionally?

A toxic abuse culture of oppression for profit, as history surely tells us, means we should expect whistleblowers and some big leaks about basic morality failures (e.g. claims about the Queen of Tesla ignoring safety).

The drivers named in the leaks and contacted by the newspaper accused Tesla of brushing off their concerns about its Autopilot technology. It is alleged that employees are given strict guidelines over how to reply to complaints, with some drivers claiming that Tesla workers were urged to avoid written communication to “offer as little attack surface as possible.”

Nobody expects the Tesla Inquisition?

Written communication about customer complaints gives… customers an attack surface?

Customers.

Who is the enemy here?

Perhaps Spain is too obscure a reference. Tesla does burn its customers alive, like in the Inquisition, but we’re talking modern technology.

Did a zombie Nixon come back to become the crazy old man of Tesla?

The files shared with Handlesblatt included details of 2,400 complaints about cars accelerating unexpectedly and 1,500 automatic braking problems – including 139 cases of unintentional emergency braking and 383 “phantom stops”. One customer, who complained about his car “phantom braking”, claimed Tesla showed an “absolute lack of any concern given the seriousness of the security problems”.

That’s like an American citizen saying Nixon had an absolute lack of concern about the seriousness of destroying democracy.

Uh, yeah. Duh.

Allegedly Tesla believes they have perfected a draconian NDA that is so regressive they internally consider it a legal sledgehammer that criminalizes any and all speech they don’t like regardless of safety.

The company said a former employee had “misused his access as a service technician to exfiltrate information in violation of his signed non-disclosure agreement, Tesla’s data management policies…”.

Let me guess, the data management policy says if any data involves customer safety concerns it must not be retained.

It does seem like they learned the exact wrong lessons from Nixon.

“Well, the hell with Dean,” Nixon told Haldeman that Monday morning in the Oval Office. “Frankly, I don’t want to have in the record discussions we’ve had in this room on Watergate.” In another conversation later in the day, the president agreed with Haldeman that they ought to “get rid” of the recordings.

But seriously, while trying to cancel the voice of its customers, Tesla has very sloppily leaked things they probably wish they had deleted.

The files include tables containing more than 100,000 names of former and current employees, including the social security number of Tesla CEO Musk, along with private email addresses, phone numbers, salaries of employees, bank details of customers and secret details from production, Handelsblatt reported. The breach would violate the GDPR, it said. If such a violation was proved, Tesla could be fined up to 4 percent of its annual sales, which could be 3.26 billion euros.

If you ask me how Germany was tricked by Tesla’s CEO to open a clearly horrible and degenerative factory riddled with ethical lapses, I’d say read the related American history.

…manipulative, master politician overseeing every detail: approving a “shakedown”… for donations, fixing the price…, orchestrating “dirty tricks” against opponents, thanking the donor of hush money….

Very modern stuff. Still reminds me of 1470s Spain. I don’t think any German politicians have been burned alive… yet.

The bottom line is there should be an outright ban (e.g. Speak Out Act) on Tesla’s obvious abuse of any NDA in automotive safety disputes.

Tesla has a long history of trying to cover up customer complaints about safety problems. As far back as 2016, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration had to announce that customers were allowed to publicize safety issues after reports that Tesla was requiring customers to sign nondisclosure agreements to qualify for warranty repairs on problematic Model S suspensions systems.

That brings forward the question of whether Tesla should also be investigated for suspicious NDA language used to fill its German factory with the “chaos” of easily manipulated and abused foreign workers who have no clue about safety or rights violations.

When Gregor Lesnik left his pregnant girlfriend in Slovenia for a job [far away in another country], his visa application described specialized skills and said he was a supervisor headed to a [completely different] auto plant.

Turns out, that wasn’t true.

The unemployed electrician had no qualifications to oversee… workers and spoke only a sentence or two of [the required foreign language]. He never set foot in [the facility that was written into his papers, a direct competitor to Tesla, to defraud the government]. The companies that arranged his questionable visa instead sent Lesnik to a menial job…. He earned the equivalent of $5 an hour to expand the plant for… Tesla.

Lesnik’s three-month tenure ended a year ago in a serious injury and a lawsuit that has exposed a troubling practice… [of Tesla lying to everyone about everything while censoring others].

That’s just a hint of what could be ahead for any journalist brave enough to interview silenced Tesla factory workers in Germany… as predicted by a 2016 report that didn’t get nearly enough attention.

The part where they report Tesla had lawyers take desperate unskilled Eastern Europeans to apply for visas for work at a BMW factory, and then under strict NDA illegally redirected them into Tesla factory jobs with no qualification or safety… it’s so evil, you can’t make this stuff up.

Think about it. If their NDA-based visa fraud gets investigated, Tesla planted false flags to misdirect authorities for its competitors to get in trouble. That’s a very 1980s South African way of undermining government while wrecking markets too.

Tesla reminds me of when Ford was excitedly pushing politicians to increase production of its cars in Germany using slave labor from Eastern Europe. Who else remembers?

Right Germany?

I mean, right? Extreme right?

Did you Nazi this coming?

There’s a note in 2018 about how Steve Bannon’s guidance for the GOP was to take a topic and “flood it with shit“.

Although no connection to history was made at that time, just a year earlier an obvious explanation for his strategy was sitting ripe and ready for anyone to pick it up. He had worked in Hollywood on a film “very much like Soviet propaganda”.

Julia Jones, who worked as Bannon’s screenwriting partner for a decade… described how Bannon admired the documentary films made by the Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl, such as “Triumph of the Will”: “Her playbook was key for him. I think he used her technique of fear, which you can see in that movie [In the Face of Evil, released by Bannon in 2004].”

Budget? $500,000 (estimated). Gross sales US & Canada? $110,577. Bannon had written this movie glorifying Reagan’s biogtry under the premise of “racists enable racists…turns of phrase and tropes are daggers.”

By 2015 Bannon had transitioned from such propagandist attempts within Hollywood to become chairman of political extremist Breitbart News, clearly motivated to “flood it with shit”. A year later in 2016 he was hired to be CEO overseeing disinformation tactics in a GOP campaign for President.

Why had Bannon become so enamored of Nazis that he helped one run for President? Why did he love propaganda methods to destroy truth and replace it with fear, generating false fascist narratives about “strong white men” as saviors?

Arguably it goes back to his role as a low-level budget planner in the U.S. Navy and, while deployed at sea, being heavily imbibed on baseless fears about the Iranian hostage crisis.

Ronald Reagan worked covertly to block American attempts to free their hostages in Iran, as a means to win the Presidency.

Bannon worshiped Reagan and saw such “means to win” as perfectly fine. It is exactly why Bannon two decades later planned in 2007 to make a completely fabricated propaganda hit piece about Jews and Muslims, calling them a threat to the Nixon/Reagan vision of America run only by white men.

Early symptoms of his fear-addled power-thirst showed up in around 1995 during a bitter lawsuit:

What sunk Bannon was, he lied…

And then in 1996 he was…

…charged with spousal abuse, simple battery, and dissuading a witness, because he had made it impossible for his wife to talk to the police.

And then 1997:

He claimed that he would sue the school if they accepted our children… the biggest problem he had with [school] is the number of Jews that attend. He said he doesn’t like Jews…

Clearly over the years he has been repeatedly accused of using horrible, ginned-up hate tactics in order to get whatever he wanted.

It’s an interesting fact that Bannon spun from being a scared bean-counter in the bowels of the Navy to go work in Hollywood, in Goldman Sachs and ultimately get rich only because of a lottery ticket — some early papers he signed on the sitcom Seinfeld.

…Bannon’s legitimation of a white nationalism that hates Jews but admires Israel has forced a reckoning with the single-minded meaning of the “new anti-Semitism”…

His “new anti-Semitism” would thus be the more classic variety, riding the backs of Jews while subtly trying to blame them for any and all failures, as if an almost exact repeat of the Nazi propaganda machine created by Riefenstahl to manipulate fear, in order to hide a fascist fraud-to-riches platform.

Bannon, Brian Kolfage, Andrew Badolato and Timothy Shea defrauded hundreds of thousands of donors in connection with the “We Build the Wall” campaign [based on false xenophobic fear mongering], which raised $25m (£19m), the Department of Justice (DoJ) said. Bannon received more than $1m, at least some of which he used to cover personal expenses, the DoJ said.

In the “pitbull without lipstick” world of the GOP the Bannon pedigree of pushing hateful lies served to navigate them into the morass they operate today. They seem not to mind at all taking his lead as their own, while leaving “Sloppy Bannon” behind and stuck into charges of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering, not to mention contempt of democracy.

And one final thought, Hollywood became what it is today because all the movie-making talent fled from Berlin, Germany in the 1930s.

From the time Adolf Hitler became Germany’s chancellor in 1933 to the opening salvos of World War II in 1939, about 800 actors, directors, writers, composers and producers fled Europe for the safety of America. The Third Reich’s loss was Hollywood’s gain as the infusion of artistic talent changed moviemaking for decades to come.

Seems sadly predictable that men like Bannon hate others for surviving and thriving like this. How dare Hollywood be so diverse, skilled and enjoy success, proving every day that Hitler failed? Bannon’s toxic competitive thirst based on fears means he fixates on easy profits and hates freedoms; but he stands out as especially easy to explain, given his overt attraction to Nazi propaganda methods intended to defraud the public and steal power… especially from “liberals” who *gasp* believe in collaboration.

The CEO of Twitter recently has been running a heavy handed PR campaign spreading hate speech to make American cities look bad.

His lawyers, in a truly bizarre twist of logic, now want Tesla customers to stop paying for their cars if they live in a city (they dislike for any reason, or no reason at all).

…lawyer Alex Spiro reportedly “loudly opined that it was unreasonable… to pay… since San Francisco was a s— hole,” and Musk himself said “he would only pay… over his dead body.”

Imagine the mind of a person who says they will only pay if they’re dead.

Clearly a genius at work there, since Tesla software reportedly is designed to kill new owners almost immediately after buying the car.

But now there’s a loophole that every dead Tesla owner will want in their will. Plot twist!

The big fancy lawyers of Tesla have clearly announced nobody should pay for things, anything, when they live in a city.

Did you hear that Tesla owners? Move to a city and you don’t have to pay for your car, even when it kills you before you kill others!

Something tells me people living in a city are too modest to want to own a s- hole Tesla that tries to kill you and everyone around you. They don’t really even want to own cars. Even a free early death is still early death, if you see the problem.

Perhaps that’s the real story here.

Tesla rapidly is losing market share and cities are no exception (as residents read about suburban owners being burned alive, their houses destroyed, by design flaws). The CEO is using his Digital Dearborn Independent as a vehicle to unleash tired hate speech without fear it will impact sales.

Or even more to the point, he doesn’t care about sales. He cares about attention. Political attention.

In fact, the less Tesla sells (repeat customers hard to find if they keep dying abruptly), the more hate speech Twitter will foment as their new business model or even political platform.

Don’t need to sell cars if the business shifts to a 1930s sentiment of trying to get paid to monopolize violence… like how GOP politician Kris Kobach wrote his Harvard thesis promoting South African Apartheid as a great business model for white men.

Has Twitter hired Tucker “it’s the birth rates” Carlson yet to promote racist talking points? Or has he been burned to death already after someone put him in a Tesla? So much death, so little news about who and why.

Come to think of it, Tesla’s CEO loudly complaining with Carlson that Hitler was right and women should be forced into birthing, while he is selling cars that seriously decline the population… seems very much the warning nobody should overlook.

From the 1920s through the 1980s a major talking point of white nationalists (e.g. Prime Minister Hertzog) in South Africa was population decline (e.g. “replacement theory” or “swamping”) despite the country at the time experiencing a population surge.

Guess who has two thumbs, whines constantly about bogus population decline theory, and originally is from 1980s South Africa? The Tesla CEO telling Twitter lawyers dumb things to say. His antics seem more and more out of date the more he talks, just like an old “verlig-verkrampstryd“.

ChatGPT, given your weirdly close relationship with Tesla money based on withheld payments, what do you think?