Confusion of large language models with general "artificial intelligence" is causing panic.

Artificial general intelligence may someday be developed, and if so it could pose many sorts of dangers, I recommend _A Fire upon the Deep, for an example, and Accelerando. And many other stories, with a wide variety of outcomes.

I agree that these systems can be dangerous. But they are dangerous in the short term in ways that hardly resemble the disaster scenarios. Indeed, artificial general intelligence is unnecessary for digital systems to bring disaster. Imagine payment systems that track all purchases, and transportation systems that track people's travel. Those already exist, and if we don't want our countries to be like China, we need to abolish them.

ChatGPT is nothing like that. It can't make coherent plans, let alone carry them out. It can generate text that looks like a plan until you study it carefully. The problems it causes come from side effects.

High-speed rail may finally be built in the US, starting with a line from Los Angeles to Las Vegas.

While the US has done almost nothing for decades, China has covered the whole country with high-speed train lines. Why has the US failed to do this? I conjecture that in the US, businesses are too powerful. So powerful that they can stop the US government from doing important things, such as building train lines.

By contrast, in China the government is more powerful than any combination of businesses. So if the Chinese government decides to build the railroad equivalent of the interstate highway system, and boost the country's industrial capacity, it can go ahead and do that.

China is using that boost in industrial capacity to build up its armed forces so it can conquer Taiwan and turn it into hellish tyranny. Meanwhile, the US can barely afford to defend Ukraine. And since business orders the US government to crush the poor, the poor turn towards fascism.

*Twitter and Saudi officials face racketeering lawsuit over jailed satirist.*

(satire) *Trump Condemned For Giving Platform To CNN.*

In his long CNN "town hall", the bullshitter brushed aside inconvenient facts by opening the firehose of lies.

I have a hunch that CNN intended this program to increase its audience among US fascists, and that it succeeded.

There were a few topics on which the bullshitter seemed unwilling to dismiss reality entirely. For instance, he said he would quickly end the war in Ukraine, but refused to state any support for it. This gives us reason to believe he still supports Putin and would "end the war" by stabbing Ukraine in the back. This would end the deaths in combat, but would not end the killing. The Putin forces did plenty of killing in parts of Ukraine that were occupied in the first months of the war, as well as kidnapping and torture. If the war turns into a bigger occupation, they will surely continue.

The line that the bullshitter is following was worked out by many progressives, who now demand to "end the war" at any cost. After years of condemning the US for starting gratuitous wars based on lies, they can't adjust to a situation where for once the US is on the right side.