We may survive Trump — somehow — but will we survive AI?
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You’ve probably heard that even the head of a top artificial intelligence company is now warning about how fast artificial intelligence will displace us.
One can argue that exaggerating the impact of one’s product is understandable. But I don’t think that’s what’s happening here.
In the past, I expressed concern about this. And last year I warned that, besides AI displacing us, there is the reality that a handful of billionaires will have a lot of control over what AI tells us to believe.
Anyone who is not paying attention to the speed at which we are being taken over by machines is missing one of the most profound changes in human history. It strikes me as one of those fast-forward sea changes where you wind up looking back and exclaiming, “Wow, how did that happen!?” When it finally hits home, the astonishment will be kick-yourself bitter — and the anger futile.
Some of the outcomes will be massively beneficial, including rapid medical and scientific advances. But a lot of us will find ourselves not needed, out of work, with no way of supporting ourselves.
And we might not be talking years. This is already manifesting itself everywhere, and in some fields the evolution is visible from month to month, sometimes day to day.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says that AI “could eliminate half of entry-level, white-collar jobs and spike unemployment to as much as 20 percent in the next one to five years.”
I think he’s understating the reality. Everywhere I turn, I see companies pivoting to justify how their AI will make things better for us. During the NBA playoffs, corporations’ ads touted that it would make their employees more effective, and thereby better serve customers. I think that’s true, but what they aren’t saying is that much of their workforce will… be gone.
On a recent trip to Silicon Valley, I could see the extent to which the massive tech industry there — and the venture money — is chasing AI. It’s a fever.
Everyone wants to invest in it. Everyone wants to work in it. It’s us all hastening our own doom. Like, say, working for Exxon — only a hell of a lot quicker.
From Casey Newton’s newsletter about the impact of AI on Google and Search:
The state of web publishing looks increasingly grim. Dotdash Meredith, which publishes sites including People and Food & Wine, said on its most recent earnings call that traffic from Google is now roughly half what it was four years ago. Business Insider said on Thursday that it was laying off 21 percent of its staff, saying the business “must be structured to endure extreme traffic drops outside of our control.”
WhoWhatWhy is committed to covering this momentous shift — because we don’t want to leave that, too, to AI. Stay tuned.
The Truth About Trump the Dems Still Don’t Articulate
For a party out of power, its most essential task is to identify which issues make their opponents most vulnerable — what behaviors or activities might be especially disturbing to the public — and then to attack those vulnerabilities relentlessly. While some might argue that, in ordinary times, the opposition can be more cooperative, this is simply not an option in the political total war Trump and MAGA have launched.
With Trump, Democrats have an embarrassment of riches. In fact, so many problems present themselves, it’s a challenge to get the electorate to focus on the most egregious items.
With this in mind, it can be argued that the standout issue is simply this: In virtually everything they do and say, Trump and his coterie demonstrate total contempt for the American people.
They don’t care about “ordinary” Americans; they never did. Their primary purpose — beyond settling scores and staying in power — is enriching themselves.
In this way, they’re strikingly like dictatorial regimes everywhere throughout history. In retrospect, we’re all outraged by the excesses of such plunderers as the Shah of Iran, Bashar al-Assad of Syria, Nicolae Ceaușescu of Romania — revealed mostly after their time was up.
Yet we don’t focus on the extent to which it is happening here. And now.
No matter what line they sold voters on, this bunch is here to cash in. It’s pretty much a criminal cabal, including those now running Justice and law enforcement.
If the opposition cannot figure this out and put it front and center, it is even more incompetent and foolish than we suspected. Fortunately, some got it right away, and more get it each day. But, unfortunately, those highlighting this issue are still in the minority.
You’ve likely seen the hit parade of examples, but I’ll just share a few that particularly caught my attention.
While the Trump “big, beautiful” tax bill definitely has enough sops to working and middle class voters to convince them it’s in their interests, the bottom line is that they’re not the ones reaping the big, beautiful benefits.
Kyle Pomerleau, a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute think tank, says that the bill will chiefly benefit people earning between a little under half a million up to a million dollars.
That’s mostly small business owners and folks like lawyers, doctors, and others who make plenty but are not super-rich. This is a key traditional GOP target constituency.
The next biggest group of winners, he figures, is the top One Percent, which is the uber-rich.
And let’s not for a moment lose sight of the fact that the big, beautiful bill piles on top of and worsens already obscene, and economically dangerous, levels of income and wealth inequality, which have been crying out louder and louder for redress, to the amusement of gilded plutocrats in populist clothing.
Meanwhile, those who struggle the most are taking one blow after another. With its cuts in Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act, SNAP, and student loans, and restrictions on Pell grant access, the projected effects of the big beautiful bill are devastating: Those earning less than $17,000 would actually lose $1,035 annually; those earning $17,000 to $50,999 would lose $705.
And when the cuts hit home, for the millions of Americans who live paycheck to paycheck there will be a drastically reduced safety net. AmeriCorps, the only federal agency for community service and volunteerism, is being destroyed by DOGE, which canceled almost $400,000 in grants and abruptly eliminated 32,000 low-paid AmeriCorps service workers — those who, as one fired worker put it, were “helping people stay alive.”
Here’s one example of an advocacy group seizing on the vulnerability of those who further or condone such reverse-Robin Hood plunder, and fighting back:
While the Trump administration is dramatically expanding the wealth inequality gap, those at the top are celebrating in Gilded Age style. The aptly named new private DC club for just 200 Trump-aligned tycoons — Executive Branch ($500,000 simply to join) — includes as members Trump’s “crypto czar” David Sachs and the Winklevoss twins, Cameron and Tyler, whose crypto firm was targeted by the SEC until new leadership picked by Trump put the government lawsuit on hold.
If you’re thinking of joining, be advised that an Executive Branch spokesman said you have to know the owners. Apparently being filthy rich is not enough: “This is not just for any Saudi businessman.” And, he said, members want a place “where they’re not annoyed.” Because nothing is more annoying to an insider than the mere presence, let alone the questions, of an outsider. Which explains their ban on the media. (I wonder if their bathroom provides gold toilet paper.)
And of course, where the lords gather in private, a Trump is always there to talk deals. In addition to the president’s son, notes The New York Times, owners of the club include Zach and Alex Witkoff, the sons of the president’s Middle East envoy, and “Omeed Malik, who leads 1789 Capital, where Donald Trump Jr. is a senior executive.”
I posted that to social media. One of my readers replied: “I admit to being curious as to what Donald Trump Jr. does as a ‘senior executive’ of…”
Junior, it seems, is everywhere to collect metaphorical tributes, the equivalent of the envelopes of cash so common and chronic in other corrupt countries.
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Trump has made it abundantly clear his administration is “pay to play.” Even his pardons of convicted felons often go to those who did him favors or will soon do so.
Trump pardoned the reality show couple Todd and Julie Chrisley, who, among other things, had defrauded banks out of more than $30 million and attempted to defraud the Internal Revenue Service. No surprise, they are Trump supporters. Their daughter Savannah spoke at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, and campaigned for Trump as part of “Team Trump’s Women Tour.”
Trump also pardoned Paul Walczak, a former nursing home executive, who was convicted of withholding over $10 million from his employees’ paychecks that was supposed to be used for their income taxes, etc. Instead, he used it to buy a $2 million yacht and other such necessities.
But never mind all that. In Walczak’s pardon application, it was explained that he was “targeted by the Biden administration over his family’s conservative politics.” It also mentioned that Walczak’s mother had raised millions of dollars for Trump’s campaigns, and that she helped publicize the addiction diary of President Biden’s daughter. After his pardon application was submitted, his mother was invited to a $1 million-per-person dinner that promised face time with Trump.
Meanwhile, Trump’s allies in the world of hucksters and disinformation purveyors, leveraging the Trump-created chaos and uncertainty, are busy pushing the foolish and greedy to buy crypto and gold. Trump is helping by hinting that the gold in Fort Knox, symbolically underpinning the strength of the dollar, might have been removed by Sleepy Joe or nefarious parties unknown. Listen to the MAGA shows: They’re all about gold and crypto. And of course, the Trump clan has jumped into every opportunity on both fronts.
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While Trump has been letting loose various felons as long as they support him, he has “kept his promise” to voters that he would rid the country of “dangerous” immigrants — such as those he labeled “rapists,” “murderers,” “the worst of the worst” — and sent them to a hell-hole prison in El Salvador.
But data from the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) obtained by ProPublica, The Texas Tribune, and journalists from Venezuela paints a different picture: The Trump administration knew that the vast majority of the 238 Venezuelan immigrants it deported to El Salvador had not been convicted of serious crimes in the US. Specifically:
- 130 were labeled as only having violated immigration laws.
- 26 were guilty of nonviolent offenses, such as retail theft or traffic violations.
- Only 6 of the 238 were guilty of violent crimes.
Outside the US, again, very few were convicted of violent crimes:
- 20 of the 238 men had been arrested and charged with a crime abroad.
- Only 11 of those 20 were allegedly involved in violent crimes.
Asked about the differences between Trump’s public statements and the way they are labeled in the government’s own data, DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said,
These individuals categorized as ‘non-criminals’ are actually terrorists, human rights abusers, gang members, and more — they just don’t have a rap sheet in the US.
Apparently McLaughlin — like everyone else in the Trump administration — believes she can get away with saying anything no matter how divorced from reality.
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Not all immigrants are sent abroad, and immigrant detention camps in the US are big business, as Trump’s border czar Tom Homan knows. Recently, according to a federal ethics filing, he earned an undisclosed amount in fees consulting for the Geo Group, one of two companies that operate the majority of immigrant detention facilities that benefit financially from the crackdown.
Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who has previously raised questions about the Trump administration’s ties to the company, said “The GEO Group is a major private prison contractor whose largest source of revenue is contracts with ICE. This news raises even more questions, and the corruption concerns are too large to ignore.”
An OpenSecrets analysis of private prison company annual reports revealed the GEO Group and CoreCivic grossed $551 million and $552 million respectively from contracts with ICE alone in fiscal year 2021. And that was before Homan’s current reign.
By the way, Homan was acting ICE director in the first Trump administration, and was the architect of the heartless “zero tolerance” policy — which separated thousands of children from their parents.
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Elon Musk is gone from the government. Hooray! Now, if he would just leave Twitter/X and return it to people who don’t flood our feed with dishonest, crazy crap, life would be (relatively, momentarily) beautiful.
Musk has nonetheless done extremely well financially from everything except Tesla. And now he wants to land a golden contract to build the “Golden Dome,” Trump’s fantasy of a defense system that can intercept missiles launched from anywhere, even the other side of the world.
Reality check: Scientists warn that no matter how well it’s put together, an adversary could overwhelm the system by simply launching a flurry of missiles at it, and by spoofing its sensors with basic countermeasures.
But, as The New Republic put it, “missile defense has never been about keeping America safe. It’s all about the contracts” — and Musk is suspected of exploiting his position in the government to get the Golden Dome contract. Will America ever be safe from Elon Musk?
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Meanwhile, the president who has no qualms about labeling fellow Americans as scum (see his rather ungracious Memorial Day post) is now befuddled by his pal Putin and the whole Ukraine mess, and expresses bafflement and (mild) irritation with Putin and his mass-murdering “special military operation.”
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Trump’s latest outrageous claim — that he, not Congress, controls the Library of Congress — has some alarming implications. Among other things, he could get access to and abuse confidential information, like sexual harassment complaint records, and raw collections of donated papers that may contain sensitive information.
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Would you have been surprised to hear something like this in Germany in the 1930s?
The US State Department has ordered all US embassies and consulates to “immediately begin additional vetting” for anyone seeking a visa to travel to Harvard University “for any purpose.”
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Trump is becoming such an egregious dictator that he is now going after everyone for almost everything, even those who by all rights should be considered his allies.
Some will of course cheer Trump’s attack on Leonard Leo, because Leo and his Federalist Society have done unspeakable harm to the long-term interests of this country and its people. But leave it to Trump to find fault with those who have made it possible for him to do what he is now doing. And just try to imagine the kinds of legal thugs and yahoos (looking at you, Emil Bove) — characters too shady and/or incompetent to make it through even the Federalist Society’s loyalty-heavy vetting process — that Trump will now tap for his remaining three and a half years of judicial appointments. One shudders to think.
When some Republican-appointed judges (including a few appointed by Trump himself) resist Trump’s attempts to ignore Constitutional constraints on executive overreach, he lashes out at them. And vilifies enablers like Leo for being insufficiently loyal — to him, in his self-appointed role as a would-be, all-powerful Führer.
Trump has also just yanked the nomination of a new head of NASA, Jared Isaacman, after he was approved by a Senate committee. Why? Not because Isaacman is closely tied to Musk, whose personal financial interests are entwined with NASA’s priorities, and not because of some discovered lack of qualification or real conflict. No, it was because Trump learned that Isaacman, who gave $2 million to the Trump inauguration, had made several contributions to Democratic candidates.
At the FBI, they’re in the midst of purging the best, most experienced agents, seeking only those who will protect the interests of the regime. Even the public corruption unit has been disbanded.
Donald Trump is certainly the most evil and twisted American president ever, by an extremely long country mile. But is his administration also the most corrupt in history?
Can there be any doubt?
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