Altman v. Musk. Who Will Rule on “The Island of Accelerationalism?”

Posted on | October 14, 2024 | No Comments

Mike Magee

Has America turned into an “Island of Musk?” He seems to be everywhere and nowhere at the same time. As Trump’s new best friend, he’s opened up the gates of Twitter-hell, morphed into a steady stream of crypto-cash, and demonstrated his dance moves alongside Trump at featured venues.

He’s also launched “a robot for every citizen” as part of a cover for sagging expectations for the Tesla Cybertruck, and issued a new round of hollow promises on his Robotaxi scheme. In short, Musk’s ADHD aside, he seems a bit more unhinged than usual.

In contrast, his arch foe, 38-year old OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, is (if you’re to believe him) almost professorial. In his own words, “Technology brought us from the Stone Age to the Agricultural Age and then to the Industrial Age. From here, the path to the Intelligence Age is paved with compute, energy, and human will.”

Part of the clash revolves around a single word, accelerationalism. Destined to become the 2025 “word of the year,” this label is increasingly assigned to thought leaders in AI who have convinced themselves that AI will soon rule the world, our politics, and the battle field, and therefore “faster is better” is now the mantra when it comes to world-dominating generative AI.

This was not always the case. Back in 2015, when Elon Musk and a young Sam Altman teamed up to launch a non-profit called OpenAI “to benefit humanity,” they both realized that the leased offices were not big enough for two alpha males. But in launching their decade long battle for dominance, they agreed that slow, transparent, and deliberative was better than fast and reckless. Altman wrote at the time, “In an ideal world, regulation would slow down the bad guys and speed up the good guys.”

Back then, Musk famously warned, “Mark my words, AI is far more dangerous than nukes. I am really quite close to the cutting edge in AI, and it scares the hell out of me.” Where Musk was ”in your face,” Altman was “extremely nice and accommodating” which masked a startlingly aggressive underbelly according to those who knew him well. As his former partner in the 2011 start-up “Y combinator”, Paul Graham said, “You could parachute him into an island full of cannibals and come back in five years and he’d be the king.” Sam was 23 at the time.

In February, 2018, Musk jumped ship, apparently disagreeing on strategy with Altman. And then Altman’s board, in an all-out coup, fired him on November 17, 2023. Twelve days later, they were forced to rehire him when major stakeholder, Microsoft, threatened to pull their considerable support. Altman, for his part, displayed a conciliatory tone on Musk’s own X-platform, tweeting on his return “For my part, it is incredibly important to learn from this experience and apply those learnings as we move forward as a company. I welcome the board’s independent review of all recent events.”

On June 7, 2023, 38-year old Sam told his Congressional questioners that money wasn’t his motivator. Rather “I’m doing this because I love it.” Sen Richard Blumenthal swooned, “It’s so refreshing. He was willing, able, and eager.” Altman, playing to the cameras, said, “We think that regulatory intervention by governments will be critical to mitigate the risks of increasingly powerful models.”

Just 9 months later, his Senate supporters were no doubt confused to open the Wall Street Journal and discover the headline, “Sam Altman Seeks Trillions of Dollars to Reshape Business of Chips and AI. Open AI chief pursues investors including the U.A.E for a project requiring up to $7 trillion.”

As the November Presidential election fast approached, Musk and Altman chose different venues. Musk attended Trump’s Pennsylvania rally, labeling himself “dark MAGA” and drawing a headline from the Rolling Stone magazine, “Internet Viciously Memes Elon Musk’s Jumpy Trump Rally Appearance.”

In the meantime, Bloomberg reported a quieter visit by Altman to the White House to pursue federal funding to pursue an “Unprecedented Data Center Buildout.” In an abrupt about face, Altman now intends to go big. How big? Really, really big – up to 7 data centers each consuming 5 gigawatts of power (the amount a nuclear reactor generates to power 3 million homes). Sam now sees future prosperity as a race to the top.

In his latest thought piece, he asks how did we arrive at the doorstep of the next leap in prosperity? “In three words: deep learning worked. In 15 words: deep learning worked, got predictably better with scale, and we dedicated increasing resources to it.”

Musk and Altman do see eye to eye on near Biblical-level “history making.” As Altman wrote about the new AI intelligence arms race, “Here is one narrow way to look at human history: after thousands of years of compounding scientific discovery and technological progress, we have figured out how to melt sand, add some impurities, arrange it with astonishing precision at extraordinarily tiny scale into computer chips, run energy through it, and end up with systems capable of creating increasingly capable artificial intelligence…This may turn out to be the most consequential fact about all of history so far.”

Of course, this past week’s inconvenient Florida’s Hurricane Milton made history of its’ own. Over 1 1/2 days, it “intensified at an unprecedented rate” morphing from a Tropical Depression to a Category 5 super-Hurricane initiated by 126 tornado warnings. That brought veteran meteorologist, John Morales, to tears.

Climate scientists were quick to remind that between 2019 and 2024, Google’s CO2 emissions, thanks to AI, increased by 50%. Not surprisingly, tech entrepreneurs who were in the lead on fighting climate change when the source point was Appalachian miners and Rust Belt manufacturers, have now gone strangely silent on the issue. How they will square that with projected AI data center consumption of 17% of all U.S. energy by 2030 remains to be seen.

Musk is now off on his own, having launched “xAI”, and cutting corners in a game of catch-up. In June he opened up a huge 100 megawatts powered data center in Memphis, Tennessee training AI models on the backs of 100,000 Nvidia H100 processors. To power the plant, he installed 18 natural gas turbines without EPA clearance or local permits. The turbines will emit 130 tons of toxic nitrogen oxides. That’s a problem for the people of Memphis already breathing in F grade air according to the American Lung Association.

Ironically, Forbes says a major goal of Musk’s xAI is to improve health care through “task automation, improved clinical workflow, and optimization of clinical productivity.” Evolutionary psychologist, Robert Wright, (author of The Moral Animal) suggests that Altman may have deliberately parachuted onto “an Elon-inhabited island” in 2015 with a super cautious, checks and balances message to capture Musk funding for Open AI. But less than a decade later, he’s eating Elon’s lunch and is king of the island of energy consuming, decidedly non-green, “accelerationalist” cannibals.

“We The People.”

Posted on | October 7, 2024 | 10 Comments

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Mike Magee

With the 2024 Presidential election four weeks away, I continue to struggle with the fact that up to 75 million of our fellow citizens may vote for Trump.

On the surface, it feels like a broad recrimination of the goodness and intelligence of nearly half of American voters – rendering us “unexceptional” at best.

Even if you grant targeted voters against abortion, or for state’s rights, or concerned about budget deficits, this requires that we accept a remarkable reliance on situational ethics: that you could accept evil, degeneracy, selfishness, and cruelty in a clearly unstable and rapidly aging leader in return for getting what you wanted in the bargain.

While there may be elements of truth in that, I think it’s too simple an explanation. There are other contributors.

We are a consumer society (aka greedy).

We are an individualistic society (aka no tradition of solidarity).

We are a gullible society (aka naive enough to embrace fantasies).

We are an entertainment society (aka easily distractible).

We are a young society (aka immature and quick to discard our elders).

We are Americans (aka vulnerable to someone exactly of the size and dimensions and character of Trump).

But we are other things as well. We are immigrants, innovative, creative, energetic, hopeful, and loving (much of the time).

We are also resilient, grateful, and largely balanced. As we approach 2025, majorities of us oppose Dobbs, Project 2025 and the planned destruction of our Democracy.

My guess is, in 4 weeks, good will conquer evil – by sizable margins.

But it is in our hands. It comes down to “We the People.” That is our America. Each of us must consider wisely and use our individual power to move the needle in favor of our better selves.

How do we make America healthy – in body, mind, and spirit?

We will have our answer in 30 days.

Category: Uncategorized
Tags: "We the People" > 2024 > america's health > autocracy > Democracy > Harris > trump > vote

The Silicon Curtain Is Fast Descending On Our Democracy.

Posted on | October 1, 2024 | 7 Comments

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Mike Magee

Whether you’re talking health, environment, technology or politics, the common denominator these days appears to be information. And the injection of AI, not surprisingly, has managed to reinforce our worst fears about information overload and misinformation. As the “godfather of AI” , Geoffrey Hinton, confessed as he left Google after a decade of leading their AI effort, “It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using AI for bad things.”

Hinton is a 75-year-old British expatriate who has been around the world. In 1972 he began to work with neural networks that are today the foundation of AI. Back then he was a graduate student at the University of Edinburgh. Mathematics and computer science were his life. but they co-existed alongside a well evolved social conscience, which caused him to abandon a 1980’s post at Carnegie Mellon rather that accept Pentagon funding with a possible endpoint that included “robotic soldiers.”

Four years later in 2013, he was comfortably resettled at the University of Toronto where he managed to create a computer neural network able to teach itself image identification by analyzing data over and over again. That caught Google’s eye and made Hinton $44 million dollars richer overnight. It also won Hinton the Turing Award, the “Nobel Prize of Computing” in 2018. But on May 1 2023, he unceremoniously quit over a range of safety concerns.

He didn’t go quietly. At the time, Hinton took the lead in signing on to a public statement by scientists that read, “We believe that the most powerful AI models may soon pose severe risks, such as expanded access to biological weapons and cyberattacks on critical infrastructure.” This was part of an effort to encourage Governor Newsom of California to sign SB 1047 which the California Legislature passed to codify regulations that the industry had already pledged to pursue voluntarily. They failed, but more on that in a moment.

At the time of his resignation from Google, Hinton didn’t mix words. In an interview with the BBC, he described the generative AI as “quite scary…This is just a kind of worst-case scenario, kind of a nightmare scenario.”

Hinton has a knack for explaining complex mathematical and computer concepts in simple terms. As he said to the BBC in 2023, “I’ve come to the conclusion that the kind of intelligence we’re developing is very different from the intelligence we have. We’re biological systems and these are digital systems. And the big difference is that with digital systems, you have many copies of the same set of weights, the same model of the world. And all these copies can learn separately but share their knowledge instantly. So it’s as if you had 10,000 people and whenever one person learnt something, everybody automatically knew it. And that’s how these chatbots can know so much more than any one person.”

Hinton’s report card in 2023 placed humans ahead of machines, but not by much. “Right now, what we’re seeing is things like GPT-4 eclipses a person in the amount of general knowledge it has and it eclipses them by a long way. In terms of reasoning, it’s not as good, but it does already do simple reasoning. And given the rate of progress, we expect things to get better quite fast. So we need to worry about that.”

This week, Gov. Gavin Newsom sided with venture capitalists and industry powerhouses, and against Hinton and his colleagues, declining to sign the AI safety legislation, S.B. 1047. His official statement stated “I do not believe this is the best approach to protecting the public.” Most believe his chief concern was losing the support and presence of the Information Technology corporations (32 of the world’s 50 largest AI companies are based in California) to another state should the regulatory environment become hostile.

Still Newsom along with everyone else know the clock is ticking as generative AI grows more capable of reasoning and potentially sentient day by day. Guardrails are a given, and eventually will likely resemble the European Union’s A.I. Act with its mandated transparency platform.

That emphasis on transparency and guardrails has now popularized the term “Silicon Curtain” and drawn the attention of world experts in human communication like Yuval Noah Harari, author of the 2011 classic “Sapiens” that sold 25 million copies. In his newest book, Nexus, Harari makes a good case for the fact that the true difference between the democracy of Biden/Harris and the dictatorship which appears the destination of choice for Trump is “how they handle information.”

According to Harari, while one form of governance favors “transparent information networks” and self-correcting “conversations and mutuality”; the other is focused on “controlling data” while undermining its “truth value”, preferring subjects exhibiting “blind, disenfranchised subservience.”

And AI? According to Harari, democratic societies maintain the capacity to control the dark side of AI, but they can’t allow tech companies and elite financiers to control themselves. Harari sees a “Silicon Curtain” fast descending and a near future where humans are outpaced and shut out by the algorithms that we have created and unwittingly released.

As for Goeffrey Hinton, his outspoken opposition does not appear to have harmed his reputation. On October 7, 2024, he was awarded a Nobel Prize in Physics.

Category: Uncategorized
Tags: AI > carnegie mellon > Democracy > dictatorship > Generative AI > geoffrey hinton > Google > nexus > robot soldiers > sapiens > sb1047 > silicon curtain > turing award > u of toront > yuval noah harari

Advise From A Young Woman: Vote For Someone You Admire.

Posted on | September 23, 2024 | 2 Comments

Mike Magee

We have six weeks to go before choosing a new leader for our still young and evolving democracy. The results will have a profound impact on the health of our citizens, their relationships with each other, and the health of our form of government under the rule of law.

When making a choice, there’s plenty of advice to go around. But the best advice I’ve heard in a long while came this weekend from a young woman. She said, “I think you should vote for someone you admire, someone you’d like to be like.”

In my younger years, we used to call that a “role model.” And by the luck of the draw, I’ve had many women and men over the years who have earned that title. Chief among them was my father who I admired, believed, trusted, and loved.

What did I love about my father?

First and foremost, he loved my mother, and everything flowed from that. We kids understood that we were an extension of their love.

I loved his physical presence – that he embraced us, held us tight, kept us safe.

I liked that he taught me to whistle, which remains a useful skill.

I was proud that he took care of people as a job, and that the people who he took care of loved him so much.

I liked that every Christmas our dining table was full of baked goods that his patients gave him to thank him for his many kindnesses – giving them time, having open office hours day and night, making house calls when they were scared or worried.

I loved that he was honest, that he didn’t cheat or fudge, that he believed your name had to stand for something.

I loved that he was a gentleman and a gentle man.

I liked that he liked to build things, that he owned tools he rarely got to use, and that he’d get upset because we were always messing with his stuff.

I liked that he liked clothes, especially shoes. He liked to look good, and he wore clothes well.

I liked that he always had lots of change in his pockets, and that it jingled when he walked.

I liked that he knew the owners of the local stores across the street by their first names.

I liked that he was patriotic and courageous. I learned after his death that he earned a Bronze Star on May 9, 1945. We never saw that medal or ever heard him talk about that day, ever.

I like that he was modest. He didn’t brag. He didn’t have to. I liked that.

I liked that he delegated. He and my mother expected us kids to help teach each other skills like bike riding, and catching a ball, and climbing a tree.

I liked that he took risks, and wanted us to take risks as well – even though a few of those risks turned out to be unwise and too costly.

I liked that he wasn’t perfect – it meant we didn’t have to be perfect, but we did have to try, and we did have to be independent.

I liked that he was often watching in the background, a last stop before disaster, and that his intervention was usually at the direction of our mother.

I loved that the two of them were a team – and that we kids were the players.

I liked that he could take a hit, that he would never fall apart, no matter how bad things were, he would get up the next morning. Our father was reliable, consistent, upright, sturdy, alive.

I thought he was handsome. Others thought so too.

I liked that he had a spiritual core – not because of his religious belief system, because his values were secure with or without religion.

I admired my father because he was such a good person.

Our country deserves to be led by good people like him. I think you should vote, and when you do, I think you should vote for a good person.

Category: Uncategorized
Tags: 2024 > Harris > leadership > presidential election > role model > trump

How Common Are Miscarriages in America?

Posted on | September 21, 2024 | Comments Off on How Common Are Miscarriages in America?

A miscarriage, or pregnancy loss before 20 completed weeks, is not an uncommon affair. Approximately 15% of pregnancies end in miscarriage, mainly the result of chromosomal or genetic abnormalities. That amounts to some 540,000 women in crisis, which most believe is under counted. 80% of miscarriages occur in the first 13 weeks of pregnancy.

Treatment Prior to Dobbs

If miscarriage occurs before 13 weeks, there is a good chance of clearing the blood clots and uterine tissue with medication and no surgical intervention. But if bleeding is severe, or the loss is occurring beyond 13 weeks, dilation and curettage (D&C) is both necessary and at times life saving. Under anesthesia, the cervix is dilated and any remaining pregnancy-related tissue is gently scraped and suctioned from inside the uterus. Patients are then closely monitored for several weeks for any evidence of continued bleeding or infection.

Treatment After Dobbs

In 14 states, normal treatment has been criminalized. Delay leads to preventable maternal death from bleeding or infection.

Category: Uncategorized

Miscarriage & Justices

Posted on | September 18, 2024 | 2 Comments

Mike Magee

“What did they know, and when did they know it?”

These are the questions Americans have become accustomed to asking of their leaders, dating back to Nixon and extending to Trump, and all Presidents in between. But now the same questions have surfaced, to the extreme discomfort of conservative Justices, as death and destruction of lives begins to mount in the wake of the Dobbs decision.

As predicted, graphic cases of young women bleeding out in parking lots after being refused life-saving acute care for miscarriage in 14 states across the nation are being documented and described. These stories are not only affecting the lives of couples across the land, but also threatening the “political lives” of downstream Republicans facing an upcoming election.

The responsible Supreme Court Justices (Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett) and their legions of Ivy League clerks had scoured the literature far and wide before making the decision to eliminate women’s reproductive freedom in the U.S. and inflict lasting harm to their life-saving relationships with their local doctors.

Their review had to include Blue Cross & Blue Shield’s timely publication, “Trends in Pregnancy and Childbirth Complications in the U.S.” That report, surveying over 1000 pregnant women ages 18 to 44 in April, 2020, was, in part, designed to understand the impact the Covid epidemic had had on prenatal care nationwide. But what it revealed was that pregnancy complications were up 16% over prior years, in part due to “social barriers such as availability of appointments, lack of transportation or nearby providers.”

A comparison of 1.8 million pregnancies in 2014 versus 2018 demonstrated a severely compromised women’s health support system. 14% did not receive prenatal care in their first trimester, and 34% missed scheduled prenatal visits with 1 in 4 of these suffering complications in pregnancy. The BC/BS summary “underscores the importance of focusing on the health of pregnant women in America, especially as health conditions increase in this population…”

The Conservative Justices were forewarned. Yet they still elected to throw fuel on a maternal health system which was already in flames. They were also aware of a 2021 study that confirmed that miscarriage was 43% more likely in Black women than in their white counterparts.

On May 2, 2022, Justice Alito and his allies engineered the release of a draft of a majority opinion in part to freeze attempts by Chief Justice Roberts to secure a compromise. The leaked document labeled Roe v. Wade “egregiously wrong from the start.” As predicted, the ruling spawned chaos. When 14 Red states established total bans on all abortions, miscarrying women seeking help in ER’s literally had to fight for their lives. Their doctors were criminalized. Was this an abortion gone bad?

25% of pregnant women experience some vaginal bleeding in the first trimester. For most (6 in 10) this is self-limiting and they go on to deliver a healthy baby. But for 4 in 10 (or 10% who present with bleeding) they go on to miscarry. All pregnant women who experience vaginal bleeding in early pregnancy need to have a medical examination. Doctors and midwifes check blood work, perform a physical examination, and do an ultrasound examination.

Most pregnancy loss (95%+) occurs before 20 weeks gestation. If miscarriage occurs before 13 weeks, there is a good chance of clearing the blood clots and uterine tissue with medication and no surgical intervention. But if bleeding is severe, or the loss is occurring beyond 13 weeks, dilation and curettage (D&C) is both necessary and at times life saving. Under anesthesia, the cervix is dilated and any remaining pregnancy-related tissue is gently scraped and suctioned from inside the uterus. Patients are then closely monitored for several weeks for any evidence of continued bleeding or infection.

What did the Justices know, and when did they know it?

They knew that Miscarriages were a medical emergency and exceedingly common.
They knew that 80% occur during the first trimester, and that existing state abortion laws on the books would restrict access to acute life-saving treatments in 14 states.
They knew that pregnancy loss was far more common in non-whites and in rural underserved communities.
They knew that the medical community opposed overturning Roe v. Wade in overwhelming majorities, and predicted maternal loss of life if the Justices proceeded.
They read, two years after their deadly decision, the Commonwealth Report which stated , “The United States continues to have the highest rate of maternal deaths of any high-income nation, despite a decline since the COVID-19 pandemic. And within the U.S., the rate is by far the highest for Black women. Most of these deaths — over 80 percent — are likely preventable.”

They knew all this, and they did it anyway.

Category: Uncategorized
Tags: Commonwealth Report Maternal Health > Conservative justices > Dobbs > medical emergency > miscarriage > reproductive freedom > Roe v. Wade > supreme court

AI and The Future of American Medicine

Posted on | September 13, 2024 | Comments Off on AI and The Future of American Medicine

Mike Magee MD

(This paper is provided Open Source as a public service. It may be republished and distributed with proper attribution. Reading Time: 30 minutes.)

The history of Medicine has always involved a clash between the human need for compassion, understanding, and partnership, and the rigors of scientific discovery and advancing technology. At the interface of these two forces are human societies that struggle to remain forward looking and hopeful while managing complex human relations. It is a conflict in many ways, to hold fear and worry at bay while imagining better futures for individuals, families, communities and societies, that challenges leaders pursuing peace and prosperity.

The question has always been “How can science and technology improve health without undermining humans freedom of choice and rights to self-determination.” . . . (Continue reading.)