I am a 53 year old teacher. I have double major in Speech and Criminal Justice resulting in a Bachelor's degree from Northeastern State University in Oklahoma and a law degree.
When I was a little boy I used to watch “The Wonderful World of Disney,” and they had heroes. There was Fess Parker playing Davy Crockett. There was Zorro, the Swamp Fox and the Scarecrow. They fought against tyranny.
(The kind of Americans we use to have.)
They did what was right at great risk.
I was a little boy in those far off days. Those characters were my heroes.
So, I have to ask. Do the people running Disney every watch their own programs? Do they care what kind of example they set? Do they look in the mirror and wonder where it all went wrong because wrong it is?
They gave into evil.
They surrendered to an orange make up covered villain. And they did it knowing that they will be bullied again and again. Once the bad guys understand what brought fear and collapsed the spines of the management at Disney, they will do it again and again. Surrender and appeasement never stop. The crawling abasement of the defeated and the cowardly continues forever.
It is said the coward dies a thousand deaths, the hero just one. Well, Disney is on one death among many. I almost pity them.
What happened to doing what was right? What happened to facing the threat of tyranny with courage and resolve?
Was it just programming? They portrayed heroic behavior to beguile children into buying merchandise? Was that all it was, just a con? Or did they at one time believe that Americans had to stand up for what was right?
We’ll never know. For what can they say that we can trust? What can they say that we will believe?
If you don’t have a spine or courage, what won’t you say? What won’t you do to give yourself one more day, one more minute of hiding from the bully, one more desperate plea, “Please don’t hit me! I’ll do anything you want me to!”
Courage is necessary right now. Many Americans are standing up against what is happening.
But not everyone is up to the standard of men and women of courage. They prefer to crawl and we should pity them but never forget that when the time came to take a stand, they ran like hell.
I want to talk about teaching and how difficult it is.
When I was teaching, there was always the “wall.” That thing that prevented what I was trying to convey from getting through.
You see, my students were generally very young, eighteen to twenty-one. There were middle aged students who returned to school and a good number of veterans, and they were wonderful students. But the great mass were the young ones. And they were inexperienced
Without perspective, they could not draw a conclusions from a similar circumstance. You could lead them to the right answer but they had enormous difficulty applying the reasoning to anything else.
I used to show a clip from “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” where the learned knight leads the local peasants to a completely wrong conclusion (that witches burn because they are made of wood). And while they thought it was funny, they didn’t get the hard cold fact that leading people in the wrong direction is not that hard and the tools we depend on for teaching are not always that reliable.
It soon became evident that they had never been trained to understand the implications of what they were learning. In fact, for most of them learning was just a long boring process of getting the necessary paperwork for later employment. I taught every new class the rationale for why each major subject was part of their course of study and fit my own classes in that picture of whole trained human being.
So, I began to plant seeds. It seemed to me that if I placed an idea with wide applications in front of them several times, they would realize at some point later the implications of that idea. So, I taught the great ideas. I showed legendary movies, and I would tell the great stories of Western Culture. I was talented enough to make those things interesting.
Did the seeds grow? Probably. Ideas especially ideas deeply embedded in the culture have a lot of relevance and staying power.
But do I know that for a fact? No. You never know what effect your teaching has. You just hope.
I am very unhappy today. I haven’t posted very much lately because I have some ideas percolating in my mind.
I have been wanting to write a major piece on the fact that everyone in politics seems to talk up the “free market” while working very hard to make sure that there is little or no free market activity in countless fields of ende3avor. I wanted to talk about the necessary elements for a free market and how government action is necessary to prevent combinations and price fixing.
(Our current national leadership.)
I also want to severely criticize business schools for their nonsensical devotion to the idea that in some strange way, the teachings of business are generally applicable in all industries and businesses. They are not. An understanding of how, why and a historical understanding of a business is absolutely essential to a successful leadership and day to day running of a company. Any examination of American movies and Boeing aircraft reveal the folly of a general business set of teachings applied where it simply does not belong. And I will get to it. It is a difficult subject.
No, today is a bad, bad day. Jimmy Kimmel has been removed from the air by a state sponsored form of censorship. The FCC threatened to pull broadcast licenses and the network complied with their demands.
These last twenty four hours have changed our futures. If this government, incompetent and pitiful as its is, can successfully tell media companies what is and is not acceptable, we have little chance of having fair election or even intelligent national discussion.
This is a nail in the coffin of democracy.
It is very painful for me to see the end of the American experiment in representative democracy, and I will be in mourning for some days.
I find it hard to believe that that coming elections in 2026 will be anything but a rigged farce and that will be the final act in America’s story.
After that we will live in some kind of 4th Reich.
Artificial Intelligence requires the continuous monitoring of humans to work.
A line from the article I quote below is very much on point:
“AI isn’t magic; it’s a pyramid scheme of human labor,” …
It is a truly marvelous quote, “a pyramid scheme of human labor.”
I read about AI every day. It is a depressing and controversial topic. I want to be able to talk and discuss this subject intelligently but there is so little agreement on many aspects of the thing.
Is is extremely shocking to find that AI’s require continuous human supervision. (My emphasis.) This really came out of left field. Since I had just a few days ago talked about the possibility of AI attaining demi-god like levels of intelligence and awareness. The article linked to below gives one the impression of a demi-god alright, a demi-god of pitiful mediocrity. that will tell you that if your cheese doesn’t stick to the pizza that you can fix it with glue.
I am disappointed in myself. I should not have been surprised. I teach and write about ethics and morality in business. AI’s have no background in ethics or morality. They also lack experience of life.
A human being in terms of its ethical life and ability to make moral decisions is completely superior to any current AI and is likely to continue that superiority for decades to come.
What are the implications of AI requiring continuous human intervention?
Let’s be utterly simple. AI’s judged by human standards are nuts. They are crazy and will do crazy things if unmonitored.
Does that scare you because it frightens me? What are our lives going to be like when these things run our banks, our businesses, our government offices and so on and so on down to the toaster in your kitchen?
There was a science fiction movie called “Forbidden Planet” where the previous inhabitants of a distant planet had been massacred by their own unconscious fears, “monsters from the id.” I wonder if our AI’s also manifest destructive tendencies. We do know that they suffer from “hallucinations.” (A topic for another time.)
I’ve concerns and I’m sharing them with you, my kind readers.
I hope that you don’t mind that I am sharing my pursuit of the facts as I am in the middle of the search. This is an immense subject with vast ramifications and I am working hard to wrap my mind around it.
Stay Tuned.
James Alan Pilant
Varsha Bansal writing for the Guardian has a a news story entitled: How thousands of ‘overworked, underpaid’ humans train Google’s AI to seem smart.
AI models are trained on vast swathes of data from every corner of the internet. Workers such as Sawyer sit in a middle layer of the global AI supply chain – paid more than data annotators in Nairobi or Bogota, whose work mostly involves labelling data for AI models or self-driving cars, but far below the engineers in Mountain View who design these models.
Despite their significant contributions to these AI models, which would perhaps hallucinate if not for these quality control editors, these workers feel hidden.
“AI isn’t magic; it’s a pyramid scheme of human labor,” said Adio Dinika, a researcher at the Distributed AI Research Institute based in Bremen, Germany. “These raters are the middle rung: invisible, essential and expendable.”
(An additional not of considerable importance.) Varsha Bansal, who wrote the article I linked to above did not just write a regular news article but an inspired and intricate account of a very difficult subject. You should read the article in full and read her work whenever possible. She knows her subject well.
Let me state firmly at the beginning of this essay, I don’t know if anyone can make any sense of AI.
If you journey across the Internet, there are a vast number of explanatory articles and a truly amazing variety of claims made about AI. You can find articles and quote for almost any point of view.
(The coming edifice of AI according to its propagandists.)
Let me tell you what we do know.
Number One, it destroys jobs. I have seen estimates of 85,000 jobs destroyed over the last year. A very fascinating question that comes from this: “Does AI adequately replace a human being in a job?” And let me tell you, I have real doubts. I see a lot of an attitude you might call, “Damn the Torpedoes, Full Speed Ahead,” when it comes to AI. For many it seems that whether is works well is beside the point if we can just get rid of so many jobs.
Number Two, everything that AI has done so far can be described as mediocre or barely adequate. AI is building an Internet of useless garbage and while it does simple things well, claims of Ph.D. level intelligence have never been successfully demonstrated.
Number Three, “our” government is rushing this technology into nation wide use without any real understanding of what it is and what it does. It may well be that this government’s profound stupidity and lack of intelligent thought is leading to a technological revolution they simply don’t get.
Number Four, corporations see a golden opportunity to get rid of millions upon millions of workers and are so pleased with this concept, every sign of danger, economic damage and just whether or not the thing works are just being ignored. The lack of concern in the business community for the likely problems with this new untried technology is astonishing. It is just like the fabled lemmings running off a cliff.
Number Five, we are being force fed AI. It doesn’t matter whether you want it or not, you’re getting it. A massive conspiracy between government and business has resulted in a situation where you are completely unprotected from AI in anything you buy, rent or come near. I experienced this when Office 365 added AI to my subscription for thirty dollars added to my charges with no other option available, just take it or leave it.
Number Six, these three entities of government, business and the tech bros are expecting a massive and unprecedented increase in their power because of AI. (My emphasis, jp) It is truly frightening.
Number Seven, the profits from this AI revolution will be counted not in billions of dollars but in trillions upon trillions of dollars. The main reason this is all being so rushed is the naked greed for all this money. It is expected to be the most profitable technological change in history. This will have profound effects on all of our lives.
I had whooping cough at six weeks old. I burst my belly I was coughing so hard. If you run your hand down the center of my abdomen you can still feel the place. I am an old man now and in those far off years there were no vaccine for that disease. I also got to experience measles, chicken pox, and mumps. The measles infection was very serious and they put me in a bedroom by myself and a doctor came and checked on me. I didn’t quite die. But I remember how it felt. I remember rolling back and forth in the bed trying to make the pain go away.
Florida’s Surgeon General is doing away with vaccine requirements.
He says requiring vaccines is a form of slavery.
So, my suffering and near death were celebrations of freedom? If I had been freed at birth from the dangerous diseases which diminished my life and didn’t quite kill me, I would have been in some larger sense “free?”
What about the millions upon millions of Americans who died from these diseases before vaccines were developed? Were they free? I don’t understand, is there some freedom resting beneath a tombstone that I am so devoid of understanding that I just don’t get it?
What would I say to the Florida Surgeon General given the opportunity? I would say “Do you know what I want to be free of, Mr. Ladapo?”
“Vaccine requirements don’t bother me, not only did I get all of mine, I made sure my son got his too. No, what bothers me is the explosion of charlatans and fools thinking they know better. And not just thinking they know better but demanding other people yield to their crackpot ideas. What I want is to be free of crazy people trying to run my life. ”
It would be nice to be free of the loonies spouting their nonsense. And comparing vaccine mandates to slavery is so repulsive and disgusting that I don’t feel I could do my anger on the subject justice in less that two or three thousand words. Suffice to say, slavery as practiced in the American South was vile beyond belief and a crime so terrible that we as a nation have not and are unlikely to ever finish paying for it
Below is a link to the story I quote from and a brief passage.
(Just another crank lost deep in his own foolishness.)
Aysha Bagchi writing for USA Today has the following story: Florida surgeon general says he doesn’t need to study impact of ending vaccine mandate.
Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo said he doesn’t need to study the potential impact of ending vaccine mandates for children before his state becomes the first to do so in 45 years.
“We do have outbreaks in Florida, just like every state, and we manage those,” Ladapo told host Jake Tapper on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sept. 7. “So there are no new, special, you know, special procedures that need to be made.”
The Florida Surgeon General confesses he didn’t bother to study the effects of his decision.
What are the business ethics here?
Any decision made about Americans’ health should be taken with great consideration for the facts. To not even bother to collect the relevant facts is a complete and total dereliction of duty and a failure to conduct oneself in accordance with simple human intelligence.
I don’t see any need for further analysis.
It is painful to live in such times where these kinds of decisions are being made based on lunacy and stupidity.
Getting even is a need for many people. Donald Trump has made getting even the central theme of his existence. The crawling thing inside him that passes for a soul only wants to punish and diminish his perceived enemies. He lives for this.
The Alumni Association says they changed their mind because it allows them to focus on its core mission of preparing cadets to lead, fight and win as officers.
I believe that is a lie and pitiful nonsense as well.
The award to Tom Hanks was well founded. It would be hard to find any American who has done more for the public of the Academy and the American military.
Why is this award being revoked?
Revenge.
Tom Hanks campaigned for Joe Biden. He was not one of Donald Trump’s friends.
He had to be punished.
This is despicable. It is the behavior of a tyrant. Every Middle Eastern despot, every fascist leader and every South American medal draped fool, all share the same need to make their enemies pay.
There is never enough praise, awards and attention to fill the empty hole of Trump’s tiny ego.
So, he settles for revenge.
The English has a phrase which I want to use on this occasion “he’s not fit to clean his boots.”
And so the fact of the matter is clear. Donald Trump is unworthy even to clean Tom Hanks’ boots.
There is something horrible about writing or talking about AI. It lends itself to exaggeration. We are continually told about AI with adjectives like revolutionary, greatest in history, most significant, world changing, … and I can just keep on going. (I would like to see just one article about AI with mundane, commonly used adjectives.)
And as I have written over and over again on this site, nobody and I mean nobody, understands AI or what is going to happen.
Yes, that’s right, “the greatest engine of progress.” Does she understand the significance? Of course not, This is just vapid word use in the hope of sounding in some way meaningful.
But there’s more. Here, let me quote from a Rolling Stone article authored by Miles Klee.
This was hardly the only nonsense uttered at the 40-minute press briefing, which was light on policy specifics but heavy on praise for the AI industry as a whole. David Sacks, the White House czar of AI and cryptocurrency as well as a Musk and Thiel ally, adopted the Cabinet technique of shamelessly flattering his boss by saying that a July 23 speech by the president was “the most important speech that’s been given on AI by any official.” In that speech, at a “Winning the AI Race” event, Trump digressively rambled about tariffs, transgender women in sports, California car emissions rules, and “getting rid of woke.” He also mentioned that he didn’t care for the term “artificial intelligence,” explaining, “I don’t like anything that’s artificial,” and called on American companies “to join us in rejecting poisonous Marxism in our technology.”
It is obvious that no one in the White House understands this stuff. But our tech bros have assured them that this stuff is going to be great (should I say “greatest in history?”).
Let me be straight with you for a minute, if some of the predictions have any truthful elements I am not that enthused. Here, let me show you one:
Artificial intelligence could soon trigger an unemployment crisis unlike anything in history, according to Roman Yampolskiy, one of the first academics to warn about AI’s risks.
…
“In five years, we’re looking at levels of unemployment we’ve never seen before,” Yampolskiy said in a Thursday episode of the “Diary of a CEO” podcast. “Not talking about 10%, which is scary, but 99%.”
He argued that AI tools and humanoid robots could make hiring humans uneconomical in nearly every sector.
“If I can just get, you know, a $20 subscription or a free model to do what an employee does. First, anything on a computer will be automated. And next, I think humanoid robots are maybe 5 years behind. So in five years, all the physical labor can also be automated.”
Let’s assume for the sake of argument that this guy has some idea of what he’s talking about. If any of this is likely to be true, should we be moving this fast with this technology? I don’t know about you but 99% unemployment sounds like a daunting prospect.
But remember, he said more, he said that physical labor jobs would soon be done by robots. That means all the currently secure jobs like auto mechanic, etc,. will be gone too.
Tell me again why all this is going to be great? Are we growing with technology or diving into an abyss?
And why in the name of God, would the White House be pushing this stuff. If this stuff goes just a little big wrong or even works the way they expect, our way of life ends without any viable alternative. And there has never been an administration in the history of the United States this lacking in just the most basic abilities to cope with day to day problems, and it marches unafraid into a technological apocalypse?
I was amazed. My first response was “What??” My second response was to quickly mentally review the many articles I have read about the efficiency and practicality of solar panels. while noting that my high school physics text book “claimed” that electricity was a form of energy.
And don’t let the facts like the little tiny obscure fact that I’m typing on a machine powered by electricity confuse you.
Shomik Sen Bhattacharjee writing for the site, Benzinga, wrote an article: Energy Secretary Says Wrapping Earth With Solar Panels Would Produce 20% Of Global Energy, X Users Swiftly Community Note Official.
Energy researchers at MIT note that Earth receives on the order of 173,000 terawatts of solar energy continuously, orders of magnitude more than humanity’s total energy use, highlighting that the constraint is not raw solar resource but economics, siting, transmission and storage.
Global solar already supplies a rising share of electricity and is projected to keep growing through 2030, according to the International Energy Agency.
So, Energy Secretary is “unfamiliar” with the nature of electricity. And there I was thinking that vaccine denial was bad. Foolish me.
And he also appears to believe that solar energy barely exists and is almost useless which is contrary to any simple examination of the facts.
You have to wonder what kind of decisions results from these two misconceptions. Just imagine how many other misconceptions he has.
It really makes you wonder. This is a very minor news story but before the age of Trump, it would be front page news and dominate the news cycle.
But it can’t. Because we as a nation have long ago come to the realization that competence, truth telling or even the most mediocre levels of ability are absent in those chosen for high office in this administration.
That cabinet secretaries can deny basic facts with complete certainty is not a surprise.
But it does bode ill for all of us who had come to expect capable public servants.
I have lately been totally fed up with this AI nonsense. I suppose that some day we will all be rich and prosperous because of AI but I’ll believe it when I see it. Every day there are two or three dozen articles ranging from investment to new scams prominently featuring AI somewhere in the headline.
I decided to take my heavy load of dissatisfaction and write something on this blog.
(Struggling with the act of creation)
And that is when I came upon the article linked to below by the wonderful Mr. Brookes. He has similar thoughts to mine and expresses them with great passion. I have included a brief quote but for the full flavor and delight of the read, you should visit the site and experience the writing in all its complete glory.
Everyone Expects Me to Use AI, Here’s Why I Don’tBy Tim Brookes
After years of hype, I’m tired of AI. I appreciate that the technology has value in fields like medicine and research. I can see how AI-driven accessibility devices can help people with disabilities live richer lives. I acknowledge that a digital assistant that can better understand me and chain tasks together is probably a good thing.
But I’ve never felt the urge to run my life according to ChatGPT, and I find myself increasingly at odds with what feels like everyone around me. I feel like I’ve had AI forced down my throat, and I can’t swallow another drop.
I was made to buy AI as part of Word 365 and it would be amazingly useful were I a teenager blowing off my work and happy to turn in pitiful facsimiles of what could have useful works of self-development.
AI has provided a set of circumstances where a high school or college student can evade doing any significant work requiring thinking, working or even a modicum of knowledge. Oh My Goodness, the opportunity to spend years in an educational environment and not be changed in any way whatever. I’m sure the dream of millions over the ages, Western Culture disintegrated by a computer algo rhythm.
And every day, more and more of the internet is a fairy land of AI content. Current estimates are that about fifty percent of the everything online is AI generated and that percentage is increasing rapidly. There are worries that this could lead to disaster. Oh, don’t worry they are not worried about human disaster. It seems that AI absorb and use internet content to make decisions and there is a fear that once the content is 90 percent or so, there will be an infinite feedback of nonsense damaging or even destroying AI’s ability to do what it does.
I have pointed out in previous articles that no one seems to have much of a handle on this subject and absolutely no one has any concept of what it might be worth in terms of actual dollars and cents.
I’m tired. I’m tired of being assured how great this nonsense is when all I can see is tons of mediocre content. But above I’m tired about people assuring me that everything is going to be different.
I really doubt it.
Let’s try and have some rational discussion and less hype about AI.
Pilant's Business Ethics Blog 
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