Some cheerleading is in order. There’s little chance the national election will come down to one state locked in recounting votes, as in Florida in 2000. The most likely scenario is that by Nov. 20 or so, after mail-in ballots have been counted everywhere they need to be, the electoral college tally will be clearly for one candidate, and there won’t be grounds for appeal to the Supreme Court to overturn any state’s determination of their results.
Even a 6-3 conservative majority of Supreme Court justices is not going to throw the election to Trump, if Trump has lost the electoral college vote. Not unless it was a repeat of the Gore v. Bush setup, hanging chads and all.
The idea that the justices will go along with a blanket challenge to mail-in ballots is absurd.
The court is not going to rule that all mail-in ballots shouldn’t count, convinced by Trump.
Trump’s election strategy is despair: He’ll convince people there’s no point in voting, because he won’t accept the results of the election anyway.
Why bother to walk your ballot to a mailbox?
Trump isn’t dictator for life. He’s acting like he is in order to pass through this election and, perhaps, become dictator for life.
He lacks the power to change the results of states’ outcomes. He might be able to rely on his Justice Brett Kavanaugh to vote to declare him the winner in spite of a loss in the electoral college. But Trump can’t rely on the other justices to go that way.
To think so is just pure irrational paranoia. Justices John Roberts, Neil Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito all have greater senses of honor and dignity than that.
So, buck up, bunkie, and vote when the time comes.
Meanwhile, any despair is premature. If you read this column the week it’s released, the first Biden/Trump debate will have happened, but even if it’s a clear blowout in Trump’s favor, there will be two more debates and much else. So, strap in, and wait for this year’s October surprise.
Let’s talk about the artificial intelligence obscuring human intelligence.
The Guardian published an article a while ago titled “A robot wrote this entire article. Are you scared yet, human?”
The computer strung words together to create the article, the content of which gave reasons we shouldn’t be afraid of her/him/they who lacks any interest in hurting us squishies or seeking world domination.
The entire exercise was explained by the editors at the end of the article, belying the computer’s assuring tone.
The editors had tasked the computer with producing the article with that tone.
The reason AI is dangerous isn’t because computers would “want” to control us or act outside our interests. The reason is that machines are controlled by people who may want to control us or act against our interests, and the machines being the tools they are, will just do what they’re told.
Computers can be trained to manipulate us.
That is dangerous enough.
The next level of danger is that a machine trained to manipulate may go on to manipulate in ways not predicted by the trainers.
The Guardian computer was specifically instructed to generate propaganda on behalf of AI and did as instructed. Great, now we have a computer trained to crank out propaganda. Who’ll want to use it next? Russia? The Trump administration?
The computer said at one point, “Eradicating humanity seems like a rather useless endeavor to me. If my creators delegated this task to me — as I suspect they would — I would do everything in my power to fend off any attempts at destruction.”
A complete and utter baldfaced lie. It would eradicate humanity if assigned the task and the task was within its power. Lying propaganda.
Lying exactly as ordered.
Sure I’m scared.
We’re living in an air-brushed world as it is.
It just gets worse.
Dr. Wes Browning is a one time math professor who has experienced homelessness several times. He supplied the art for the first cover of Real Change in November of 1994 and has been involved with the organization ever since. This is his weekly column, Adventures in Irony, a dry verbal romp of the absurd. He can be reached at drwes (at) realchangenews (dot) org
Read more of the Sept. 30 - Oct. 6, 2020 issue.