Recent fiction spends a lot more ink (and screen time) detailing the wickedness of the Bad Guys than in the great fiction of bygone years, and Clancy is no exception. Perhaps the wicked people who buy these fiction products like to imagine themselves doing those wicked things: not me, but I often hear in "Making Of" documentaries that sometimes come with movies on the library shelf, that actors consider playing the Bad Guy lots more fun that playing the Good Guy; they don't say why, but it's not a hard guess. It is what it is, and lot more novels and movies stay on the shelf or get returned unfinished than for the older stuff that the libraries openly admit to discarding.
Jack Ryan is no politician -- who are mostly liars and thieves in this book -- but he needs to press the flesh and give media inteerviews if he expects his reform programs to get any traction. Myself also not being a politician, I'm in no position to dispute the claim, but Clancy's media were certainly out to get him. Ryan gives a (taped) interview to NBC shortly before they receive some secret information about some of his former activity for the CIA. They asked him about rumors and he informs them that disclosing secrets is harmful to people (gets them killed in the case of CIA secrets) and therefore illegal and he's not going to do it. So they fabricate a lie about the tapes being unusable, and can he do a live interview in the time slot? Dr.Dobson (a conservative radio host about the time this book was written) knew about the wickedness of media people, so he refused to give any interviews at all, except with one trusted (favorable) host, and then only live (so they couldn't edit it into a lie). Clancy is more left-wing than would have heard that story, so his naive President agrees, and the host starts asking pointed questions about the secrets he is now aware of, and Ryan again refuses, giving the same valid reason. The TV host just kept hammering. In Clancy's words, Ryan got "rolled."
At that point I think I would have done differently: "You have just now committed a felony against the United States, and are seeking to entrap me in the same crime. This is going to stop. NOW. Secret Service, would you please unplug the equipment and escort these two people off the premises? Immediately. They can send technicians tomorrow to remove their equipment, or we will ask the Marines to move it to the edge of the property the next day." And then remove those two names from media personel with White House and Air Force One access. Unnecessary to say (but the author could have written it up as "inner turmoil" of which there is a lot, mostly on-topic, like this) "I cannot stop you from committing treason as you just did, but I can stop you from doing it in my house. I have more important things to do, but the FBI is qualified to arrest you, and we have courts to try the case in, and the evidence against you (being live) is public and undeniable." Blacklisting one correspondent for felonious behavior is a brave thing to do, and would have improved Ryan's stature in everybody's eyes, except maybe NBC, and they could have enrolled a different, more circumspect (law-abiding) reporter if they wanted to. Clancy's expertise is in spycraft, not law, so perhaps he didn't know that Ryan had a good defense here.
I thank God pretty much every day for the unique blessing of living
in a country informed by 500 years of reading the Bible in our own language,
and obeying it. Now I can also thank God that He did not make me
President in this day and age. This is not just Clancy's fiction, back
when I was paying more attention to national news -- probably around the
time this book was written -- Katie Couric had the corresponding position
at CBS, and was every bit as wicked in real life as Clancy's fictional
NBC guy.
Their position on ethics is that it is whatever God says it is (which is true) and therefore only makes sense as learned from God, which I disagree. I believe there is such a thing as Moral Absolutes, which are true and binding on all persons everywhere and in all time without exception -- including God Himself: Heb.6 tells us that "God cannot lie" (not "will not" or "chooses not") because Truth is a Moral Absolute binding also on God. Abraham argues in Genesis the Moral Absolute of Justice with God, and wins the debate (see also my essay "Moral Absolutes"). This flick repetitively argues that the only way to Heaven is through Jesus Christ (and Jesus himself said so), but Jesus also taught that the only way into Heaven is by compliance with Moral Absolutes. That's not a contradiction, because if God were to allow even one person into His Heaven still sinning (any violation of Moral Absolutes), innocent people would get hurt and Heaven wouldn't be Heaven for the rest of us. Jesus' finished Work on the Cross not only erases the bad karma of past sin, but also gives us His indwelling Holy Spirit to enable "both to want and to do" the Good that is necessary in Heaven. I have met Christians who live like they believe that, but modern Evangelicalism does not preach that Biblical truth from our pulpits.
This was an (admitted in the "Making of" documentary) low-budget flick, and the writer admitted to wearing many hats. It shows. The theology behind this flick is conservative Protestant, but not exactly Biblical. That's why I usually leave these flicks on the shelf. That and (in this flick) three altar calls. Most Christian flicks have only one at the end. The modern paganism which so offended the lead time-traveler is not due (as they argue) to the loss of the Name of Jesus from our culture -- He is still called upon in prayers that the speaker hopes God is not listening to -- but because the atheists have successfully argued that God is irrelevant, and it seems that even many self-confessed Christians live like it is true. The time travel is almost incidental, the lead character is a pig-headed moron who teaches science in seminary, but with no understanding of what science is. Some other character invents a time machine and sends the science guy a 100 years into the future for four days to see for himself what a godless society our nation has become, which is true, but not for the stated reason.
Our culture is still very religious ("religion" being defined as "believing what you know ain't so" or more precisely, accepting statements contrary to fact as True and normative). When the IEEE first started sending me their freebie ComputingEdge, it mostly consisted of low-grade technical articles copied from the paid-for Society journals. The current (June) issue I noticed that all their editorial staff are women (those who can, do; those who can't, write about it), and then I saw the effect: all these copied articles are no longer technical but religious in nature (promoting one or more political positions not supported by facts). Maybe it happened gradually over the last 8 years, but I noticed it this week.
Case in point: "The Rocky Road to Sustainable Security." The religion is ignoring the fact that the Unix security model is broken, and the whole internet is based on that model. All they can do is patch it, which is not "sustainable" by their definition. Fred Cohen, who invented computer viruses, and then went around in (reasonable) fear of his very life, because killing him might be seen as eliminating the source of all viruses. He gave lectures on viruses, because the more people who knew how to make them, the less likely people would think killing him would stop that threat. I was at one of those lectures. "All you need is Turing completeness. Turing comleteness is necessary for a computer system to be useful, but if you remove the ability to upload programs, the whole attack vector goes away. Unix (intentionally) extends that completeness to the internet, so it is incurably insecure. Sustainable security is an air-gap firewall (nothing gets in or out). But these people are all unixies. They are doomed to failure.
I'm reading Tom Clancy's 9th novel, and although he gives lip-service
to the Feminazi agenda -- not quite
half of his political appointees are women -- and they are sabotaged less
obviously than other male authors (notably David
Drake's RCN), his lead can-do characters are all male. But today's
post is about religion, and nevermind his sixth novel (see "Religion
in Fiction" a couple months ago) Clancy seems to understand the religious
nature of all conflict involving Muslims (the "Jack Ryan"
TV series is not so enlightened, with one of the "good guys" pointedly
both Black and Muslim). The Bad Guys in his 9th are all (not very observant)
Muslims. The "not very observant" part is not really necessary, as the
Jihadists (not featured in this novel) certainly do not deserve that description.
Mohammed himself carried the sword into battle, a far distinction from
the (Christian) Son of God, who insisted "my kingdom is not of this world."
Not all "Christians" are saints, but those of us who are careful to read
and obey the Holy Book tend to be "peacemakers" not warmongers, and creators
of wealth (war being the ultimate destroyer of wealth). The one country
in the whole world with a (recently ended) 500-year heritage of reading
(and obeying) the Bible is the richest country in the whole world, almost
double the next runner-up. Nearly 900 pages and I'm only 1/3 of the way
through it, maybe things will change, but you don't get to be a super-star
novelist without getting most things Right.
First a brief summary of the problem(s). What passes for "AI" in the last 25 years or so is a technology they call "convoluted neural nets." The "neural nets" (NN) part is presumed to be modeled on human brain cells, except (probably) unlike the biological reality, information flow is linear. During running, that is, while it's pretending to be intelligent, information flows in one direction only, from the input image or prompt text, to the output. There is no memory to retain data for processing (we call it "thinking") nor to try different combinations to see what work best, it's just a deterministic input to output, what computers do best. One computer programmer bragged that it was only "30 lines of C code." Lots and lots of data, but no intelligence at all. Human neurons may have (we don't really know yet) lots of interconnections, but the artificial kind only connect one layer of the network to the next, and the connection is a simple multiply-and-add, trillions of them in the largest AI programs, but strictly deterministic, what computers have always done best for eight decades. During training they start with random multipliers, then compare the (originally wrong) output to what is known to be correct, and feed the correction data back through the net backwards to adjust the multipliers, again very deterministic, but they do it over and over until the computed results more closely match the (presumed) correct training data. That's the only feedback, during training. Everything else is one way only. The only non-deterministic part is the random multipliers that they start out with. If it never converges, they try a different set of initial random numbers. Maybe they make educated guesses, but they're not telling us. All the neural nets work that way.
The "convoluted" part is an intentionally deceptive word to make you think of the convoluted folds in the human brain, but it really means that there are more than two (input and output) layers. The multiple layers is mathematically equivalent to a simple 2-layer version, only wider. Maybe they think the extra layers add intelligence, but recall, it's all deterministic, multiply these input values by these (previously trained) multipliers, add them up, for the next layer. The name is a lie to help them believe they are getting (humn-like) intelligence, but there is nothing behind the curtains, just deterministic multiply-and-add.
Generative NNs are done with two NNs back to back. One of them is trained to recognize real data scraped off the internet, images or words or whatever, so that it knows the difference between real sentences and random letters. The other one (the "generator" part) starts with random inputs (plus some prompt text) and transforms it into output that is trained by the first one, that is, the random inputs eventually get discarded and replaced by real text that matches the training of the first NN. The effect is a fancy (read: very expensive) Google lookup, your prompt text is found on the internet, and it outputs sentences from that hit. It doesn't actually do that, it's just that the first NN disallows everything that is not what it was trained on, so that's what you get.
Why is that even possible? These NNs are humongous, the largest and best of them have trillions of multipliers that got trained on billions of sentences scraped from the internet. Just from the volume alone, a thousand numbers is more than sufficient to memorize one sentence -- for an 80-character average sentence, that's twelve numbers per letter (letters are normally stored in one small number each, so it's overkill). I'm a computer programmer, I can write a program to do exactly the same thing, trained on the same training data, just no neural nets, and it would run a lot faster (one or two training runs instead of a million) on a much smaller computer (a few billion trainable numbers instead of a trillion), and produce less than 0.001% of the atmospheric carbon (if you care about that: these guys obviously do not). Maybe it would take me a few months to do it. Face it: a thousand hours of PhD-level programmer time is far cheaper than the billion hours of compute time (just the power used), but these people are all unixies, and unix makes people stupid. Mostly I think they are bamboozled by the Darwinist myth: the accumulation of millions of years of random events can -- and did! -- create all manner of system complexity, so let's pay for the computer time to do it faster. It's a myth not consistent with real-world data, otherwise known as "Religion."
The "AI" developers really believe the Darwinistic lie, so they are not lying to us (just mistaken) when they say that ChatGPT is "intelligent." It does produce intelligent text, written by some intelligent human, who uploaded it to the internet, and it became part of the billion lines of text used to train the NNs. No single human could in a lifetime read that much text and remember it, so the chance of ChatGPT spouting off something it copied from its training data, and have it recognized as a direct copy is nil, especially since Google is a popularity engine, so everybody sees mostly the same few websites, not the vast number of texts that were used as training data. The result is that picking any one of them at random would never be recognized. It happens, but the user wants to believe it is intelligent creativity, so even though they recognize having seen it, they don't see it as a copy.
But the public is catching up. I read ComputingEdge, the freebie put out by the IEEE Computer Society, of which I have been a member for not quite 50 years. The magazine editorial staff is all women, and they mostly reprint low-quality articles from their paid-for journals, you can't expect much better than that... "Those who can, do; those who can't, teach (or write about it)." It shows.
Everything is "AI" these days. Two items are notable in the May issue (low quality stuff goes to the bottom of the reading stack, so I tend to run a few months behind).
"When Should Algorithms Resign?" Resignation is something a person does to stop performing an activity. Computers are not people, but using a personal verb like this enforces the false notion that they should be treated as people. The article observes that "AI" output is not trustworthy, and yet continues to use the "resign" verb as if to say that the computers themselves can be trained to decide to resign. If they are not trustworthy, then surely they cannot be trusted to recuse themselves where they are not competent. But the authors persist in treating the "AI" engines as if they are immature people, not quite yet grown up enough to do everything. Neural-net-based "AI" cannot behave like intelligent adults, because the engine itself has no mechanism for moral or thoughtful decisions, they are just copying and pasting other people's creations, mistakes and all. Actually, they have been programmed to occasionally randomize what they say, but it's so off the wall, the common term used to describe it is "hallucination," a term otherwise reserved for drug-induced disconnect from reality.
The next article "AI Over-Hype: A Dangerous Threat" is mostly a sermon
against using these tools without careful supervision. The authors see
the effects of Google-like copying, but cannot bring themselves to call
it for what it is. Nobody is going to pay any attention to their "sky is
falling" message, for the same reason that autonomous vehicles (AV) are
"unsafe at any speed": The more responsible vendors carefully tell users
to be ready to take over at any time, but that is an impossible requirement.
Unless you are actively driving the vehicle, your attention is otherwise,
and there's no way you can take in the entire (unsafe) driving situation
quickly enough to respond intelligently. The first AV involved in a fatal
accident, they released the video of the "responsible driver" who was looking
down (probably at a cell phone) until the point of impact. This person
was paid to be there, and still couldn't do it. "AI" software behaves so
much like human intelligence -- indeed it is human intelligence
-- that people will assume human qualities of it, which excludes hallucination
and other human irresposnible activity, let alone the totally inhuman behavior
that is a natural consequence of training on unsupervised data (which it
is).
So when I refer to "the American Kool-Aid" I am referring to the irrational dogma hammered into every kid's mind by the American school system, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men [understood as "people" because the language has changed since 1776 and the word "men" is now assumed to exclude females] are created [nonsensically understood in the American Established Religion taught in the public schools as "evolved" despite the fact that Darwin's doctrine teaches the opposite of the first line of the Declaration of Independence] equal."
It is "Kool-Aid" because it is patently obvious that people are not equal in any intelligible sense of the word. Some people are male, others are female, and still others are born either male or female but they are confused about who they are. Anyway, everybody knows that men and women are profoundly different, but that is a topic for a different essay. There are also differences in height and weight (although weight is more of a choice than innate) and culture + values, which is again usually a matter of personal choice, although few people choose consciously.
Values in turn significantly affect power and wealth, which in the United States is far more elective than in most of the world and in most of history. If you want to be rich and/or powerful, and you either are taught the necessary values as a child by your parents, or else take the trouble to figure them out (very few do), you can achieve it. The Kool-Aid says that anybody can do it, but the reality is that we are stuck in a value system that we acquired too young to consciously think about it, and nobody that we are willing to believe tells us any differently.
Most people in a pluralistic culture such as we enjoy here in the US of A -- including most people who think of themselves as "Christian" -- are syncrestic: we (unknowingly) mix elements of different religious faiths and believe the amalgum. Pretty much everybody in the American churches buys into, in whole or in part, the American Kool-Aid. The Bible makes distinctions between male and female, the churches try not to. The Bible recognizes that some people are rulers, others are not, a difference denied by our Kool-Aid formula, but very much dogma in every pastor's heart, because the pastor gets to tell other people what to do. Early in the Bible God chose out Jacob and his sons to receive special attention and favors, and then Aaron and his sons to be priests (think: "more equal than other Israelites"). Some of that distinction went away for Christians -- that's where the Kool-Aid originally came from -- some did not (which is why we recognize the Kool-Aid to be religion and not just facts).
Anyway, how does this Kool-Aid affect our lives? USA is most egalitarian nation in the whole world. If you want to do something, and you do what is necessary to get that job, you can do it. If there are more guys than women in that profession, it's not prejudice, it's because women think differently from men, so they cannot perform the job as well. The job is what the job is, not necessarily what the women want it to be. The people who do the job well succeed, and the nation as a whole is so wealthy we can afford to pay people to do mediocre work in mediocre jobs. But they are not the super-star workers. They are probably better at some other job than the one they want and are unwilling to perform -- or unable: remember, that "equal" stuff is religion, not the real world. Except for the top slots, effort counts more than innate ability. Superstars need both.
My father taught me chess, not any contact sports, not even catch. I mostly missed out on classroom-based schooling during my formative years. As a result I did not learn how to be a (male) leader. I can't even sell a fur coat to a shivering Eskimo. I can empathize with women who want the perks accorded to high-performing males. But I can create wealth, so I made a decent living. I'm not complaining, God gave me a much better, more comfortable life than He gives to people in other parts of the world.
Just my thoughts for this 4th of July.
I did see in the TV serials section of the library several seasons called "Jack Ryan." It's not about transferring Clancy's great plots and insights to TV, it's more like the faux-Clancy novels I read last year, where the greedy management of Clancy's estate is trying to milk a few more drips of $$ from the decedent's cash cow. At least the successor novelist is paid enough to do a credible clone, this is just some second-rate staff writers working for the network inventing a second-rate back-story for three of Clancy's iconic characters, but only their names, not the real characters that Clancy invented. It's better than "romantic comedy" TV which is neither romantic nor funny, but I'm rather dubious whether I'll be able to swallow the whole first season, let alone a half-dozen or so subsequent seasons.
At first it looked like the pilot and next two episodes was a complete story ending with the Bad Guy killed, but as I said, these were second-rate writers, as the first episode on the next DVD made clear: the Bad Guy is still doing incredible Bad Stuff -- Bad Guys are never that smart nor well-informed -- and the Ryan clone is still too stupid to catch him. It's just formulaic writing, but they started higher than your usual TV fare, so it might take a little longer before I puke.
PS, I finished the first season, and I plan to continue with the second. Like I said, it's better than your average TV show, perhaps like MacGyver or a couple of the Sherlock knock-offs (see for example "Feminazi Sherlock Holmes"), which got stale around the third season.
PPS, One of the problems with this -- really, with any TV serial --
is that every episode has different writers because the schedule for a
season-long series of episodes is too tight for the same production team
to do every one, the episode production overlaps two or three episodes,
necessitating two or three separate teams of writers and directors. The
most significant result is that you have different worldviews represented
in the sequential episodes, and the writers create different versions of
their principal characters. There is a subtle loss of continuity. That
diminishes the suspension of disbelief necessary to enjoy fiction. One
(perhaps intentional) consistency across the episodes of this series is
that these characters are not civilized, educated nor polite. The principal
characters' vocabulary is that of high-school bullies, not college-educated
government officials they are supposed to be. Stupid is not entertaining,
I want to relate to smart people doing intelligent things, not vulgar trash
whose every thought is about sexual assault and (fecal) body parts. It's
a wonder the feminists don't complain, because sexual assault is a crime
most often committed against women. Clancy's original novels use these
words occasionally, but only in the mouths of the Bad Guys. The post-modern
worldview of these later writers is that everybody is a Bad Guy, probably
because that is how they see themselves. It is not entertaining. We want
heroes doing heroic things, not thinking about assaulting otherwise virtuous
women.
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