Ramblin' with Roger

In general, I try not to be a Luddite. Technology changes all the time. But A.I. is making me nervous. And part of it is the mindset of some of the technology’s promoters. In the Boston Globe, behind a paywall, I read the piece: “I had a front-row seat to the emergence of the Tech Right. It wasn’t pretty.” It was written by Richard Hanania, president of the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, which funds policy research. He is the author of the new book “Kakistocracy,” from which the essay is adapted.

“One of the most important political developments of recent years is the surge of the Tech Right. The conservative-leaning Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz is pouring unprecedented sums into the midterm elections, helping to prop up a dangerous Trumpism at a moment when it is weak. The crypto industry is taking regulatory capture to new heights. And Elon Musk’s X is poisoning the public conversation.

“I once believed that tech billionaires entering the Republican coalition would take it in a more fact-based and less populist direction. This did not happen. There is a bitter irony in the fact that adding smart people to the coalition did not raise the collective intelligence of the movement, and may have even made it dumber.”

Fighting Big Tech

Hanania, a self-described “repentant” FOTUS voter,  was engaged in delusional thinking. Cory Doctorow noted, “With America [under Biden] and the EU on the same side of the tech fight, the world had a fighting chance. Tech knew this, which is why Big Tech backed [FOTUS] hard during the 2024 election and aggressively curried his favor after he won. From the tech barons who paid $1m each to sit behind him on the inaugural dais to the millions tech companies donated to his Epstein Ballroom at the White House, tech has made it clear that it supports anything he wants to do, provided he shields Big Tech from any attempt to limit their ability to spy on and steal from Americans and the world.”

Early on, FOTUS delivered. “Pursuant to Executive Order 14179 of January 23, 2025 (Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence), I revoked my predecessor’s attempt to paralyze this industry and directed my Administration to remove barriers to United States AI leadership.”

Government corruption

The grift/graft is in plain sight. “Four senators bought AI stock while the Senate considered deregulating A.I. “Senators Capito, Moran, Fetterman, and Boozman all reported purchases (either personally or by their spouse or dependent child) of Google stock in May 2026… During that time, the Senate was considering the future of AI regulation across the country, including passing a 10-year moratorium on A.I. regulations that would ban any state laws on the technology… The A.I. regulation moratorium was eventually pulled from the Senate version of the budget bill, after passing the House, but the fact remains that these senators were purchasing stock in AI-related companies as those same companies were lobbying for a massive deregulation of the industry. “

The pitch is that A.I. will create great wealth. Peter Allen Clark writes in eMarketer that this is hardly a given. “SpaceX’s record-shattering public debut has become the first major test of whether investors will continue funding A.I. companies that burn billions while chasing distant profitability. The rocket company’s $75 billion raise, larger than all US IPOs combined over the past two years, signals both the enormous capital requirements of AI development and growing uncertainty about returns…

The money goes out… 

“ChatGPT maker OpenAI and Claude maker Anthropic have both filed confidential paperwork with the SEC for potential IPOs this fall, following SpaceX’s lead. The timing reflects an urgent need for capital as A.I. development costs spiral.”

“They’re burning money at an unconscionable rate, and they need to find new sources of capital,” said analyst Nate Elliott. “We’ve never seen this kind of CapEx spend.”

Note that tech stocks tumbled this week on worries about A.I. spending and China’s chip competition. This appears fiscally unsustainable without a government bailout. 

So when I read that OpenAI was blamed for a hacking event on its A.I. models going rogue, I was unsurprised. The first comment to the AP article:  “So if people can switch off safeguards, what’s to prevent someone from doing it for nefarious reasons? Issac Asimov’s 3 rules of robotics don’t exist.” 

It’s all playing defense. NYT: “How to Prevent Meta From Using Your Instagram Images in A.I. The company’s new A.I. image generator has a surprising twist: It allows people to use images from public Instagram accounts.” But it’s NOT really a “surprising” twist, is it?

Intellectual fraud

A Medium article by Matt Lillywhite, I’ll Instantly Know A Writer Used ChatGPT When I See This notes: “AI detectors regularly disagree with each other. I’ve watched writers paste the same article into multiple detectors and receive completely different results. So out of curiosity, I pasted the Declaration of Independence into two separate A.I. detectors.

“Guess what? The scores came back wildly different.

“ZeroGPT estimated 92.5% AI. And GPTZero gave the exact same text a score of 2% AI. So either the Founding Fathers were time travelers with access to large language models, which would certainly please my inner conspiracy theorist. Or, we can throw our hands up and admit these tools aren’t exactly foolproof.”

Librarians are hosting viral ‘Avoiding AI’ workshops for people who are fed up with Big Tech. A.I. music makes Rick Beato and me cranky. I despise Tilly Norwood, the A.I. “actor.”

Data centers

This is why we are seeing pushback on data centers, the lifeblood of A.I. American Rivers: “In 2023, U.S. data centers consumed enough electricity to power about 12% of US households. Electricity generation relies on water at many power plants, so this level of energy demand was associated with a substantial indirect water footprint, estimated at nearly 800 billion liters (~211 billion gallons) nationwide.”

Most new data centers in the U.S. are coming to rural areas. “4% of Americans don’t live near a currently operational data center but live within 5 miles of one that’s planned. Taken together, that means 42% of the population lives close to an existing or planned data center.” “Currently there are no legally binding energy standards that apply explicitly to the operation of data centers in the private sector.” Check out the Brockovich AI Data Center Reporting.

How Meta Got Everything It Wanted in a Secret Louisiana Data Center Deal.

Inner ballast

I could tout some useful functions of A.I.  Indeed, my cousin Anne tweaked this picture from 115 years ago of our great-grandmother, Lillian Archer Yates Holland. 

Maybe Debbie Millman is correct in this New York Times opinion piece. “There is a stern warning to anyone who wants to study Kabbalah, a mystical tradition within Judaism that seeks to uncover the hidden nature of God and the universe: Just wait. In traditional practices, prospective students are urged to delay their studies until they reach the age of 40, at which point it is assumed they will have developed the inner ballast to withstand what they might encounter.

“We should consider doing something similar for artificial intelligence.

“There is something druglike about using A.I., not because it necessarily produces pleasure, but because it removes a particular kind of pain. A person who grows up with A.I. may never know the necessary agony of a blank page, the false start, the dull vocabulary and the private embarrassment of a first draft. A student who relies on A.I. too early will likely never sit long enough with confusion to distinguish it from failure.

“Confusion is a necessary state wherein they learn how to think for themselves…  Language is not merely how we express ourselves; it is one of the ways we become ourselves. We write in order to find out what we think, we revise in order to discover whether or not we believe it, and we speak, stumble, clarify, retract, and try again and again in order to understand the space between ideas and truth.”

Since I’m, er, over 40, when A.I. offers me suggestions I could have thought of myself, or are plain wrong or simplistic, or mine others’ intellectual property, I believe/hope  I’m savvy enough to separate the wheat from the chaff.