Over the millennia, we have created security systems to deal with the sorts of mistakes humans commonly make. //

But it’s not the frequency or severity of AI systems’ mistakes that differentiates them from human mistakes. It’s their weirdness. AI systems do not make mistakes in the same ways that humans do.

Much of the friction—and risk—associated with our use of AI arise from that difference. We need to invent new security systems that adapt to these differences and prevent harm from AI mistakes. //

AI errors come at seemingly random times, without any clustering around particular topics. LLM mistakes tend to be more evenly distributed through the knowledge space. A model might be equally likely to make a mistake on a calculus question as it is to propose that cabbages eat goats.

And AI mistakes aren’t accompanied by ignorance. A LLM will be just as confident when saying something completely wrong—and obviously so, to a human—as it will be when saying something true. The seemingly random inconsistency of LLMs makes it hard to trust their reasoning in complex, multi-step problems. If you want to use an AI model to help with a business problem, it’s not enough to see that it understands what factors make a product profitable; you need to be sure it won’t forget what money is. //

Matt • January 21, 2025 11:54 AM

“Technologies like large language models (LLMs) can perform many cognitive tasks”

No, they can’t perform ANY cognitive tasks. They do not cogitate. They do not think and are not capable of reasoning. They are nothing more than word-prediction engines. (This is not the same as saying they are useless.)

You should know better than that, Bruce.

RealFakeNews • January 21, 2025 12:35 PM

Part of the problem is AI can’t fundamentally differentiate a fact from something it just made up. It can check cabbages and goats are related via some probability, but it can’t check that a cabbage doesn’t eat goats because it can’t use the lack of data to verify if that is correct.

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Jake Tapper has found time to post about an 18th-century composer in the last couple of hours.

He has not found time to post about Joe Biden pardoning a drug lord who mu*dered a child and his mother.
9:41 AM · Jan 27, 2025

Bonchie
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Jim Acosta has found time to post about the January 6th pardons (again) in the last 24 hours.

He has not found time to post about Joe Biden pardoning a drug lord who mu*dered a child and his mother.
9:43 AM · Jan 27, 2025

Returning to Biden's culpability, isn't it a pretty big scandal that the only excuse one can come up with is that the then-president was so mentally incompetent that he didn't even know what he was signing? I get that the guy is out of office and there's a desire to look toward the future, but I think Republicans can't let this stuff lie. If they do, it just incentivizes more bad behavior from Democrats.

We need to know who drew up these pardons, who vetted the list of names, and why Adrian Peeler was included. Was it truly an "accident?" Or was this another act of "social justice" by one of the former president's handlers? Biden's mental incapacity remains the biggest scandal in presidential history. Every person involved in the cover-up needs to be exposed. Letting bygones by bygones isn't an option.

BRENNAN: You know FEMA has specialized expertise that some of these states just don't have in their arsenal...

VANCE: Oh, Margaret, I wish that they...

BRENNAN: And how will these states who are lower-income states, the Mississippis, the Kentuckys, the Alabamas, be able to do this for themselves without federal help?

VANCE: Well, the president, to be clear, is not saying we are going to leave anybody behind. He's saying that the way in which we administrator these resources, some of which is coming from the federal level, some of which is coming from the state level, we've got to get the bureaucrats out of the way and get the aid to the people who need it most.

Look at the disgust on her face as she calls red states "low-income" hellholes that can't possibly manage themselves without overpaid, useless federal bureaucrats telling them what to do. Notice that she didn't bother to mention California, though, which has shown a lack of ability to effectively respond to natural disasters. Instead, she only sneers at those uneducated rubes in the "Mississippis, Kentuckys, and Alabamas."

That's not an accident. People like Brennan live in a bubble where they truly think credentialism and dollar totals on a spreadsheet dictate competency. For example, calling the above states "low-income" and suggesting that makes them incapable ignores that the cost of living exists. Incomes are indeed lower in Southern states but so are costs, which means the standard of living is not necessarily any worse than high-cost blue states.

Yet, Brennan sees the average income and just assumes everyone in Alabama is an idiot because that's the mindset held by Beltway dwellers such as herself. They can't fathom that other people are not only just as smart as they are but in many cases, are smarter. There's a reason the top states in the country regarding economic growth and employment are almost exclusively Republican-led states, many that Brennan would claim are "low-income."

The reality is that the federal bureaucracies have shown themselves to be the most incompetent entities in the country. If they had "specialized expertise" that simply can't be replicated at the state level, then North Carolinians wouldn't still be living in tents right now.

The discovery of a ship, missing for five centuries, in a southwest African desert, filled with gold coins, is one of the most thrilling archaeological finds in recent times.

The Bom Jesus (The Good Jesus) was a Portuguese vessel that set sail from Lisbon, Portugal on Friday, March 7, 1533. Its fate was unknown until 2008 when its remains were discovered in the desert of Namibia during diamond mining operations near the coast of the African nation.

Error #1: The citizenship clause merely adopted the pre-Dred Scott common law rule that everyone born in the United States is automatically a citizen.

In 1856, the Supreme Court held in the infamous case of Dred Scott v. Sandford that the U.S.-born descendants of African slaves were not and could never become citizens, even though under the traditional common law rule, a person automatically became a citizen of the nation on whose soil he or she was born. The plaintiffs contend that the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause was intended to restore this earlier common law rule of universal birthright citizenship.

They support this claim with a single, highly edited quotation from Sen. Jacob Howard, a Republican from Michigan, who was instrumental in drafting the citizenship clause: “This amendment … is simply declaratory of what I regard as the law of the land already, that every person born within the limits of the United States, and subject to their jurisdiction, is … a citizen of the United States.” //

Instead, Howard was referring to the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which was valid federal law. That act was Congress’s first attempt to override Dred Scott, and statutorily defined birthright citizenship for the first time in American history: “[A]ll persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed, are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States.”

Far from being an adoption of common law universal birthright citizenship, the Civil Rights Act intended to bestow birthright citizenship only on the children of those who, like the newly freed slaves, owed complete allegiance to the United States and were subject to the fullest extent of its political jurisdiction. //

Indeed, the most damning indictment of the plaintiff’s contention comes from the very quotation they use to support it—at least when that quotation isn’t disingenuously edited. The very next line of the quote, which the plaintiffs in this lawsuit conveniently cut, reads: “This will not, of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of embassadors [sic] or foreign ministers accredited to the Government of the United States, but will include every other class of persons.”

This clearly demonstrates that Howard believed they weren’t constitutionalizing the common law rule, but rather a rule that—consistent with the Civil Rights Act’s focus on allegiance to foreign powers—was much more selective in its bestowal of birthright citizenship. //

Error #2: This is an unprecedented action—the executive branch has long recognized that it can’t deny citizenship to children based on the immigration or citizenship status of their parents.

This assertion is only true if history begins in the first half of the 20th century. Unfortunately for the plaintiffs, it doesn’t. In the decades following the ratification of the 14th Amendment, the federal government regularly articulated a view of the citizenship clause that’s remarkably similar to that espoused in Trump’s order, and the executive branch issued citizenship documents accordingly. //

Error #3: The Supreme Court confirmed in Wong Kim Ark that the citizenship clause automatically bestows citizenship on the U.S.-born children of noncitizen parents.

Contrary to popular assertions, this is not what the Supreme Court held in the 1898 case of Wong Kim Ark v. United States. The question decided by the court in that case was far narrower: whether a child born in the U.S. to lawfully present and permanently domiciled immigrant parents was a U.S. citizen. And the court concluded that, indeed, the U.S.-born child of this narrow and specific subset of noncitizen parents is a citizen. //

In fact, the court repeatedly emphasized the lawful and permanent domicile of Wong Kim Ark’s parents, factors that are utterly irrelevant under the common law. A true common law opinion would have said, “He was born on U.S. soil, his parents aren’t diplomats or part of some invading army, so therefore he is a citizen.”

This is also why, for decades after Wong Kim Ark, leading constitutional law scholars continued to articulate a distinction between American birthright citizenship—“where the alien must be permanently domiciled”—and birthright citizenship under English common law, which applied even to temporary sojourners. //

Error #4: The president’s order will leave many children deportable and stateless.

It would rarely, if ever, be true that a U.S.-born child of illegal or nonpermanent resident aliens would be left stateless simply because he or she isn’t automatically granted U.S. citizenship. Virtually every nation (including the United States) recognizes some manner of citizenship “by blood,” under which a child is automatically eligible for citizenship when one or both parents are citizens, even if that child is born abroad. //

The plaintiffs, meanwhile, don’t bother articulating a single set of circumstances under which a U.S.-born child of foreign nationals would ever be completely ineligible for—or disqualified from—citizenship or nationality in every other country the world due to a confluence of legal technicalities and the fact of his or her birth on U.S. soil.