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by Flo Read

Billionaire Peter Thiel addresses students at the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford

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Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer have a secret agreement to talk about the culture wars as much as possible, Peter Thiel has said.

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Speaking at the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford as part of the Scruton Memorial lecture series, the Silicon Valley billionaire argued that the Prime Minister and Labour leader were trying to distract the population from the economic problems facing the country:

- Peter Thiel

He began his speech with a chant he remembered from his days as a student at Stanford: Hey hey, ho ho, western cultures got to go. It sums up, he says, a battle that has raged ever since. But the woke vs. anti-woke dichotomy is a magic trick designed to distract us from what is really going on.

Thiel singled out the housing crisis, which successive politicians have failed to remedy over the last two decades: Think about the craziest woke excess in the UK of the last 10 years and then think about how it increased aggregate housing prices, he told the audience, before adding that the Marxist critique had quite a bit to it:

- Peter Thiel

Thiel asserted that the Left was more prone to trying to repeat old radical ideas than the Right, warning that going back to Blair is a mistake we have to make in the UK:

- Peter Thiel

In his address and subsequent conversation with philosopher John Gray, Thiel said there were other issues that politicians and elites were attempting to distract from. One was the decline of the sciences in universities.Be suspicious of cancer researchers claiming theyll have a breakthrough in just a few more years, Thiel warned. Science has been degraded, and it is no longer progressing:

- Peter Thiel

The most significant loss in contemporary society, according to Thiel, has been that of God and religion. Its an odd thing to be distracted from, Thiel said, because it suggests so many ways that this debate could be reframed. Wokeness, meanwhile, was a perversion and acceleration of Christian narratives: woke post-Christian temptation is to be more Christian than the Christians.

The venture capitalist concluded that a possible alternative to the extremes of fascism or communism might be some form of Christian democracy.

Read more:
Peter Thiel: UK leaders have 'secret agreement' to talk up culture wars - UnHerd

Its hard for Americans in the 21st century to think about their guns as ordinary objects. When nightmarish events like the recent mass shooting in Maine occur, we retreat to reassuring positions in the culture wars.

Gun cultureis our collective, contentious effort to apply meaning to these inanimate things made of wood, plastic, and steel. For some, guns may be the biggest force for evil in America, as Seattle Times columnist David Horsey wrote last year of the firearms industry. For others, like the National Rifle Association, guns are in fact the best defense against malevolent supernatural forces. In the aftermath of the horrific 2012 mass slaughter of children in Newton, Connecticut, NRA executive vice-president Wayne LaPierre explained that genuine monsters walk among us, people so deranged, so evil, so possessed by voices and driven by demons that no sane person can possibly ever comprehend them. We ought to expect similar platitudes from the gun lobby in response to Maine in the days ahead.

A 2021 study by a group of sociologists found a correlation between Americans who believe in the earthly presence of demons and devils and support the expansion of gun rights. You might negotiate with metaphorical monsters, you might think the laws you pass limit their ability to harm others, but when it comes to genuine monsters, you must shoot to kill.

To kill fantastical creatures, you need fantastical weapons. Thats where the gun industry comes in, to provide you with the talisman you need to operate in a world in which evil people possessed by demons walk. Guns are more than just metal and plastic, more than just technology. They protect, defend, secure, preserve, and safeguard. They connect, too, linking gun owners present with an imagined past, with those who resisted tyranny with arms, or who took up arms to fight for causes noble and ignoble. Youa white man armed with an AR-15 and storming your state capitol building to protest state coronavirus restrictions, or stockpiling guns just outside Washington, D.C., on January 6, 2021you are the minuteman who grabs his musket to answer the call to confront the Redcoats. Magical thinking about guns is one of gun capitalisms most effective products, turning cheap crap into cherished commodities, at the cost of a society increasingly fearful and armed.

Read More: Maine Is Missing Opportunities to Stop Gun Violence, Experts Say

Magical thinking about guns is a kind of fetishism, which sees guns as totems instilled with meaning beyond their basic material parts. Its a variant of what Karl Marx called commodity fetishism, which obscured the more mundane material realities of the social relations of industrial capitalism. Commodities were raw materials transformed through human labor into objects of utility. But capitalism made magic of them, in the process making invisible the labor of the exploited workers who made raw materials into consumer goods.

Gun capitalists of the 19th century first learned to sell the magic of guns to American consumers. Samuel Colt and Oliver Winchester, among others, knew that selling guns meant selling stories about guns and thus imbuing the guns with cultural meaning. God created men equal. Colonel Colt made them equal, went one variation of a popular tagline, while Winchesters Model 1873 rifle was the gun that won the West. These early gun capitalists were storytellers as much as they were inventers and tinkerers.

The innovative gun capitalists of the postwar United States crafted a different narrative. Chief among them was Samuel Cummings, founder of Interarms, which became the worlds largest arms dealer by the 1960s. While the press occasionally linked him to international arms dealing intrigue, he made most of his money in the most mundane of ways: he sold American consumers millions of cheap guns. His biggest moneymakers in Interarmss first two decades were war surplus firearms, hauled out of European warehouses where they had been collecting dust. Cummings cleaned them upsporterized them, in the parlance of the times, anticipating the 21st centurys modern sporting rifle by a half-centuryand shipped them to hunters and collectors and the gun-curious, mostly white men, suddenly flush with cash in the afterglow of Americas moment of global supremacy.

The story Cummings and the new postwar gun capitalists toldthe magic they soldwas of a country without limits when it came to partaking of the worlds bounty of firearms. Interarmss advertisements, packed with dozens of guns for sale, most of them war surplus imports, spoke of abundance and power: guns from vanquished foes like Germany, Japan, and Italy, and even from new rivals the Soviet Union, could be yours for as little as $10. The gun consumer was a global conqueror. Cummings joked that a cheap Carcano rifle made in wartime Italy, just like the one Lee Harvey Oswald used to kill John F. Kennedy, was a throwaway gun, one you could leave out in the woods after you bagged your first deer.

Oswalds Carcano inevitably drew attention, however, as did the plague afflicting urban residents in an era of rising crime rates: cheap handguns, many of them also imports, mass-produced in fly-by-night factories in Western Europe out of scrap metal leftover from the war. When Congress began debating new restrictions on firearms in 1963, a movement of consumers rose up to oppose itthe gun rights movement. The National Rifle Association, arguably the worlds most successful consumer lobby, stepped in to help write new laws that would not so much prevent gun violence as they would protect gun consumerism. The resulting 1968 Gun Control Act was a mild set of restrictions that respected the fundamental legitimacy of the gun consumer market and sought to protect the law-abiding citizenanother magical totem of our gun culturefrom certain categories of people (like convicted felons) who might give gun buyers a bad name.

The Gun Control Act didnt make anyone happy. Despite prioritizing the needs of the law-abiding citizen, it angered gun rights activists convinced that it was the first step down a slippery slope toward totalitarianism. For the early grassroots gun control activists emerging after 1968, the law was so weak precisely because it was written to placate gunmakers and consumers. These activists urged their political leaders to look to other liberal democracies around the world, which either rejected guns as a market good altogether or regulated the gun consumer market so extensively as to make it unrecognizable to its American counterpart.

Todays predominant understanding of the Second Amendmentthe widespread popular belief that this constitutional provision protects an individual right to own a firearm independent of service in a militiaemerged in the first decades after the Second World War, when gun consumerism boomed and Cold War anxieties supercharged conservative politics. Just as consumers grew accustomed to Cummingss seemingly limitless bounty, state and federal officials started debating how to restrict it. A burgeoning gun rights movement seized on the obscure Article II of the Bill of Rights (few Americans in 1968 could have told you what right it protected) to claim that any limits on gun ownership amounted to a violation of basic freedoms. Those activists saw themselves as the well-regulated militia (even if few of them were active members of the United States actual militia, the National Guard), ready and eager to defend the nation from its external and internal enemies. But as the gun rights movement increasingly became a popular gun consumer movement in the 1970s and 1980s, the right-wing cold warriors commitment to what the Constitution calls the unorganized militia fell by the wayside, and the Second Amendment increasingly became a statement of consumer rights centering the individuals desire rather than the collective good. It, too, is fetishized, divorced from its historical origins and imbued with mystical power.

But the Second Amendment says nothing about capitalism or commerce; its two crucial verbs are keep and bear, neither of which is or ever has been a synonym for buy, sell, distribute, market, or manufacture. Yet weve mostly fought our political battles over guns on the field of commerce. Various federal efforts to restrict guns stand on Congresss constitutional power to levy taxes and regulate interstate commerce. Any suggestion that a government has an obligation to defend its citizens from deadly violence is met with the circuitous counterargument that the government cant strip the citizen of the right to defend himself from his own government. If gun capitalism sold magical abundance in the 1960s, today it sells the fantasy of insurrection and righteous violence against political enemies, or even against ones own government of the people.

Thinking about gun capitalism means thinking about the quotidian experience of buying and selling guns in America. Sam Cummings didnt sell freedom or security or insurrection; he sold cheap crap. Thinking about gun capitalism also means considering how weve written our laws and built a legal and state infrastructure to accommodate all that gun buying and selling. Gun capitalism is too deeply embedded in our political life, and as a result, too easily obscured by its ability to make magic out of the mundane, to convince us that only the most lethal violence can stop the monsters and demons that walk among us.

Excerpt from:
How Magical Thinking Gave Guns Their Power - TIME

Where have all the flowers gone? American icon Pete Seeger sang. When will we ever learn?

This question stands. Our children, family, friends and neighbors die at the hands of angry, violent men (mostly) and boys shooting legal assault weapons at innocent, peaceful citizens trying to live freely. We increasingly use firearms to kill ourselves at vulnerable moments, too. Firearms are now the biggest culprit in the death of our children. We are exhausted, exasperated and outraged.

Keep hope, take action, we are also a rightful majority.

Im 100% with author Stephen King, who said last week: Stop electing apologists for murder. Im also with Pulitzer Prize winner Nicholas Kristof, who wrote: Lets try to bypass the culture wars and try a harm reduction model familiar from public health efforts to reduce deaths from other dangerous products such as cars and cigarettes.

Teach peace at home and at school lets strongly work to raise more gentle men. Support litigation that holds manufacturers and marketers of defective battlefield products accountable for this reign of terror. If you see something, say something.

We must all channel our anger and heartfelt prayers into a sense of purpose.

Peter Scott Yarmouth

Previous

Read more:
Letter to the editor: We must channel anger into a stand against gun ... - Press Herald

In an unexpected move that surprised parents, educators and community members, the school board in a small Garfield County school district Wednesday night suddenly voted 3-to-1 to adopt the state social studies standards that were backed by a diverse committee of district residents.

Community members had been expecting the board for Garfield County School District RE-2 to institute the controversial American Birthright social studies standards after this Novembers election. However, Board President Tony May pulled the discussion item from the agenda after learning a local committee was going to recommend the board instead adopt the state social studies standards. Pulling the item from the agenda enraged community members who packed the boardroom Wednesday night.

Twenty-nine speakers spoke in support two did not of the state-adopted standards. One called the Birthright standards religiously and politically charged, and many spoke of their fatigue over political battles at school board meetings.

Over the last year Ive watched the priorities change from doing whatever it takes to help every child to fighting meaningless culture wars and pushing radical agendas that do not benefit or even reflect the interests and needs of the community, said Celeste Kratzer, who grew up in Rifle and now teaches at Rifle Middle School.

But what most struck community members was how a social studies review committee composed of residents from different political and economic backgrounds, faiths and beliefs agreed on recommendations for the board.

Garfield County is a conservative county on the Western Slope, and the school district student body is more than half Latino.

Everyone came together to hash it out, to really figure out what the community of this district really wanted, said Jay Puidokas during the comment period. And it was extremely eye-opening to see the values align.

State law requires each school district to host a local forum about the new social studies standards. Garfield chose to create a 59-person committee to review how well three sets of standards the adopted state social studies standards, revised state standards, and the American Birthright standards aligned with several Colorado laws and how well the standards aligned to community values.

Our entire goal has been to work collaboratively with the school board and with our community to understand what the community values are, said Jacob Pringle, secondary school curriculum director.

In the end, 83 percent of the committee members decided that the state-adopted standards best aligned with law and the communitys core values.

You have brought us together Director May, by inciting this outlandish political conversation. People from across the spectrum are now united in our community, Angela Strode of Rifle told the board.

She said the board needs to move on to other issues such as a school staff shortage.

We need to harness the energy behind me to start fixing the problems in our schools.

After hours of testimony, the board majority voted to move forward on the social studies standards.

Last year the state board of education passed new social studies standards to align with several state laws. The most controversial called for social studies standards to reflect the history, cultures and social contributions of diverse peoples. The law names specific groups: African American, Latino, American Indian, Asian Americans, and LGBTQ people.

Some Garfield board members pushed back on the states adopted standards.

But the community, alarmed that the option could be the American Birthright standards, began to rally. Several parents said they were afraid the district was going down the same path as the Woodland Park school district, where a conservative board adopted Birthright standards and instituted several dramatic changes, including the elimination of many mental health counselors and social worker positions. An estimated forty percent of school staff left Woodland Park last year.

We dont want our community to be torn apart like Woodland Park, where vocal ideologues took over the school board, causing chaos where there used to be peace, Willow Brotzman, a parent with two students in the RE-2 District, said in a press release issued Thursday after the vote.

District leaders in Garfield led an exhaustive community review process that involved public surveys, community and staff meetings as well as a social studies curriculum committee to identify the core values the community wanted to see embedded in the social studies standards, such as students becoming independent problem solvers and being a critical thinker.

Still, despite many in the community backing state standards, curriculum leaders said there is wariness among some in the community around LGBTQ topics in school.

If a 4th grade student asks what LGBTQ is, asked board member Jason Shoup, is that instructor obligated to get that in-depth? Or in the (district) training (for state adopted standards), does it give avenues of an out?

Simone Richardson, elementary curriculum director, gave an example of how such an issue might arise according to state-adopted standards: a teacher is reading a book about mom and dad taking their children to the zoo. If a child raises his hand and says, I have two dads who took me to the zoo! the teacher acknowledges the child and moves on, she said.

Much of training would be around how does a family carry out those conversations and not an educator, said Richardson, meaning teachers could encourage students with more questions to ask their parents.

Pringle, the secondary school curriculum director, said training for teachers prior to the implementation of new standards would consist of age-appropriate responses.

District officials will now make sure the curriculum aligns to the state-adopted standards. Garfield RE-2 has three open seats on the school board this election.

Go here to see the original:
Garfield County residents rallied against the American Birthright ... - Colorado Public Radio

As I head to the UKs AI Safety Summit Fringe reading the Governments AI discussion paper, some diverse forces have been shaping my own reflections on AI safety: the Gaza-Israel crisis, humanitarian law and principles, and science fiction film, The Creator.

Recently, many of us working across humanitarian aid agencies have been responding to events in the Middle East. As a community, we are calling loudly for parties to de-escalate violence, allow unfettered humanitarian access, and protect civilians.

Ill leave others to write about Israel and Gaza, but the political, legal and emotional complexity of this protracted crisis also lends insight into some of AIs thorniest issues and the human dynamics at their centre.

If we think of AI as the architecture of a new societal order that could perpetuate harmful power structures unless they are actively designed out of the plans, then it feels logical to infer lessons from human contexts where decision-making, bias, neutrality, reliable information, and humanity itself are stress-tested.

Whose safety?

Safety in its simplest definition, means protection from harm. Laws can contribute to safe environments by setting boundaries ranging from national legislation protecting the right to life to international laws of war. Laws exist to keep people safe, they set norms and expectations, but the simple existence of a law does not guarantee it wont be violated.

More fundamentally, safety requires changing behaviour. Safety needs people to share a mindset, values and beliefs to act, or not act, in a way that harms others. Actively practising humanity, compassion, and addressing structural inequality is as critical to individuals safety as is the rule of law.

This applies to AI safety measures just as it does to peace agreements: for either to be meaningful, the process to get there has to be inclusive. If its only elites at the table, if different groups arent invited to share perspectives and shape decisions, they can soon collapse. The benefits and harms AI can confer or perpetuate diverge significantly according to the individual just as someones experience of a humanitarian catastrophe differs depending on their gender, age, ability and so on.

This is why we must build meaningful bridges between staff in frontier AI companies and Global South civil society, as I argue in How to Do Good and Avoid Doing Harm: 7 Actions for Big Tech, Governments and Civil Society. Otherwise, how can AI architects understand the lived experiences of people very different to themselves, and know what safety means to them?

Can humanity be programmed into machines? (Film spoiler alert)

At the end of a day working on Gaza-Israel, I went to see The Creator for what was intended as two distracting hours of light relief. In it, humans go to destructive war with artificial intelligence. (In retrospect, yes, it would have been wise to read the synopsis in advance).

The film opens with the bad guys artificial intelligence having blown up New York City and occupying New Asia. There, AI civilians are embodied in humanlike simulant form living alongside New Asian humans, while AI soldiers resemble a post-pubescent WALL-E.

Meanwhile, the West is fighting for humankinds freedom led by the good guys in the U.S. army.

So far, so similar to every human vs AI terminator movie.

But all is not as it seems, and this is where the film gets interesting. As our assumptions and biases are tested, the narrative raises questions about god-like AI, compassion, the fog of war, and what it means to be human.

For me, the film explores a key question: if it is our humanity that makes us human (which supposedly differentiates us and makes us superior to intelligent machines), then what does it mean when we lose our humanity?

Filmed in South East Asia, The Creator recalls films like Apocalypse Now and the barbarity of the Vietnam war. In one coastal scene, humans attack from the air with overwhelming force. We watch as the U.S. Army locks a missile target onto an individual AI robot on the ground. It runs, but cant escape the lethal blue circle tracking it. It appears scared and runs for cover where a terrified human family are already sheltering.

As they scream in fear realising they will be caught by the blast, the AI stops, reverses with reassuring raised hands, then sprints back towards open ground and immediate death. Recalling Isaac Asimovs Third Law of Robotics, the AIs instinct (or, adapted learning) is to prioritise the humans survival over its own.

Some techno-optimists argue that an AI-led world would be more compassionate than our human-ruled one. Its a polarising debate like that over existential risk and whether doomer arguments distract from existing and near-term harms.

In a weak moment, having never seriously engaged with the concept that an AI-led world could be more compassionate than our own, current world events caused me to run the thought experiment. Could an AI system be programmed to be more compassionate than a human? What is the nature of compassion?

Programming values into machines

As I consider this, I become trapped in an infinite loop. Why? Because its humans who build AI on foundations of human-selected data. Humans are exceptionally complicated and the decisions we make are based on deeply embedded beliefs, world-views and power dynamics. And selected data on which AI is trained can reflect, over-index, or miss that.

As AI systems are woven ever more into the global social fabric, becoming increasingly deferred to for signifiant decisions over citizens lives, will it ever be possible to solve this Escherian puzzle?

As we know both from the culture wars and violent conflict, people regularly fight over which truths and human rights are right. This even influences interpretations of globally agreed rules like the laws of war.

In other TMR articles, Ive discussed the seductive certainty provided by an algorithmic recommendation. And I dont mean the times Spotify suggests Old MacDonald over Miles Davis because a small child has borrowed your phone.

Im talking about harmful decisions being made in an earthquake response in poor areas where fewer people, especially women, have a mobile phone leading to inaccurate (biased) geospatial data. Or someone from the wrong part of a city being denied parole because biased data flags their characteristics as indicators of reoffending risk.

The Chief Commercial Officer of a frontier AI company recently told me, The thing is, you can programme bias out of an AI system. You cant do that with humans.

But as the creators of AI, its still humans deciding (or noticing) what constitutes bias, what that looks like in data and AI, and what is the right way to correct for and mitigate it. Programming bias AI out of AI system includes decisions on which data to include or exclude, how data is labelled, inclusive approaches to generating questions and gathering data (to know what data even exists), and, the small task of tackling the root causes and symptoms of inequality and marginalisation across society.

In short: who will programme the bias out of the human tasked with programming the bias out of the AI system?

The quality of humanity

Plotting a course towards safe AI means first navigating the messiness of humans, of competing human rights, and structural inequalities. AI safety will remain rhetorical unless there is inclusive analysis and informed protection across genders, age, ethnicities, financial status, geography and more.

Of the four principles that traditionally guide humanitarian aid work humanity, independence, impartiality and neutrality humanity is the one which raises fewest debates. As the UK welcomes the leaders of nations and AI companies to iconic Bletchley Park, not every attendee will share the same interpretation of safety.

But as a starting principle, maybe they can coalesce around one: humanity.

Hit Follow above to be alerted to new articles from The Machine Race blog. Share your comments, corrections and suggestions here, on LinkedIn, or on Twitter @TheMachineRace. Listen to Suzy Madigan talking about AI and society on the Standard Issue podcast and see the About page for authors biography. Thanks for reading.

Originally posted here:
AI Safety: Can we programme humanity? | by The Machine Race by ... - Medium