Oh Look, Pope Leo Presumes To Tell Us What To Do With A.I.! Ethics Observations, Part II

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

The summary of the Pope Leo’s open letter to “all people of good will” is at Part I, along with a link to the whole 42,000 word opus. News reports on the document can be read here, here and here.

1. The document appears to begin, as we would expect, from the basic socialist/Communist/progressive bias the Catholic Church has always displayed, which includes suspicion and contempt for capitalism. In the text, Pope Leo says that while “technology should not be considered, in itself, as a force antagonistic to humanity,” he added that “the pursuit of greater profits cannot justify choices that systematically sacrifice jobs.” The encyclical doesn’t resolve the obvious conflict that has always existed in that perspective: technology ideally improves the quality of life for humanity, saves resources and redistributes them elsewhere, and often reduces the costs of goods and services making them more affordable to all. One of my favorite inventors, Walter Hunt (inventor of the safety pin), invented the first practical sewing machine but didn’t patent or market it because he was certain that it would put seamstresses out of work. So Elias Howe patented the sewing machine instead. Were more jobs lost or created by the invention? I have no idea. This has been the inevitable sequence with new technology throughout human history: its ultimate impact is usually impossible to predict.

Ethics Lesson: Trying to develop rules and laws limiting the uses of emerging technology is stifling as well as futile, and foolish to boot.

2. A Pope using the Biblical fable of the Tower of Babel as his primary analogy to justify limiting the use of artificial intelligence is signature significance that makes me, for one, tend to roll my eyes at the entire document. That’s a story about the Old Testament God finding sinful the aspirations of mankind and sabotaging an effort by humans to cooperate in creating something ambitious and unprecedented. The encyclical demands acceptance of human limits, while science, capitalism and American individualism set no limits on human advancement. The Pope seems to be saying the equivalent of “If God had meant for us to fly, he would have given us wings.”

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Oh Look, Pope Leo Presumes To Tell Us What To Do With A.I.! Ethics Observations, Part I: The Text

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The big news this morning is that Pope Leo XIV issued an A.I encyclical titled “Magnifica Humanitas,” or “Magnificent Humanity,” his first such document. These things are supposed to impart authoritative teachings on moral or social challenges, but fall short of the legal status of a papal bull, which is a formal declaration of an article of faith or moral law. Catholics are supposed to use encyclicals to guide their lifestyles and choices. You know, like devout Catholic Joe Biden believing abortion is murder while supporting the practice so Democrats won’t lose the the single female vote.

I started to read the thing, which is over 200 pages, and officially feel bad about giving up 25% through, especially since I routinely criticize people who attack court decisions without reading them. Do I trust the various reporters and pundits who are supposed to summarize and explain the document? No. However, unlike court decisions, which I am accustomed to reading and have the experience and training to understand, a Pope’s declaration about how we should work with new technology has as much relevance to a non religious question as his opinion on one of the legal controversies settled by a Supreme Court decision: none whatsoever. He is not, by any framework, an expert on technology. He has a bias, indeed many biases, that he has already made clear, and the Pope’s view on A.I. is exactly as valuable as the opinion of of one of my next door neighbors, and maybe not as well informed.

The document has some significance because it will doubtless be used as an appeal of to authority is future debates over A.I. policy even though it shouldn’t be.

Ironically, one of my first substantive uses of A.I. is to ask one of the things to summarize “Magnifica Humanitas.” The result is below, so those of you who are not speed readers or who actually have lives so spending the time necessary to read what the Pope has wrought isn’t practical can prepare for the Ethics Alarms reaction to come. I suppose there is always the possibility that the bot read it, thought “Oh-oh!” and slanted its summary to advance its own welfare and evil plans…

Anyway, here is the summary, which is presumably objective, but who knows? I’ll be back with ethical observations in Part 2. (I couldn’t figure out how to get rid of the hanging letters in some of the sentence breaks without WordPress getting funky. I’m sorry.)

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Another “Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” Smoking Gun, As If We Needed Any More…

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

This exchange…

Ethics villain, Jim Acosta eventually quit CNN in a snit because it began showing a little bit of balance regarding President Trump, but how was such a partisan, biased Axis hack allowed to be CNN’s White House correspondent in the first place? The guy is an A1 Choice USDA -certified ethics villain and, incidentally, an asshole.

Cheer-leading for Colbert is signature significance, to begin with. Gutfield is correct on the facts: it has been verified repeatedly that CBS was losing millions on Colbert.

A swollen staff is part of the reason; the other reason is that Colbert deliberately alienated half the country.

Acosta then defaults to the Axis narrative that President Trump got Colbert cancelled. It’s a lie, flat out. “Dear Leader” is a sarcastic name used by the Trump Deranged. This Axis “advocacy journalist” was out to trash President Trump from the moment he was elected,

Then Acosta privets to the “poor fired employees” guilt trip. They lost their jobs because the show they were working for was losing money! It happens to the best of us (and me, several times). That’s how business works in the U.S. Too bad this isn’t the socialist worker’s paradise Acosta and his fellow travelers dream about. And Gutfield didn’t celebrate the staff losing their jobs anyway. He stated that the staff was ridiculously huge, which it was.

[I will link to Jim Acosta’s ugly EA dossier when WordPress is functioning better, which it currently is not, and its “Happiness Engineers” (Yuck!) have been useless.]

He’s an Ethics Villain. When people complain about Trump calling the news media the “enemy of the people,” Jim Acosta is Exhibit A in the President’s defense.

Note: Exhibit B could be Dana Milbank, whom the Washington Post finally jettisoned as one of its partisan columnists after years of Axis hackery. Today on ABC he cited as one of the three reasons Kamala Harris lost the election was “the backlash against a black woman being the Democratic nominee.” Just thinking that, never mind saying it in public, disqualifies anyone as a serious and trustworthy analyst. Milbank was a political reporter and columnist for the Washington Post for 25 years.

On Trying To See Both Sides Of The Illegal Immigration Issue…

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments
A Guest Post by Ryan Harkins

[This guest post’s origin was the most recent Open Forum. Personally, I don’t believe there is a rational, ethical, realistic “other side” to the issue. As I wrote in a longer response to Ryan that you can read here, “the issue of illegal immigration is quite simple. It’s against the law. It’s against the law because open borders to a country like the US is literally national suicide…The immigration laws we have, flawed or not, have to be enforced uniformly and strictly.”—JM]

My wife and I have been debating the illegal immigration issue on and off for a while now, and part of the reason we keep returning to ethics of the illegal immigration issue is the fact that so many in leadership in the Catholic Church have been very critical of Trump’s deportation efforts.  As faithful Catholics, we believe we need to listen when our bishops speak.  It doesn’t mean we mindlessly agree, but in cases where the bishops take a position we initially oppose, it is incumbent upon us to study and ponder the issue as thoroughly as we can before making any objections.  

To that end, my wife and I are trying to be as open as we possibly can regarding the issue of how to manage people who are in our country and in our local communities illegally.  I have told her that I think the best way to understand a viewpoint with which we disagree is to argue from that viewpoint and to steelman its arguments as best we can.  Interestingly enough, my wife and I do highlight differing aspects of why we have problems with illegal immigration.  I focus very heavily on the human trafficking issue.  She focuses very heavily on the financial injustices the illegal immigration causes. 

From the trafficking standpoint, I think that is it clear that a lot of illegal immigrants end up practically as slave labor, which has largely been overlooked because it seems like it keeps prices down in the supermarket.  But far more devastating is the sex trafficking which never seems to get the attention it deserves, especially when so many of these “lost and displaced children” end up serving the debauched desires of affluent Americans who believe they can continue their predations because “Who would dare contact the authorities?”. 

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Ethics Quote of the Week: “Victory Girls”

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

“So here we are … where prominent Democrats across the country spanning politicians, media, academia and even celebrities … have been overtly anti-Semitic for a number of years, but NOW we are supposed to believe Jeffries claiming Galindo crossed a line? “Free Palestine” agitators can stalk and beat-up Jewish students with no repercussions but Galindo wanting to imprison “American Zionists” is a bridge too far?…Democrats in Texas voted for her in enough numbers to put her in the runoff. You just don’t like that she might lose the election over her beliefs. You can’t Jedi Mind Trick yourself out of your party’s Nazi problem.”

—Victory Girls blogger Darleen Clark, correctly noting the gaslighting and hypocrisy of Democratic Party leaders pretending to erupt in horror after Texas Democratic congressional candidate Maureen Galindo openly talked about prison camps for “American Zionists” and “castration processing centers” as if she were the first prominent member of their party to advocate anti-Jewish, anti-Israel positions and spit anti-Semitic rhetoric.

Apparently Democrats are worried that too many voters might finally realize what their party has become. As I mentioned in the previous post,  “recent polls, show that two-thirds of Democrats (67%) now support Palestinians over Israel, with only 17% being on the side of the nation and the population Hamas wants to push into the sea and off the map.” Galindo is a mainstream Democrat now, and was appealing to the base. Jeffries, who posted this…

is being deliberately deceitful, but as my Dad used to say in such situations, “What else is new?” Clark correctly notes that Jeffries didn’t mention that he was referring to a Democrat, and even (Aren’t these people disgusting?) implies that she is a Republican! Now here is AOC, herself anti-Israel and anti-Semitic, doing the same thing in response to Galindo’s plans:

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Update On The Trump-IRS Settlement Scandal, and More Leftover Ethics…

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

There are a substantial number of Republican Senators who are taking proper notice of Trump’s stunning explosion of conflicts of interest and dubious Constitutional manipulations last week. (I assume all Democratic Senators are in opposition, since they would oppose anything relating to the President anyway.)Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche met with GOP Senators to discuss the nearly $1.8 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” his Department of Justice will supposedly operate as part of a settlement President Trump reached with the IRS, with the cash distributed by commissioners, appointed by Blanche (again supposedly) to selected victims of “unfair treatment by the government.” Most offensive of all, the odoriferous deal shields Trump, his family, and the Trump Organization from further action by the IRS. Reportedly there was general anger and disgust over the arrangement among the Senators. Sen. Mitch McConnell called the fund “morally wrong.” “So the nation’s top law enforcement official is asking for a slush fund to pay people who assault cops? Utterly stupid, morally wrong – Take your pick,” he said. I’d vote for both stupid and ethically wrong, not that McConnell is an authority on right and wrong from any perspective.

I continue to think, or at least hope, that this abomination will be stopped. As I already wrote when asked in a comment, this, unlike the artificial offenses behind the two purely partisan impeachments in Trump’s first term, is a genuine impeachable offense. That’s a non-starter now, though if the Democrats take the House they will be looking for any excuse for indicting Trump, and this will be an irresistible temptation.

It is apparent by the public reaction, however, that not many people who weren’t already Trump Deranged are all that upset about the scam, that many MAGA loyalists are satisfied, even enthusiastic with it, and the vast majority don’t understand what’s going on. It might even win more votes for the GOP than it loses.

In other ethics news:

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Comment of the Day: Ethics Quiz: The Dogs of The Titanic

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Recently esteemed veteran Ethics Alarms commenter Michael West has been active in commenting again. For as long as it lasts this time, I am grateful. Under his initial handle texagg04, or “tex” for short, Michael elevated the level of discourse here, and notably vanquished Ethics Alarms’ most aggressive progressive/libertarian warrior among the commentariate, the legendary tgt. (Don’t get me wrong: I like and miss tgt, who was sharp, articulate and civil, but he fled the battlefield.)

One of Michael’s most interesting recent contribution is the one below, which examines exactly the issues I was hoping to have discussed when I composed the ethics quiz about the dogs on the Titanic. Before I turn the floor over to Michael, I want to emphasize a few points that have been obscured in the discussion:

  • One reason I offered this quiz was because I am so sure that my late wife Grace would have wanted to stay with the sinking ship rather than let a beloved pet die alone. I would have had to put her in restraints and drag her into the lifeboat, and she would have divorced (or murdered) me for doing it if I somehow survived. I’m not kidding. And I would have been the one comforting the dog…
  • Several commenters said that they would never take a dog on a ship because of the implied danger. Remember that there were no planes in 1912. For anyone leaving the US to stay overseas or vice-versa, the choice was to bring their non-human companions, not to go, or leave them behind.
  • Passengers did and do take dogs on cruise-ships, and while Michael in other posts reminds us that the Titanic was never exactly marketed as unsinkable, it was marketed as the safest ship there was, which was translated in the minds of travelers as “virtually unsinkable.”
  • I don’t want to contribute to false history. As I stated in the post, there is no evidence that Ann Elizabeth Isham chose to die with her dog, or even that she had a dog with her. She was one of the four First Class women who didn’t get into a lifeboat when the rule was “women and children first.” The others stayed with their husbands, so the story about her Great Dane was posited as an explanation. She could have saved herself and didn’t. Nobody knows why.
  • The sinking of the Titanic is one of those historical events that is so studied and written about that new evidence and theories still keep, ah, surfacing. We may not have heard the last of Ann and her ghostly Great Dane.

Now here is Michael West’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Ethics Quiz: The Dogs of The Titanic”:

* * *

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Amish Integrity? Nope. Amish Hypocrisy!

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

I always thought of the Amish as a devout religious sect with thee courage of their faith’s convictions, notably that technology is a tool of Satan, and the way to be closer to God is to eschew the modern developments that slowly but surely corrupt us all. That describes an ethical culture to me, if one that I personally find extreme and illogical. Google tells me that “The Amish are a traditionalist Christian group of Swiss-German Anabaptist heritage known for their pacifism, simple living, plain dress, and reluctance to adopt modern conveniences. Numbering roughly 411,000 across North America, they primarily reside in rural settlements in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana.” That’s nice. I’ve seen “Witness” several times, and assumed that Harrison Ford film more or less accurately portrayed Amish society.

I was also vaguely aware that there were variations withing the sect, based on, to some extent, relative isolation because of the general rejection of modern communication methods. Every local congregation operates under an unwritten set of rules called the Ordnung. These dictate daily life, acceptable technology, and community standards.

Today I realized that the Amish are not, in fact, a conservative religious sect that believes it can best maintain traditional values by rejecting technology. It is, in fact, a cult without integrity regarding technology. The Unabomber had more integrity.

According to New York Magazine (Stipulated: I am relying here on a source that I have found to be unreliable before, but unless the piece by Eric German is a flat-out lie as well as an attempt to defame the Amish, I believe it is trustworthy.), “The Amish Are Falling in Love With AI: Cars and TVs might be banned, but some sects are all-in on ChatGPT.”

What the hell? From the article:

“Holmes County, Ohio, has the highest concentration of Amish people of any county in the U.S. Visitors expecting to see traditional horses and buggies, bonnets and Abe Lincoln beards, won’t be disappointed. Still, they’ll find Amish entrepreneurs plugging into the digital economy and one clan of early adopters weaving generative AI into their knowledge work without much hesitation. Of course, none of this sounds like the tech-shy Amish life in the popular imagination. However, there’s no such thing as a single Amish approach to technology. There are some 2,600 Amish churches across the country, and each makes its own, separate decisions about what sorts of new hardware and software church members can use. The Wengerd’s church is Old Order Amish. Its married members dress plainly, don’t drive cars or own TVs, and don’t connect their homes to the electrical grid….Daniel is a minister in his church and has played a role in the congregation’s collective decisions to interdict smartphones and social media but to allow e-bikes, flip phones, solar-generated electricity, and religiously curated internet access. “I don’t want to paint a picture that we’re pushing for new technology and we don’t have respect for our traditions and our values,” he tells me. “We’re not just opening the door to anything.”

Sure they are. In fact, I can see no legitimate argument that a sect that embraces artificial intelligence can be taken seriously when it simultaneously rejects standard electricity, television and automobiles. Ethics is based on integrity, and requires holding to consistent standards subject to continuous testing and re-evaluation based on observed experience. Morality, in contrast, requires obeying clear rules of conduct that will be enforced by an authority, in the case of religion, God. The Amish appear to have neither a moral code nor ethical principles regarding technology. “We believe modern technology is a corrupting force in modern society and that it is not sanctioned by God, unless the technology is really cool and can save us time, like chatbots” is not a coherent code of conduct.

This is religion as Calvinball, the satirical “Calvin and Hobbes” game where the rules are made up as you go along. In Mark Harris’s novel “Bang the Drum Slowly,” a team’s baseball players fleece gullible fans by luring them into a gambling card game called “Tagwar.” It’s an acronym for “the amazing game without any rules.” It’s cheating.

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Brilliant! Democrats Kill The National Womens’ Museum Because It Wouldn’t Include Non-Women! [Revised and Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Wow.

A veteran EA commenter today who excels in the contrived “gotcha!” accused me of “name-calling” because I consistently describe today’s Democratic Party as aspiring totalitarians, Machiavellian, and cheaters, and say Democrats want to gut the Constitution. It reminded me of the objection in the Continental Congress (as portrayed in “1776”) over Thomas Jefferson’s use of the word “tyrant” to describe England’s King George. Jefferson’s justification of his choice of words: “He is a tyrant.” I bet my critic really be incensed as I write—now—that today’s vote in Congress indicates that the party is also silly, doctrinaire and…wait for it….moronic.

Because it does, and it is.

Democrats, along with a few Republicans who should go the way of Thomas Massey, voted to cancel the Smithsonian’s planned Women’s History Museum because Republicans added language to its astablishment bill defining women in a manner that leaves out Renee Richards, Caitin Jenner, and the fully, ah, “intact” male “transitioners” who have been slaughtering female competitors in amateur swimming, wrestling, volleyball, and track and field. You know, like this person known as “Lia Thomas.”

The measure to establish the museum was defeated 216 to 204. Not a single Democrat voted for it, so chained is the party to radical LGBTQ propaganda.

Amazing. Amazing. The fact that most women still support a party that is so hypocritical regarding women’s welfare and rights—this is the party, remember, who made serial sexual predator Bill Clinton the keynote speaker at its national convention proclaiming the “Year of the Woman”!— is as incomprehensible as the fact that so many American Jews still vote for the party that increasing supports Hamas.

In fact, irony and hypocrisy are everywhere in this vote. The Axis of Unethical Conduct (“the resistance,” Democrats and the news media) like to say that Congressional Republicans refuse to swerve from the MAGA script, but the GOP virtually never gets 100% agreement. Every House Democrat, however, wants to see a Women’s History Museum that has a special exhibit honoring this recent Democratic administration official:

How “inclusive.”

Because the proposed museum wouldn’t be pandering to anomalies like Admiral Rachel Levine and the former cute-as-a-bunny actress playing Achilles in the new Odyssey film…

…Democrats decided en masse that American women who were crucial to the founding and development of this nation despite being marginalized, abused and discriminated against shouldn’t have their fascinating and inspiring stories told at all. Their museum wouldn’t sufficiently validate the social pathogen causing parents to allow their children to be mutilated and sports to undermine the cause of female athletes after they fought so hard to compete, you see.

An earlier version of the bill was co-sponsored by 127 Democrats. Republicans on the House Administration Committee added new language to the bill last month to dedicate the museum to “preserving, researching, and presenting the history, achievements, and lived experiences of biological women.”

As opposed to, you know, men who decided they were women, wanted to be regarded as women, or pretended to be women.

Republican New York Rep. Nicole Malliotakis resigned as vice chair of the Problem Solvers Caucus today in response to the Democrats’ ridiculous tantrum, being appropriately disgusted by the vote even though 20 Democrats on the caucus co-sponsored the bill. In a letter to the committee’s co-chairs, Malliotakis pointed to Democrats on the committee refusing to cross party lines on pieces of legislation.

“If not one Problem Solvers Democrat would vote for a straightforward measure to transfer federal land for a women’s history museum simply because it was amended through regular order, during the committee process, to ensure that only biological women are exhibited, then what can we actually rely on the Caucus’ Democrats to join us on? I therefore submit my resignation as vice chair and member of the Problem Solvers Caucus, effective immediately,” Malliotakis wrote.

Good for her.

[Incidentally, I am not unalterably opposed to a National LGBTQ Museum that includesaccomplished and significant trans individuals, if they ever stop killing people…]

Open Forum on a Crazy, Rainy Friday…

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

Thanks to my observant sister, who told me my head should be exploding due to the IRS settlement scandal when many sources, blogs and pundits hadn’t even covered it yet, I was able to get some commentary out even ahead of my legal ethicists listserv, which, predictably since they pounce on Trump whatever he does, REALLY pounced yesterday.

On the bad side, my head hasn’t stopped exploding yet, and the whole house is a mess. And I haven’t even been able to seriously consider the gravamen of the New York Times joining Margery Taylor Greene in condemning Trump’s helping to jettison a GOP Congressman who couldn’t bring himself to condemn anti-Semitism.

On my Facebook page, a smart, Trump Deranged Jewish lawyer friend who called for everyone to vote for the illegal and dishonest “restore fairness” Virginia gerrymandering referendum, bemoaned the end of CBS radio and called it smoking gun proof that CBS was now working for MAGA. Yes, CBS radio’s demise is Trump’s fault. He even included a weepy reference to Edward R. Murrow. News radio is, like the US Postal Service, bow ties, landlines and the Sears catalogue, outdated, anachronistic and disposable, having once served a great purpose. You know, like the Model T.

Yes, it’s crazy out there. Use the Open Forum to start fixing it,