Destroying Progress

In case you haven't heard, Google's AI chatbot "Gemini" has a "woke" problem. It's offering us (as headlined by the NY Post) historical fiction in place of fact, as in black Vikings, a female pope, and black Founding Fathers. For the record, Vikings, being of northern climes where sunlight is relatively weak, were by anybody's measure, white. Because Vitamin D. There has never been a female Pope - the rules of the Catholic church require the Pope to be male. The fifty-six Founding Fathers who signed the Declaration of Independence were all white men.

As I understand it, AI learns from processing massive amounts of information. Given the basic facts I laid out, there's no way an AI worth using should come up with such counterfactual results. Unless someone tipped the scale.

Behold, Jack Krawczyk, Gemini's "senior director of product," who appears to be in full wallow regarding supposed systemic racism, white privilege, and similar folderol. Cue GIGO - "Garbage in, garbage out."

A friend, playing around with Gemini, got this result.

Of the more than 260 popes in the history of the Catholic Church, three may have been black. Pope Victor I (189-199), Pope Miltiades (311-314), and Pope Gelasius I (492-496) had African roots. But, even there, we must consider that being African does not necessarily mean "black," and even if we lean towards concluding they were, the AI should not be returning a result based on one percent of history.

Apparently, the ancestors of lily-white Scandinavians were well-endowed with melanin. Where did it all go across the ensuing centuries?

I was today years old when I learned that the contemporaries of Socrates, Archimedes, and Aristotle had a remarkable resemblance to Native Americans, Asians, and Africans.

Were you aware that 1820s Scotland was so diverse?

How about Nazi Germany?

I don’t think anyone needs me to detail why an image of a black Nazi soldier is a historical inaccuracy, but just for the record, the 1935 Nurenberg Laws obviated the citizenry of the few blacks that lived in Germany, and blacks were considered “race polluters” in the same vein as Jews and Roma were.

Google offered an “oops.” Per the Associated Press:

Google said Thursday it is temporarily stopping its Gemini artificial intelligence chatbot from generating images of people a day after apologizing for “inaccuracies” in historical depictions that it was creating.

Has being progressive or "woke" devolved to simply saying "white people bad, 'people of color' good?" Are the Best-and-Brightest, among whom Krawczyk must surely include himself, that boneheadedly dumbass? Is their racism that moronic?

Can they not fathom how offensive this “colorizing” of history is - to everyone?

Have they given a moment's consideration to how people will react to this ham-fisted nonsense?

Jump with me now to a different AI-related story, a more positive and 'Murica! success tale. As detailed by James Freeman at the WSJ, Jensen Huang, the founder and CEO of Nvidia, is an immigrant who, along with a couple friends, birthed the company in a Denny's. After a spectacular earnings beat, Nvidia is now the fourth largest company in the world by market cap, and Huang is worth $70B. Freeman makes a point I have been making (and fretting over) for a long time:

Immigration is good.

I will amend that a bit: Immigration, done right, is both good and necessary.

Done right in the Charles Koch way:

I would let anybody in who will make the country better, and no one who will make it worse.

Good, in that people coming here from other places in order to pursue "the American Dream" is what built the nation, is what feeds innovation and can-do entrepreneurialism, and enriches our society.

Necessary, in that native-born Americans are not having enough babies to sustain the population, and a declining population is an aging one that will be unable to sustain the Social Security program that even many die-hard conservatives insist is "their money" and not to be touched.

The Left's wanton disregard for border control and orderly immigration has prompted a nativist reaction from the Right. That reaction proved the deciding factor in Trump's nomination in 2016, and continues to be the core issue for the GOP. It also, sadly, has stoked enough animus and bigotry to be troubling.

Similarly, Woke's obsession with skin color is prompting reactionary backlash. Which I cannot fault - unjustly call someone a racist and you get a "f--k you" response, whether vocalized or internalized. But, affirmative action, shoehorning race into everything, and tokenism also cast doubts on the abilities, capabilities, and qualifications of even those 'people of color' who earned their stripes. As I've written more times than I can count, Woke, which is supposed to be about inclusion and tolerance and acceptance, is exclusive, and intolerant, and divisive.

We are already seeing erosion of the decades of social progress toward racial harmony. Contrary to what the Left wants us to believe, they, not the Right, are the prime eroders. Unfortunately, many on the Right are reacting to the elevation of race-baiting incompetents to positions of high power, both in government and in Big Business, with a growing and generalized distrust. Thomas Sowell and Clarence Thomas warned us of this. They and others told us that when skin color is made more important than merit, the meritorious will suffer suspicion and doubt.

The same is already happening to AI. AI could be a transformative technology, on the par with or exceeding the printing press, the automobile, the airplane, the semiconductor, or penicillin. If, however, it comes out of the gate 'tainted' by its curators' biases, the technology itself will suffer the same sorts of suspicions that successful minorities and women do in an age where identity has supplanted merit.

The term "progressivism" piggybacks the positive attributes of the term "progress," rather than embracing it. Present day progressivism thus claims credit it does not deserve, and masks its destructive and regressive reality. This is rather obvious, and we do right when we point it out. We must not, however, act in the same contrarian fashion as the Left has been acting since Biden replaced Trump. We mustn't forget that immigration should be fixed rather than ceased, and we mustn't forget that a colorblind society is the true and proper aspiration, no matter how much the Left's excesses prompt us to react.