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For all the talk of walking and chewing gum vis-a-vis America’s looming threats to national security, have you ever asked whether China is the walking part or the chewing gum? Elbridge Colby has. He joins Rob, James and Charles to explain why the analogies to multitasking are divorced from our current defense strategy — such as it is — and why even thinking back to the Cold War can only do so much for us.
Our hosts get into lousy speeches and wonder if ChatGPT could make for an improvement; plus they say farewell to the essential Burt Bacharach.
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This week’s money quote from our guest:
I am a big fan of Charles C. W. Cooke and of his American mindset. And I agree that some congressmen and -women acted like barnyard animals in response to Biden’s truly despicable lie about Social Security and Medicare—I say screw any representative who balks at having to vote regularly for legislation they claim to support. I think it’s a great idea. And I would love to have statesmen and -women at the fore on both sides, but that’s not where we are. We’re in a vicious street fight over reality: the meaning of melanin, of sex, and, most importantly, what is and is not owed by one group of American strangers to another. California cities and places like Boston are setting up committees on reparations. (The mind spins almost out of its socket!) I don’t know if it’s more funny or more absurd, but it’s definitely tragic, cynically pitting group against group, one against the other in the name of justice. I say the outbursts (though unattractive) were an understandable and perhaps necessary release for people who have been continually slandered by this president while the media lets him get away with it. It’s true; the Republican boo-ers were crass. But at this point I say, as a citizen and taxpayer, so be it.
Was “we’ll need fossil fuels for another 10 years” actually from the written speech? I haven’t seen any clips for a while but I thought the “10 years” was something that Biden just pulled out of his own… what passes for his mind.
I can see how economic sanctions against a place like North Korea might not be effective because North Korea doesn’t have much of an economy to start with. The regular people are already in the toilet, and even tough sanctions might leak enough for the top people to live in luxury, and that’s all North Korea cares about.
A big part of Reagan’s strategy was helping freedom fighters around the world, helping anyone willing to fight our enemies, even when “our” side was a little unsavory.
It’s unlikely Reagan would stand around and let Vladimir Putin undo his greatest achievement, liberating the European parts of the Russian Empire or, as it then styled itself, the Soviet Union.
Reagan understood the concept of political capital. After Beirut, which was one of the worst days in the history of the Marine Corps (241 dead), Reagan did not expend more on revenge. That allowed him to do what he wanted to do vis-à-vis the Soviet Union.
George W. Bush, on the other hand, spent a generation’s worth of political capital in the Middle East. And that’s what you’re seeing play out now. The resistance is not coming from the political class – this is all abstract to them. As a whole their children are not involved or if they participate at all it’s as Brass or JAGs. The resistance is from the families of the dead and those who are wounded of mind, of body, of spirit.
My oldest son was 5 on 9/11. He served 8 years in the Corps and got out a year before the debacle of the Kabul withdrawal. His baby brother will go active duty in three years. And nobody yet has coherently offered an explanation of how Ukrainian sovereignty is America’s problem. Or even in the Top 25 of America’s problems.
Do you really think I’m going to be swayed by the argument that it’s a Reagan Legacy project? Give me a break.
During WWII the BBC would insert coded messages to European resistance fighters in its broadcasts. So imagine Agent Q to his/her Chinese handlers — ‘When I’ve achieved access to the highest level of decision making, I’ll insert something completely off the wall into the SOTU, something about resort fees to let you know I’m inside’
You all were having this conversation about ChatGPT in which James made the excellent point that we will use it because it is easy, even though it is inferior in many ways. Then James said it was time for an ad, and you cut to a pre-recorded ad instead of James reading copy, an apt metaphor for James’ point! I felt sad that you were playing an ad instead of James’ excellent and entertaining reading of it. Easier, yes, but not as good.
Interesting point!
Since the VPN I’m using currently has me in France, the ad I got was in French!
The U.S. government — to be specific, the Clinton Administration — coerced Ukraine into giving up its nuclear deterrent, and handing it over to (wait for it) Russia, benevolent peace-loving Russia.
Ukraine doesn’t need a nuclear deterrent, the U.S. explained patiently. Russia promises to respect its borders; look, here’s the signature!
Of course, the U.S. could choose the path of dishonor, as it has done before. Borrowing line from Animal House, we can say to Ukraine, “You screwed up — you trusted us!”
In the meantime, every non-nuclear country in the world beats a path to North Korea to make a deal for atomic weapons.
The chatter around Chat GPT, or AI in general, gets melodramatic and misses the point of how it can be used effectively. Just as important is what it cannot do. I’ve been using it for writing and it is a game-changer.
Here are three points to keep in mind:
AI won’t replace writers
AI will automate low-leverage tasks
AI is an intern/research assistant and needs your guidance
What this means is that you’ll spend more time thinking and less time on rote tasks.
It’s about more than just mimic-ing human speech or replacing Google.
But also remember that anything you put into AI or use AI for, will also be available to everyone else who uses it, but you won’t get any credit for it or book royalties from other people who may “write” a book (or column, etc.) just like yours, etc. You wouldn’t have any claim on those ideas/words like you do from actually writing something yourself.
Rob’s faith in technology solving all problems is disturbing. I noticed he didn’t actually tell us what the prayer said. I also thought we were supposed to be exploring Mars and driving flying cars by now.
https://www.cnbctv18.com/technology/google-ai-chatbot-bard-fails-to-provide-accurate-information-ad-campaign-15890851.htm
This will need a solution, and I think it will get resolved. It’s the same problem but from a different perspective because of AI’s unique capability. A future iteration might include links or some kind of citation.
But if 100 people ask it to produce some article about something, wouldn’t it necessarily be drawing from the same links/citations? Not only would you not be able to copyright that yourself, but 99 other people could accuse you of plagiarism!
When James says “Goo goo g’joob” at minute 15, I nearly spat out my coffee
The ChatGPT thing continues to fascinate me. I suspect deep AI will cause another cultural shift, similar to (if not as transformative as) that caused by smart phones and the continuously connected existence.
I don’t like what the latter has brought; I don’t expect to like what AI brings, either. I’m with James on this one, as on a great many things (but not TNG; I’m not going to watch it).
I was amused by one comment of James’ regarding ChatGPT replacing Google search. Yes, there’s serendipity to searching that will be lost when AI takes us straight to the summary. Yes, it’s easier to ask someone/something else to do the sifting for us: everyone will be able to afford a research assistant (sort of). But what amused me was that I made exactly the same argument to my older children when Google began displacing bound encyclopedias.
We owned four sets to cover the span of our children’s ages and reading comprehension, and I remember explaining to my kids that using an encyclopedia was better than just typing in a search query. With an encyclopedia, you had to think about how you were going to find something, think of the keywords that would lead you to the volumes that would contain the information you wanted — that information lodged between unrelated (except by alphabetical collation) topics of perhaps even greater interest. Talk about serendipity! Now ChatGPT and its successors will take away even the poor reflection of that unplanned discovery offered by the search engines.
As did ubiquitous connectivity, I think this is going to hit children hard.
I appreciate your perspective, though I don’t think I share your optimism. I think the only thing preventing AI from replacing some writers, and perhaps quite a few writers, is its tendency to lie, which is unfortunately intrinsic to the current technology. This makes it problematic as a research assistant as well: if you catch your flesh-and-blood research assistant making stuff up you can discipline or fire the fellow. You have no similar recourse with ChatGPT: it will simply offer an insincere apology without explanation, and then go about its business of weaving truth and fantasy together into something intended to earn your approval.
ChatGPT is actually a fallback to the old way of getting just one, “authoritative” opinion. Reminds me of when I looked up Alger Hiss in a hardbound biographical dictionary. I was solemnly informed that the espionage charge against him had been disproven, kid you not.
Now, a search engine like DuckDuckGo will deliver you a variety of opinions to select and judge. (Never Google, though, which is designed to suppress conservative, and other dissenting opinions.)