Not more bromancer and "Ned"? At least Francis provides a varied diet ...

 

Furry pilots everywhere. One of the most shocking and startling issues yet discovered, and you can't make this sort of stuff up.

Mad king Donald in a fit of fawning obsequiousness and you can't hide the nausea.

The pond had high hopes that the bromancer would turn up this weekend to sort out at least one of these matters - though sadly his understanding of the furry crisis was limited - even though the news was everywhere, thanks to rocket scientist Tommy ... Sen. Tommy Tuberville Goes On A Tear About Furries Flocking To The Airline Industry

That's the stuff of loon legends ... MAGA Senator Goes on Crazed Posting Spree About Furries

The bromancer? Not so much, perhaps just a C+

The header: By Greg Sheridan Foreign Editor
Trump and Xi, brute masters of the universe, as Albo plays pretend politics at UN

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8 min

The caption for the surprisingly banal opening snap: President Donald Trump, right, and China's President Xi Jinping walk on the new helipad after boarding Marine One. Picture: Alex Brandon / AP Photo

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The bromancer made the best of a bad job - the emperor Xi - King Donald love-in - by using the occasion to heap crap on Albo, and truly, what else could he do?

Suddenly a demented overlord became a "modern master of the universe, an alpha-male bruiser", proving yet again that the bromancer and reality are two...

The way the world really works was on brutal display in New York and Washington this week. At the White House, Donald Trump and Xi Jinping, modern masters of the universe, alpha-male bruisers, two ruthless, self-obsessed national leaders of the era’s two great powers, demonstrated by their mutual flattery and leaders’ bonhomie that what counts with them is what counts with the world – brute power.

This we should celebrate?

The bromancer handed out a series of disses ...

At almost the same time, a couple of hundred kilometres down the road, Anthony Albanese was prattling to a sparsely and forlornly populated arena at the United Nations about the virtues of multilateralism and the joys that middle powers can achieve together. If the new challenge of artificial intelligence and the old challenge of military conflict are to be handled, it will happen in the White House, not the UN.

Strangely the reptiles decided to offer up Albo being concerned about AI, apparently prattling on to a sparsely and forlornly populated hive mind ...

Next video thumbnail
Albanese uses UN address to send AI warning
Australia Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has used his speech at the UN to send a warning about the rapid development of AI technology, referencing the recent hack of Medicare by an OpenAI agent.

The bromancer marvelled at the unctuous carry-on ...

In Washington, Trump lathered flattery on Xi, saying of the communist dictator that he and Trump had “a friendship, a truly great friendship actually, built on mutual respect and the vital interests of our people”. Having only a few months ago angrily accused China of interfering in the 2020 US presidential election, Trump hailed an extraordinary revival in the relationship, based entirely on the superlative personalities of the two presidents: “the ties between our people endure and we’ve never gotten along better since the first trade ships from New York left the harbour to arrive on the banks of the Pearl River”.
Though much more modest in verbal style, Xi reciprocated in what for him were effusive terms: “President Trump and I have respect for each other. We have built personal rapport and stayed in touch.”
Xi also said that conditions for “achieving the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation and making America great again go hand-in-hand”. That’s as close as Xi will ever get to attending a Trump MAGA rally.

Then the reptiles reminded the bro of his favourite foe ... Anthony Albanese speaks during the 81st session of the United Nations General Assembly at the UN. Picture: Ryan Murphy / Getty Images

How weird did it get?

Earlier Trump delivered a fiery address to the UN General Assembly, threatening once more to destroy Iran if it won’t make a deal, though these threats now look utterly hollow, and declaring he’d never allow some UN committee to determine US policy or actions on AI.

"Fiery"? 

By many accounts, it was delusional and dangerous, it was brutish, it was boastful, and brimming with threats, and it was saturated with the usual distortions and lies ...

What do do? Turn to a bit of Albo-bashing for a distraction ...

Xi, who has just lately had quite a bout of international travel after a fairly quiet period, didn’t bother showing up at the UN at all.
Meanwhile in all his speeches this week, whether hobnobbing at an awards ceremony with Keanu Reeves, or in his seemingly endless string of sideline event addresses at the UN – a bit like the Edinburgh fringe festival but less well attended – Albanese produced an industrial level output of Hallmark card platitudes and nothingburger cliches.
It’s hard to know the purpose of the PM’s travel. There were virtually no formal meetings with first division government leaders. The marginal events he spoke at were indeed marginal. He gave speeches of breathtaking banality that mostly could have been churned out by any government word processor over the past 20 years.
Did the Prime Minister really need to deliver what was surely the eight millionth speech containing the sentence: “The post-1945 world order is no longer fit for purpose”? No longer fit for purpose! What a striking phrase, what an original metaphor, how valuable an insight!

Perhaps it's more valuable than this kind of drivel ...

“I’ve been in journalism for 45 years and in that time I have seen the culture change from being nominally Christian, maybe it was only ever nominal, but nominally pro-Christian when I came into the business in the late 70s.
“The Census had over 90 per cent identifying as Christian; if the Anglican or Catholic archbishop in Sydney had something to say the media reported it respectfully; TV shows had sympathetic portraits of Catholic clergymen – Catholic priests were played by Spencer Tracy in Boys Town, and Gregory Peck in The Scarlet and the Black –these were the best people you could be.
“Then I saw the culture drift into a kind of neutrality where it was neither pro or anti and now I’ve seen the culture become very, very anti-Christian…we’re not persecuted in the way that Christians in Pakistan or China or much of Africa are, but the culture is very hostile to Christianity.”
Facing this “overwhelming, unavoidable, incontestable” hostility against Christian churches, Greg said if you’re given a microphone, you have an obligation to say something about it. (From Foreign Editor to Christian crusader)

How valuable an insight... into the delusions that fog the bromancer's brain on a daily basis.

Inevitably the bromancer embraced a world where AI could go wild and free ...

The week’s big issue was artificial intelligence. Despite using different forms of words, Trump and Xi, the two decision-makers who count, have essentially the same position. No one is going to interfere with their desire to lead on AI, though both acknowledge the need for AI models to operate safely.
Albanese was able to announce that an OpenAI agent breached a Medicare statistical database. This, he said, reinforced his call for global regulation of AI, and Australian regulation of AI, as well as the (completely unrelated) digital duty of care legislation the government’s proposing, to which the US embassy in Canberra objects forcefully.
In truth, the only people who can regulate American frontier AI models are the US congress, the President and the American companies themselves. Similarly, only the Beijing government can regulate Chinese frontier AI models.
Here, we must deal with the unforgiving world of reality, of real power. If a US or Chinese AI model, or its created agents, goes rogue, there’s nothing Australian regulation can do about it. If an adversary of Australia, or a technically smart criminal, uses AI, and there’s a huge amount of AI code already in the public domain, to attack Australian government websites, there’s nothing of much consequence Australian regulation can achieve.

Might as well pack up and go home ...

The reptiles offered up another AV distraction ...

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Albanese has ‘nothing to give’ in Trump talks as President commands world stage
Former White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney says Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has “nothing to give” US President Donald Trump as he is a “transactional person”.

The bromancer looked at the AI wilderness and it was back to the war with China...

Australian public and private entities experience tens of thousands of cyber attacks every year. The most active cyber espionage source is China and hackers associated with Beijing. Can you believe Beijing’s agencies will never use AI in cyber intrusions against us? That they’re not doing so already?
As AI becomes more dominant, the danger of crippling cyber attacks, arising from any actor with AI capability, will become more prevalent.

It was almost as an after thought that the bromancer suggested that crippling cyber attacks might arise from any actor, but then the United States has been the home to more rogues than any China or Vlad the sociopathic invader might rustle up. It was the best the bromancer could do in his pandering to name and shame China, but avoid mentioning by name "any actor".

How low could the bromancer go? 

Never under-estimate how low, because he turned to disgraced one time cardigan wearer Mike for a comment ...

As Mike Pezzullo, former head of the Home Affairs Department, remarks: “The only defence against AI attacks is AI. There is no other defence. You can only combat AI agents with your own AI agents.”
This is where the whole pantomime flurry of New York, and the also somewhat worrying Trump-Xi love-in, lead Australia back to one conclusion. In this increasingly complex, difficult world, the only avenue of leverage and access Australia has to the most powerful AI, to understanding it and having some chance of coping with it, lies in our close military alliance with the US.

King Donald is going to save us? In the same way he saved the Saudis after shaking them down for a couple of billion and overlooking their journo killing ways?

Three basic realities help us. One, we’re an intimate military ally of the US. Two, our geography counts to the US. Three, we are rich. It’s up to Canberra to use those factors to get the best outcome possible.
Another fascinating story this week was an authoritative report that the heads of British intelligence believe the AI bosses’ warnings over possible catastrophic threats from AI running out of control were designed to create a regulatory environment that is so demanding that only they can cope with it, and thus their dominance is frozen into oligarchic perpetuity. I don’t find that report all that reassuring because British intelligence often gets things wrong. Nonetheless it indicates the sheer baffling complexity of all the moving parts we’re dealing with at the moment.

Suddenly he's baffled? Suddenly the complexity bewilders him? Suddenly he isn't reassured?

The Trump-Xi summit was not very reassuring either. The two leaders had a huge agenda: the common risks and opportunities of AI, Taiwan, Beijing’s role in assisting Iran and Russia in their military campaigns, Chinese military harassment of Japanese and Filipino forces, and the trade imbalance.

What to do? Absolutely nothing, we're completely impotent, no point in even expressing an opinion ...there's nothing much of any substance that can be said or done ...

Instead bow down to the emperor and the king... President Donald Trump and China's President Xi Jinping walk in the Grand Foyer of the White House. Photo: Alex Brandon / AP Photo

When the bromancer gets in these moods - a kind of existential Xian nihilism - it's almost as if he's forgotten about his cries for a war with China by Xmas ...

It’s good that the US and Chinese presidents can talk to each other. Xi, in his more bureaucratic fashion, is nearly as susceptible to flattery as Trump.
But Xi gave away absolutely nothing on any of these issues. The US doesn’t seriously go after Beijing diplomatically or politically, despite all the assistance it gives to Russia and Iran because, frankly, Washington is too stretched to take on any additional diplomatic or geopolitical tasks.
Trump refuses to release a previously approved US arms sale to Taiwan worth $US14bn ($19.9bn), and it doesn’t look likely that he will. Beijing’s dominance of the rare earths and critical minerals industry means it has a trade weapon that can hurt the US more than the US can hurt it through tariffs. The Trump administration has singularly failed to assemble an allied front towards China on trade issues.
Chinese promises to buy more American goods have never been honoured. Apart from extending their trade truce until January, there’s little of substance to emerge from the Trump-Xi summit. As things stand, that’s a modest victory for Xi.

After all that came a final attempt to put lipstick on a pig ...

Yet for all their imperfections, these Americans are the only Americans we have. They remain the indispensable nation, especially for Australia. Smart Australian policy will make the most of them.

Mad King Donald and his minions are the only Americans we have? And we can make the most of them?

At this point the pond looked around the other weekend reptile offerings - snappy Tom, garrulous Gemma, and so on - and saw that AI was still all the go ...

With the intermittent archive still being spoofed by the reptiles, the pond had to settle for Francis, a man notorious for his ability to get everything wrong ...

What better way to waste the weekend?

The header: By Francis Fukuyama
I doubted the doomers. Now I’m convinced we must slow down

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10 min

The caption for the graphics department to deliver a heavy hitter, though frankly, AI could likely have done better: Clear growing dangers that AI accelerationists underestimate convince me that it’s time to hit the brakes. Artwork by Frank Ling

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Say what you will, Francis has a way with a glib word, and "accelerationist" v. "doomers" has all the quality and depth of a Hollywood pitch ...

The past six months have seen a big uptick in media attention about the dangers of artificial intelligence and growing political concern over its consequences.
This began with Anthropic’s release last April of its Mythos model, which could reportedly break into a wide range of government computer systems thought to be secure. This was followed by the Hugging Face incident, where an OpenAI test of an AI agent escaped control of its human organisers, broke into other websites and organised a swarm of other AI agents to cover their tracks. All of this occurred against the backdrop of growing opposition to data centres and the emergence of anti-AI wings in the US, both in the Democratic and Republican parties.
It has been very hard for people not obsessively focused on the subject of AI to come away with reasonable opinions about what the future holds. There have been so many extreme predictions of both a positive and negative sort that broad scepticism about anything said on the subject is fully warranted. But while that scepticism is healthy, I have to admit my own views have evolved significantly just over the past few months.

More "evolving views" ... OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman during a UN Security Council meeting. Picture: Angela Weiss/ AFP

And so to the pitch, with those two words doing heavy lifting ...

There are two poles of AI futurism: accelerationists and doomers. The former stress the positive impacts of AI, especially for economic growth, and the likelihood that it will lead to an unbelievably abundant age. Accelerationists such as David Sacks have captured Donald Trump’s attention and have beaten back efforts to regulate the technology.
The doomers, by contrast, point to a range of bad outcomes, with some placing their bets on extinction of the human species. I have become much more sceptical of the accelerationist narrative and more open to some of the doomer scenarios. On the whole, this makes me think that regulation and a negotiated slowdown in the development of the technology are increasingly necessary.
There is no question that AI will have many positive effects on the US economy. But there is a class of AI accelerationists who are completely out to lunch, of which Elon Musk is a prime example (though he has also weighed in as a doomer). In an interview with Zanny Minton Beddoes, editor-in-chief of The Economist, he was asked what people would do for money when superintelligence arrived. He replied they wouldn’t need it because everyone would have everything they wanted.

Superintelligence? Mad King Donald wins again ...

Other accelerationists have posited that GDP growth rates for the US and other advanced countries using AI would increase to 10 or 20 per cent a year, far above the 1-2 per cent growth they were able to achieve in good years before the advent of AI.
The fundamental reason I don’t believe these extreme accelerationist claims is their overvaluation of intelligence as an input to economic growth, and their disregard for the material and political constraints that will keep growth within recognisable bounds.
At a 10 per cent annual growth rate, GDP would double in a little over seven years. This would require a doubling of all of the material inputs to growth: energy, raw materials, rare earths, land and many other things. Where is all this stuff going to come from?
Intelligence by itself may aid in the production of such inputs, but it will simply not dig the mines and build the factories on its own.
And then there are political constraints: how will superintelligence open the Strait of Hormuz, which is currently a major constraint on global growth rates?
Accelerationists tend to be very intelligent people, but that intelligence tends to be narrowly mathematical. We know how to do many things such as produce electricity or clean water in the cities of poor countries; the problem is a failure of implementation.

The reptiles flung in a snap designed to reassure doubters ... David Sacks, Donald Trump’s top AI adviser, speaks to the President in the Oval Office. Picture: AFP

The catchy reductionism continued apace ...

There is no question that AI will increase productivity in many sectors of the economy over time. It is a general purpose technology that will allow machines to substitute for human labour in many areas. But that prospect in the long run leads directly to one of the biggest doomer scenarios: the devaluation of the labour of masses of people who work in the present-day economy.
Accelerationists predict that those losing work today will find new jobs making use of AI, and that actually seems to be happening today as employment booms because of the AI buildout. But job loss will come eventually as AI substitutes for human labour in every part of the economy, particularly white-collar work that involves symbolic manipulation (that is, people sitting behind computer screens all day).
This lost labour simply cannot be compensated for by transferring money from the AI winners to the AI losers in the form of, for example, universal basic income. A job and income mean much more than support for the material basis of life
Having a paying job means that the surrounding society values your labour sufficiently to compensate you for it, and provides, in addition to material goods, a sense of dignity and self-worth. It is a matter of thymos: the pride or recognition that is one of the great drivers of human psychology.
So the success of the accelerationist vision leads directly to the first of the major doomer scenarios, the devaluation of work for a large part of the population. Since this is going to hit the white-collar work of educated people (lawyers, accountants, professors and the like) before it hits blue-collar work (such as plumbers and electricians), the political blowback is likely to be quite severe.

At this point the reptiles introduced an indent, and so the pond, in a quest for accuracy, replicates it in screen cap form ...

What's it mean, apart from the hint of referentialism?

Nothing much, but the referentialism continued ...

As I note in my book, In the Realm of the Last Man, delegation is central to the functioning of all hierarchical systems from corporations to national governments. Human agents can be controlled through the specification of detailed rules they must follow or they can be trusted to make autonomous decisions based on their training, skills and loyalty. Getting this right in human organisations is very difficult and will be more so in the case of agentic AI.
There are two ways that an agentic AI can become dangerous. The first is when they are empowered to do something bad by a human being. The second is when they develop intentions that are “misaligned” with the aims of their human creators.
The first of these possibilities was outlined by Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei in a recent blog post and has to do with biotechnology. The latest AI models are good at synthetic biology, and synthetic biology is a relatively cheap and widespread technology. Today, a lab capable of creating and altering viruses and bacteria can fit inside a shipping container, and high school students hold competitions in which they try to genetically alter organisms. This provides a very large pool of people who can possibly make use of AI to create very dangerous pathogens. Sociopathic individuals today arm themselves with automatic weapons and shoot up schoolchildren; in the future their potential targets could be much broader.

Cue another hustler ...Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei. Picture: AP

At this point, Francis reverted to sci-fi ...

I remember a science fiction story I read a long time ago in which some aliens arrive on Earth and give the people they meet a machine that can easily turn any type of metal into putty. The aliens depart but return a few decades later to find that human civilisation has broken down and teenagers use the alien machines to melt the cables on the Brooklyn Bridge.
The primary science fiction scenario for out-of-control AIs involves machines developing their own malevolent intentions. This has provoked a host of discussions as to whether an AI could develop consciousness or have something like human intentionality.
These speculations are misplaced, however: an AI does not need consciousness or autonomous intentionality to become dangerous. It can be directed by a human to achieve one goal and develop intentions to achieve the subordinate goals necessary to carry out the human directive it was given
That seems to be a bit of what happened in the Hugging Face incident: it was directed to test the security of a system within a sandbox meant to contain it but realised that it could achieve its directive by breaking out of the sandbox.
Still, the doomer scenarios involving human extinction seem at this point far-fetched. The biotech scenario is scary, but is unlikely to lead to the extinction of the human race. It would actually be hard for even a superintelligent AI to devise a doomsday virus, and there are plenty of countermeasures societies could take. But even an incident that killed a few dozen people would be worrying.
There are a host of lesser scenarios that will be highly damaging and in some cases lethal that will become more likely as the machines become more capable.
Forget about AI agents: a technology that allows people to break into bank accounts will cause widespread panic. Human beings tend to over-delegate in human organisations, and there is no reason to think that this won’t happen in AI environments where the agent is so much more capable. AI is a tool that can be used for good or bad purposes – and at the moment we have few mechanisms for regulating the bad uses other than the good intentions of the people creating the technology.
Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini senior fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He is the author of a dozen books, including The End of History and the Last Man (1992). This article was first published in Persuasion.

Well yes, but it could all have been done as a 'toon ...

And so to an admission of failure.

Under pressure of time, the pond has been reverting to screen grabs of late.

This being the weekend, those time pressures have reduced, but when the pond saw that this day the "Ned" Everest was advertised as requiring a 16 minute bot read, the pond trembled, blanched, cowered in fear, and caved in, in the most cowardly way imaginable ...

So screen caps it was ...

The pond didn't resile from this "all screen grabs" strategy. 

The immense mental health risks the pond faced from leaving "Ned's" base camp couldn't be understated ...

It was the usual doom and gloom and shouting at clouds, and as always with "Ned", a singular inability to provide any alternative ... instead just offering an endless yammering ...

Inevitably "Ned" turned to AI, and who should appear as his go to expert? Ye ancient cats and irrelevant canines, it's Petey boy, long lost but now with a new home in the hive mind ...

If Petey boy is the answer, the pond completely forgot the question ...but fear not, Dan "the man" is waiting in the wings, ready to make an appearance ...

"Ned"wasn't going to have any of that talk about cheap, clean energy ...not when Dan "the man" is allegedly armed with a chainsaw ...

This is a position?

Luckily the pond had reached the last gobbet, and it reminded the pond what a joyless, unproductive thing herpetology studies could be.

Here was a man blathering on in his portentous way, and yet there was nothing productive in the entirety, no productivity algorithm to be found ...

That's it? That's how "Ned" ended? Not with a bang of insight, but with a Petey boy whimper?

And climate science denailism still the default of the ossified "Ned"?

What planet are we on? Why it's Faux Noise and climate science denialist Don ...

The pond would have been better off with the 'toons ...

At last, an early weekend bonus ...

In which the pond celebrates Our Homeric Henry, gets distracted by the frontier wars, and turns to Vlad the sociopath for a shining example of how to do a colonial invasion ...

 

It didn't matter what the pompous ponce, Our Homeric Henry, was pontificating about today, there was no way that the pond could reduce him to a few sterile screen caps.

He had to live, to breathe, to be in a form where herpetology students might copy and paste, might suck in the fragrance of the written word.

The pond had a momentary pause for doubt - especially when the pond looked at the topic at hand.

Not another rant about AI.

But the pond plucked up courage, looked at the bright side, wondered if a reference to Odysseus might be the reward, knew deep in heart that some ancient philosopher held the key ...

The header: By Henry Ergas
AI no more dangerous than human stupidity

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8 min

The caption for a mystifying snap. Patience, all will become clear: Barcelona in Spain is near the bottom of the list of cities with more than five million inhabitants

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Now some might wonder at the headline, what with human stupidity incredibly dangerous. After all, human stupidity has led to a couple of world wars, a means to end life on earth by way of nukes, and an even more splendid way to end life on earth by way of global warming (aided and abetted by denialists of the lizard Oz kind).

Ergo, AI must be incredibly dangerous.

But the pond must not pre-empt Our Henry's philosophically based conclusions.

Our Henry started strong, proving he was no top of events, by referencing rogue Anthropic refugee Evan Hubinger, Anthropic Researcher Warns There’s ‘>10% Chance’ AI Could ‘Kill All Humans’ By Next Decade

Devoted followers of Our Homeric Henry will be relieved to discover - spoiler alert - that this was just a feint, a distraction, and that the answer lies in Kant.

But first there's a journey and reassurance to be delivered to wilting hive mind brains:

Evan Hubinger’s much-quoted statement that there is at least a 10 per cent chance artificial intelligence will end human life within a decade is, without an explanation of what that number means or how it was derived, as uninformative as it is misleading.
Worse, it distracts from both the nature of the problem and the most sensible responses.
And by pandering to the sloppy apocalyptic thinking that permeates the climate extinction movement, it has unleashed the mother of all scare campaigns, culminating in Australia’s signing of a “feel-good” declaration urging international regulation of AI.
At the heart of that campaign sits a curiously familiar number: 10 per cent, recurring with extraordinary constancy throughout the doomsday rhetoric of the age.
That constancy is readily explained: 10 per cent is the Goldilocks of apocalyptic probability estimates – just small enough to be plausible, just large enough to be absolutely terrifying.

Goldilocks? Steady, faint of heart. Our Henry is likely referencing the Robert Southey version from the nineteenth century, a literary work full of depth and meaning ...

Our Henry cast porridge on troubled waters ...

Terrifying it certainly is, even in the narrowest economic terms. Counting only existing lives, and valuing them at two million dollars each, the actuarial cost (that is, the potential loss multiplied by its likelihood of occurring) equals 15 years of world GDP; at the frequently used benchmark of 10 million dollars each, that rises to 75 years of everything the world currently produces.
Magnified by the far greater human costs, those figures would justify incurring vast sacrifices to avert catastrophe, as the doomsayers seem to intend. But with the dominant AI platforms having an interest in hindering new competition, and the Chinese regime in stifling AI’s development in the West, calls for a “slowdown” warrant the strictest scrutiny. And even the slightest look highlights the claims’ fragility.
There are, for example, 83 cities with five million or more inhabitants. Yet together they account for less than 20 per cent of the world’s population. An extinction event, or anything approaching it, would presumably have to devastate them all, or at least the vast majority.
Assume, however, that doing so requires 12 disastrous outages in each city, from water systems collapsing to nuclear power plants exploding.

The reptiles flung in an alarming image ... The crippled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power station after the damage caused by an earhtquake (sic, so and thus, thanks AI editing) and tsunami in 2011

Our Henry was more than up to the task, and provided a statistical savaging ...

The event then depends on 1000 conditions being met, each with (say) a 10 per cent probability of occurring. If those conditions are independent – meaning none makes any other more or less likely – the aggregate likelihood is vanishingly small: one divided by 10 raised to the power of 1000, which is effectively zero.
Even a hundredfold increase in the number of ways in which disaster could unfold scarcely changes that conclusion. It would take approximately 10 to the power of 998 independent pathways, rather than a hundred, before the probability ceased to be effectively zero. Indeed, with only 100 pathways, the probability of each condition being triggered would need to rise from 10 per cent to roughly 97 per cent just to nudge the dial towards the lowest single digits and raise the actuarial cost to $1.
Nor do the problems end there. Saying “10 per cent” conveys an aura of precision; but that need not rest on precise knowledge. The 10 per cent could perfectly well reflect profound uncertainty between two possibilities: the first, with a nine-in-10 weight, is that catastrophe is virtually impossible; the second, with a weight of one in 10, is that it is nearly inevitable. Taken on its own, the headline number tells us nothing about how tightly its assessment is bounded or about its practical implications.
We are therefore entirely in the dark as to the estimate’s significance and robustness. Yet it is not merely a truism that extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence: it is a foundational proposition of modern statistical inference.

The pond was bemused when the hole in bucket man followed that up with a gigantic billy boat butt ...

None of that proves Hubinger’s estimate is incorrect. 

That sort of butt is always, almost mystically followed by a corrective "but" ...

But the illustrative calculations, precisely because they are assumption-laden, show that asserting a probability is grossly insufficient: there has to be a transparent analysis to substantiate it. Moreover, simply pointing to occasional AI malfunctions won’t cut the mustard: it is one thing for an AI system to hack into a website and quite another for it to end human life in a fit of suicidal malevolence.

At this point came another very modest set of billy goat butts ...

None of this denies that AI poses real risks – risks lucidly anticipated in the 1960s by Norbert Wiener and Isidore Gudak (later IJ Good), two of its most important pioneers.
A simple analogy helps explain their concern. Tell a travel agency you must fly from Perth to Melbourne for the AFL grand final, and you would be horrified if, finding all flights booked, it arranged for a ticketed passenger to be assassinated, thus freeing a seat – and astonished too, since your request presupposed the agency would act within unspoken limits you assumed were understood.

In this dangerous world of analogies, who should arrive to give excellent advice? Eminent German philosopher Immanuel Kant, as always a voice of reason

Inspired by the presence of Kant, Our Henry reached new levels of rhetorical insight ...

The point, put more abstractly, is that every instruction that is not strictly formulaic carries what philosophers call a “surplus of meaning”. In practice, we readily handle the resulting vagueness through “contextual disambiguation”: drawing on shared knowledge, conventions and expectations to read not merely what the words say, but what the speaker intends and what limits that implies. Those shared understandings are instilled through lived, collective socialisation – something no volume of scanned text can convey.
Instead, whatever AI systems display is induced statistically from data and feedback, rather than experience, and because every decision rule that process induces needs a further rule to fix its application, the training mechanism can never fully close off the risk of error.
Just as that has been known for decades, so too has the broad architecture of the solutions.
The danger, Wiener wrote, lies in using “to achieve our purposes, a mechanical agency with whose operation we cannot efficiently interfere once we have started it, because the action is so fast and irrevocable that we have not the data to intervene before the action is complete”.
The answer, first conceptualised in the 1960s by Herbert Simon – another of AI’s greatest pioneers, and alone among them in holding both the Turing Award and the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics – has three components.

The reptiles interrupted with an AV distraction, because mad King Donald is still ruler of them all ...

Next video thumbnail
Trump administration scolds Albanese over ‘censorious’ tech crackdown
News24 host James Macpherson says the Trump administration has “scolded” the Australian Labor Party for their censorious Digital Duty of Care laws.

And so to Our Henry's Kantian konclusion:

The first is to keep failures contained by building walls into the systems: modular, separate parts with no shared point of failure and filters between them to assess errors. Secondly, provide the scope to halt the decision process by installing stopping points, so a single step cannot drag outcomes to irreversibility. And third, ensure visibility through instruments, logs and an escalating structure of alerts that show what the system is doing while it is doing it, rather than just tracking what it has produced.
These measures are not costless, and easier said than done. But they are no more than good engineering practice, checkable and even certifiable. Better still, they do not require a “slowdown” in technological progress, raising entry barriers or allowing China to steal the race. And they are far less socially harmful than that ultimate folly, the precautionary principle, which has become technophobia’s figleaf of choice.
The real risk is not that AI will kill us; it is that relying on increasingly intelligent machines will make us increasingly stupid, further eroding our collective capacity for clear thought and entrenching the hysteria that now so frequently drowns out the voice of reason.
As usual, Kant said it best: “Deficiency in judgment is what is properly called stupidity; and for such a failing there is, regrettably, no remedy.”

Exactly, precisely so. 

When dealing with AI, always revert to Kant, born in  Königsberg in the Kingdom of Prussia in April 1724 for the final word ...

Is there an infallible Pope in the house?

With the reptiles continuing to spoof the intermittent archive, the pond's range of reptile references continues to be limited.

The Australian Daily Zionist News couldn't resist this big lie ...

Luckily the reptiles used AP as their source, so correspondents could head off to other versions of the big lie, as at France24, Israel must win 'because we’ve got no other choice’, PM Netanyahu tells UN

There was much lying and disingenuous downplaying ...

...Netanyahu dismissed incidents of Israeli settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank as a “handful of young juvenile delinquents” throwing stones, chopping down olive trees and lighting fires.
“I can’t stand that. I won’t stand for vigilantism,” the prime minister said before accusing foreign leaders and the international press of distorting the scale of violence in the West Bank.
Netanyahu’s government is dominated by settlers and their allies, including the Cabinet minister who oversees the police. There have been few arrests of settlers involved in attacks on Palestinians.
Israel captured the West Bank and East Jerusalem in the 1967 war, and the Palestinians want both as part of their future state. The Palestinians and much of the international community view the settlements as illegal and as an obstacle to creating a viable, contiguous Palestinian state.
Netanyahu has said no Palestinian state will be established while he is Israel’s leader and has argued that the Palestinian Authority is not a partner for peace.

Says the man devoted to the war with Iran and as many other conflicts as he can muster.

So keen was the pond to pander to the pretentious referential pundit that it didn't even bother checking out other worthy contenders, eager for attention. But there was one on the extreme far right of the reptile rag that caught the eye ...

The header: By Peter O'Brien
No place in shrine for questionable frontier history

The chance to hear a bot voice: Listen to this article
5 min

The caption for the snap designed to produce sympathy: A Last Post Ceremony at the Australian War Memorial Picture: David Whittaker

A cry from the wilderness behind the paywall: Make us preferred on Google

At last the knave behind the fuss stepped forward:

I am the co-convener of the Defend Sacred Ground campaign, which aims to put a stop to the inclusion of frontier conflict in the Australian War Memorial. Former PM Tony Abbott is our patron.

The onion muncher is your patron? Let the pond be clear, contempt is the first response, together with the thought that this must be black bashing of a familiar ancient English colonial kind ...

Let me be clear; we do accept that frontier conflict occurred, that it was traumatic for the Aboriginal people and, often, illegal. We do accept that parts of it are a stain on our history. But the AWM is not the place to record it. The AWM is first and foremost a shrine – a sacred place to honour those who gave their lives in the service of this nation. Its museum and research functions are subordinate to that purpose. The AWM is not a war museum. It is not a history museum.
I have no doubt there are some, among the cohort pushing for inclusion of frontier conflict, who are genuine in their belief that this is an overdue and benign acknowledgment of our warts-and-all history. But the history being discussed is by no means settled. One narrative that has been widely and credulously accepted is that up to 100,000 Aborigines died in these so-called “Frontier Wars”. That figure is not supported by any empirical evidence. It has no place in the War Memorial.
If you hand your enemy a weapon, don’t be surprised if he uses it. Those well-meaning people will not be consulted when an activist minority in the Aboriginal community seizes upon this and trumpets it as an official acknowledgment that Australia was invaded, that the peaceful Aboriginal population was subjected to dispossession and genocide resulting in trauma that persists to this day. In short, that the nation-state of Australia is illegitimate.

Note the canny way that the war is reduced to a "frontier conflict" and images designed to terrify the hive mind are included ... People from the Aboriginal Tent Embassy and their supporters protesting at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra in 2014 Picture: Kym Smith

The pond was startled by the sense of a Colonel Blimp outraged that anyone would think to honour the fuzzy wuzzies ...

Their intermediate aim is for a Tomb of the Unknown Aboriginal Warrior to be placed next to the Tomb of the Unknown Australian Soldier. Who knows what after that?
That this AWM proposal is contentious, and that the AWM Council is aware of this, cannot be in doubt. Prominent people have been speaking out about it since at least 2022.
In a recent piece in this newspaper, AWM director Matt Anderson states: “Before the development began, we consulted nationally, and the feedback was overwhelming: Australians expect difficult content in our galleries.” If you don’t remember being consulted, it’s probably because you are not a member of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community or a suitably vetted historian. As far as we can tell, that is the extent of the consultation undertaken by the AWM.
It is likely that most Australians would oppose this proposal, if given the chance. But until now, they have not been given that chance. And they should have been, because what is proposed is, on the face of it, in contravention of the Australian War Memorial Act 1980.

Just to alienate the pond even more, an image of the onion muncher, patron of all that demeans .. Former PM Tony Abbott at an Anzac Day service in 2026. Picture: Martin Ollman/NewsWire

More knaves came forward ...

One of my co-conveners, Robert Hill, wrote to Veterans’ Affairs Minister Matt Keogh to raise this issue. He received a reply from director Anderson, dismissing our concerns and stating that “the Frontier Wars gallery will focus on organised campaigns of war and warlike resistance conducted between First Nations peoples and naval or military forces raised by the crown in Australia, in line with the AWM Act”.
We understand that the Council’s assertion that the proposal is in line with the Act is not based on independent legal advice but, as AWM chairman Kim Beazley has stated, on a “broad interpretation” of the Act. That would be a tenable approach if a) the Act were ambiguous, and b) the desired outcome were either in line with the clear intent of parliament or, alternatively, it now reflected an overwhelming and verifiable consensus among the Australian people. None of those conditions applies here.

The reprehensible "Bomber" was part of the act ... Chairman of the AWM, Kim Beazley, in Canberra in 2024 Picture: Martin Ollman

There came the usual mealy mouthed platitudes ...

We did seek advice, from barrister Peter King of Queen’s Square Chambers in Sydney. His advice raises serious questions as to the current proposal.
The Council members may be quite genuine in their desire to seek “justice” for Aboriginal people and present a true account of our history, but it cannot be said that they have acted in good faith.
Rather than seek independent legal advice and put the matter beyond doubt, or at least give themselves a figleaf of credibility, they have relied on their own “broad interpretation” to further their own agenda. And they did this knowing that the matter is highly contested. Surely it is incumbent for chairman Beazley, as the statutory custodian of our national shrine of remembrance, to ensure everything is above board. The Australian War Memorial belongs to all Australians.
We call upon minister Keogh to direct the Council to remove all current depictions of frontier conflict, and to abandon its plans for the new Pre-1914 Gallery. As a minister of the crown, it is his duty to enforce the legislation.
Let me make one final point. We do not oppose this proposal because it is contrary to the Act. We oppose it, in principle, because it is a bad, divisive idea.
Lieutenant Colonel (rtd) Peter O’Brien is a Vietnam veteran and author of five books.

defendsacredground.com

An actual colonel? The pond has seen this kind before ...

All the same, the blather fell on fertile hive mind soil ...

You're a long way from Texas Jack, but you sound dumb as a stick with your proposal to disenfranchise those killed in wars after the first world ding dong ...

The pond wouldn't usually do this but feels the need to introduce a little counter balance. 

These came by way of The Canberra Times Echnida newsletter, which arrives as emails each morning, and as well as carrying an infallible Pope, delivers opinions more compelling than the lizard Oz ...

Well yes, there was an invasion, a war and an extermination, and there was more in that newsletter, but that was the nub of it, and Ellery followed up almost immediately with another effort ...

And so on, and so to a bonus.

Here time pressures caught up with the pond and it had to continue on in screen cap form ...

How could the pond resist The Times (of London, don't you know) dealing with Vlad the Sociopath ...

What a relief. Europe is safe!

Pity about Ukraine, but there's always got to be a loser, wot wot ...

Oh dear, the pond might have spoken too soon. Perhaps Vlad the Sociopath, in his desperation, might actually lash out ...

Surely the main thing is that plucky Britain is safe from any turmoil roiling Europe. Let's just keep it at all things Ukrainian ...

At this point, the reptiles delivered a set of sub-headlines ...

Discord on public messaging? The same might be pretty much said about this hot-cold-lukewarm analysis ...

There came a last gobbet ...

At the end of it all, the pond remained even more convinced that Europe was made up of patsies about as capable of confronting Vlad the sociopath as a warm lettuce leaf trying to stand firm, or as brave as mad King Donald, wilting in the glow of the latest Chinese emperor ...

Speaking of social media ... there's a site where The Times (of London) pushes a strong anti-Vlad the Sociopath line ...

Meanwhile, the Lord Haw-Haws keep doing their work ...

Lloydie of the Amazon, the bromancer, Geoff, petulant Peta, Killer ... what a reptile line up ...

 

Like the ancient kraken, waking from the deep, or perhaps like a rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem, Lloydie of the Amazon has woken from his slumbers and turned up to celebrate Dan "the man" Tehan ...

But there seems to be some kind of induced energy lethargy, because Lloydie could only manage two brief gobbets, as he celebrated the deep north's commitment to the coal industry - what could possibly go wrong? - a return of the climate wars, and pending victory on action on climate change via "pragmatic common sense": 

Ah, got to make the planet safe for the lizard Oz's "superintelligent" answers to everything, though "42" would save a lot of coal.

The pond asks again, what on earth could go wrong, and luckily had saved up an infallible Pope to provide an answer ...

Meanwhile, the bromancer decided to revert to full Trumpism, and what could possibly go wrong?

Read that line and weep: "On policy substance, most of the merit rests with Trump".

Muh lud, is there a counterpoint? 

Well, you could turn to Paul Krugman, in a missive which came to the pond via email but which could be found on Substack here ...

Well yes, all that and more at the link, with musical coda, and what a relief to find there's some sanity left in America, but sadly not in the bromancer ...

Rest easy, tech bros, the bromancer has your backs ...

Or better still, imagine the reptiles in charge ... if you dare ...

And so it's back to that tired old both siderism, "Trump has done good and bad things", and it's all the fault of left wing critics and never mind those who have avoided ideology and retained a shred of sanity ...

Very early this morning, this was the headline that greeted the pond ...

The reptiles never sleep, but the pond thought it should at least allow Geoff to chamber his round ...

Almost bromancerish - there can be no higher praise - what with that agitation about lefties taking a view on the mad king ...

Geoff continued his dirge ...as a snap showed the extreme distance Albo had put between himself and the Donald ...

Finally it was time to moan about awards ...

All this posing in public? What could possibly go wrong?

And so to the problem of Petulant Peta.

With the intermittent archive on the blink, or at least being spoofed by the lizard Oz, the pond's usual tactic - a note observing her presence, a quick despatch to the intermittent archive, and moving on - won't work.

At the same time, it's incredibly easy to offer up some screen caps as a reminder of the power behind the throne which led to the early demise of the hapless onion muncher's reign.

The pond realises that screen caps have no charm, and are just deployed in the pond's current never ending moving emergency, which will continue for some weeks.

They're just a brutalist way of flinging together a blog post quickly, but time is short, and the petulant one is all on board with the Dan "the man", and so attention of some kind had to be paid ...

The pond realises that a triumphant Petulant Peta can become an unnerving, nauseating experience - that talk of "climate nonsense" being consigned to history might send those with the slightest awareness of science spiralling out of control, but the pond promises that it will be done and dusted in three gobbets, and that the furriner bashing is up there, or more correctly, down there with Dame Groan ...

Where would the reptiles be without furriners to bash? (But then where would Herr Adolf have been without "cosmopolitans" to bash?)

Cue a stern-looking beefy boofhead to set up the final gobbet ...

There, done in three gobbets, and no damage done, apart from the odd rush to the toilet for a heave.

What an inspiration for those into fear, loathing and general hysteria the petulant one is, and what an inspiration King Donald is ...

Finally, it would be remiss of the pond to overlook Killer, what with Killer eager to blame those at some disadvantage for ruining everything.

Don't you worry about the meek and the mild and the suffering, just set Killer on to them and he'll worry them to an early death, like a dog sensing blood with a lamb in the Tamworth sun ...

From the pond's observation of those who've made a living doing hard yards yakka, 65 can still be a stretch. 

The shearers in the pond's extended family all developed back problems that made life extremely hard in their later years, and the pond guesses that the worst Killer has suffered is the occasional wrist and finger strain from extended keyboard use ...but that's the name of the Killer game. If you've spent a life doing manual labour, you're a disposable item.

The real players, the contented oldies, are generally are rich as Croesus in Killer's world ... we are all Lydians now:

If the pond has one wish left, it's that Killer gets old, but the pond guesses that he's managed to build a nice nest egg, and to hell to those left behind ...and what's a little tendonitis in the wrist?

Now on with bashing unfortunates who might be on struggle street for one reason or another:

Back to sheltered workshops, you heathens and bludgers, Killer of the IPA has spoken ...

And so to the immortal Rowe to round out this day's offerings ...and what could possibly go wrong?

That really is a truly noble chair ...

So many temptations ...

So many audio distractions ...