More Fauci Fallout

Here are a couple of more recent takes on Dr Fauci's Senate testimony this past Wednesday. First, from Alan Dershowitz:

Let me begin with Fauci’s constitutional right to invoke the Fifth Amendment. Yes, he was pardoned for any past crimes but the pardon does not operate prospectively. The committee was trying to prove that he had committed crimes not only before his pardon but after it. He surely had the right to invoke the Fifth Amendment as to any potentially incriminating information that would allow prosecution for post-pardoned crimes.

. . . Senator Rand Paul tried to avoid this constitutional barrier by specifically asking him questions that are clearly covered by the pardon President Biden gave him. This may make it appear that Dr. Fauci had nothing to fear from answering questions limited to that period. But that ignores a line of Supreme Court cases that hold that if a defendant answers some questions about a particular subject, he may not refuse to answer other questions about that subject. He may not turn the spigot on and off. Once he opens the door by answering questions about a subject, he may not close it in response to other questions.

So any good lawyer will always advise a client who seeks to invoke the Fifth Amendment to invoke it across the board and not try to pick and choose safe areas. That’s what Dr. Fauci’s lawyer did here, and that’s what I would’ve done had I been Dr. Fauci’s lawyer.

But that doesn't solve Fauci's contempt of Congress problem:

The congressional committee may well recommend that he be held in contempt. And congress may vote to hold him in contempt. The Trump Justice department could indict him and he would have to litigate these issues. Although there is no guarantee that he will win, the law seems clearly to be on his side. Moreover it may take a considerable amount of time for this case to work its way through congress and the courts.

Dr Fauci is 85 years old. I'm not sure what good it would do to prosecute the guy at this stage, especially when the sociopolitical mechanisms that put him where he was are fully intact. Alex Berenson touches more on this issue, but he doesn't quite get there:

Throughout the Covid epidemic, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci didn’t know what he didn’t know.

Worse, he didn’t care.

Fauci’s Covid “diary” — his musings about his Covid experience — have revealed his epic self-love to the world. But it’s what the diary doesn’t say that’s the real problem.

. . . Fauci had just turned 79 when the news of a potential outbreak emerged from China at the start of 2020. For a generation, he had worked mainly as an federal administrator, not a bench scientist or physician. Now he faced a novel coronavirus with a “furin cleavage site,” an unusual and frightening feature.

. . . He could have insisted on a national seroprevalence trials, like the ones the British government conducted, to track the spread of Covid infections over time. He could have pushed for fast relatively cheap studies of different medicines tested alone and in combination. (Again, the British ran such a study; it found dexamethasone, a cheap steroid, cut the risk of death in people with severe Covid.)

He didn’t do those things, or much else that was forward-looking. He didn’t push for head-to-head trials of Covid vaccines, either. Later, in 2021, he would prove to be stupidly overconfident in the mRNAs, failing to realize how quickly their protection would wane.

. . . The answer is that Fauci was not daunted by the need to keep up with the flood of information about Covid. Quite the opposite. His diary shows a profound lack of interest in nearly all the topics mentioned above. No wonder he had so much time for television appearances.

“I represent science,” Fauci famously proclaimed in 2021. “I am science.”

Dr Fauci's real problem is that he was raised up by the media, which delighted him, and he absolutely encouraged it. That he was a complete phony helped his rise, but it's led to his fall, and now, that same media has turned him into a scapegoat.

I think of this often when I’m standing in the supermarket checkout line and reviewing the latest headlines from the tabloids: an actress who has gained weight and looks grotesque in an inappropriate swimsuit, claims that dashing leading men are abusive or involved in clandestine gay relationships, divorces, rehab, etc. We all are fascinated by the beauty and life of celebrities, and even more intrigued by their delicious falls from grace. Details change a bit, but essentially it’s the same story, week after week, year after year.

What Dr Fauci really needs to do now is hire the kind of publicist that can keep him out of the news. I'm not sure if he knows that exists. He might check with Dubya, whose flacks have done an outstanding job.

Could AI Be Too Cheap To Be Profitable?

Here's an area where AI does quite well. I've been reading a lot of Henry James lately, and I discovered another of his private jokes. I asked Chrome AI mode, "In which Henry James stories does the Grand Duke of Silberstadt-Schreckenstein appear?" It answered,

The fictional realm of Silberstadt-Schreckenstein and its royal figureheads appear or are explicitly referenced in two of Henry James's works:

1. The Liar (1888)

The exact title "the Grand Duke of Silberstadt-Schreckenstein" is explicitly mentioned in this short story. He does not appear physically as a character in the narrative, but he serves as a comedic plot device. Colonel Capadose—an incorrigible, pathological liar—claims that the Grand Duke is an intimate family friend and an elite art collector. The Colonel uses the Grand Duke as an excuse to explain why a prized portrait painted by Oliver Lyon is mysteriously missing from his home, claiming they gave it to the Duke as a birthday present.

2. The Europeans (1878)

While the "Grand Duke" isn't named in this short novel, his immediate family and the fictional German principality form the entire backstory of the plot.

The Principality: The fictional state of Silberstadt-Schreckenstein is the European home that the protagonists leave behind.

The Relatives: The protagonist, Baroness Eugenia Münster, is trapped in a crumbling morganatic marriage to Prince Adolf of Silberstadt-Schreckenstein.

The Sovereign: The ruler of the realm is referred to in the text as "The Reigning Prince" (the brother of Eugenia's husband), who is actively pressuring the couple to dissolve their marriage for political advantage.

I'd read The Europeans and "The Liar" in quick succession, and I'd wondered if Silberstadt-Schreckenstein appears elsewhere, but apparently not. I would rate this answer "very probably true", but here's the rub: it appears that AI had to search the entire body of James's literary output -- or at least that very high percentage that's digitized and accessible -- plus a certain amount of academic commentary, to come up with this answer, which it did in a second or two.

It did this "for free", or at no cost above the cost of licensing Chrome and an internet connection. Is Google losing money doing this? I don't know, so I asked AI: "How does Google make a profit off basic Chrome AI?" It answered,

Google does not make a direct profit from the free, basic AI features built into the Chrome browser; instead, it uses Chrome AI as a loss leader to drive its highly lucrative advertising, cloud, and subscription ecosystems.

OK, that sounds about right. It makes subtle efforts to upsell me as it gives its answers, but so far, I get stuff from Chrome AI for free that I would have to pay for if I had ChatGPT. This may not last forever, though.

AI labs aren’t much like the hyper-profitable tech giants of the 2010s. Facebook and Airbrb were relatively capital-light businesses with ultra-low marginal costs (adding a profile to Facebook or listing to Airbnb costs the companies virtually nothing). And once each gained a foothold in their respective markets, network effects enabled them to retain formidable positions without needing to constantly upgrade their products.

Building a state-of-the-art AI company is a much more involved — and astronomically more expensive — endeavor. To get to the frontier, Anthropic and OpenAI have sunk (at least) tens of billions into semiconductors, data centers, power plants, and other capital investments. Staying at the cutting-edge, meanwhile, compels them to perpetually churn out evermore costly models.

. . . All of which raises the question: Why would investors expect businesses with a cost-structure this challenging to be not merely profitable, but massively so?

For now, the AI products we most commonly see are loss leaders. And if what they're mostly doing is answering questions about how often the Grand Duke of Silberstadt-Schreckenstein appears in Henry James, it's spending a lot of money to perform parlor tricks. The problem is that as the services it provides become potentially more valuable to the customer, it's going to have to do things like recursive self-checking -- as the meme at the top of this post suggests, it's going to have to double-check its own answers, which will at least double the cost of every search, and it might increase it exponentially.

The facts on the ground at the link, which the writer doesn't seem quite to understand, are that at least for now, there are too many players in the AI market, and the competition will keep prices down and make the industry less profitable, especially since the industry requires high initial investment. The answer, which pioneer industrialists like John D Rockefeller understood, is to reduce the number of players, something we've seen most recently in banking and air travel.

The Ceuta Migrant Invasion

US media seems to have been caught by surprise by the mass invasion of the North African Spanish enclave Ceuta (pronounced "SYOO-tah" in English). Its history dates back to the Phoenicians, but according to Wikipedia,

For much of the Middle Ages, regional powers north and south of the Strait of Gibraltar vied for control over Ceuta, which was a key contested port in the so-called Battle of the Strait. In 1415, it was annexed to the Kingdom of Portugal, and subsequently, after 1580, to the Hispanic Monarchy, with the city choosing to stay in the latter after 1640. Ceuta was a regular municipality belonging to the Spanish province of Cádiz prior to the passing of its Statute of Autonomy in March 1995, as provided by the Spanish Constitution, henceforth becoming an autonomous city.

Following the decolonization of Africa, Ceuta and the Spanish city of Melilla became the only European-held territories left in mainland Africa. Along with the Canary Islands, Ceuta was classified as a free port before Spain joined the European Union. Its population is predominantly Spaniard Christians and Arab Muslims, with a small minority of Sephardic Jews and Sindhi Hindus, from Pakistan.

The Ceuta border fence has a separate entry in Wikipedia:

The Ceuta border fence forms part of the Morocco–Spain border at Ceuta, a city on the North African coast. Constructed by Spain, its purpose is to prevent smuggling and to stop migrants from entering Europe. Morocco objected to the construction of the barrier since it does not recognize Spanish sovereignty in Ceuta.

Ceuta is an integral part of Spain, and therefore of the European Union; its border and its equivalent in Melilla are the only two land borders between the European Union and an African country.

The fence consists of parallel 6 metre (20-foot) high fences topped with barbed wire, with regular watchposts and a road running between them to accommodate police patrols or ambulance service in case of need. Underground cables connect spotlights, noise and movement sensors, and video cameras to a central control booth; dozens of guard ships and patrol boats check the coast, while 621 Guardia Civil officers and 548 police officers control the shore.

Since its initial construction in 1993, there have been regular attempts to breach it, although none as large or successful as the current one.

On 7 October 2005, the border fence was assaulted by hundreds of migrants, attracting international attention. Caught between Spanish rubber bullets and Moroccan gunfire, a number of migrants died (sources put the number of deaths between 13 and 18 people) and more than 50 were wounded.

. . . On 17 February 2017, an estimated 600 migrants, some armed with clubs and shears, broke through the security gates, and 300 of them are reported to have entered Ceuta, where police attempted to locate them.

. . . On 30 July 2026, during the Throne Day celebration in Mdiq, a large number of people forced their way into the enclave at the Tarajal breakwater. Activists initially estimated more than 2000 people crossed that day and another 1500 arrived the week before according to regional authorities, but numbers of arrivals continued to increase over the next day, and Spanish authorities claimed on 31 July that some 49,000 individuals had entered Ceuta in the past 24 hours.

NEW: Spain is now deploying its military after thousands of military-aged men stormed over the border into Ceuta, Spain.

Ceuta authorities are calling on Madrid to declare a national emergency after the border "totally collapsed."

"The situation is absolute chaos. It’s not… pic.twitter.com/Mpe5Lc1xlK

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) July 30, 2026

According to Politico,

Spain’s opposition parties are taking aim at Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s migration policies following the arrival of tens of thousands of unauthorized migrants in the Spanish exclave of Ceuta.

Over the past 24 hours, the migrants have forced their way into the heavily fortified autonomous city, which covers 18.5 square kilometers on the northern coast of Africa. With the Civil Guard forces that normally defend Ceuta overwhelmed, the Spanish army was mobilized late on Thursday to secure the border.

Speaking from Ceuta, where he flew to meet with officials overseeing the crisis on Friday, Sánchez characterized the situation as “an attack, a violation of the territorial integrity of Spain.”

Spain’s interior ministry on Friday said that approximately 50,000 people had entered Ceuta — whose normal population is around 80,000 — illegally. Of that total, approximately half have since voluntarily returned to Morocco. The Spanish presidency said migrants are departing from Ceuta at a rate of about 150 people per minute.

. . . Officially, Spanish authorities are attributing the current crisis to a legal decision issued by Spain’s Supreme Court earlier this month.

“These events are related to a court ruling,” Foreign Minister Albares said on Thursday.

On July 8, the top court ruled that Spain’s immediate-return procedure does not apply to migrants intercepted while attempting to swim to Ceuta and Melilla. According to the ruling, current legislation only permits unauthorized migrants to be returned without a formal deportation process if they are caught breaching a physical barrier.

Unauthorized migrants can still be sent back after crossing an unmarked maritime border, but are entitled to a formal deportation process. In its ruling, the top court said authorities should install some kind of “maritime containment measure” if they want to immediately return migrants caught in the water. On Friday, Sánchez said his government would move to create those conditions by deploying buoys off the autonomous cities’ shorelines.

My Take On Dr Fauci

The one big thing I noticed about Dr Fauci's testimony before the Senate Homeland Security and Governnment Affairs Committee yesterday was that he can turn the Brooklynese on and off. In the video above from 2023, he's talkimg about his fawthuh from New Yawk. But in his prepared statement to the committee in the video below, he may as well be from Philadelphia: "I serrved at the NIH forr overr fifty-fourr yearrs. . . . underr the advice of my attorrney. . ."

The commentator in the second video points out that Fauci is under a great deal of stress and anxiety, but the one thing he doesn't mention is that all of a sudden, he's dropped the Brooklyn schtick, demonstrating that when he wants to, he can speak standard English perfectly well. Of course he can; he graduated first in his class from Cornell Medical School.

So the Fauci from Brooklyn has always been an act. What's he up to? I asked Chrome AI mode, "Dr Fauci can apparently speak perfectly good standard English. Why does he affect a Brooklyn accent?" Well, much as I like AI as a research tool, there's a range of things you know you csn't ask it. In this case, ignoring the clear evidence just above, it answered,

Dr. Anthony Fauci does not affect a Brooklyn accent; it is his genuine, native dialect. He was born and raised in the predominantly Italian-American neighborhoods of Bensonhurst and Dyker Heights in Brooklyn, New York.A person's native speech pattern is a fundamental part of their identity. Dialect coaches and linguists point out several reasons why his natural accent remains prominent.

Many professionals undergo speech therapy or consciously "code-switch" to General American English to avoid regional stigmas. Fauci simply never chose to alter his natural voice.

Dr Fauci is completely authentic! It's not a bug, it's a feature! What always struck me about Fauci's public persona during the lockdowns was how annoying the guy was with the Brooklynese. I think this has been something of a life strategy; he comes off as annoying, but you're not allowed to say that, because he's authentic. If he stopped being annoying, he'd just be a 5'7" guy who faded into the crowd.

This is another strategy that comes out in the diaries: he had people on his staff who researched awards and cash prizes he could win. Then they pestered the nominating committees to nominate him and give him the prizes. He even pestered the ethics boards to declare he was eligible to get the prizes.

[Missouri Sen Josh] Hawley exhibited personal emails from Fauci’s staff in 2020, showing that Fauci directed federal employees while the pandemic was still raging to apply for and solicit over $1 million from at least eight cash prizes – for himself.

The federal employees involved included Fauci’s chief of staff Greg Folkers and Fauci’s personal assistant Patricia Conrad, as well as Lawrence Tabak, Holli Jaffe, Courtney Billet, Louis Miller, Katherine Miller, and Hugh Auchincloss .

“[Y]ou turned your staff into a full time application machine,” Hawley said. “You actually wrote to people and said, ‘do you think maybe I’d qualify?’ … You then had them go out to the ethics agencies and ethics watchdogs and demand that you be able to get the money. That's right, we've got it in your emails."

Federal law expressly prohibits using federal resources, including employees and time, to solicit cash awards or other personal benefits for federal employees.

Hawley went on,

“You may have been a good public servant at one time, I don't know. But I can tell you from reading your emails now, from looking at what you did, how you used your employees, somewhere along the line it became all about you,” Hawley told the doctor. “You became a narcissist and a megalomaniac and a liar."

Well, if I learned much of anything in the Ivy League, it was how people have hokey strategies for success that fool enough people enough of the time. They were like that by the time they were in high school. Fauci becamed captian of his high school basketball team. It's pretty clear he know how to work the system even then. He didn't become corrupt and narcissistic later in life, he started out that way.

This Isn't Vigilantism

Had been wondering when vigilantism was going to make a comeback in LA

Should have guessed some enterprising former gangsters would step in to fill the void left by city government

(Am a new subscriber to L.A. Material, which is great.) https://t.co/41i6qOx36Q pic.twitter.com/1GMeVPEFXz

— Moses Kagan (@moseskagan) July 28, 2026

Leave it to Instapundit to get things wrong. If you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If you're a libertarian, everyone looks like a vigilante. The post refers to a new site, LA Material, which has a detailed story on what might be called a security services provider, Ghost Town in Venice, a beachfront part of Los Angeles that has a big homeless problem.

What I think is happening here is that entrepreneurs are recognizing that there are innovative legal ways to address problems like squatting and homelessness that don't directly involve law enforcement, which may be prevented by state laws or department policies from intervening over squatters, for instance. Typically if a property owner calls the police over a squatter, the police will sympathize, but they'll explain it's a civll matter and refer the reporting party to the courts.

Tenant law in many states heavily favors squatters, who invoke tenants' rights and prolong eviction proceedings for months and years. A company called Squatter Hunters offers to bypass eviction proceedings to make life legally unpleasant enough for squatters that they'll simply agree to move out, or they can be moved out via mechanisms like building code or health department enforcement that don't involve the police.

A recent series on A&E, Squatters, documents the efforts of the company's founder, Flash Shelton, at evicting squatters, some of which have been occupying property and charging tenants rent for years. His most typical method is to get the legal owner to give him a lease on the property, which entitles him to enter the property for inspection. Once he enters the property, which he's legally entitled to do, he simply turns the squatter's tactics against the squatter and refuses to leave, announcing that the squatter has a new roommate.

Sometimes the squatters will call the police themselves, but when Shelton shows the police the lease from the owner, the police recognize there's nothing they can do and leave. At this point, some squatters will simply give up and move out. If they're still stubborn, as the new roommate, Shelton and his staff will do things like play loud music all day and all night, and eventually even the stubbornest squatters will recognize they're better off simply leaving. This is all legal, but Shelton's staff need to be pretty burly as well and able to protect themselves if they need to.

This isn't the only strategy. Often, if a building has no utilities, the local health department can declare it uninhabitable and get it cleared that way. If Shelton's inspection shows pest infestations or building code violations, the building can be cleared that way, too. All of this costs money -- Squatter Hunters lists various services and prices on their site -- but it's cheaper and faster than lawyers and the courts, and it's just as legal. There's no vigilantism involved.

From the piece at LA Material, Ghost Town appears to operate following a similar paradigm, providing paid services that conventional law enforcement can't provide due either to legal constraints or lack of resources, but that an independent service provider can legally -- or at least, not illegally -- provide at additional cost:

IN THE AFTERMATH OF THE PANDEMIC, as local government and nonprofits left a void in the increasingly high-demand encampment resolution market, Ghost Town stepped in to fill it. In my early conversations with Venice locals, I heard that the firm built much of their reputation with their work on a large encampment outside the Whole Foods on Lincoln.

In Google Street View photos, a tent can be seen on the sidewalk outside the store’s parking lot as early as September of 2022. By December 2023, the encampment’s footprint had grown larger: five tents or makeshift shelters, along with baby carriages, bikes, shopping carts, and at least one dog.

In early 2024, Whole Foods hired Ghost Town to provide property management services. Shortly thereafter, team members began engaging directly with encampment residents. Some of that work was documented by a blog, Santa Monica Closeup, which followed a Ghost Town employee in the aftermath of a city cleanup in March of 2024.

In the video, a burly man in a black Ghost Town hoodie paces the newly-cleared sidewalk, watching city sanitation workers as they throw items into a garbage truck and chatting up lingering residents of the encampment.

“You find a spot?” the man in the hoodie asks a man wheeling a bike loaded up with possessions, a dog sitting patiently in the basket.

The man with the bike replies something inaudible over the cars whizzing by.

“Yeah, well, regardless what he says, you can’t come back here,” the man in the hoodie replies. “It’s not gonna work out. This is my spot now.”

It's plain from both the Squatters series and the Ghost Town story that staff, while they don't use violence to entice squatters or homeless people to relocate, must be able, and appear to be able, to defend themselves if necessary.

I asked [founder Bobby] Luna about the rumor that his staff members were former members of Venice gangs. He confirmed it. Some of his employees had come to him after being released from prison, looking for work and a way to keep themselves on track. He is proud of those hires, but also says they’re careful not to bring on anyone who maintains ties to gang life. “It works for us because we're using people that are locals, but also people who have lived that life,” he said. “But no longer live that life.”

. . . I asked Luna about a video testimonial on Ghost Town’s Instagram page, where a business owner says he’d called the company for help with an encampment “that the cops have been here ten times to try and solve, and they can’t do anything or they won’t do anything.” Did Luna see his firm as acting as a secondary police force?

“I think a lot of people see us like that. We don't see ourselves as filling the gap,” he told me. He agreed that his company would take on jobs that LAPD wouldn’t — but that the police wouldn’t do them because they were too menial, rather than too extreme.

“Most of the time it's just talking to people, and I don't think the LAPD has time for that.”

Yes, it's just talking to people, but it involves a unique skill set to be able to talk to people while sending the message that you aren't going away. If people like Luna and Shelton can keep their businesses focused on that particular mission, more power to them -- but the intellectual welterweights at Instapundit are wrong to confuse that with vigilantism.

Maybe I could start a business negotiating with Instpundit people by offering them free memberships to MENSA if they'll just stop posting.

Is The Rapture Here? No, Wait: "We Are Now In The Singularity!"

This is via Real Clear Politics, so you know it's the best that's been thought and written:

OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman said during an interview on the "Relentless" podcast that "the singularity" has arrived and artificial intelligence is on the cusp of the point where they have created "a genie that can grant any wish." And the first thing he plans to do is wish for more wishes.

I guess Sam Altman is a big-picture guy, and big-picture guys can get away with being imprecise.

But the main thing that’s different from 10 years ago is, we’re actually in it. This is real. I think it is both true that it is all one crazy exponential, and any one moment is not the tipping point, and also that we are somehow in another one of those decisive periods where the curve can go one way or another, like it was when we started 10 years ago.

But what is this "it" we're actually "in"? All he does is say the same baloney we used to say in the dorm rooms 60 years ago: "Wow, man! Blows my mind!" Let's back up. According to Wikipedia,

The technological singularity, often simply called the singularity, is a hypothetical event in which technological growth accelerates beyond human control, producing unpredictable changes in human civilization. According to the most popular version of the singularity hypothesis, I. J. Good's intelligence explosion model of 1965, an upgradable intelligent agent could eventually enter a positive feedback loop of successive self-improvement cycles; more intelligent generations would appear more and more rapidly, causing an explosive increase in intelligence that culminates in a powerful superintelligence, far surpassing human intelligence.

What puzzles me is that Real Clear Politics often pairs essays with opposing views. Robert Reich will argue that Trump is Hitler, while Roger Kimball will explain that Trump isn't Hitler, and nobody will have learned a thing. Why didn't RCP post an opposing viewpoint here? My guess is that would have been too challenging a task for the interns who actually put the site together, but here's one they could have chosen, Sam Altman says AI has entered ‘singularity’: Should we be worried?

The 2014 US film Transcendence follows a dying scientist who uploads his mind to a supercomputer and becomes a near‑omnipotent intelligence. A year later, Ex Machina told the story of a humanoid robot who outsmarts her human handlers and escapes into the wider world.

Both of these films, like many others from the realm of science fiction, referred to what is known as “the singularity”, a moment in time when technology, particularly AI, surpasses human intelligence and becomes increasingly difficult to control.

However, the piece wanders off into whether everyone's gonna lose their jobs and doesn't raise the philosophical and scientific problems with the idea of AI and the "singularity". Noam Chomsky, with whom I disagree 99.4% of the time on linguistics as well as politics, nevertheless makes an important point:

He implies that the singularity is a misconception born of confusing impressive engineering with theoretical science; because machines lack the biological and cognitive architecture to understand “why” as opposed to “what,” they cannot surpass human intelligence in any meaningful sense. They simply hit a wall of diminishing returns where more data yields better mimicry but not understanding.

At the same link,

Yann LeCun, a Turing Award winner and Chief AI Scientist at Meta, offers a skeptical perspective grounded not in linguistics, but in the practical engineering and physics of intelligence. While he acknowledges the utility of current AI, he vehemently disagrees with the notion that scaling up current Large Language Models will result in Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) or a singularity event. LeCun argues that the current paradigm of autoregressive token prediction—guessing the next word—is inherently flawed and incapable of capturing the complexities of the physical world.

. . . LeCun’s argument is that true intelligence requires a “world model”—an internal simulation of reality that allows an entity to predict outcomes and plan actions based on understanding physics and causality, not just text patterns. He suggests that until AI architectures move beyond text prediction to model-based reasoning (similar to how humans and animals learn), they will remain tools rather than super-intelligent beings.

Further,

Rodney Brooks, a roboticist and former director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, challenges the singularity through a lens of robotic interaction and linear progress. Brooks is famous for critiquing the “exponentialist” fallacy, the belief that because computing power grows exponentially, AI capability will follow suit indefinitely. He argues that progress in AI is often subject to logistical curves that flatten out, and that the jump from current AI to AGI is not a smooth trajectory but a series of incredibly hard engineering problems that do not solve themselves.

. . . He argues that the singularity narrative ignores the difficulty of interfacing AI with the messy, unstructured real world, a problem known as Moravec’s paradox.

According to Wikipedia,

Moravec's paradox is the observation that, as Hans Moravec wrote in 1988, "it is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility". This counterintuitive pattern may happen because skills that appear effortless to humans, such as recognizing faces or walking, required millions of years of evolution to develop, while abstract reasoning abilities like mathematics are evolutionarily recent.

But it's just as easy to substitute for "evolution" the idea that consciousness and active volition are something God put to some extent in all creatures, they didn't necesssrily evolve that way.

The basic problem is that people who believe in the "singularity" read too much science fiction. Maybe I'll get into that another time.

Dr Fauci Is Back In The News

Over the weekend, Sen Rand Paul's office released a big deposit of documents obtained via subpoena from Dr Fauci, the NIH, and various other individuals. The most prominent is a digital diary that Fauci kept, apparently on agency computer resources, an incredibly dumb move on Fauci's part. So far, the stories haven't made it absolutely plain that Fauci kept the diary on NIH computers -- which made it public property and thus easily accessible -- but it's hard to avoid thinking this was the case.

On July 24, Senator Rand Paul's committee published two documents that have not been reported in any depth.

The first is Fauci's personal diary, 1,141 pages, running from late 2019 through his retirement in December 2022. It is partly a journal and overwhelmingly a scrapbook: he pasted hundreds of articles about himself into it, frequently in full.

The second is 136 pages of internal email about his awards - nominations, ethics clearances, and the disposition of prize money.

The most detailed take on the diary is by Miranda Devine at the New York Post:

Fauci emerges from the diary entries as a frivolous narcissist, possibly corrupt and a really bad speller (for example, “dyswaded” for dissuaded).

As a onetime writing instructor, I found the spelling errors fascinating, for instance:

“Big front page article abut [sic] me appeared in the Washington Post. Very flattering,” he wrote on May 21, 2020, noting global deaths of 9,800, with 272 deaths in the US.

“It is not hyoperbole [sic] to say that today I am the most famous and talked about person in the country and one of the most recognizable peson [sic] in the world . . . The entire secret service corps is coming over to me and chatting. They let me into the first gate without even checking ID.”

Everybody makes typos, and they can be hard to catch (ask me how I know), but rampant misspellings are just a sign of carelessness. And shouldn't doctors and public health officials cultivate habits of care? But another big issue that nobody has specifically pointed out is how Fauci spent his, and apparently his subordinates', time. The diary alone is 1,141 pages over three years, including hundreds of media articles pasted into it. How much time per day did he spend on it? Then there was his time, and staff time, spent soliciting and collecting awards:

By June 2022, he was officially a legend: “It has been an extraordinary spring with all of these wonderful honors that I have received. This will have been my 58th honorary doctorate.”

. . . Additional files released by Paul in the prelude to Wednesday’s showdown reveal that Fauci, who had been the highest-paid federal official in the US government, also solicited nominations for big-money awards for himself from scientists to whom he had given millions in government grants, according to the files.

He “stacked up cash prizes worth hundreds of thousands of dollars during COVID,” said Paul, including one foreign prize worth a cool $900,000.

Fauci even had his taxpayer-funded staff writing nominations for him.

As of February 15, 2021,

America's top infectious disease official Dr. Anthony Fauci received a prestigious $1 million Israeli prize Monday, along with six other researchers who shared two additional $1 million prizes for their contributions to health and medicine.

The Dan David Prize, affiliated with Tel Aviv University, said it honored Fauci for his career in public health and "speaking truth to power" during the politicized COVID-19 crisis.

Fauci "is the consummate model of leadership and impact in public health," the awards committee said in a statement.

Fauci has in fact continued to do very well financially since his retirement:

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former White House Chief Medical Adviser and a prominent figure during the COVID-19 pandemic, has seen a significant increase in his wealth since retiring from government service, according to the government watchdog group Open the Books.

"He was the highest-paid bureaucrat when he was working for the federal government, he was making $480,000 as his final salary. He’s actually doing even better post-retirement," said Rachel O’Brien, Public Policy Editor at Open the Books.

Open the Books obtained Fauci’s financial disclosure, revealing that his household earned more than $3.5 million in 2023. This included multiple six-figure deposits, though the sources of these deposits were not detailed in the documents. Fauci reportedly had several paid speaking engagements and sold his memoir to a subsidiary of Penguin Random House for approximately $5 million.

. . . Additionally, Fauci's government security detail, which cost approximately $15 million since he retired from government life, was canceled by President Trump shortly after taking office.

Quick research on the web indicates there's been little serious attemtion to the total amounts and sources of the financial awards the guy has received, which must certainly total in the multimillions. Maybe this renewed attention will change this.