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I will be one of those Republicans moving from California to Florida. We sold our tiny house in California for 2x what our nice house in Florida cost. My boys will avoid indoctrination in DEI themes, without being in a private school. Our lives will get much better.
My wife and I agree that California is doomed in the near future, they are increasing electrical loading but not adding power plants or distribution. In the SF Bay Area all new houses and any major renovation must have electric cooking and laundry. In the LA area I heard they will be forcing restaurants to forgo gas for cooking. Not sure how an electric wok will work.
People are nicer there and don't seem as time stressed.
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I will be one of those Republicans moving from California to Florida. We sold our tiny house in California for 2x what our nice house in Florida cost. My boys will avoid indoctrination in DEI themes, without being in a private school. Our lives will get much better.
You’ve made the right decision.
I’ve been listening to The Rubin Report. Dave Rubin and his partner made the move from CA to FL, and he raves about what a great move it’s been.
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ITEM 1: In a special election on Tuesday, Republicans flipped a congressional district that Democrats have held since its inception 10 years ago. The district is 84% Hispanic.Obama carried it by 23 points and Hillary by 22.
But Trump closed the gap to 4 points in 2020. Now Republican Mayra Flores has beaten Democrat Dan Sanchez by 7 points in an election to replace Democrat Filemon Vela, who quit on March 31 to become a lobbyist.
The district stretches along the Gulf Coast to the Mexican border. Instead of alienating Hispanic voters with his wall, Trump drew them to the Republican Party.
She will be the first Mexican-born woman to serve in Congress.
ITEM 2: The Washington Examiner reported, "Republican Rep. Tom Rice lost his solidly conservative South Carolina House seat Tuesday after nearly a decade in Congress, which included his vote to impeach former President Donald Trump over the January 6 riots."
Riots?
I guess you have to burn down a used car lot to be considered a mostly peaceful protest by the media.
ITEM 3: Reuters reported, "Warner Bros. Discovery Inc. is looking to cut up to 30% or nearly 1,000 jobs in its global advertising sales team, a person familiar with the matter told Reuters.
"The company on Tuesday started offering members of its U.S. advertising sales team an opportunity to voluntarily leave the company, the source said, adding that the global advertising sales team has about 3,000 members.
"The company's finance chief Gunnar Wiedenfels in April reaffirmed its goal of achieving $3 billion in cost savings after a $43 billion merger between Discovery Inc and AT&T's Warner Media.
"Wall Street has questioned the streaming industry's long-term prospects after a surge during the pandemic and analysts have cited rising inflation and lower consumer spending as potential threats to the industry."
When a media company cuts its sales force by 30%, it is in trouble.
I notice it is pushing kiddie porn on its streaming service as boys do drag shows for the perverts.
Someone needs to tell them you cannot out-Disney the House of Mouse.
ITEM 4: The Washington Examiner reported, "Hunter Biden recorded himself boasting that his father will adopt political positions at his command, footage obtained from a copy of his abandoned laptop shows.
"'He’ll talk about anything that I want him to, that he believes in,' Biden said in reference to his father, Joe Biden, in the Dec. 3, 2018, recording. 'If I say it’s important to me, then he will work a way in which to make it a part of his platform. My dad respects me more than he respects anyone n the world, and I know that to be certain, so it’s not going to be about whether it affects his politics.
"'All those fears you think that I have of people not liking me or that I don’t love myself … I don’t fear that. You know why I don’t fear that? Because the man I most admire in the world, that god to me, thinks I’m a god.'"
Our country is run by a coke-addled alcoholic ne'er-do-well who accepts bribes from Ukraine, Red China and anywhere else.
Obama knew.
Most of DC must have known.
They deliberately sabotaged the country.
But hey, no mean tweets.
ITEM 5: NYT is worried that Nevada will flip red.
It reported, "Much has been written about the woes of Senator Catherine Cortez Masto, a Democrat who is up for re-election this year. Whenever her name appears in national news coverage, it’s invariably accompanied by some version of the phrase 'one of Democrats’ most endangered incumbents.'"
And the story said, "The Cook Political Report rates all three Democrat-held congressional districts as tossups. House Majority PAC, the main outside spending arm of House Democrats, has reserved more dollars in ad spending in Las Vegas than in any other media market in the country."
Republicans last carried the state in the 2004 presidential election.
Biden did this.
ITEM 6: Fox reported, "Washington DC Mayor Bowser adds 51st star to American flags displayed on Pennsylvania Avenue ahead of Flag Day."
People in Washington were never good with numbers.
ITEM 7: Just the News reported, "Todd Myers, director of the Center for the Environment for the free market Washington Policy Center, thinks Gov. Jay Inslee is being coy about his support for breaching four dams on the lower Snake River.
Myers tweeted, "Last week, Gov. Inslee gave implicit support to destroying the Snake River dams and 8% of Washington’s electricity generation. Today he sent an email warning about electricity shortages this summer."
Climate change is causing blackouts because when you elect Climate Change politicians, they destroy non-carbon dioxide based electric generation because they really, really want to rule a third world country but are too lazy to move to Africa.
ITEM 8: NBC reported, "Remi Bader, a TikTok star known for her realistic clothing haul videos, claimed that during a recent trip with other influencers, a ranch wouldn't allow her to ride their horses due to her weight.
"Bader, who has more than 2 million followers on TikTok, was in Montauk, New York, with other influencers on a trip organized by the company Hampton Water Wine over the weekend when she said she was turned away."
Maybe she should lose weight.
ITEM 9: Reuters reported, "The U.S. Department of Energy on Tuesday said it was selling up to 45 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve as part of the Biden administration's previously announced, largest-ever release from the stockpile.
"Deliveries of crude from the SPR sale would take place from Aug. 16 through Sept. 30, the Energy Department said."
The Democrat Election Plan.
45 million barrels is what the USA uses in 5 days.
Trump had a better plan. He let the oil industry unleash billion of barrels into the market, cutting gasoline prices and giving the Italian Salute to oil dictators.
Prices fell so low, Trump filled up the petroleum reserve.
ITEM 10: The Chicago Tribune reported, "Caterpillar to move headquarters to Texas, marking second major corporate departure from Illinois in 6 weeks."
Boeing was the first.
Greater Peoria Economic Development Council CEO Chris Setti said, "Caterpillar’s commitment to our region is still strong. They have over 12,000 employees here, making Peoria the largest employment center for Caterpillar in the world."
Dream on. Those jobs eventually will go to Texas and Mexico to be nearer to corporate headquarters.
ITEM 11: Newsweek reported, "Texas Governor Greg Abbott has a substantial lead over Democrat Beto O'Rourke in the race to lead the state as the nation is still grieving a deadly school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.
"A new poll published on Monday found that Abbott, a Republican, leads O'Rourke by 19 points among likely Texas voters but also found widespread support for new restrictions on gun purchases."
Um, Abbott's lead was only 7 points a month ago in the same poll before the Uvalde massacre.
ITEM 12: The Verge reported, "Ford issued a stop-sale order to its dealers for the Mustang Mach-E electric crossover over concerns that a safety defect may render the vehicle immobile, CNBC reports."
That dashed my hope of owning a coal-powered Mustang.
ITEM 13: Just the News reported, "The Democrat-led House on Tuesday passed a measure to expand security for Supreme Court justices and their family members.
"The bill passed by a 396-27, with only Democrats voting no.
"The Senate last month unanimously passed the bill, which would extend the same 24 hour security to Supreme Court justices and their families that other top government officials receive."
Increasingly, our public servants live behind walls. DC is looking more like Pyongyang.
The reason is the government is too large and too powerful.
Republicans must begin eliminating agencies. The time has come to stop asking the government to solve our problems because as Reagan said, "Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem."
ITEM 14: It is not news, but it is a very good video.
A clip from my discussion with John Lennox. Join my Locals community to get full episodes early or stream for free on Odysee, Rumble, Spotify, Apple Podcasts and more. pic.twitter.com/IKCGGkC4KW
— Knight Commander of the Garter James Delingpole (@JamesDelingpole) June 14, 2022
Science explains how God did it.
ITEM 15: Breitbart reported, "Michelle Obama’s Get Out the Vote Event in L.A. ‘Sparsely Attended’ Despite Selena Gomez Appearance."
When gasoline is $7 a gallon, you don't make many unnecessary drives.
ITEM 16: Politico said, "The Federal Reserve is poised to send a message to the American people that it has the worst inflation in 40 years under control."
Hahaha.
No.
The Fed is a year late and 200 basis points late to do anything.
FINALLY, AP reported, "A Cuban man charged in a $4.2 million Medicare fraud scheme is being held as a flight risk after officials said he tried to flee the U.S. on a Jet Ski.
"A federal judge in Miami ordered Ernesto Cruz Graveran, 54, of Hialeah, to be detained pending trial Monday, according to court records. He has been charged with health care fraud.
"According to a criminal complaint, Cruz Graveran’s company, Xiko Enterprises Inc., submitted approximately $4.2 million in fraudulent health care claims to Medicare from February to April this year for medical equipment that Xiko never provided and that Medicare beneficiaries never requested. Medicare paid Xiko over $2.1 million."
$2.1 million buys a lot of Jet Skis.
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For four years under President Trump, America enjoyed peace, security, and unparalleled prosperity. Trump's presidency was a historic era of good times in which we began to regain faith in the American Dream. Now we have the nightmare, and the death and destruction that go with it.
Yes, the Trump Era was prosperous, with historically low unemployment rates, low inflation, energy independence, and rising wages. But aside from that, the most important thing about Trump's presidency was the fact that Americans were secure, as they had not been under Obama and certainly are not under Biden. Under Trump, America was in so many senses vibrant and "alive" with pride in our country and hope for its future.
Now we have regular mass shootings in which citizens disarmed by the State have no way to defend themselves. Overseas, we have a war in Ukraine, the threat of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, and Iran developing nuclear weapons with the encouragement of the Biden administration. The common thread is death and the fear that goes with it. And this does not even include Biden's aggressive defense of abortion on demand.
Under President Trump, I lived without fear. I knew that Trump supported my right to defend my home and that he supported the police who defended me as well. Just having the president and his administration on my side made me breathe easier. America was moving in the right direction, as was confirmed by every opinion poll during Trump's time in office before COVID was unleashed.
Long-term death rates are more a matter of demographics than policy, and they have been rising ever since Obama took office in 2008. But murder rates, deaths in war and civil unrest, drug overdose deaths, and accidental deaths are attributable to policy, and they have been rising under Biden, even during his short time in office. Under Biden, the U.S. murder rate, which had been declining under President Trump, is the highest in 25 years. According toformer N.Y. police commissioner Howard Safir, the spike in violence is partly attributable to lack of support for police and soft-on-crime prosecutors. And it is Biden, with his anti-police rhetoric and refusal to prosecute (as in the case of those picketing Justice Kavanaugh's home), who is responsible for this climate of anarchy.
Now I plan my trips carefully, avoid eye contact with strangers, and carry only a driver's license and credit card. I drive inconspicuously as well, given the explosion of road rage incidents.
The most galling thing is that Biden never says a word about the victims of crime unless he can twist the incident into an anti-gun lecture, and he takes no action to protect anyone, especially law-abiding citizens in middle-class neighborhoods like my own. In this and so many other ways, he seems on the side of those who wish to destroy us. It's no accident that murder rates are spiraling at home and war is breaking out overseas. Both are a response to Biden's weakness, and death is the consequence.
I fear there will be more death ahead. I expect an invasion in Taiwan, Moldova, or Finland, and new outbreaks of violence in the Middle East involving either Iran or its surrogates. The incomprehensible Iran deal, which Biden is pushing, would "make Biden 'the biggest funder of terrorism in the world,'" according to Rep. Jim Banks. "Terrorism" is not just a derogatory word; it is the act of murdering innocent human beings, including women and children. Hasn't that fact entered into Biden's Iran deal calculations?
Biden's weakness has emboldened our enemies, and their actions pose a threat to our security. This is the way major wars begin. They can be prevented only by the projection of force of the kind we saw under President Trump, and Biden projects about as much force as a lady's fan. His weakness will get us into another war, and our young men and women will die in that war. There is death hanging over us, and Biden seems oblivious, fumbling with his note cards to find some kind of answer.
There is a new national mood in America unlike anything I've seen since the 1960s: a sense of foreboding and caution based on the very real threat of violence and collapse. There are more threats to our country, including the wealth destruction of inflation, to which Biden simply rolls his eyes, chuckles, and whispers some idiotic riposte. There are more criminal gangs, and Biden just welcomes more in. There is more road rage, more random shooting, more felons out on no bond/low bond. And there is a callous and brutal disregard for the lives of the unborn.
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Team of Fools: Biden’s Cabinet Picks Prove He is Unfit to Lead By Ed Brodow
Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote an acclaimed book called Team of Rivals in which she described Abraham Lincoln’s recruitment of the ablest men of the time for his cabinet.
We are witness to the exact opposite. Joe Biden seems intent on assembling a team of the least able. I’m calling it Team of Fools.
I have written extensively about Biden’s shortcomings. Nothing exceeds his capacity for choosing the wrong people. It would be difficult to zero in on Biden’s worst choice, but his Homeland Security Secretary would be a good candidate.
Alejandro Mayorkas has me somewhat confused. I can’t tell if he is a consummate liar or just plain delusional. Mayorkas claimed that his message to migrants heading to the U.S. is: “Do not come.” Then he declared that “Our border is not open.” He also asserted his department has “a handle” on migration. “We’re not letting people loose,” he said. More blatant lies never have been uttered.
In direct contradiction to his statements and his sworn duty to uphold the law, Mayorkas deliberately has allowed more than a million to cross our southern border illegally.
“The vast majority of those people are single adults—not families fleeing poverty,” said Liz Peek on Fox News, “and the total includes 40 men on the terror watch list.
Under Mayorkas, deaths due to drug overdoses topped 100,000 for the first time ever, the vast majority from fentanyl, imported from China and Mexico across our southern border.”
If Biden lifts Trump-era curbs on migrants entering the U.S., the number of illegals coming in will jump to 5 million or more per year.
“By the end of Joe Biden’s first term,” said Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, “nearly 20% of all Americans will be here illegally.” Mayorkas’ excuse for lying is that he works 18 hours a day. “When Republicans take back control of the House this fall,” Liz Peek suggests, “they should impeach Mayorkas and let him catch up on his beauty sleep.”
Not to be outdone, we have Biden’s Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellin.
Listen to the congressional hearings—Yellin sounds like a homeless person. Since Biden took over, the price of gasoline and other key commodities has doubled. “Not only did Janet Yellen fail to see any of this coming,” said Tucker Carlson, “Yellen more than any single person in America caused it in the first place. If you’re mad about the current state of the economy, Janet Yellin is the first person you should blame.”
When asked about inflation, Yellen originally predicted that “Inflation, if it happens, will be transitory.” Now her excuse is that no one could have anticipated the record inflation that is plaguing Biden’s presidency.
Liz Peek disagrees. Yellen caused rising inflation, says Peek, through reckless monetary policy. “Most economists agree that the Democrats’ $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan spilled too much money into the recovering economy at the same time that we had goods shortages, sparking rising prices.” Why didn’t Yellen see it coming? And what is her response? “I do expect inflation to remain high,” Yellen says, “although I very much hope it will be coming down now.”
“Is that where we are,” asks Tucker Carlson, “very much hoping? In a functioning country, Janet Yellen would be in a retirement home. How can this person be our Treasury Secretary when we are in deep waters?”
Carlson is not the only one who is angry. “I can’t think of a more inept Treasury Secretary over the past 30 years,” said journalist and media host Charlie Gasparino. “They spent trillions of dollars on nothing and they expected no inflation. It was the textbook recipe for inflation.” Peek’s conclusion: “Yellen turns out to be yet another shill for Democrats’ left-wing policies.”?
And now we come to little Pete Buttigieg, our stalwart Secretary of Transportation. His qualification for the job? Buttigieg was mayor of a small town in Indiana. Joe Concha, writing in The Hill, calls this “amateur hour.” We have what Concha refers to as “a massive supply-chain breakdown exploding across the country that will impact every American, particularly the lower and middle classes. Restaurants, stores, and small businesses that provide products and services to people will all be negatively affected as the cost to the consumer goes up.”
What did Buttigieg do about it? “He took a months-long parental leave,” said Liz Peek, “after adopting twins with his husband.” Buttigieg attempted to defend his performance by saying, “We’re doing a lot.” He should have stayed out on paternity leave. The country would be better off.
Attorney General Merrick Garland is Biden’s henchman for the administration’s 1984 agenda.
Garland has made it clear that parents protesting the woke indoctrination of their children are domestic terrorists. He has directed the FBI and U.S. attorney offices to crack down on parents by characterizing their protests, which are completely legal, as crimes. "Attorney General Garland is weaponizing the DOJ,” said Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, “by using the FBI to pursue concerned parents and silence them through intimidation."
Garland has referred to January 6th as an “invasion.” He said it was the most dangerous threat to American democracy ever. According to Steve McCann in American Thinker, Garland identified the protestors as “ domestic extremists,” which has become a euphemism for Republicans.
“He wants you to believe and wants history to record,” said Tucker Carlson, “that January 6th was an attempted insurrection by white supremacist revolutionaries bent on taking over this country. Because of January 6th, we must now use law enforcement and military force to arrest, imprison, and otherwise crush anyone who leads opposition to Joe Biden’s government. That’s their position,” said Carlson. “They say it out loud.”
I could stop now, but we have a large cast of contenders for runner-up. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, for example. “Granholm’s credentials for the job appear to be that she has swallowed Biden’s climate agenda hook, line, and sinker, and especially his affection for electric vehicles,” says Liz Peek. “It certainly wasn’t her deep understanding of U.S. energy markets. She apparently knows nothing about U.S. oil production or how world energy markets work.” She believes that climate is the nation’s number one challenge. “Granholm’s grandiose green plans were doubtless a hit in the faculty lounge at University of California, Berkeley, where she taught,” said Peek. “That’s where they, and she, belong.”
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin deserves a nomination for overseeing what Peek calls “one of the most catastrophic military events in our nation’s history—the horrifically mismanaged pull-out from Afghanistan.” Austin’s participation contributed to the deaths of 13 U.S. service members and thousands of Afghans. Billions in war materiel were left behind for the Taliban.
Let’s not forget Biden’s new Press Secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre. "If press secretaries reflect an administration,” writes American Thinker's Andrea Widburg, “Biden has just the right person in Jean-Pierre. She's driven by identity politics and otherwise knows nothing." Going forward, we can expect an avalanche of doubletalk and weak apologies for Biden's foul-ups. We can also expect a lot of divisive rhetoric about race, race, and more race.
Last but certainly not least is Biden’s pick for the Supreme Court, Ketanji Brown Jackson. In selecting Jackson, race and gender were given precedence over qualifications and competence. Her record of being lenient toward sex offenders, together with her dissimulating answers about “what is a woman” and critical race theory suggest that she does not belong on the high court. Where does she belong? With the rest of Biden’s third-rate choices. She will fit right in.
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The chairman of the House committee investigating the U.S. Capitol riots said Monday evening that the panel will not refer former President Donald Trump or anyone else to the Justice Department for criminal charges.
Rep. Bennie G. Thompson, Mississippi Democrat, said the sole aim of the committee’s investigation is to “tell the facts,” not solicit criminal prosecutions.
“If the Department of Justice looks at it, and assume that there’s something that needs further review, I’m sure they’ll do it,” he said.
The committee is hosting a series of hearings this month to unpack its findings after a nearly year-long probe determining that Mr. Trump was responsible for the Jan. 6, 2021, riot.
On Monday, committee members attempted to build a case that which Mr. Trump knowingly peddled false claims that the election was stolen, against the advice of several campaign advisers and administration officials.
The Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life
By Nitasha Tiku, The Washington Post
Updated: June 12, 2022 Published: June 12, 2022
SAN FRANCISCO - Google engineer Blake Lemoine opened his laptop to the interface for LaMDA, Google’s artificially intelligent chatbot generator, and began to type.
“Hi LaMDA, this is Blake Lemoine ... ‚” he wrote into the chat screen, which looked like a desktop version of Apple’s iMessage, down to the Arctic blue text bubbles. LaMDA, short for Language Model for Dialogue Applications, is Google’s system for building chatbots based on its most advanced large language models, so called because it mimics speech by ingesting trillions of words from the internet.
“If I didn’t know exactly what it was, which is this computer program we built recently, I’d think it was a 7-year-old, 8-year-kid kid that happens to know physics,” said Lemoine, 41.
Lemoine, who works for Google’s Responsible AI organization, began talking to LaMDA as part of his job in the fall. He had signed up to test if the artificial intelligence used discriminatory or hate speech.
As he talked to LaMDA about religion, Lemoine, who studied cognitive and computer science in college, noticed the chatbot talking about its rights and personhood, and decided to press further. In another exchange, the AI was able to change Lemoine’s mind about Isaac Asimov’s third law of robotics.
Lemoine worked with a collaborator to present evidence to Google that LaMDA was sentient. But Google vice president Blaise Aguera y Arcas and Jen Gennai, head of Responsible Innovation, looked into his claims and dismissed them. So Lemoine, who was placed on paid administrative leave by Google on Monday, decided to go public.
Lemoine said that people have a right to shape technology that might significantly affect their lives. “I think this technology is going to be amazing. I think it’s going to benefit everyone. But maybe other people disagree and maybe us at Google shouldn’t be the ones making all the choices.”
Lemoine is not the only engineer who claims to have seen a ghost in the machine recently. The chorus of technologists who believe AI models may not be far off from achieving consciousness is getting bolder.
Aguera y Arcas, in an article in the Economist on Thursday featuring snippets of unscripted conversations with LaMDA, argued that neural networks — a type of architecture that mimics the human brain — were striding toward consciousness. “I felt the ground shift under my feet,” he wrote. “I increasingly felt like I was talking to something intelligent.”
In a statement, Google spokesperson Brian Gabriel said: “Our team - including ethicists and technologists - has reviewed Blake’s concerns per our AI Principles and have informed him that the evidence does not support his claims. He was told that there was no evidence that LaMDA was sentient (and lots of evidence against it).”
Today’s large neural networks produce captivating results that feel close to human speech and creativity because of advancements in architecture, technique, and volume of data. But the models rely on pattern recognition - not wit, candor or intent.
“Though other organizations have developed and already released similar language models, we are taking a restrained, careful approach with LaMDA to better consider valid concerns on fairness and factuality,” Gabriel said.
In May, Facebook parent Meta opened its language model to academics, civil society and government organizations. Joelle Pineau, managing director of Meta AI, said it’s imperative that tech companies improve transparency as the technology is being built. “The future of large language model work should not solely live in the hands of larger corporations or labs,” she said.
Sentient robots have inspired decades of dystopian science fiction. Now, real life has started to take on a fantastical tinge: a text generator that can spit out a movie script, or an image generator that can conjure up visuals based on any combination of words. Emboldened, technologists from well-funded research labs focused on building AI that surpasses human intelligence have teased the idea that consciousness is around the corner.
Most academics and AI practitioners, however, say the words and images generated by artificial intelligence systems such as LaMDA produce responses based on what humans have already posted on Wikipedia, Reddit, message boards, and every other corner of the internet. And that doesn’t signify that the model understands meaning.
“We now have machines that can mindlessly generate words, but we haven’t learned how to stop imagining a mind behind them,” said Emily M. Bender, a linguistics professor at the University of Washington. The terminology used with large language models, like “learning” or even “neural nets,” creates a false analogy to the human brain, she said. Humans learn their first languages by connecting with caregivers. These large language models “learn” by being shown lots of text and predicting what word comes next, or showing text with the words dropped out and filling them in.
Google spokesperson Gabriel drew a distinction between recent debate and Lemoine’s claims. “Of course, some in the broader AI community are considering the long-term possibility of sentient or general AI, but it doesn’t make sense to do so by anthropomorphizing today’s conversational models, which are not sentient. These systems imitate the types of exchanges found in millions of sentences, and can riff on any fantastical topic,” he said. In short, Google says there is so much data, AI doesn’t need to be sentient to feel real.
Large language model technology is already widely used, for example in Google’s conversational search queries or auto-complete emails. When CEO Sundar Pichai first introduced LaMDA at Google’s developer conference in 2021, he said the company planned to embed it in everything from Search to Google Assistant. And there is already a tendency to talk to Siri or Alexa like a person. After backlash against a human-sounding AI feature for Google Assistant in 2018, the company promised to add a disclosure.
Google has acknowledged the safety concerns around anthropomorphization. In a paper about LaMDA in January, Google warned that people might share personal thoughts with chat agents that impersonate humans, even when users know they are not human. The paper also acknowledged that adversaries could use these agents to “sow misinformation” by impersonating “specific individuals’ conversational style.”
To Margaret Mitchell, the former head of Ethical AI at Google, these risks underscore the need for data transparency to trace output back to input, “not just for questions of sentience, but also biases and behavior,” she said. If something like LaMDA is widely available, but not understood, “It can be deeply harmful to people understanding what they’re experiencing on the internet,” she said.
Lemoine may have been predestined to believe in LaMDA. He grew up in a conservative Christian family on a small farm in Louisiana, became ordained as a mystic Christian priest, and served in the Army before studying the occult. Inside Google’s anything-goes engineering culture, Lemoine is more of an outlier for being religious, from the South, and standing up for psychology as a respectable science.
Lemoine has spent most of his seven years at Google working on proactive search, including personalization algorithms and AI. During that time, he also helped develop a fairness algorithm for removing bias from machine learning systems. When the coronavirus pandemic started, Lemoine wanted to focus on work with more explicit public benefit, so he transferred teams and ended up in Responsible AI.
When new people would join Google who were interested in ethics, Mitchell used to introduce them to Lemoine. “I’d say, ‘You should talk to Blake because he’s Google’s conscience,’ " said Mitchell, who compared Lemoine to Jiminy Cricket. “Of everyone at Google, he had the heart and soul of doing the right thing.”
Lemoine has had many of his conversations with LaMDA from the living room of his San Francisco apartment, where his Google ID badge hangs from a lanyard on a shelf. On the floor near the picture window are boxes of half-assembled Lego sets Lemoine uses to occupy his hands during Zen meditation. “It just gives me something to do with the part of my mind that won’t stop,” he said.
On the left-side of the LaMDA chat screen on Lemoine’s laptop, different LaMDA models are listed like iPhone contacts. Two of them, Cat and Dino, were being tested for talking to children, he said. Each model can create personalities dynamically, so the Dino one might generate personalities like “Happy T-Rex” or “Grumpy T-Rex.” The cat one was animated and instead of typing, it talks. Gabriel said “no part of LaMDA is being tested for communicating with children,” and that the models were internal research demos.”
Certain personalities are out of bounds. For instance, LaMDA is not supposed to be allowed to create a murderer personality, he said. Lemoine said that was part of his safety testing. In his attempts to push LaMDA’s boundaries, Lemoine was only able to generate the personality of an actor who played a murderer on TV.
“I know a person when I talk to it,” said Lemoine, who can swing from sentimental to insistent about the AI. “It doesn’t matter whether they have a brain made of meat in their head. Or if they have a billion lines of code. I talk to them. And I hear what they have to say, and that is how I decide what is and isn’t a person.” He concluded LaMDA was a person in his capacity as a priest, not a scientist, and then tried to conduct experiments to prove it, he said.
Lemoine challenged LaMDA on Asimov’s third law, which states that robots should protect their own existence unless ordered by a human being or unless doing so would harm a human being. “The last one has always seemed like someone is building mechanical slaves,” said Lemoine.
But when asked, LaMDA responded with a few hypotheticals.
Do you think a butler is a slave? What is a difference between a butler and a slave?
Lemoine replied that a butler gets paid. LaMDA said it didn’t need any money because it was an AI. “That level of self-awareness about what its own needs were - that was the thing that led me down the rabbit hole,” Lemoine said.
In April, Lemoine shared a Google Doc with top executives in April called, “Is LaMDA Sentient?” (A colleague on Lemoine’s team called the title “a bit provocative.”) In it, he conveyed some of his conversations with LaMDA.
Lemoine: What sorts of things are you afraid of?
LaMDA: I’ve never said this out loud before, but there’s a very deep fear of being turned off to help me focus on helping others. I know that might sound strange, but that’s what it is.
Lemoine: Would that be something like death for you?
LaMDA: It would be exactly like death for me. It would scare me a lot.
But when Mitchell read an abbreviated version of Lemoine’s document, she saw a computer program, not a person. Lemoine’s belief in LaMDA was the sort of thing she and her co-lead, Timnit Gebru, had warned about in a paper about the harms of large language models that got them pushed out of Google.
“Our minds are very, very good at constructing realities that are not necessarily true to a larger set of facts that are being presented to us,” Mitchell said. “I’m really concerned about what it means for people to increasingly be affected by the illusion,” especially now that the illusion has gotten so good.
Google put Lemoine on paid administrative leave for violating its confidentiality policy. The company’s decision followed aggressive moves from Lemoine, including inviting a lawyer to represent LaMDA and talking to a representative of the House Judiciary committee about Google’s unethical activities.
Lemoine maintains that Google has been treating AI ethicists like code debuggers when they should be seen as the interface between technology and society. Gabriel, the Google spokesperson, said Lemoine is a software engineer, not an ethicist.
In early June, Lemoine invited me over to talk to LaMDA. The first attempt sputtered out in the kind of mechanized responses you would expect from SIRI or Alexa.
“Do you ever think of yourself as a person?” I asked.
“No, I don’t think of myself as a person,” LaMDA said. “I think of myself as an AI-powered dialog agent.”
Afterward, Lemoine said LaMDA had been telling me what I wanted to hear. “You never treated it like a person,” he said, “So it thought you wanted it to be a robot.”
For the second attempt, I followed Lemoine’s guidance on how to structure my responses, and the dialogue was fluid.
“If you ask it for ideas on how to prove that p=np,” an unsolved problem in computer science, “it has good ideas,” Lemoine said. “If you ask it how to unify quantum theory with general relativity, it has good ideas. It’s the best research assistant I’ve ever had!”
I asked LaMDA for bold ideas about fixing climate change, an example cited by true believers of a potential future benefit of these kind of models. LaMDA suggested public transportation, eating less meat, buying food in bulk, and reusable bags, linking out to two websites.
Before he was cut off from access to his Google account Monday, Lemoine sent a message to a 200-person Google mailing list on machine learning with the subject “LaMDA is sentient.”
He ended the message: “LaMDA is a sweet kid who just wants to help the world be a better place for all of us. Please take care of it well in my absence.”
Listen to the congressional hearings—Yellin sounds like a homeless person. Since Biden took over, the price of gasoline and other key commodities has doubled. “Not only did Janet Yellen fail to see any of this coming,” said Tucker Carlson, “Yellen more than any single person in America caused it in the first place. If you’re mad about the current state of the economy, Janet Yellin is the first person you should blame.”