But Let’s All Focus on the Sensational Clickbait on Social Media and Ignore the Threat –

The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson – 

WASHINGTON, D.C. — You know, if I actually thought sensational tabloid news would make a difference in this crazy world, I might have gravitated in that direction myself many years ago. I almost did.

These days, however, when I see these clickbait stories going viral on social media, I tend to throw up a little in my mouth, then run as fast and far away as I can get. I would much rather be sitting outside in the shade of the woods in a comfortable camp chair sipping sweet tea, watching and listening to the birds sing.

But when it rains for three solid days and the winter cold just won’t seem to go away and give us all a spring break, what is a news reader and writer to do? Like I’ve said before, writers write. So I’m holding my nose and will comment on a few stories in the news today, going against my better judgement but in the interest of adding some wisdom to the conversation.

Let me just make it clear here that I have come to hate the month of March. It’s the most annoying month of the year. The pounding rain. The howling wind. And the freezing cold that won’t go away. April does not promise to be much better in the Mid-Atlantic region. This has not always been the case. I don’t blame it on god or the weather forecasters on TeeVee. The climate is clearly changing, so we all must find ways to adapt and cope.

But these sensational stories make me want to retire completely from the news business, seeing that even otherwise intelligent, educated people who never bought The Weekly World News in the grocery store checkout line can’t seem to resist the latest scandals on cable infotainment and social media.

At this point it’s not clear to me whether many people care enough to spend a few minutes actually reading a news story or an opinion column. Maybe I’m exaggerating and catastrophizing. But from what I see people responding to on Facebook, it’s all sensational headlines turned into memes. Very few people bother to share the stories that go with them anymore, so I can only assume that the facts of the stories are totally irrelevant to the vast majority of the American public.

I suppose I could be wrong. Some people are still paying the New York Times for digital subscriptions. And there are a tiny few who still claim they like reading in print.

So do you want the sensational tabloid story first? Or the serious story that could be the end of us all?

They are both sensational clickbait stories, and apparently the reporters and news writers who are pushing them get off on such things. Maybe they make more money practicing this than I ever did reporting and writing real news and trying to educate the public in a democracy and make a difference for the planet.

Everything seems to be about the money these days. Maybe I’m like the dinosaurs, about to become extinct.

Let’s take the tabloid story first.

It happens to be about the trial about to take place in New York against Donald Trump for having sex with porn star Stormy Daniels, then going to great lengths to pay her off in hush money and prevent the story from coming to light when he was running for president in 2015.

But Trump is not the star of the show today, even though it is the case that will go down in history as the first criminal indictment and trial of a former U.S. president ever. Stormy is also not the star of the show. Not today.

Today’s star is tabloid reporter and editor Lachlan Cartwright, a gay Aussie journalist who had the fortune or misfortune of finding himself working for the National Enquirer and its sensational scoop driven editor David Pecker in 2015. He gets his 15 minutes of fame this week, because the New York Times magazine published his tell all story just as the New York trial is getting underway.

Read it and weep, or laugh out loud.

What I Saw Working at The National Enquirer During Donald Trump’s Rise: Inside the notorious “catch and kill” campaign that now stands at the heart of the former president’s legal trial.

Before landing the assignment as an assistant editor at the Enquirer, Cartwright (presumably no relation to the Western TV family) was working for The New York Daily News, a street-wise local tabloid mostly read by the working classes in Manhattan and the outer boroughs. When I rode the Staten Island Ferry once, and the subway a few times, there were more copies of the Daily News on the boat and the train by far than the Times, which was considered an elite paper more for the educated and the wealthy.

Back in the day when it seemed to matter, it was said that the Times was the national newspaper of record being read by all the leaders of the world, as well as all the new broadcasters on television like Walter Cronkite.

When I had dinner with a top editor at The Daily News in 1988 in a restaurant on top of some rotating hotel bar near Times Square, it was still chasing sensational local crime stories like the penny papers in the 19th century. This was not my thing, so I passed on the chance to move to New York and go to work for the Daily News, holding out some hope that one day I might get a chance to work for the Times instead.

That dream did come true. These days the difference doesn’t seem to matter. But back then the vaunted Times would never have hired a tabloid reporter. They do it all the time now.

This is only a side note to Cartwright’s story, since he took the nose dive and has somehow survived, recently getting hired to cover media, entertainment and politics for The Hollywood Reporter.

In my case, and in the interest of total transparency, it was 1988 when I flew to New York to pitch a book idea on George Wallace to the legendary agent of George Orwell. I stayed in Manhattan with Roger Newman, the author of Hugo Black’s biography, and Jeff Samuels, a Brit who was then editor of The Globe tabloid who had an apartment in Soho. I had been doing some free-lance reporting in the South for the Enquirer, The Star and The Globe, human interest stories mostly.

The pay was great, usually $750 a story plus expenses. I just reported out and wrote these news features we found in local newspapers. In New York, they just sensationalized them and wrote the screaming headlines.

A friend of mine from Decatur, Alabama named Chuck Michilini who was doing public relations for UAB then had spent a decade covering health and science for the Enquirer. He introduced me to the former health and science editor, a cheeky fellow named Maury Breecher. We were all hanging out partying on the Southside of Birmingham then, when I was the proprietor of NewsBreak, a newsstand-bookstore-coffee shop on Highland Avenue.

But that was a long time ago, before anyone foresaw the coming of the mass internet, the rise of social media or the threat from machine learning, the new savior or the new doomsday threat often called Artificial Intelligence.

Speaking of AI, there is another story going around on social media today from another sensational writer who claims to have found scientists who quantify the threat from AI, and adds a diminishing response from Elon Musk, the drug addled sole proprietor of X, formerly known as Twitter. This seems like an odd thing to say, since the domain name is still located on the web at twitter dot com.

AI safety researcher warns there’s a 99.999999% probability AI will end humanity, but Musk “conservatively” dwindles it down to 20% and says it should be explored more despite inevitable doom: AI might doom humanity, but Musk says it should be explored even more either way.

So this guy Kevin Okemwa, who calls himself a “seasoned tech journalist” based in Nairobi, Kenya, starts out normally enough with a nod to both sides.

“Generative AI can be viewed as a beneficial or harmful tool. Admittedly, we’ve seen impressive feats across medicine, computing, education, and more fueled by AI,” he writes. “But on the flipside, critical and concerning issues have been raised about the technology, from Copilot’s alter ego — Supremacy AGI demanding to be worshipped to AI demanding an outrageous amount of water for cooling, not forgetting the power consumption concerns.”

Musk has been rather vocal about his views on AI, he reports, “brewing a lot of controversies around the topic.”

Recently, the billionaire referred to AI as the “biggest technology revolution,” but indicated there won’t be enough power by 2025, ultimately hindering further development.

Will AI End Humanity?

While at the Abundance Summit, Musk indicated that “there’s some chance that it will end humanity,” he says.

He links to a clip from Business Insider and says while Musk didn’t share how he came to this conclusion, he says there’s a 10 to 20 percent chance AI might end humanity.

Strangely enough, Musk thinks that potential growth areas and advances in the AI landscape should still be explored, saying, “I think that the probable positive scenario outweighs the negative scenario.”

While speaking to Business Insider, an AI safety researcher and director of the Cyber Security Laboratory at the University of Louisville, Roman Yampolskiy, disclosed that the probability of AI ending humanity is much higher. He referred to Musk’s 10 to 20 percent estimate as “too conservative.”

The AI safety researcher says the risk is exponentially high, referring to it as “p(doom),” the probability of generative AI taking over humanity or worse — ending it.

We all know the privacy and security concerns, the battle between the U.S. and China, etc. Last year, the U.S. imposed export rules preventing chipmakers like NVIDIA from shipping chips to China. The U.S. government indicated the move wasn’t designed to rundown China’s economy, but a safety measure designed to prevent the use of AI in military advances.

Musk raised similar concerns about OpenAI’s GPT-4 model in his suit against the AI startup and its CEO Sam Altman.

“The lack of elaborate measures and guardrails to prevent the technology from spiraling out of control is alarming,” this writer concludes.

Musk says the model constitutes AGI and wants its research, findings and technological advances to be easily accessible to the public.

Most researchers and executives familiar with (p)doom place the risk of AI taking over humanity anywhere between 5 to 50 percent.

But Yampolskiy says the risk is extremely high, placing the probability at 99.999999 percent. The researcher says it’s virtually impossible to control AI once superintelligence is attained, and the only way to prevent this is not to build it.

In a separate interview, Okemwa quotes Musk again.

“I think we really are on the edge of probably the biggest technology revolution that has ever existed. You know, there’s supposedly a Chinese curse: ‘May you live in interesting times.’ Well, we live in the most interesting of times. For a while, it was making me a bit depressed, frankly. I was like, well, will they take over? Will we be useless?”

Musk shared these comments while talking about Tesla’s Optimus program, and added that humanoid robots are just as good as humans when handling complex tasks. He jokingly indicated that he hoped the robots would be nice to us — if/when the evolution starts.

Well, that’s nice.

So we should just sit back and hope that the Borg will treat us nicely once they take over humanity and destroy the Earth?

What would Captain James T. Kirk do, or Jean-Luc Picard?

Destroy the fucking Borg, that’s what.

If we have a chance to prevent this, why don’t we? Because Congress is full of morons who have no clue how to write laws and regulations concerning technology?

The people love their Facebook?

I’ve said before, and I’ll say again. We need to be preparing ourselves to do battle with this army of bots.

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