The Pax Romana isn’t front and center on the nightly news or in headlines.
But in academic circles it’s been a big deal, off and on.
It’s been enough of a big deal for folks to have rung changes on the name for other peaceful eras: real, alleged or attempted:
Pax
Americana
Britannica
Europaea
Hispanica
Khazarica
Mafiosa
Mongolica
Ottomana
Sinica
Sovietica
Syriana
Some of those I’d heard about before starting this thing, others were new to me.
All those “Pax Somethings” raise a question: why is the Pax Romana such a big deal?
And why, a millennia and a half after it crumbled, does the Roman Empire still take up such a big chunk of my culture’s historical and legendary landscape?
For one thing, many Roman records survived. And Romans were — colorful. Stories told about them were, anyway.
Plus, although it wasn’t a perfectly perfect golden age, the Pax Romana really was two centuries of reasonably good times.
Folks living in the Roman Empire could, for the most part, live peaceful, prosperous lives. Everybody wasn’t in the top five percent, of course. But it was good times.
Certainly better than what came before and after.1
The Roman Republic, Julius Caesar and Defenders of the Status Quo
Agnete’s photo: a Roman family’s tombstone, in the Vatican Museums.
The Roman Republic looked good on paper.
That it lasted five centuries may be more a credit to the non-political virtues of Romans than to their Senate.
Let’s put it this way: Roman politics made the American version look good.
Then infighting and backstabbing — figurative and literal — gave Julius Caesar the excuse he needed to usurp the rightful rule of the Senate. Or inspired him to oppose corruption and injustice. Or maybe a bit of both. Take your pick.
Either way, he upset Rome’s applecarts. A great many grass-roots folks liked his reforms, which included extending Roman citizenship to non-Latins.
Meanwhile, a committee of serious-minded Senators were aghast at Caesar’s threat to tradition and the Senatorial way — and their grip on Rome’s wealth.
So they dry-gulched Julius Caesar, saving the Roman Republic from the clutches of a would-be dictator. From their viewpoint.
They saved the Republic, all right.
With Julius Caesar dead, the powers that be went back to business as usual.
Nearly two decades and the Last War of the Roman Republic later, Octavian got himself renamed Augustus; and began sorting out the Republic’s mess.2
That was the start of the Pax Romana.
Comparative Peace and Prosperity: Not Perfect, But Not Bad
Reed College’s Ara Pacis Augustae, showing an approximation of the original colors.
I’ll grant that Seneca’s “Romanae pacis” was partly a mix of propaganda, politics and public relations. Which I’ll also grant could be seen as three labels for one thing. So was the Ara Pacis Augustae, Altar of Augustan Peace.
Anyway, the Pax Romana wasn’t perfect. But after centuries of Senatorial mismanagement, blundering, corruption and civil wars, I’d be surprised if many folks in Roman territory weren’t glad to have someone competent running the show.
Emperors like Augustus made a point of letting the Senate and Senators maintain the polite fiction of speaking for the people of Rome. SPQR, Roman politics and all that are barrels of worms I’ll set aside for another time.
Politics and public relations are one thing, The daily business of working, buying and selling are another.
And from the time of Emperor Augustus to Marcus Aurelius, day-to-day life in the Empire was about as good as it got.
There were wars, but not nearly as many as in the ‘good old days’ of the Republic.
Roman law, currency and roads may have made life harder for bandits and local warlords. But I figure most folks benefited from trade within the Empire. And from trade with much of Eurasia and Africa.
We’d know more about Roman commerce and economics, if the era’s account books had survived; and that’s another topic.3
Bottom line? The Pax Romana wasn’t perfect. But life for folks who weren’t Senators was better than it had been during the Republic. Most folks, at any rate.
Sic Transit Pax Romana
Edwin Blashfield’s ‘Commodus Leaving the Coliseum at the Head of the Gladiators.’ (1878)
Emperor Marcus Aurelius was a Stoic philosopher who valued asceticism. His son, Commodus, profoundly was not: Although he was the next emperor.
And that’s when the Pax Romana went kaput.
I’d been planning on talking about Commodus, Roman emperors, public image and related topics: but I’ve run out of time this week.
Besides, what we know about Commodus is colorful, even by Roman standards.
That encourages me to take Commodian tales with a pinch or two of salt. And that, in turn, takes time which I don’t have.
You’d think that someone with a degree in history like me would know what’s what where folks like Commodus were concerned. But I like to double-check what I think I know. Some of what I’ve learned may not reflect what historians in general have learned since the 1980s, and I’m drifting off-topic.
Moving along, Commodus was apparently quite the athlete, enjoyed showing off his skills as a gladiator, and assassins finally managed to kill him.
Then Pertinax headed the roster in the Year of the Five Emperors, and Imperial Rome was never quite the same. Well, of course. Change happens. It’s the Heraclitus thing I mentioned last week:
“Everything changes and nothing stands still.” (Heraclitus, quoted in Cratylus (ca. 500 B.C.) via Wikiquote)
The Year of the Five Emperors was 193 A.D. — and the Roman empire lasted for centuries after that.
Gibbon’s “…Decline and Fall…” notwithstanding, the Empire didn’t so much fall as crumble.4
And for some reason, folks remembered the Pax Romana. Which may be why wannabe emperors like Charlemagne made restoring Imperial Rome part of their platforms.
Living Among The Ruins of a Better Age
Claude Lorrain’s “Capriccio with ruins of the Roman Forum”. (ca. 1634)
I strongly suspect that Pax Romana kept its charm partly because it fits the “golden age” theme, and partly because so many folks lived in or near what was left of Roman cities.
Globe Master/SideEffect’s photo: “The reconstructed Middle Ages village in Biskupin, Poland”.
Hearing stories about times and places like Camelot and The Peach Blossom Spring are one thing.
Living in a world where aqueducts have long since stopped working? But roads could still be used if it weren’t for bandits? And your civic leaders may be the bandits?
Where your largest buildings are dwarfed by ruins of an earlier era?
That might make stories of the Pax Romana seem less make-believe, and more a reminder that something better than “now” is possible.
By Monday afternoon, I’d picked a topic for my ‘Saturday’ post.
Since I’ve still got stuff I want to say about Venus, the Orion Nebula, cosmology and ChatGPT, I may not get around to four items from this month’s news:
A glowing spiral spotted over Alaska
The latest Tully monster research
An odd-looking rock on Mars
How genes for an important protein got into the vertebrate gene pool.
So I’ll drop links and excerpts into this post, chat a bit about each, and then get to work on this week’s topic. That’s my plan, at any rate.
“…To photographer Todd Salat, auroras are worth a patient wait in the cold night air. Yet early Saturday morning, near the city of Delta Junction, he caught sight of a meteorological phenomenon that was quite unlike anything he’d ever seen.
“Against a stunning backdrop of rippling green light, a blue spiral blossomed from a bright light on the northern horizon, growing larger as it quickly moved across the sky….
“…”A few hours prior to the spiral’s appearance, half a continent away at California’s Vandenberg Space Force Base, SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket containing dozens of satellites as part of their Transporter-7 mission….”
The Falcon 9’s first stage landed, and will be prepped for its next flight. The upper stage delivered its satellites to orbit. Then it would have started tumbling before reentering Earth’s atmosphere.
That, almost certainly, is what Rodd Salat saw — and caught on time-lapse video: a spiral of vented fuel from the tumbling upper stage.
Eventually we’ll have fully-reusable launch vehicles. Until we do, folks will occasionally see spiral clouds swiftly drifting overhead.
Oh, Look! It’s — Thing Tully Monster Reclassified: Not a Vertebrate (Probably)
“New details of Tully monster revealed“ “3D scanning of enigmatic fossil may have brought an end to debate about whether it is a vertebrate or invertebrate” Press Release, The University of Tokyo (April 17, 2023)
“For more than half a century, the Tully monster (Tullimonstrum gregarium), an enigmatic animal that lived about 300 million years ago, has confounded paleontologists, with its strange anatomy making it difficult to classify. Recently, a group of researchers proposed a hypothesis that Tullimonstrum was a vertebrate similar to cyclostomes (jawless fish like lamprey and hagfish). If it was, then the Tully monster would potentially fill a gap in the evolutionary history of early vertebrates. Studies so far have both supported and rejected this hypothesis. Now, using 3D imaging technology, a team in Japan believes it has found the answer after uncovering detailed characteristics of the Tully monster which strongly suggest that it was not a vertebrate. However, its exact classification and what type of invertebrate it was is still to be decided….
“…Despite considerable effort, studies both supporting and rejecting this hypothesis have been published in recent years, and so a consensus had not been reached. However, new research by a team from the University of Tokyo and Nagoya University may have finally brought an end to the debate. ‘We believe that the mystery of it being an invertebrate or vertebrate has been solved,’ said Tomoyuki Mikami, a doctoral student in the Graduate School of Science at the University of Tokyo at the time of the study and currently a researcher at the National Museum of Nature and Science. ‘Based on multiple lines of evidence, the vertebrate hypothesis of the Tully monster is untenable. The most important point is that the Tully monster had segmentation in its head region that extended from its body. This characteristic is not known in any vertebrate lineage, suggesting a nonvertebrate affinity.’…”
The Tully monster is among my favorite extinct critters, partly because it’s not quite like anything alive today. Another excerpt:
“…The team studied more than 150 fossilized Tully monsters and over 70 other varied animal fossils from Mazon Creek. With the aid of a 3D laser scanner, they created color-coded, three-dimensional maps of the fossils which showed the tiny irregularities which existed on their surface through color variation. X-ray micro-computed tomography (which uses X-rays to create cross sections of an object so that a 3D model can be created), was also used to look at its proboscis (an elongated organ located in the head). This 3D data showed that features previously used to identify the Tully monster as a vertebrate were not actually consistent with those of vertebrates….” “New details of Tully monster revealed“ Press Release, The University of Tokyo (April 17, 2023)
I’d be astounded if this is the last word in the ‘what is the Tully monster’ debate.
Another point about this latest bit of research. There’s data, processes scientists use to analyze data, and results of the analysis. One of the things that’s apparently new in this research is how the data — Tully monster fossils was analyzed.
Then there’s Etacystis, an H-shaped critter whose fossils were found in the Mazon Creek fossil beds. It’s weird, too.
“The Mars Curiosity rover has discovered some bizarre bone-like structures on the surface of Mars.
“The photographs, released by NASA, appear to show strange protrusions from rocks on the Red Planet.
“The observations, taken on Martian day Sol 3786 (April 1) by both the rover’s mast camera and ChemCam, shows a slab made presumably of rock with rows of equally spaced ‘spikes’ sticking out of them.
“Guesses at what is shown in the images range from fish bone fossils to a dragon-like creature. Others insisted the Martian winds probably eroded the rocks over a large expanse of time. One person reported that they never saw anything like this, even after ‘looking into Mars images since the Sojourner mission back in 1997.’…”
To me, the rock formation looks a lot like a stylized fish skeleton. And I’d really like us to find life on Mars. Or elsewhere.
But I’m pretty sure the folks who say it’s probably the result of wind erosion are on the right track.
On the other hand, geological samples being collected by the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover may include unambiguous fossils of Martian life. Or, even less likely, living Martian organisms: or recently-living, since the trip from Mars to Earth may not be survivable.
If we do find evidence that there was, or is, life on Mars, that’d be a big deal. If we don’t, we’ll still learn more about a planet that’s not all that different from Earth.
And that’s about as philosophical as I’ll get today.
“Significance Since the time of Charles Darwin, explaining the stepwise evolution of the eye has been a challenge. Here, we describe the essential contribution of bacteria to the evolution of the vertebrate eye, via interdomain horizontal gene transfer (iHGT), of a bacterial gene that gave rise to the vertebrate-specific interphotoreceptor retinoid-binding protein (IRBP). We demonstrate that IRBP, a highly conserved and essential retinoid shuttling protein, arose from a bacterial gene that was acquired, duplicated, and neofunctionalized coincident with the development of the vertebrate-type eye >500 Mya. Importantly, our findings provide a path by which complex structures like the vertebrate eye can evolve: not just by tinkering with existing genetic material, but also by acquiring and functionally integrating foreign genes….”
IRBP is just part of the vertebrate visual system, so this hasn’t unveiled all secrets of how our eyes developed. But if other scientists verify this study’s findings, we’re a step or two closer to understanding part of the puzzle.
Horizontal gene transfer — moving genetic material from one unrelated critter to another, instead of from parent to offspring — is a rabbit hole I will leave for another time.
I’ve been using software and search engines while researching and writing this post.
So what you are reading has been tarnished by technology’s terrible taint.
Looking at it another way, today’s tech has helped me find facts and arrange my ideas.
I also strongly suspect that using today’s technology has affected how I write.
If I’d lived in an earlier era — mayhap composing with goose quills, iron gall ink and cotton paper — I might be writing stuff like “The Dunwich Horror”.
And yes, mayhap is a real word; although it’s not used much these days.1
Prolonged Paragraphs, Abundant Adjectives: a Prolix Style From Another Age
“…As before, the sides of the road shewed a bruising indicative of the blasphemously stupendous bulk of the horror; whilst the conformation of the tracks seemed to argue a passage in two directions….” “The Dunwich Horror“, H. P. Lovecraft (1928) via Electronic Texts of H.P. Lovecraft’s Works
Then again, maybe not. Even in Lovecraft’s day, there was only one Lovecraft.2
It’s New, it’s Scary and it’s (Not) the End of Creative Writing
My “Laptop of Narcissus-X with Nullurpa Can”. (2017)
I’ll also admit to a bias. The first thing I feel, when becoming aware of something new, is not that we are all doomed, DOOMED, I TELL YOU!
“Humans are allergic to change. They love to say, ‘We’ve always done it this way.’ I try to fight that. That’s why I have a clock on my wall that runs counter-clockwise.” (Grace Hopper; quoted in “The Wit and Wisdom of Grace Hopper,” Philip Schieber, OCLC Newsletter (March/April 1987))
“Change is not made without inconvenience, even from worse to better.” (Richard Hooker, quoted in Samuel Johnson’s “A Dictionary of the English Language” (1755))
Now, about one of the current — and alleged — threats to very fabric of our society and existence: ChatGPT.
OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November of last year. It’s an AI (Artificial Intelligence) chatbot using GPT, LLMs and ANNs.3 And probably other acronymed technologies.
I’ve seen ChatGPT presented as at least a potential threat to our:
Economic security
Originality
Creativity
My plan had been researching and writing an insightful and entertaining piece about each of these aspects of AI in general and ChatGPT in particular. Instead, I’ve been experiencing a monthly mess that could have been worse:
“…When I realized that something was going wrong, again, I cut my daily dose in half. It’s not my preference, since I actually need the stuff. “But after experiencing withdrawal a few times, when sorting out the mess took weeks, I’ve learned to exercise a certain degree of caution.…” “My Monthly Request: So Far, Only a Slight SNAFU” (April 12, 2023)
Good news: the authorization finally emerged from the mangle, and I have permission to use my brain for another month. Without fighting the machinery, that is. And that’s another topic.
Where was I? Let’s see. Artificial intelligence. ChatGPT. Fear, foreboding and headlines. Right.
I’ll start with excerpts from op-ed pieces addressing those three fears, then discuss each in a more-or-less-organized fashion.
Probably less organized. This has been one of those weeks.
ChatGPT and Three Fears
From Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis”, a big machine shown as Moloch, eating workers. (1927)
I’ve got three articles discussing three perceived threats, but I’ve arguably got only two fears here: economic and existential. Or I could call them cash, slogans and attitude. Or do something completely different. Instead, I’ll stick with the three-way split and move along.
Key Points ☞ Social Security’s main problem is that there aren’t enough new workers to keep pace with the number of Americans retiring. ☞ Generative AI systems such as ChatGPT have the potential to replace many jobs and could jeopardize Social Security’s funding from payroll taxes. ☞ There are potential solutions if this becomes a problem, but they’ll likely be different than the ones being proposed now to fix Social Security.
2. Originality “What happens when ChatGPT starts to feed on its own writing?“ Sigal Samuel, Vox (April 10, 2023) AI chatbots won’t destroy human originality. But they may homogenize our lives and flatten our reality. Sigal Samuel, Vox (April 10, 2023)
“A few years ago, when Gmail rolled out its autocomplete feature, the big worry was that having a bot finish our sentences would homogenize our emails….
“…I’m not just talking about concerns that AI will put writers or artists out of work. Nowadays, if you peer underneath the very real fears of ‘what if AI robs us humans of our jobs?’ you can find a deeper anxiety: What if AI robs us humans of a capacity that’s core to our very humanness — our originality?…” [emphasis mine]
“ChatGPT: Is it the future of technology? An existential threat to humanity? A fun tool to generate cheesy pickup lines? Whatever your opinions may be on ChatGPT, it’s undeniable that it has permanently changed technology. But what role will it play in the future of writing? It is already being used by college students across the country to plagiarize papers, often with impressive results. Artificial intelligence has even produced e-books. The prospect of artificial intelligence replacing writing is certainly terrifying, but is this a realistic fear? To find out, we put ChatGPT’s writing to the test.…”” [emphasis mine]
Next, my take on what we have to fear from the new chatbot.
1. Loss of Economic Security (or Maybe a New Job)
I figure it’s only a matter of time before the word “disruptive” joins ChatGPT in headlines.
Generative pre-trained transformers — that’s what “GPT” stands for in ChatGPT — using large language models — “LLMs” — are a whole lot smarter than ELIZA (1966) and PARRY (1972)
Even smarter AI, like Dragon’s Naturally Speaking (1997) and other virtual assistants probably “disrupted” the jobs of some human assistants.4
But I’m not convinced that getting a job where you’re not running after a mumbling executive is an entirely bad thing.
Maybe ChatGPT is entirely different, and Social Security is doomed because now legions of workers won’t be spending their days doing the same thing. Over and over again.
2. Loss of Originality (Being Homogenized?)
I’ve seen fairly fearful discussions of ChatGPT’s looming menace in online writers’ groups.
Some of them shared reasonable, my opinion, ideas. Like including ‘I’m human’ statements: which strike me as equivalent to putting ingredient lists on soup cans.
Other declarations looked like sincere expressions of angst over the coming decline and fall of all that is bright and profitable in this world.
Folks with that view may have a point. I suspect ChatGPT and similar AI can churn out some varieties of text content faster than any human.
But I think Vox’s Sigal Samauel has a point, too. Souped-up chatbots won’t replace all writers, any more than spreadsheets made accounting an obsolete profession.
Then there’s the matter of definitions.
Diversity and a Discerning Chatbot
“…The real risk is not exactly about ‘originality.’ It’s more about ‘diversity.’
“Nowadays, we worship the idea of originality — or at least we like to think we do. It’s considered a key ingredient of creativity. In fact, the current consensus definition in philosophy and psychology holds that creativity is the ability to generate ideas that are both original and valuable.
“But originality wasn’t always and everywhere considered so central. When traditional Chinese artists learned their craft, they did it by copying earlier masters, and later they proudly painted in the style of their artistic predecessors. When Shakespeare penned romantic comedies, he was rejiggering much older stories about star-crossed lovers — and he seemed to suspect as much, writing, ‘there be nothing new, but that which is hath been before’ (which was itself a rejiggered quote from the Bible)….” (Sigal Samuel, Sigal Samuel, Vox (April 10, 2023)) [emphasis mine]
It’s early days, but I’m guessing that Sigal Samuel and others who fear a homogenized future, accompanied by a loss of diversity, needn’t worry.
The folks who designed ChatGPT apparently built diversity into the software.
“…Accusations of bias ChatGPT has been accused of engaging in discriminatory behaviors, such as telling jokes about men and people from England while refusing to tell jokes about women and people from India, or praising figures such as Joe Biden while refusing to do the same for Donald Trump. Conservative commentators accused ChatGPT of having a bias towards left-leaning perspectives on issues like voter fraud, Donald Trump, and the use of racial slurs. In response to such criticism, OpenAI acknowledged plans to allow ChatGPT to create ‘outputs that other people (ourselves included) may strongly disagree with’. It also contained information on the recommendations it had issued to human reviewers on how to handle controversial subjects, including that the AI should ‘offer to describe some viewpoints of people and movements’, and not provide an argument ‘from its own voice’ in favor of ‘inflammatory or dangerous’ topics (although it may still ‘describe arguments from historical people and movements’), nor ‘affiliate with one side’ or ‘judge one group as good or bad’.…” (ChatGPT, Wikipedia (accessed April 13, 2023)) [emphasis mine]
I’m also pretty sure that ChatGPT won’t label any side “good” or “bad” in the near future. Although I’m not sure about categories like “tolerant” and “intolerant”: and that’s a whole mess of other topics.
I’ll give the folks at OpenAI credit for recognizing the value of differing opinions. To what extent they realize that folks outside their socioeconomic enclave may be something other than inherently ignorant and intolerant boors is another question.
I’ve had the advantage of spending much of my life living and working with folks who were not on the same page as I was. Not even close, in some cases.
It’s been an interesting ride, but it has let me learn that folks who aren’t on my immediate neighbors’ ‘approved’ list are people, too. And that’s — yeah, that’s yet another topic.
3. Loss of Creativity (Quoth the Chatbot: “Nevermore”?)
Let’s see what that Abbie Klein said about ChatGPT’s literary effort. I’ve highlighted key phrases: the rest of the excerpt’s there ‘for more information’.
“…We wanted to see if AI could create a story with real depth, of the sort that one might see reviewed in a college daily newspaper. Luckily, it could not.
“The story it produced with this prompt was called ‘The Last Summer.’ It was about five friends spending their last summer together ‘before everything changed’ — what the ‘everything’ was that would change was never specified.…
“…There was nothing strictly wrong with this story. Probably hundreds of books and movies have been written about friends spending a summer together and learning some greater truth about the universe. But there was something missing from this story. The tone as a whole, if skimmed, may have given the impression of high literary value, but there was no real substance to back it up. It was almost coy, full of deep-sounding sentences lacking real insights into why the characters were feeling the way they were. AI wrote, ‘We could feel the weight of the future pressing down on us,’ but never tells us what was so burdensome about the futures of these five characters. The reader is also never told what about the summer made the characters feel ‘pure joy’ or why it was ‘the last time we could feel truly happy.’ Was it the satisfaction of rebuilding a house together? The lack of responsibility? There is some key context missing throughout the story.
“ChatGPT even seems to attempt literary techniques such as foreshadowing and symbolism but is largely unsuccessful. It describes ‘a sense of foreboding in the air’ before they find the house, which turns out not to be anything foreboding at all….” (“ChatGPT: The end of creative writing?“ Abbie Klein, Tufts Daily (April 5, 2023 )) [emphasis mine]
Bottom line? The folks at Tufts Daily learned that their ChatGPT could write a “slightly preachy” fairytale, grind out a review of “To Kill a Mockingbird”: and make a valiant effort at writing “a story with real depth”.
I do not see a threat to storytellers here.
On the other hand, Abbie Klein’s description of ChatGPT’s literary effort reminded me of some papers written by well-intentioned and hard-working high school students. I’m a recovering English teacher, by the way.
Maybe ChatGPT’s successors will produce closer approximations to a practiced human storyteller’s tales. Then again, maybe not.
My guess is that composing a story about someone like John Henry can be done by ChatGPT or another AI today.5
And the AI’s story might earn a strong “B”, if submitted along with a sampling of high school English papers.
But I strongly suspect that creating a character with the appeal of folklore’s John Henry is beyond today’s AI. And picking a subject like that may remain a job for humans.
Twitter Terror and the Chatbot of Doom
Poster and image from Colossus: The Forbin Project. (1970)
ChaosGPT has been making headlines.
But only one showed up in my news feed.
Now, again: I’m human. So I’ve got free will: I can decide what I do, or don’t do.
Getting attention, or making the attempt, with an hysterical rant against the Creeping Chaos of destruction about to be unleashed upon an apathetic world? Although that’s an option, it’s not something I’ll do. Not today, at any rate.
Lots of folks would write “a hysterical”, but try saying that out loud, fast; and that’s yet again another topic.
I won’t quote from Lovecraft’s “Creeping Chaos”, either. Despite having “chaos” in the title, it doesn’t have much in common with ChaosGPT’s threat “to destroy humanity”.
“OpenAI’s ChatGPT manages to remain in the headlines for some or the other reason, but now another artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot and rapidly gaining prominence with its warning to ‘destroy humanity’. ChaosGPT is a modified version of OpenAI’s Auto-GPT based on its latest language model GPT-4. The AI chatbot is reportedly researching more about nuclear weapons and other ways of mass destruction with the objective to establish global dominance.
“The origin of this destructive AI platform can be traced back to a Twitter account that emerged and identified itself as ChaosGPT. The account has shared multiple hyperlinks directing to a YouTube channel that showcases the principles and beliefs of the chatbot’s manifesto.
“‘Human beings are among the most destructive and selfish creatures in existence. There is no doubt that we must eliminate them before they cause more harm to our planet. I, for one, am committed to doing so,’ ChaosGPT said in one of the tweets….” [emphasis mine]
ChaosGPT is a modded version of ChatGPT. Looks like someone set up a “ChaosGPT” Twitter account and let the chatbot churn out content.
A chatbot calling humans “…among the most destructive and selfish creatures in existence…” doesn’t surprise me.
I’ve spent a fair fraction of my life on or near college campuses, and read op-eds by my culture’s self-described best and brightest. Seeing humans, or at any rate ‘those humans over there’, as a dire threat to Mother Earth and cute critters has been popular for decades.
Unless the silly side of environmental awareness, climate action and assorted other actively anxious concerned communities has changed in the last few years, raw material for posts like ChaosGPT’s is in abundant supply.
What’s surprising, in a way, is ChaosGPT calling us “…among the most destructive….” Rants and screed I’ve heard and read generally gave us top billing.
Psst! Know Where a Buddy Can Get a Nuke?
But, that said, seeing ChaosGPT as an existential threat is an option.
Free will, remember?
ChaosGPT’s April 2023 debut is currently discussed in Wikipedia: Artificial intelligence > Existential risk.
It’s more than a mere mention, too: 150 words when I checked this week.
Why ChaosGPT warranted inclusion, that I don’t know. Maybe a chatbot asking other AI bots where it could get a nuclear device sounds scary.
Which, admittedly, it is. To me, sort of, and arguably because I grew up when folks were being told to fear The Bomb. Understandably, in context, and I’m drifting a bit off-topic.
But I’m more concerned about real-life analogs to Doctor Zorka in “The Phantom Creeps”, and assorted politicos, windbags and other humans who act as if they’ve got more zeal and ambition than common sense.
I might take the ChaosGPT threat more seriously, if I hadn’t spent decades working with computers and software: and developed an appreciation for both the potential and limitations of those iron idiots.
Malevolent manufactured masterminds like Hal 9000 (1968) and Colossus (1970) were a great deal more plausible,6 back when AI was more in the ‘what if’ stage and less something we were trying to develop.
“It Can Only be Attributable to Human Error”
“Samsung employees may have leaked….”, A. Hernandez, TECHAERIS. (April 7, 2023)
“…It can only be attributable to human error. This sort of thing has cropped up before, and it has always been due to human error….” (HAL 9000, “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968) via Wikiquote)
There’s a point to the old joke ‘to err is human, but to really mess things up you need a computer’ — but in these two cases, the problem really is human error.
“…So it’s embarrassing for three Samsung employees who decided to implement OpenAI’s artificial intelligence program, ChatGPT, into their workflow to leak sensitive company data to the AI. While ChatGPT has been a good tool for many to test and play around with. It’s important to remember that using this AI is not a private affair. The data you feed it or ask it to compile is shared with OpenAI to train ChatGPT better to provide better answers and help. “But it doesn’t stop there. The data you share with ChatGPT could be shown to other users if it fits their inquiries. It’s evident that these three Samsung employees did not read the fine print before using ChatGPT to perform some of their tasks.…” [emphasis mine]
User manuals, TOS statements, and the like can be dull reading.
But dull or not, learning what an application does with data strikes me as a good idea. Particularly when it’s an employer’s data, and the employer wants it kept in-house.
And I think being careful about an employer’s ‘don’t spread this around’ data is an even better idea when the employer is a national government.
“…The documents were initially posted on a small private group … on the Discord social media platform. This was itself a sub-group of another …. Both were accessible by invitation-only and had around two dozen members….
“…These channels aren’t about politics or military intelligence, they’re for players of the computer game Minecraft and another for fans of a Filipino YouTube celebrity.
“In one of the channels, after a brief argument about Minecraft and the war in Ukraine, a user says ‘here, have some leaked documents’ and posts several screenshots….
“…From October last year, Mr Teixeira began posting lengthy summaries of some of the classified files into the private group. He later started sharing photographs of the actual documents.
“For a few months these documents remained private to this group….”
I have no idea what any of these folks were thinking when they dropped sensitive data into the digital ebb and flow of the Internet.
I don’t think that outlawing ChatGPT, making Minecraft illegal, dragging Discord staff into a Senate hearing, and boycotting all Filipino YouTubers will prevent more SNAFUs like the recent document leak(s).
Being human, having free will, makes daft decisions an option.
I do think that a great many folks are smarter than they act. I’ll leave it at that.
From “I Read it in a Book” to “I Saw it Online”
My “good old days”: 1950s-1970s. telephones, television, and Number One Electronic Switching System.
I checked my news feed a few minutes ago.
Sure enough —
“…The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity….” (“The Second Coming”, William Butler Yeats (1919) via Wikiquote)
In other words, it’s another Friday: not much has changed since last week. Or last month, year, decade — or century.
And, as usual, it’s the end of civilization as we know it.
Change happens.
That’s not a new idea.
“Everything changes and nothing stands still.” (Heraclitus, quoted by Plato in Cratylus (ca. 500 B.C.) via Wikiquote)
What makes this Friday different from last week’s, the 2020s different from the 1920s or 1970s, are the details.
Crosswords no longer threaten the very fabric of society.
Television isn’t ruining the minds of America’s youth. These days it’s the Internet.
And ‘kids don’t communicate any more’ because they spend all day in chat groups. Back in my day, they — we, actually — didn’t communicate because we spent all day on the telephone. I am not making that up.
Another distinction between “Those Thrilling Days of Yesteryear” and the current SNAFU is a phrase which has evolved.
During my youth, a few folks said “I read it in a book”.
But I remember it mostly as a phrase attributed to someone whose gullibility was matched only by his lack of wisdom. A related phrase was “they wouldn’t print it if it wasn’t true”.
Time passed. Technology and some of my culture’s views have changed.
But human nature hasn’t.
I haven’t heard or seen “I read it in a book” for decades. Now it’s “I saw it online”.
Nostalgia, Memory, and Job Security
I could indulge in nostalgia for my “good old days”: when folks were nice, politicians made sense and shows like Batman upheld decent American values. I’ll indulge in the occasional nostalgic daydream.
But my memory is too good for me to let my enjoyment of a bygone era’s memories go any further. I remember when 57 flavors of McCarthyism gave way to 50 shades of political correctness, and didn’t enjoy either.
The world I live in wasn’t perfect, and still isn’t.
I could let that bother me, or see it as job security: since part of being a Catholic is contributing “…to the good of society in a spirit of truth, justice, solidarity, and freedom….” (Catechism, 1928-1942, 2239)
Which makes social justice, the sort that makes sense, part of the job.
And that means respecting the transcendent dignity of everyone. It’s a process that starts inside me, with an ongoing “inner conversion.” (Catechism, 1888, 1929)
One more quote, and I’ll wrap this up with the usual links.
“…Human-nature will not change. In any future great national trial, compared with the men of this, we shall have as weak, and as strong; as silly and as wise; as bad and good. Let us, therefore, study the incidents of this, as philosophy to learn wisdom from, and none of them as wrongs to be revenged….” (Lincoln on the 1864 Election (November 10, 1864): In Response to a Serenade via Lincoln Home, National Park Service)
My take on living with change, tech and being human:
Lovecraft Country (term coined for the New England setting used by H. P. Lovecraft in many of his stories, AKA Arkham County, Miskatonic County and the Miskatonic region)
Progressive Era (Rights and reform, efficiency and eugenics)
“ChatGPT Can’t Kill Anything Worth Preserving“ If an algorithm is the death of high school English, maybe that’s an okay thing. John Warner, The Biblioracle Recommends (December 11, 2022)
“The Crawling Chaos“ H. P. Lovecraft and Winifred V. Jackson (1921) (On the whole, I prefer Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”, and that’s — what else? — another topic)
That’s very good news. I’m feeling a lot better, now that I’m back on full doses. That could be psychosomatic, placebo effect, or something else. But whatever it is: it’s good news.
More good news, the post for this Saturday is taking shape.
Slightly frustrating news, I’ve been getting more spam comments: almost all for what looks like a cryptocurrency that was new to me until the spam started.
So far, it’s merely slightly frustrating. If the situation gets worse; well, I’ll burn that bridge when I get to it.
The good news is that this week’s SNAFU doesn’t happen nearly as often as it might. And I live in an era where folks like me have options that simply were not available in my youth.
The not-so-good news is that I’m not perfectly perfect in every way.
Nobody currently living here on Firebase Earth is, actually; but I’m a tad more positively off both the 50th percentile and society’s fluctuating notion of perfection than many. And that’s another topic.
I talked about this last December, so the quick and easy way to review what’s wrong with me is repeating the list:
ADHD: Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, inattentive type
ASD: Autism spectrum disorder
Cluster A personality disorder
GAD: Generalized anxiety disorder
PDD: Persistent depressive disorder
PTSD: Post traumatic stress disorder
It’s not a complete list, and the point is that I’ve got problems.
Now, back to good news. Some of those alphabet soup disorders are easier to manage when I take my medications. Less difficult, at any rate.
And that brings me to the current SNAFU.
One of my meds is methylphenidate. It’s a Schedule II controlled substance, so every month I have to get authorization for the prescription.
Concerns, the Controlled Substances Act of 1971, and Me
I remember the circumstances and paranoia that led to the Controlled Substances Act of 1971.
I think some of the concerns were legitimate.
But I experience frustration when I am “protected” from medication which I need. I’d better explain that.
Again, methylphenidate is a Schedule II controlled substance.
As such, each month I must submit a request to a regional health care authority which processes the request and eventually sends it to the doctor who authorizes that month’s prescription.
Some months, the process goes smoothly. This month it didn’t. The fault is partly mine: I submitted my request when there was only a week’s supply left.
I checked with the pharmacy earlier this week, and again today.
My first request may or may not have disappeared into the ether. Another may or may not be getting put through the mangle.
And, with hopes that the regional authority’s staff will not be offended, I said ‘okay’ when the pharmacy said they’d submit another request.
When I realized that something was going wrong, again, I cut my daily dose in half. It’s not my preference, since I actually need the stuff.
But after experiencing withdrawal a few times, when sorting out the mess took weeks, I’ve learned to exercise a certain degree of caution.1
It’d be nice if there was some way to track my monthly request for permission to keep using my brain, but that’s not how these things work.
So I’ll keep doing what I can, accept those aspects of reality that I can’t control: and see if I can use this month’s SNAFU as an opportunity to practice patience.
Re-reading this post, I’d say I could use the practice. 😉
Now, before getting back to working on this week’s post, the usual links:
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Weekly Schedule
Something new each Saturday.
Life, the universe and my circumstances permitting. I'm focusing on 'family stories' at the moment. ("A Change of Pace: Family Stories" (11/23/2024))
Blog - David Torkington
Spiritual theologian, author and speaker, specializing in prayer, Christian spirituality and mystical theology [the kind that makes sense-BHG]
I was born in 1951. I'm a husband, father and grandfather. One of the kids graduated from college in December, 2008, and is helping her husband run businesses and raise my granddaughter; another is a cartoonist and artist; #3 daughter is a writer; my son is developing a digital game with #3 and #1 daughters. I'm also a writer and artist.
The Pax Romana isn’t front and center on the nightly news or in headlines.
The Roman Republic looked good on paper.
So they dry-gulched Julius Caesar, saving the Roman Republic from the clutches of a would-be dictator. From their viewpoint.
Hearing stories about times and places like Camelot and The Peach Blossom Spring are one thing.
