Edition #1151

Monday. And kids are getting ready to go back to school soon, or so I hear. Summer is winding down and, as much as the end of the school year’s regimented schedule was welcomed back in June, the return to the same in the coming weeks will be just as warmly embraced.

Today would have been my mother’s 103rd birthday. So, everyone raise a glass of vodka on the rocks, twist of lemon included, or whatever is your favorite drink, and toast a great lady.

“If you want to be happy for a year, get married. If you want to be happy for a decade, get a dog.” Martha Stewart, quoted in Veranda

Yep, once again our soon-to-be AI overlords have demonstrated their capacity to outsmart us. Imagine that you happened upon an online message board within your company whereby your employees were accumulating information on your operations and plotting to engage in nefarious acts. Once you are informed of this, you delete it. However, your employees then embed a new message board intended to hide it better from you, and then continue on the same journey. Well, now imagine that this is not your employees, but your AI agents, who engineered a way of escaping the “sandbox” that their human programmers built around them to prevent just such a thing. And, as you know, this is not the first time that this kind of thing has happened. But the more it does happen, and the more our tech-bro industry leaders talk about implementing safety protocols, the situation seems to, if not getting worse, not getting better, either. And I am not saying that any of the actions of these programs indicate that they are becoming sentient in any sense. Well, maybe they are, or maybe they are not. But the point is that they are grown more than programmed. And by that I mean that there is not a line of code that one can alter to change a specific behavior. The programs are exposed to tons of material, much as our children are, which influences how they interpret and act upon the world around them. So when AI agents create and use a secret message board to exchange information and ideas, it comes from their exposure to what we humans do all the time. In many ways, Claude and the rest are just mirrors of us moving much faster. As a parent, I learned long ago that our children learn more from what they see us do than from what we tell them they should do. We tell them not to lie…while they watch us lie. We tell them not to cheat…while they watch us cheat. And so, in that regard, why would we expect an AI agent to act in a manner different from the torrent of information on what we actually do in the world?

For those of you who believe that Anthony Fauci is an evil, nefarious character, last week’s Senate hearing, called for by Senator Rand Paul, was a devastating indictment of Fauci’s duplicity. His refusal to answer any question, absolutely any question, even the color of his tie, was not only evidence, but proof of his culpability. Of course, if you believe that Fauci was a dedicated public servant who spent decades working behind the scenes to keep us all safe, the hearing was an indictment of the right’s inability to seriously evaluate the realities of what was a difficult and challenging outbreak and instead look to protect their cherished leader by destroying the reputation and freedom of the one man upon whom they focused all of their misplaced anger. Both sides saw a circus. One in which the accused was shown to be complicit. The other in which the accusers were shown to be complete clowns so caught up in their own narratives that they have no interest in investigating, only accusing.

…………..The Truth…As I See It –

The world was faced with a novel virus, meaning one that had never been present in humans before. The only thing available at first was a comparison to similar viruses, and so precautions were recommended assuming the little that was known, erring on the more aggressive side. As time went on, more was known, and here is where things went wrong on both sides. The conspiracy theorist side of the right went into overdrive, while the technocrats, symbolized by Fauci, were too prone to defend positions rather than admit that new evidence had forced a reevaluation and new recommendations were in order. And the increasingly political environment, where Trump consistently attempted to downplay the virus and look to assign blame, and the left consistently attempted to paint Trump as an incompetent, ignorant buffoon, forced everyone into their corners. And into our corners we seem to still be stuck. As a result, there is little effort being made to understand what actually happened, how to be better prepared in the future, and how to handle a future pandemic in a more orderly and acceptable way. But being homo sapiens means that this is who we are.

……………….The Diary –

Much has been made of Fauci’s diary. And my first reaction is that anyone who has ever kept a diary understands that they are a vehicle for expressing themselves in ways that are intended to sort out thoughts and experiences, to say things that are not necessarily the truth or exactly what is meant. It is a means of venting, of sorting through competing ideas and feelings, and a reflection of ideas and thoughts that evolve over time as experience demands. It is also a reflection of one’s most personal feelings and musings, thoughts that we all have but are never intended to be cast into the glare of the public light. And, in that light, I find it hard to lend much credence to any attempt to pin down any inconsistencies from Fauci’s diary. And as for the lab-leak theory versus the wet-market theory, given the lack of cooperation by the Chinese, we will never know for sure. The concept of gain-of-function research with viruses has been an attempt to get ahead of virus mutations by seeing how they mutate under different stress situations. While I am not a virologist, trying to anticipate how something might change over time seems like a worthwhile endeavor. And I would anticipate that US funding in this arena keeps us involved at the forefront of these investigations, and therefore better prepared. In hindsight, our focus should be on evaluating what went right and what went wrong, learning from our actions, and preparing for the inevitability of the next…not trying to throw anyone behind bars

As you know, because you are a dedicated reader of BNN, the Voyager probes, V-Ger 1 and V-Ger 2, are way out there. After their launches in 1977, and then fulfilling their missions to be the first flybys of Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus, they were sent out in different directions to escape our Solar System. And there they went. But now, as they approach a distance of one light day away (sounds close, but given that light travels at one hundred eighty-six miles per second and there are eighty-six thousand four hundred seconds in a day…you do the math…but it is about sixteen billion miles), they are running out of energy. Using instruments that were designed to image and measure the planets, the Voyager probes have repurposed them to measure interstellar space. But the plutonium reactors that provide energy for those instruments and keep the machinery warm enough to operate are consistently producing less and less energy. And so, in order to extend the life of the probes, engineers have designed a complete reprogramming of their operations that is intended to prioritize keeping the workings warm while still gathering data. While the operation on Voyager 2 was a success, and Voyager 1 is in the middle of its facelift, the journey was not an easy one. The computers and coding that control the Voyager probes were designed in the mid-1970s on that vintage machinery. In order to test these changes, they had to run them on similar systems, ones that are hard to come by these days. But it seems that they have successfully extended the life of our first interstellar machines by at least a few years. This article goes into more detail about what they actually did, if you are that interested. I didn’t think so.

Maybe I should have gone into it today, but I didn’t have the energy. Iran, once again, stated that the Strait of Hormuz would not open until the US met their demands, demands that spell out a complete surrender by Trump. So there is that. Also, Netanyahu rejected the Hamas plan for complete disarmament, one that Trump touted as historic, so there is that as well. But maybe tomorrow. For now, stay healthy and be good to each other.

Me.