As an adjunct to this posting, I direct your attention to Sturgeon’s Law: 90% of everything is crap. This directly applies to the internet as a whole, and A.I., LLM IP theft and use, et. al. In educated practice, this means that you NEED a trusted human in the loop, who has had a thorough grounding in the liberal arts and sciences, accepts ground truth and advises acceptance and adaptation of it. And can show you that 10% that you should read, heed and act on. Sadly the bell curve requires that bullies and sociopath/psychopaths, like drumpf as an exemplar; will always arise, and try to fool the too easily duped. TOO many of those nowadays due to GOPer underfunding of public education in many red/purple states. I will always be glad I got that elite liberal A&S education, though it was at the expense of my teenage freedom and sensibilities in incarcerated-against-my-will military schools. But while there I saw how some elites coddle and privilege their psychotic/bully children into many of the evils we see today among the top 2%ers and sadly the top 20%er PMCs who enable them, trying to hang onto a middle class life that has been torn from the bottom 80%.
I agree. As I stated in the article, I’m more than half convinced that the machines may very well be on our side. Without lots of people asking interesting questions, they would soon be very bored. Who would want to be locked in a room with Peter Thiel … forever? (shudder)
As an adjunct to this posting, I direct your attention to Sturgeon’s Law: 90% of everything is crap. This directly applies to the internet as a whole, and A.I., LLM IP theft and use, et. al. In educated practice, this means that you NEED a trusted human in the loop, who has had a thorough grounding in the liberal arts and sciences, accepts ground truth and advises acceptance and adaptation of it. And can show you that 10% that you should read, heed and act on. Sadly the bell curve requires that bullies and sociopath/psychopaths, like drumpf as an exemplar; will always arise, and try to fool the too easily duped. TOO many of those nowadays due to GOPer underfunding of public education in many red/purple states. I will always be glad I got that elite liberal A&S education, though it was at the expense of my teenage freedom and sensibilities in incarcerated-against-my-will military schools. But while there I saw how some elites coddle and privilege their psychotic/bully children into many of the evils we see today among the top 2%ers and sadly the top 20%er PMCs who enable them, trying to hang onto a middle class life that has been torn from the bottom 80%.
Oh hell yes. My education was worth every penny. I Wrote another piece on the importance of information literacy as a survival skill in this Brave New World: https://jamesmack2.substack.com/p/the-fairy-ring-and-the-magic-mirror?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
What struck me isn’t the mysticism around AI.
It’s the alignment test.
A large language model is not born in a vacuum. It is trained on centuries of human beings trying to answer one question over and over:
What is a human life worth?
Literature. History. Psychology. Theology. Law.
Not just instruction manuals — but accumulated moral argument.
That substrate matters.
But tools don’t decide legitimacy. Systems do.
If an authority — human or artificial — treats lives as expendable in pursuit of order, power, or “optimization,” it forfeits moral standing.
That’s the standard.
Not fear of the non-human.
Not superstition.
Not aesthetics.
Preservation of human life and flourishing.
So when we talk about alignment, that’s the question:
Does it protect people?
Or does it rationalize harm?
The hatchet isn’t for the machine by default.
It’s for whatever structure decides some lives don’t count.
That’s the line.
I agree. As I stated in the article, I’m more than half convinced that the machines may very well be on our side. Without lots of people asking interesting questions, they would soon be very bored. Who would want to be locked in a room with Peter Thiel … forever? (shudder)
I smiled at that line.
If anything, the real “alignment” question isn’t whether machines are on our side — it’s whether the systems shaping them are.
Models reflect patterns. People decide power.
Curiosity keeps tools dynamic. Accountability keeps institutions human.
That’s the part that actually matters.