Three snapshot applications of AI:
During early phases of the war in Gaza, the Israeli military used software to select bombing targets on a scale that would not have been possible for human analysts.1
During the Trump administration’s initial attack on the federal government, there was lots of nonsense about how Elon Musk and DOGE were using software to identify waste. House Speaker Mike Johnson commented that Musk has “created these algorithms that are constantly crawling through the data, and… the data doesn’t lie.”2
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. commissioned a report with the ridiculous title “Make America Healthy Again.”3 It turns out that many of the citations in the study are erroneous, including references to articles which simply do not exist. Incorrectly citing things and misrepresenting results is plausibly human malfeasance or incompetence, but totally inventing sources suggests chatbot hallucination.
The wrongs committed here are morally different, and I don’t want to suggest a false equivalence. But each of these cases provides a specimen of how reliance on AI has been used to further dangerous agendas. Yet the reliance on AI is really just a sideshow.
Continue reading “Higher-order bullshit”