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 ...

Next video thumbnail
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 ...