Obsidian Wings

Death to individualism

by liberal japonicus

I flagged a story about Air Canada's use of an AI chatbot and how they tried to avoid responsibility for the information it gave out and Janie pointed out in a comment that JB's John Cole mentioned it. Take it away, JC

In other news, the Air Canada Chatbot lawsuit thing is quite a hoot. For those who have not heard or read about it, apparently a guy’s mother died, so he was trying to buy tickets from Air Canada to go home. He didn’t have time to wait for an approval from them, so he went to their website, used the chatbox, and asked if in their bereavement policy it was allowed to buy the tickets ahead of time and request a refund later. Unbeknownst to the man, he was not actually talking to an employee at Air Canada, but an AI chatbot. And that AI chatbot had just created that policy out of the ether. Which just goes to show you that artificial intelligence has more common sense and empathy than the MA’s and corporate lawyers at a major corporation.

At any rate, the obvious happened. The guy said “Ok that seems reasonable” and went and purchased his tickets. Later on, he tried to get reimbursed, and living Air Canada employees told him to go get fucked that that was not their policy. So he sued, and the Air Canada lawyers actually argued in court that technically the AI chatbot on their website is not an Air Canada employee so technically we are not liable and don’t owe him a refund.

At which point, everyone on the tribunal said “get the fuck out of here with that bullshit” and found them liable:

Here's the Guardian link. His point that a chatbot actually has more empathy and common sense than the corporate lawyers is nice and a lot more cheerful than mine. I find the argument by Air Canada that the chatbot is responsible for it's own counsel links up with my feeling that the use of these tools is going to reflect different cultures, which I posted about earlier here. To return to that hobby horse, it's difficult for me to imagine an Asian company making that argument. This is not because Asian companies have some sort of greater integrity, it's just that they won't use 'just because we programmed that bot, it doesn't mean we are responsible'. (one point that I'd make is that you now need to screenshot any interactions with a chatbot, it's because this guy did that he was able to get the tribunal ruling in his favor)

Slowly, my Japanese colleagues are finding that their students are turning in assignments done with chatGPT and are lamenting. However, there is still no sense of crisis, no concern of what this does to their learning. I believe it is because they don't really have a concept of learning as a way to become more individualistic and as the Japanese system rushes to adopt bits and bobs from Western (basicaly US) education, they are just stuck to the outside.

I may have told this story in the comments, but we are being encouraged to create can-do statements for our classes. Now, Japanese university students who fail a class, say 1st year [whatever], are told that they have to take that class at the same time as they are 2nd year English [whatever] so I said gee, if we have can-do statements, that means the students need to first pass the 1st year course before moving on to the second year, what a great idea! To which my colleagues said no, why would that be the case? This is just one example, we have lots of things nailed here and there that are to adhere to some letter of the law, but not to the spirit.

What generally happens here is that everyone takes advantage of the system until it reaches the breaking point and then draconian rules are put in place. Enforcement is done because everyone is watching you, not because you feel a duty to do the right thing. If you can then get a certain percentage of the population to conform, you develop something like a herd immunity.

Anyway, that's what I was thinking when I read about Air Canada's chatbot 'going rogue'. If you had thoughts about this or anything else, knock yerselves out.

Lost Horizon

by liberal japonicus

This quasi open post (aren't they all?) begins with a question. In this Guardian article, the title is King strips CBE from former Post Office boss Paula Vennells but the subtitle of the story says "Vennells had said she would return honour after fresh fallout over wrongful prosecution of post office operators", so I'm curious if King Charles took the step or if there is some usage here where no one can return an honor, it can only be stripped. It brings to mind Nadine Dorries, who resigned 'with immediate effect' in June of last year and finally sent the letter in August. Maybe some different in the British and US ideas of 'immediate'. Or Dorries doesn't do vocabulary nuances. Be grateful to anyone who can explain the details of honors and how they are taken away.

On the off chance anyone is unaware of the Horizon scandal, here is a the Guardian's explainer.

I've been watching various youtube videos of the inquiry and am at a loss for words. It seems that the testimony is full of evasions, half-truths, and ass-covering and it amazes me that it could have gone on so long and that the people testifying were able to get jobs. Though there seems to some aspects to ass-covering that are particularly British, especially when watching how Badenoch's firing to Henry Staunton is unfolding.

I have a few observations about it and my choice of title that I'll put in the comments, but any bits and bobs that have interested you from this particular dumpster fire, I would love to hear.

Maybe Someday

by JanieM

Preface: I’ve had a draft of this post rolling around in my head for a while. I picked some photos to go with it, then let it sit around some more. It’s just a little slice of life, and probably relevant to a number of us, but it also feels incredibly trivial in the light of wars, assassinations, the ongoing attempted destruction of American democracy, climate change, and anything else you’d like to add from the headlines. Then again, vaguely nodding toward the serenity prayer, life is quiet in my corner of the world right now, so on a day to day basis this is just one of the things I think about.

Open thread.

**************************

My to-do list includes several projects that are, in effect, endless, including the one where I try to get rid of all kinds of stuff I don’t need anymore. (Or never did.)

Some people tackle a project and don’t stop until it’s finished. Not me. I chip away at things and get them done eventually, but the very nebulousness and lack of urgency of this task makes the chipping away even more desultory than usual. I putter in my attic in spring and fall, when it’s not too hot or too cold up there. I purge no longer needed financial records once a year. I take boxes to the Goodwill now and then – mostly clothes and books.

Okay, mostly books.

Year of the Dragon thoughts and open thread

by liberal japonicus

In my facebook feed, this cover, from 2017 popped up, reminding me I had started a Year of the Dragon post. Probably an appropriate year, given that dragons tend to represent chaos and untamed nature, and in light of the fact that everything seems to be going to hell. Japanese celebrate the New Year's according to the Gregorian calendar, and the 'real' Chinese New Year started on 10 Feb, when it is celebrated in China (春節/Chunjié), Korea (설날/Seollal), and Vietnam (Tết). The lunar calendar has virtually disappeared from Japan, and if you are wondering why, this article is quite good.

Thinking about China, this WSJ piece about how Prigozhin's assassination was connected to Nikolai Patrushev, Putin's right hand man had an interesting anecdote that I can't pry out again, as the piece has slid back behind a paywall, but I think there was an anecdote about how US negotiators brought Patrushev a map showing areas of Russia that China historically claimed and Patrushev replied 'we know who our enemies are'.

Now, it's not clear what was on the map, but the anecdote made it sound like large tracts of land. I've found this article about Bolshoi Ussuriysky Island, all 350 km², which, given the sizes of Russia and China, is like a rounding error. The article points out other countries who China has land disputes with (India is foregrounded as it is an Indian publication), but the thing that caught me was that there seemed to be an assumption that China wanted to gobble up territories. I have to think that this is a fundamental misreading. Certainly, China has issues, a probably incomplete list being: the Spratleys, the Senkaku/Daiyou islands, Aksin Chin, the Paracel Islands and, of course, Tibet. But all of those are based on a narrative that they are part of China's territory. So the idea that China wants to somehow swallow up Russia or other places seems more projection of Western attitudes of imperialism rather than what's actually going on.

This isn't to say that China is somehow innocent in all this. The way China has treated Tibetans and Uyghurs deserves robust condemnation and the smaller issues are things that I feel are ginned up to create nationalist fervor in the Chinese population and equal and opposite reactions being what they are, in the countries affected. Internet nationalism is definitely an issue, though it can be prone to backfire. I agree with the idea that this internet nationalism is responsible for 'brutalising public discourse' and I think that this parallels problems with enshittification. So trying to place a 'they are trying to take over the world' gloss on things isn't really helpful, and obscures what is actually happening.

I thought more about this when I read this piece about Tucker Carlson. The author, Michael Penn, is a friend who started up Shingetsu News Agency while in Japan and has moved to a position in the US as a journalism professor. While he's a friend, I think he's profoundly mistaken in this take on Carlson, but I've been trying to figure out why I think that. However, I think the bolded phrase gets at why there is a problem here.

Carlson is not a progressive and probably never will be; he is more fundamentally an American nationalist. But he is a sincere nationalist who wants to speak for the interests of ordinary blue-collar society and not for the corrupt ruling classes, with which he is now quite antagonistic.

The idea of a 'sincere nationalist' is an interesting one. I imagine that 'sincere nationalism' is at the root of Israel supporting Hamas, Putin invading Ukraine, and stringing razor wire along the Rio Grande. That's where 'sincere nationalism' is going to take you, methinks.

To me, Carlson's evolution is a repetition of Pat Buchanan. Buchanan's 1992 Republican convention speech was the one which Molly Ivin's observed “probably sounded better in the original German.” And while some, maybe not so much here, but in other places, get upset when you start thinking about the f-bomb, but as Johnson said, patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. So granting Carlson cover because of 'nationalism' seems to be profoundly mistaken.

While cheering for your country in [obscure sport name here] every four years seems pretty benign, it is hard to see how nationalism can coexist with a solution to problems of the anthropocene era. which include:

...Carbon dioxide emissions, global warming, ocean acidification, habitat destruction, extinction and widescale natural resource extraction are all signs that we have significantly modified our planet.

I always have difficult finding a conclusion to these musings, but this is your invitation to talk about China, Carlson, lunar calendars or whatever else strikes your fancy. A lot of links, none of them required reading, just background.

Still and Always

by JanieM

Rebecca Solnit has a long essay in the London Review of Books called In the Shadow of Silicon Valley. It opens with a meditation on driverless cars:

I’ve become somewhat used to driverless cars in the years they’ve been training on the city’s streets, first with back-up human drivers, and then without. They are here despite opposition from city officials, including the fire chief, and San Francisco recently sued the California state bureau that gave companies licence to use the streets as their laboratory. Firefighters have reported driverless cars attempting to park on firehoses; last June one such car prevented emergency vehicles from reaching victims of a shooting; the vehicles are apparently unequipped to assess these situations and respond by stopping. Direct communication isn’t an option: the only way to get a driverless car to do anything is to contact the company in charge of it.

In early October, a driverless car owned by Cruise, a subsidiary of General Motors, hit a woman who’d just been struck by another car, and in the course of performing what was described as a rote ‘pullover manoeuvre’ dragged her twenty feet, mangling her badly and leaving her trapped under its wheels. The device was unable to detect that it was on top of a human and would not respond to rescuers, who had to lift the car off her. Cruise withdrew its 950 driverless vehicles, but Waymo, a company launched by Google’s parent company, Alphabet, continues to send its cars onto the streets.

Driverless cars are often called autonomous vehicles – but driving isn’t an autonomous activity. It’s a co-operative social activity, in which part of the job of whoever’s behind the wheel is to communicate with others on the road. Whether on foot, on my bike or in a car, I engage in a lot of hand gestures – mostly meaning ‘wait!’ or ‘go ahead!’ – when I’m out and about, and look for others’ signals. San Francisco Airport has signs telling people to make eye contact before they cross the street outside the terminals. There’s no one in a driverless car to make eye contact with, to see you wave or hear you shout or signal back. The cars do use their turn signals – but they don’t always turn when they signal.

Solnit's point about driving being a cooperative social activity is one I’ve never seen made before, yet it’s (semi-consciously) central to my own thinking about driving. For too many people driving is more like a competitive cage match than a cooperative problem-solving enterprise, but even then it’s a matter of humans participating with other humans. The cooperative use of cars is central to the whole notion of public roadways, and I have never seen the lack of it brought up before in discussions of the “wonders” of driverless vehicles.

My name is Will, Will of the people.

by liberal japonicus

When I lived in Eugene, Oregon, a city that is an outlier in a state that's an outlier, around election time, we'd get a phonebook like publication with all of the ballot amendments. Some were well-meaning, others totally wack and it was always a fun read back in the days when there was some sense to the world. It is something that was baked into the process back in 1902, and this wikipedia article has a list of all of them. The process also required that a statement be included on the effect on the budget. I can't remember the precise wording, but some had something to the effect that 'we have absolutely no idea how this will impact the budget" and I was always drawn to those for comedic value.

More recently, when I have thought of it, I just assumed that it was one of the early volleys in the current enshittification of US government. So you can imagine my surprise when I saw this.

The Oregon Supreme Court said Thursday that 10 Republican state senators who staged a record-long walkout last year to stall bills on abortion, transgender health care and gun rights cannot run for reelection.

The decision upholds the secretary of state’s decision to disqualify the senators from the ballot under a voter-approved measure aimed at stopping such boycotts. Measure 113, passed by voters in 2022, amended the state constitution to bar lawmakers from reelection if they have more than 10 unexcused absences.

Cue Nelson Muntz. I'm still undecided as to the value to the whole process, but I'm happy in this instance. Still, it seems like brownian motion. An open thread for your thoughts on ballot amendments as well as all of the anecdotes from whereever you are. Or find the proposed amendment in the wikipedia article that catches your fancy and share it here.