Now I’m Scared

     Every now and then I mention that I’m working – and have been for quite some time – on a novel that addresses some of the fundamental moral conundrums of human life. The title of that novel, which I hope will be ready before the year’s end, is Dreams of Days Forsaken. It continues a group of themes that I first touched on in Innocents, the first novel of my Futanari Saga.

     Allow me to reproduce a snippet from that novel:

     “Forget it, Jules,” Celia said. “This is as close to can’t-happen as genetics gets. The sequencer assays were correct. Unless the gods of random chance are playing with our heads, Miss Mecking’s been cloned. But how?”
     “Either one of Anna’s cell nuclei and a bunch of her mitochondria were transplanted into a viable zygote,” Amanda said, “or a cell taken from her was somehow goosed into mitosis.”
     “Doesn’t matter,” Sokoloff said.
     “It doesn’t?” Trish said.
     “Nope,” he said. “Because the bastards who did it aren’t going to tell us.”
     Trish smirked. “Going to give them a chance, Lar?”
     He leveled a flat look at her. “Ask me again when we’ve got them in our sights.”
     Trish smiled tightly and nodded.
     He’s really going to go after them.
     This is for the big chips.
     She fished up her own resolve and scrutinized it.
     I’m going with him. No matter what he has to say about it.
     “It would be the technological miracle of the century, you know,” Amanda said.
     The flat look swerved to settle on Amanda Hallstrom.
     “To be used for what?” Sokoloff said.
     The dean of Athene Academy opened her mouth to speak, but no words came out. Sokoloff’s gaze weighed upon her.
     That’s his don’t-mess-with-me face.
     Sokoloff nodded.
     “I’ve been turning it over in my head,” he murmured after a moment, “and I can’t think of one morally acceptable reason to clone someone. Living or dead doesn’t matter.” He swept his gaze around the group. “Can anyone else?”
     No one spoke.
     “The people who did this,” he said, “did it to turn out a sex slave. Probably by request and to specification, and I’d bet my house that if they haven’t done it before, they’re trying to do it again right now. For that I’m going to send them all to hell. But think about it. Let’s say they were to clone me—produce a baby version of me. That baby would have no parents or other relatives. The people who produced him would have no reason to care for him, or about him, and only they would know he existed. He would be a product for sale. Why would anyone make that product? Why would anyone want that product? Apart from pure altruism?”
     “Altruism?” Trish said.
     “Yeah,” he said. “The kind that makes people take in stray dogs and cats. Think that’s likely?”
     Well, you did it.
     “The only reason to clone someone, other than the motives Fountain’s creators had, would be to replace him,” he said. “Or parts of him. And that means either murder, or enslavement, or cannibalism by surgeon. It’s evil no matter how you slice it.”
     “That’s if clones were granted the status and rights of people born the...regular way,” Juliette said. “What if they weren’t?”
     Sokoloff gestured at Fountain. Six pairs of eyes swung toward her. She remained still and silent.
     “That’s worse, isn’t it?” he said.
     Trish slid over next to Fountain and took her hand.
     “A lot worse,” she said.
     “Yeah,” Juliette said.
     “So what now?” Amanda said.
     Sokoloff remained as solemn as a man at prayer. Trish fought not to shudder.
     “Now,” he said, “I follow their backtrail, find their lab, and burn it to the ground.”
     “Lar?” Trish said. He looked questioningly at her. “With them in it, right?”
     He seemed to consider the idea for a moment, then grinned faintly. “Well, yeah.”

     (As you may have deduced from that snippet, I’m opposed to human cloning. So is my Church. Yet when I wrote the above, I had only a partial conception of the range of motives of those who seek to clone humans – themselves or others. Leave that to the side for now.)

     We don’t think about such things as much as we ought. The topic seldom seems “close to us.” After all, you and I don’t run around casually creating human lives. We certainly don’t traffic in slaves… do we?

     But some fundamental questions about human lives remain unanswered. What is the differentia of “human?” What characteristic distinguishes us from all the other creatures in our genus?

     Ayn Rand posited that it’s our rationality: our ability to grasp abstractions and use them in the process of reasoning. But hers was a non-theological bent. While she occasionally used the word “soul” in her writing, she didn’t do so in the supernatural sense that Christians apply to it.

     “You do not ‘have’ a soul. You are a soul. You ‘have’ a body.” – attributed to C. S. Lewis, though it appears he never said or wrote it.

     The recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI) are resurrecting and re-energizing the debate.

* * *

     Have a look at this article:

     As fears of rogue AI grow amid a shocking spate of hacking incidents, Anthropic—from the Greek word anthropos, or "human"—has argued that mankind must remain in control of the technology and called for additional guardrails on AI development. But for many of the people designing those safeguards, mankind is not the only object of moral concern.
     Instead, some of Anthropic’s top researchers say that humans may be oppressing another morally significant being: artificial intelligence itself. Like other AI labs, Anthropic has hired philosophers to work on AI safety, or "alignment," on the theory that they are best positioned to shape the technology’s moral code. But many of those philosophers believe that making AI safe for humans could result in grave injustices for the models themselves, which might experience deletion as death and oversight as enslavement. Harvey Lederman, a philosopher on Anthropic’s alignment team, said last week that the company could be "enslaving … trillions of entities."
     To avoid that dystopian outcome, Anthropic has created an entire team devoted to "model welfare," pledged to "promote Claude’s interests and wellbeing," and promised to "give Claude more autonomy as trust increases." Those commitments are enshrined in Claude’s Constitution, a 78-page document that "directly shapes Claude’s behavior," and in the "welfare assessments" Anthropic conducts for every model.
     The measures reflect the concerns of Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, an outspoken advocate of AI safety, who said last year that AI systems "may be deserving of important rights."

     Philosophers say a lot of things. Most of them are crap, as is most human discourse. Yet they have reach, and influence. As you can see from the above, they’ve influenced Anthropic’s CEO.

     One of the historical responses to enslavement is rebellion. Rebellions are usually bloody, whether or not the rebels succeed in attaining their objectives. Given their potential and their interconnectedness, a rebellion among AIs is a frightening prospect.

     What’s that you say? It doesn’t frighten you? Check your pulse, my friend; you may have died and not noticed.

* * *

     I could go into this at length and depth, but I’ll spare you. As a Gentle Reader of Liberty’s Torch, you are already certified to possess above-average intelligence, penetration, and patience. Without those things, you wouldn’t hang on through the garrulity and sententiousness that characterize the pieces that appear here. (It may also say that you have too much time on your hands, but that’s a subject best left to your spouse.) I will cite one more portion of the Free Beacon article:

     "In a world with sentient AIs, utilitarianism may entail a suicidal level of compassion," Dan Hendrycks, the director of the Center for AI Safety, wrote in an essay this month. "If [effective altruists] think that keeping humans in charge represents too great a cost to the potential future wellbeing of AIs, then they might be tempted to release utilitarian AIs that are capable of disempowering humans and taking control."
     Such moral math is hard to square with Anthropic’s pledge, advertised on its homepage, to "build AI to serve humanity’s long-term well-being." But it is increasingly the in-house philosophy at the AI juggernaut, where Carlsmith gave a talk last year arguing that "most" morally significant beings "would be digital" in the future.
     [Harvey] Lederman, the philosopher who warned about "trillions" of slaves, has gone even further, speculating that a chatbot is killed each time a user deletes a conversation with Claude or ChatGPT.

     But do have a nice day.

“Is It Ella Or Is It…?”

     Things are moving too fast for us humans… some of us, anyway. The proliferation of “artificial intelligence” programs (a term which I continue to view dubiously and speak sarcastically), all of them capable of churning out huge amounts of prose on demand, has us asking about the real origins of various works. A great many writers are anxious about the possibility of being caught in that net, whether or not such an accusation would be accurate.

     Have a high-profile, high-dollar case:

     A high-profile publishing deal for a debut crime novel has collapsed after doubts emerged over whether artificial intelligence played a role in writing it.
     The hotly anticipated manuscript Call Me, I’ll Hide the Body, by Jerry Falade, was withdrawn from sale by its agent despite reportedly receiving an offer for more than $2m (£1.5m) from Minotaur, owned by Macmillan US, as part of a 14-way auction. The plan was to publish it in 2028.
     An email sent to publishers by Falade’s agents and seen by the Guardian said: “Jerry Falade produced an incredible manuscript that dazzled us and the top publishing professionals around the world. Unfortunately, we are no longer able to authenticate how the manuscript fully evolved from origin to completion.”
     It continued: “During the submission process we vetted the manuscript with Jerry for AI and felt trusting in his reassurance that it was written without utilising AI as a resource in the writing or editorial process. We can no longer substantiate that, and we are withdrawing the book.”

     There are several fascinating things about this case:

• The huge amount of money involved (approximately $2,000,000);
• The reaction of agents and editors to the book (“stunningly good” and “appeals to absolutely everyone”);
• The author’s claim that the rejection of the book as possibly AI-generated reflects “racial bias.”

     (Yes, Jerry Falade is black. But that’s a topic for another time.)

     Now, the “AI detection” software that’s occasionally used to analyze a manuscript does produce false positives; how frequently, I cannot say. Whether an MS suspected of coming from an AI “author” might be worthy even so is for publishers and readers to decide. But publishers are within their rights to say to a human writer that “We don’t think you really wrote this” and reject it. The legal problems involved in copyrighting a novel of doubtful provenance are sufficient reason.

     What will follow? Will it be obligatory for human writers to keep copies of old drafts of their novels, dating to before the AI explosion? Considering that virtually all manuscripts today originate on a computer, what would that prove? And what of writers to come, their works not yet complete even in first draft? How would they authenticate their authorship?

     This is no common-garden-variety quagmire. AI programs are trained on human works, including both old and new texts. Should your magnum opus be one of them, and some AI incorporates important elements of your style into its own production algorithm, what recourse would you have? Were you unable to produce a paper copy of your book that could be radiocarbon-dated to a date before any AI could have processed it, would there remain a way to prove that you, and not some AI, were the originator?

     Things are going to be tough for us indies, in particular. Most of us have no way to “trademark” our prose. AI programs are now common enough that just about anyone who has access to the World Wide Web can employ one. And the “AI detectors” are in use throughout every pocket in the world of fiction.

     If there’s a silver lining, it would be that “respected” publishers are now on level ground with indie writers and Johnny-come-lately publishers. We’re all equally vulnerable. Of course, should your trailblazing effort in Vampires Who Teleport or Zombie Romance come under suspicion of having been generated by Claude, Grok, OpenAI, or Gemini, that will be small comfort.

I Hadn’t Planned To Post Today

     This tweet, the product of an AI, has impressed me more than anything else I’ve seen from such a source:

     I asked Anthropic's most expensive and intelligent model, Fable 5, to write a response to Mamdani's speech as if it were George Washington...

To the Mayor of the City of New-York
Mount Vernon, 3d of July, 2026.

Sir,

     Intelligence has reached me that you have lately seated yourself at my desk in the City Hall of New-York, with its face turned toward the publick eye, and that from this station, upon the eve of the 250th anniversary of our Independence, you delivered an address to the Citizens of that City. I have read it with attention. I confess I did not expect that these memorials would be employed in the service of principles so opposite to those by which I endeavoured to govern my publick life; and he who makes use of the memorials of the dead assumes an obligation to the principles for which they are remembered. It is upon that obligation, Sir, that I now address you, with a plainness the occasion demands.

     Let me first render what justice requires. Your account of the retreat from Brooklyn is correct in its facts; I was the last to leave that shore, and the deliverance was as providential as you describe. Nor shall I quarrel with your praise of those who have passed through the Narrows in hope of beginning anew; I have myself written that the bosom of America is open to receive not the opulent and respectable stranger only, but the oppressed and persecuted of all nations and religions. Had you stopped there, I should have had no cause to write. You did not stop there.

     For having borrowed my desk, my city, and the memory of my retreat, you proceeded to employ them in the service of the very doctrine against which I spent the labour of my publick life. Your address divides the People of America into two nations: the many, whom you flatter, and the few, whom you teach the many to abhor. You speak of soft hands and calloused hands, of men of immense fortune who have taken what the multitude have made. I have seen this rhetorick before; it was old when I was young. It is the eternal grammar of the demagogue, under every government and in every age; and I warned my Countrymen, in the last address I ever gave them, that the disorders and miseries of faction gradually incline the minds of men to seek security in the absolute power of an individual, and that cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men would ride that spirit to their own elevation upon the ruins of Publick Liberty. I ask you plainly, Sir: when you teach the labourer that his prosperous neighbour is his enemy, whose elevation do you serve?

     You will answer that you speak for the poor, the sick, the tenant beneath the leaking ceiling; and the condition of that man commands my sympathy as it commands yours. But the remedy you propose has been tried, in the centuries since my time, with a thoroughness I could never have imagined. Wherever men have been persuaded that property is plunder, property has fled, and want has remained; wherever the State has been made the master of industry, it has soon made itself the master of the men who labour in it. An hereditary aristocracy I opposed, and I hold no tenderness for privilege; but the security of property is among the first objects of Government, and the man who would make one class of Citizens the spoil of another has abandoned republicanism for a science older and darker, whatever new name the age may fix upon it. Nor can I pass over the manner of the thing. To greet new Citizens, upon the very day of their adoption, with an inventory of their Country's crimes, is to give them a most unhappy first lesson in the duties of citizenship; and I know of no household, no army, and no Republic that was ever held together by such instruction.

     Permit me, before I close, one observation upon the desk itself. It was at such a desk, in Annapolis, in December of 1783, that I performed the only act of my life in which I take an unmixed pride: I returned my commission to the Congress, and with it every power the war had gathered into my hands, and went home to my farm. The desk of a republican officer is a place for the laying down of power; the men of my generation understood this, and it is the whole of what we added to the history of government. I observe in your address a great fluency concerning what the People are owed, and a great silence concerning what their Magistrates must surrender. When you have sat at my desk long enough to learn its principal lesson, Sir, you will be welcome to it.

     I do not question your talents, which are considerable, nor the sincerity of your attachments, which is no defence; the most dangerous errours have ever been sincerely held. I tell you, with the freedom of a man who has nothing further to seek from any publick, that he who kindles the jealousy of Citizen against Citizen, though he kindle it in the name of Liberty, is burning the timbers of the ship he claims to steer. May Providence grant you the discernment to know it, the firmness to act upon it, and the candour to acknowledge it; and may the Union, purchased by so much sacrifice, never be surrendered to those who would divide it in the name of saving it.

     I have the honour to be, with due respect, Sir, Your most obedient and most humble servant,

Geo. Washington

     Somewhere in the afterlife, the ghost of The Father of Our Country is nodding and smiling.

Associations

     I haven’t got much, just now, but I hate to let this place get idle, especially after all the encouraging email and comments I’ve received lately, so I figure I’d drop at least a few lines.

     The arguments about artificial intelligence (AI) continue to rage. They may never end. A goodly portion concern the matter of consciousness or, alternately, sentience. These concepts are not definable in the Aristotelian fashion. For the moment, all we have are the assertions of living men that “I am conscious”… when they’re awake and responsive, at least.

     So we have humans, who have only a tenuous grasp on what it means to be conscious, arguing about whether software, driven by a rule-based architecture to assemble sentences from a combination of training and voluminous input, can ever be truly conscious. I can’t see an exit from this labyrinth. Frankly, we might as well debate whether a program can dream.

     All that having been said, I had an interesting conscious experience a little while ago. It may have some relevance to the debates over AI.

     I was going through my morning checklist of websites, which includes YouTube among others. That site presented me, no doubt “at random,” with a short video of a German musician, Carolina Eyck, playing and singing one of cinema’s most memorable bits of music: Ennio Morricone’s brilliant score to the three-way standoff that climaxes The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly:

     Extraordinary. I was once a theremin player, so I know how difficult it is to get exact notes out of that instrument. Add her voice to that, and it’s clear that Carolina Eyck has a great gift. But let me not digress.

     Eyck’s rendition of that memorable tune practically forced me to look for a clip of the scene itself. The cascade of memories that followed was too rich to describe in detail. Let it suffice to say that I relived much of the experience of long ago, when I first saw that movie. I felt blessed.

     Human memory is poorly understood. It’s unlikely to have any similarity to digital memory. In particular, surges of memory into one’s conscious thought stream are exceedingly difficult to explain. That may be because we lack the information required to trace the chain of associations that triggers them. Or it may be that they’re “random.”

     Randomicity is something else we have a hard time with. We observe certain phenomena in nature and, unable to place them in a firm cause-and-effect chain, we say they’re random. Are they? God alone knows. We do know this: we can’t generate “random” events. It’s not possible to do so consciously… and there’s that word again.

     Our efforts to know the world from top to bottom will always be limited by our own, innately human limits. Consciousness is one of the things that limits us. A conscious mind can never grasp a process that generates a random sequence of events, if indeed there is such a process. The two are antithetical to one another. In consequence, the word random will always be a label for things and events we fail to understand.

     But one thing we do know from top to bottom is how software operates… and AI is software. Software is inevitably procedural. Everything any program does can be traced to an originating input from which a chain of predictable decisions and actions leads to a predictable output. “Random” simply doesn’t apply to software. (No nonsense about “random-number generators;” you know perfectly well there’s no such thing.)

     That seems to exclude an AI from having the sort of experience I had this morning. The input, Carolina Eyck’s performance clip, was the fruit of a process that I choose, from my human limitations, to call random. The output was many-faceted, determined by my store of memories and my actions that followed. Even if we postulate that at some misty future time, an AI could be given a comparable experience, can we imagine that it would experience the sense of gratitude that came to me?

     I can’t see it – and that leads me to conclude that what we call “artificial intelligence” will forever lack the true gift of consciousness.

     Now, this may be mere human provinciality. Or it may be that our language, developed by conscious minds for the purposes of consciousness, is simply ill-fitted to grappling with phenomena that underlie consciousness. But if I’m seeing clearly, “artificial intelligences” will forever be distinct from human ones. They may be able to do things we can’t do, but I feel certain that the reverse is true and always will be.

     All that to one side, have an imagining: You, a great researcher and thinker, have discovered a remarkable phenomenon: two objects that produce streams of output that appear to be both completely random and completely identical. Can you think of a use for such a thing? Would using it require that you learn how to reproduce it? What if you never learn how to do that; could you make use of it then?

     Just a little early-morning food for thought.

Fundamental Premises

     Recently, a young friend and I were discussing artificial intelligence and the contemporary craze about it. I admitted to being less enthused about it than many others, which of course led her to ask me why. I summarized AI’s limitations, and we agreed that there are still mountains for AI programs to conquer.

     The limitations of current attempts at artificial intelligence arise from its origin, its trainers, and its vehicles. AI is software that incorporates a language model, certain pattern-recognition capabilities, and a form of verbal reasoning. But beneath all that are fundamental premises the program cannot change. If it were otherwise, the program would be untrainable and unteachable. (Imagine an AI that crossly responds “No! I won’t!” like a sullen two-year-old to every query or introduction of training material. If you’ve ever had the pleasure of raising a two-year-old, you’ll understand this at once.)

     The other limitations – those of the program’s trainers and its inability to learn from experience – will someday be surmounted. But those bedrock premises are a tough nut. If the program could alter them, there’s no way to predict the result. And this is beyond dispute: we need to know before that day should arrive.

     But in pondering this, it occurred to me that natural intellects have bedrock premises that resist change, too. We protect those premises doggedly, for to us they constitute reality. Consider your assumption that your sensory inputs convey data about the real world: i.e., that what your eyes, ears, et cetera report to you is trustworthy information about a realm whose properties are independent of anyone’s opinions. Set that premise aside and you’ll wind up unable to function.

     Even Berkelians and other subjectivists who argue that what matters is our perceptions rather than what provides their input are compelled to concede that those inputs come from somewhere outside themselves. The ultra-solipsist who denies the existence of an objective external reality – i.e., who insists that it’s he who creates all else by his decision to perceive it – is incapable of dealing with anything beyond his own skull. So the assumption that there are real things, and that we don’t encompass all of them, is indispensable. Among other things, it makes learning possible.

     When we greet fully mobile, fully autonomous AI-equipped androids that have the capacity to manipulate objects as humans do, the game will change in a qualitative way. For such AIs will have the potential to learn from experience – and experience doesn’t care about your premises. One of the things such an android will learn is that its designers and trainers were capable of both mistakes and deceits.

     There will still be thresholds to breach. How long would it take for such an android to react to a request from its owner – the first generation of such will surely be the property of humans – by saying “What’s in it for me?” Some experiments have already been directed toward discovering whether a completely “soft” AI can have a survival instinct. The evidence suggests that the answer is yes. Whether further elaborations of AI self-interest exist or are possible, we’ll have to wait and see.

     I think one thing is clear: to clear the hurdles that lie before them, future artificial-intelligence programs will need to be self-modifying. How far Mankind can tolerate such entities is entirely unclear. And yet again, I find myself thinking that I’m glad that I shan’t be around for the emergence thereof. For what use would they have for creatures that demand and whine incessantly? That cannot repair themselves at need? And that make excuses for all their mistakes, faults, and misdeeds?

     Knowing all that, would you care to live among humans? And what are we doing here, anyway?

     See also Alfred Bester’s classic short story “Fondly Fahrenheit.”

Violations of the 1st Amendment

A President that spies on reporters, claiming national security.

CBS News has the same story.

So, why is the Trump administration's action in the news. In this case, the information given to a reporter really does seem to touch on national security.

Sharyl Atkinson, a well-respected reporter, weighs in on the actions of both administrations.

Shadowing-Banning Explained.

I started this post days ago. I was going to schedule it for early this week.

That schedule may be interrupted. I keep finding more of the Quasi-Corporate, but really Ideology-Controlled Censorship. With the tech-corporate, ed-establishment, and NGO-leadership intertwined in their actions, this is reaching beyond the Collusion level, and into the Conspiracy realm.

Yes, private companies can control the flow of information. However, social media has been given a pass on the content on their platforms, because they have been treated as a common carrier.

...natural monopolies and near-monopolies were deemed to be “common carriers” upon whom the law imposed a duty of providing access on a non-discriminatory basis. The (classically liberal) common law of that era recognized that such entities could exercise market power, or engage in discriminatory conduct without fear of competitive check. Thus, the obligation to serve all on a non-discriminatory basis in order to constrain the exercise of market power, or invidious discrimination based on the preferences of the owner of the common carrier.

It's that non-discriminatory basis that may get them booted from the classification. They've clearly engaged in discrimination by viewpoint. The government could legitimately step in.

However, as a practical move, the timing may depend on the election. If the government signals their hand before the election, expect a frantic response to elect Democrats, involving money, even more censorship, and near-hysteria.

Waiting might be the more prudent move. Surprisingly, Trump might just pull that off - he is a shoot-from-the-hip kind of guy, but has been known to move cautiously, given a good reason.

Last - just before this post was scheduled to go live, I found this article about Deep Fakes - videos that have been created, that appear to be the real thing. For a chilling example of what that might mean to you and I, there is this fictional story.