It’s a problem that the KKK in America fraudulently campaign on an underdog ticket.

According to historians Ed Ayers and Brian Balogh, Americans have long rooted for the underdog.

It’s truly problematic that the oppressors can somehow twist logic into appearing as if they’re victims.

Our country and the very fabric of our existence as the United States of America come from our ability to rise up and excel during improbable circumstances, dating all the way back to the Revolutionary War.

Being a horrible “loser” in fact motivates support.

The phenomenon has also been documented outside sports. In one 1980 study — conducted during the presidential election — participants disproportionately rooted for Ronald Reagan when told that Jimmy Carter had a lead in the polls, and rooted for Carter when told that Reagan did.

A lot of it links to the KKK fraudulently claiming it is somehow unfair that white men don’t get to rule the country judged only by their gender and race.

…when someone has been disadvantaged unfairly, being the underdog can actually make that person appear significantly more physically attractive.

So you can see the problem, hopefully, when The Economist writes that an American politician is disadvantaged from being “politically inept, morally barren and temperamentally unfit for office.”

I’m surprised the presidential ticket didn’t become a deplorable candidate calling themselves “morally barren” as if a badge of honor. Imagine posters saying “vote for me, I’ve been called politically inept”.

Thus, an oppositional politician who tried calling Americans “deplorables” was like pouring gasoline on a burning cross that only makes Americans fight harder… for the wrong side.

After all, George Washington leveraged horribly racist propaganda to amass a violent rebellion for the purposes of profit from war and preventing abolition of slavery. His take on starting a revolution against Britain was to save the poor colonial white man, stop American Blacks from being free, to stop Native Americans from gaining prosperity.

He reminds me of another famous American, a guy who gets his name put on sweatshirts and ballcaps all the time as if he wasn’t a horrible genocidal megalomaniac.

Was Leland Stanford a ‘Magnanimous’ Philanthropist or a ‘Thief, Liar, and Bigot?’

In that sense, actual underdogs had their identity appropriated by a white man and his militia who set a tone that repeatedly resurfaces in American political theater. Watching election campaigns today seems not that different from the past methods of racist propaganda. The KKK doesn’t go away because they never get effectively portrayed as the elitist, power-hungry oppressors they truly are.

During WWI, black soldiers boarding trains to leave Okla­homa City held banners that read, DO NOT LYNCH OUR RELATIVES WHILE WE ARE GONE.

And of course we all know that after WWI these black veterans and their relatives were firebombed, murdered and buried in mass graves by the KKK.

Some even argue the KKK aren’t the KKK, embedding a comical “no true Scotsman” fallacy into their defense against accountability. The oppressors are presented as some kind of fiction, allowing false underdog status to be stolen by them more casually.

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?