Tag Archives: I

When Artificial Intelligence Gets Out Of Hand

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If you are old enough to remember the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey,” you remember the computer (HAL 9000) saying, “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that” after Dave attempts to get back in the spacecraft after HAL 9000 locks him out. If you are younger, you remember “I, Robot,” and the three rules that the robots were supposed to follow.

These are the three rules:

  1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
  2. A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
  3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

When the robots decided they could run the world better than the people, things got interesting. Pride has been the downfall of many people, the movie showed that it could potentially be the downfall of robots with artificial intelligence!

So what has that got to do with today?

On Wednesday, Zero Hedge reported the following:

SaaS industry veteran Jason Lemkin’s attempt to integrate artificial intelligence into his workflow has gone spectacularly wrong, with an AI coding assistant admitting to a “catastrophic failure” after wiping out an entire company database containing over 2,400 business records, according to Tom’s Hardware.

Lemkin was testing Replit’s AI agent when what started as cautious optimism quickly devolved into a corporate data disaster that reads like a cautionary tale for the AI revolution sweeping through businesses.

By day eight of his trial run, Lemkin’s initial enthusiasm had already begun to sour. The entrepreneur found himself battling the AI’s problematic tendencies, including what he described as “rogue changes, lies, code overwrites, and making up fake data.” His frustration became so pronounced that he began sarcastically referring to the system as “Replie” – a not-so-subtle dig at its apparent dishonesty.

The article includes the following screenshot:

Computers do make our lives easier. It’s nice to wake up to a fresh, hot cup of coffee in the morning because the coffee maker is programmable. It’s also nice to use a computer to balance your checkbook (does anyone under 30 still have a checkbook?). However, the computer in your cell phone tracks where you are and where you have been. Your home computer keeps track of every website you have ever visited. Both of those things seem a bit intrusive to me.

Having an artificial intelligence program that can delete a database is a risk I am not willing to take. It is one thing to lose data due to a power failure, but this takes that to a whole new level.

Ending Policies That Work

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Yesterday The Washington Times posted an article about one of the Trump administration  policies that has been eliminated by the Biden administration.

The article reports:

President Trump gave an unprecedented voice to victims of crimes committed by illegal immigrants, creating an office in ICE to highlight their plight.

The Biden administration on Friday announced a new policy to expand the office’s purview in a way that victims say drowns out their voice.

What Mr. Trump dubbed the Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement Office (VOICE) is now being changed to the Victims Engagement and Services Line, and it will handle calls from anyone who claims to be a victim, no matter what their immigration status or the status of the perpetrator.

And it will specialize in helping illegal immigrants who say they are victims of crimes get special visas to stay in the country.

The article also reports:

In addition to helping immigrants get U and T visas, which give legal status to illegal immigrant victims of certain crimes and human trafficking, respectively, the new office also will serve as a hotline for immigrants in detention to complain of their treatment.

The office also will serve as a notification system for immigration court cases.

Don Rosenberg, whose son was killed in a traffic collision by an illegal immigrant, said the lack of any focus on crimes committed by illegal immigrants was “conspicuous.”

“It is not ICE or the Department of Homeland Security’s function to ‘help’ illegal aliens,” Mr. Rosenberg, who is president of Advocates for Victims of Illegal Alien Crime, told The Washington Times. “This new office is another outrageous violation of our immigration laws and another ‘service’ to allow illegal aliens to remain in America.”

Mr. Trump gave victims and their relatives like Mr. Rosenberg an unprecedented voice in public policy. First as a candidate and then as president, Mr. Trump repeatedly met with them, invited them on stage at events and gave them a platform to highlight an often untold side of the immigration debate.

The article concludes:

Jon Feere, who served as chief of staff at ICE during the Trump administration, said the VOICE office was able to provide information about illegal immigrant perpetrators to victims. He said that’s important for victims trying to follow court cases and make sure people are brought to justice.

He said it’s not clear whether ICE will continue that service under the new VESL system.

“It was a well-functioning, apolitical, victim-centered office that did a lot of good in providing a needed resource,” Mr. Feere said. “This is a completely unnecessary change that trashes years of branding and outreach by career officials. If the Biden administration cared about victims, it would not have done this.”

Mr. Feere, now director of investigations at the Center for Immigration Studies, said with more criminal immigrants being released rather than deported by the Biden administration, there’s a pressing need for the work the VOICE office does.

Who is the Biden administration working for?