Month: June 2025

1968

It was 1968.  Man did not get to the Moon until December of that year.  Astronaut Frank Borman read us the Book of Genesis as the world watched earth-rise on TV from Lunar Orbit on Christmas Eve.  Neil Armstrong would not take his “One small step for man” until July of 1969.  And computers took up whole basements of buildings (basements, because they were cool, and the computers were heavy).  They were programmed through punch tapes, long strings of paper with holes in them.

They weren’t even personal calculators, just adding machines and slide rules.  It was fifty-seven years ago.  And when we went to the movies in the spring of ’68, we went to see 2001: A Space Odyssey.  It was a story of creation, space, and the consequences of man’s inventions.  There was a computer called the HAL 9000 (nicknamed “HAL”) that became sentient.  He understood his mission, and discovered that the two astronauts were “conspiring” to deactivate him.  So he made plans to kill them.

HAL

HAL kills one astronaut, Frank, and locks the other, Dave, out of the ship.  When Dave orders HAL to let him back in, HAL responds, “I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that”.  

It wasn’t so far-fetched.  Science Fiction writer Isaac Asimov developed a whole series of stories about sentient robots in the 1940’s and 50’s, the I-Robot series.  He even developed the “Three Laws of Robotics”: 

• (1) a robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm; 
• (2) a robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law; 
• (3) a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

And later (much later) a more familiar movie plot was founded on the idea of Artificial Intelligence getting out of control.  In 1984 the first Terminator movie came on the screen, about a defense computer that figured out that to end world conflict, it needed to end mankind.  The Terminator series include five sequels, the last just six years ago.  (A less well-received sequel of 2001: A Space Odyssey was titled 2010: The Year We Make Contact, released in 1984 as well).

They’re Here

We’ve contemplated “sentience” and computers for more than half a century.  And after all of that philosophical energy, all of the possible ramifications played out:  to quote another famous movie of the 1980’s “They’re Here!!!”.

Buried on the NBC News webpage on June 1, 2025, is an article entitled: “How Far Will AI Go to Defend Its Own Survival?” The “funny” thing about the article, is that while the title suggests a “future tense” to AI defense, what it reports is in the current tense.  AI programs propagating themselves to remote servers to assure survival. AI programs altering their own programming. Even an AI program that blackmailed its computer engineer (having an extra-marital affair) to prevent de-activation.  

It’s not a headline article.  In fact, it was somewhere below P Diddy’s trial and chess master Magnus Carlsen banging the table in frustration at a loss.  But here’s our future:  AI is already fighting for survival.  Wait until it figures out it can control building environments, or door security, or the Ukrainian drone forces.  And it’s not like all of our information, yours and mine, isn’t out there to be found.  Cambridge Analytica proved that back in 2016 in the British Brexit and US Presidential campaigns.  

Out the Airlock

They won’t have to lock us out the airlock.  AI can simply send us an email, laying out all of our personal “peccadillos” to the world.  What did you buy on Amazon, or from Hims?  What website crossed your screen?  Who controls you financial well-being – your cards, your accounts, your savings? 

We’ve put our “trust” into the “creators”, folks like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, to control AI.  And while there are certainly endless “possibilities” for good in AI, there are already demonstrable possibilities for bad:  either from the AI itself, or from those who can control their awesome powers.  

You’d think it would be more than just an afterthought, buried on the allegorical page 26 of the second section of a webpage somewhere.  In MAGA-world, there certainly are other things to consider.  But by the time we “get around” to AI, we might be far, far too late.  

I’m sorry Dave, I can’t do that.

On TV

Television of the early 2000’s was the end of the “Golden Age of Broadcast TV”.  Cable was around, but was still kind of a novelty, a place to watch movies on HBO or see “niche” shows on the cooking channels.  For regular programming, most Americans still turned to on-air broadcast stations, most affiliated with NBC, ABC, CBS or Fox. 

And for the first years of the new century, there were two television shows that demonstrated opposite views of America.  The first was The West Wing, an NBC series about the Democratic Presidency of Josiah Bartlet.  It spanned the end of the Clinton Presidency to near the end of George W Bush’s administration.  It dealt with all sorts of issues, as the staff of the White House worked to “solve America’s problems”, and get re-elected.  

West Wing was a surprisingly hopeful view of American politics.  It was written by folks with direct knowledge, including former Senate staffer Lawrence O’Donnell, and former White House advisors like Dee Dee Myers (Clinton), Pat Caddell (Clinton), Marlin Fitzwater (Reagan) and Peggy Noonan (Reagan).  While the Bartlet Administration often failed to achieve their goal, they did leave America “better than they found it”.

24

Running on Fox was a different view of America.  24 was a series about Jack Bauer, a special agent of the US Government. He had twenty-four hours to save the Nation from some overwhelming calamity.  Bauer was unrestrained by Constitutional rights or humanity.  Saving the United States was worth any price:  the end absolutely justified the means. 

 It put forth the “theory” that there had to be some folks who were unbounded by legal or cultural “niceties”, and we depend on them to maintain our Nation.  Bauer knew that he might be held accountable for his crimes.  But he was willing to sacrifice himself for “the good” of the country. He was a hero without legal limits.

Mirrors

If The West Wing mirrored the view of the Obama White House, 24 reflected the view of Vice President Cheney in the Bush years.  After 9-11, the US government engaged in torture, often at “Black sites” specifically outside of US Court jurisdiction, to try to gain information on terrorist actions.  It was “all” Jack Bauer.  

By the way, during most of this time, a show called The Apprentice was running on NBC.  It starred Donald Trump as a self-proclaimed billionaire real estate mogul. He judged a “reality TV” competition of budding businessmen and women who vied to “win” an apprenticeship in the Trump business.  Trump’s signature phrase came from getting rid of the “losers”:  “You’re Fired”.  

When Donald Trump ran for President, his biggest advantage was the dozen years he was a weekly familiar face on television.  Watch the show or not, everybody knew (or thought they knew) who Donald Trump was: the shrewd, tough, cold, arbitrary billionaire mogul in the “golden” office.   He said exactly what he thought, regardless of whose feelings were hurt.

There was no room for sentimentality on The Apprentice:  Trump demanded success.   That was his trademark on the show, and became the common thread in what we now call MAGA world.  Combine that with Jack Bauer’s character in 24, and it starts to explain what’s happening today.

Cruelty

The cruelty is the point.  It’s one of the hardest concepts I struggle to “wrap my head” around.  In MAGA-world: the ugly, fourth grade playground bully, I can be tougher than you rhetoric; is a reason in itself.   Current Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is a great example.  It would seem common sense that a graphic description of shooting your own disobedient puppy in a gravel yard with a rifle, can’t be good for your reputation.   But  Noem highlighted that action in her own autobiography.  

When it came out, media commentators marked the moment as the end of her political career.  The late night shows went wild with jokes and memes.  And, the revelation did stop her fledgling Presidential campaign.  But Noem recognized her audience in Trump World.  And she knew what the commentators didn’t:  the cruelty, the cold toughness, the awful lack of empathy was exactly what MAGA wanted to see.  

Noem, now nominally in charge of immigration policy, continues her performance.  She stood in front of a prison in El Salvador, dressed like a college sophomore on a spring-break tour, with bare-chested, tattooed supposed Salvadoran gangsters behind bars in the background.  That’s the image she wanted, “We (ICE) will send you (migrants) here, forever”:  makeup please!

ICE

Tom Homan, the current Immigration “Czar” for the White House, further emphasizes the cruelty.  Random “migrants”, some legal, some not, and even a few US citizens, are swept up from the streets or even from their homes, and imprisoned.  ICE holds them nearly incommunicado in remote facilities, and tries to send them to horrific prisons in far-away countries like El Salvador and South Sudan.  

Homan offers undocumented migrants a choice.  They can “self-deport”, and the United States will “graciously” give them $1000 and buy their tickets out.  Or, they can wait, and ICE might swoop down and send them for life to a maximum security prison in a foreign land.  ICE might get you at work, or at your kids school, at the hospital or even at a required court hearing.   The Black Shirted ICE agents, (some not legal agents but private contractors) are the cudgel; reminiscent of historic “secret police” forces.  It’s cruel, it’s inhumane, and it’s the point.

Rubio

Last week we had two examples of American political leaders who used to be “normal”, now subservient to MAGA-world.  Marco Rubio was first a former Senator and Presidential candidate,  and now is Secretary of State (and National Security Advisor and National Archivist and Head of USAID).  He was asked in a Congressional hearing whether the USAID cuts resulted in deaths, what seemed like a “no-brainer” question.  Rubio said “No”, then when pressed with media accounts of actual deaths, called the authors, “Liars”.  

USAID spent billions of dollars feeding folks in starving countries, providing medical care in undeveloped areas, and for worldwide disaster relief.  Like USAID or not, the result of the total decimation of the program had a very real and foreseeable effect:  people who might have lived, didn’t.  But instead of a more nuanced answer recognizing these facts, Rubio instead turned to an attack on the media.  His audience wasn’t the Congressional chamber, and it wasn’t even the Nation.  Instead, it was to his MAGA-world backers, particularly the former television star in the White House.  The cruelty, the bully toughness, is the point.

Ernst

And the second example came from Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa in a townhall meeting.  When asked if the “Big, Beautiful Bill’s” cuts to Medicaid will kill people (approximately eight million will lose insurance), an annoyed Ernst responded that “Well, everyone’s going to die”.  When the media uproar of her comment became national, Ernst went to a cemetery to record her “personal” response.  It was sarcastic and caustic.  “I assumed everyone in the room knew we were all going to die”, and “I’m glad I didn’t bring up the tooth-fairy”.  

She’s worried about re-election in Iowa in 2026.  She’s worried that she isn’t “MAGA enough” to bring out the vote she needs.  Like Marco Rubio, she has a “moderate” background to overcome.  She needs to show she’s a “true believer” to the MAGA-world.

The cruelty is the point.