Monday, August 05, 2019






'A.I. is a military technology': Silicon Valley visionary Peter Thiel ramps up his attack on Google for conducting artificial intelligence research in China that can be seized by Beijing while refusing to do business with the US military

Billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel once again hit out at Google for opening up an artificial intelligence lab in Beijing, saying the American software giant is helping China gain a military edge in the future A.I. battlefield.

Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal and one of Facebook’s early investors, accused Google of being ‘naive’ and engaging in ‘shocking behavior’ by sharing artificial intelligence technology with the Asian power.

Last month, Thiel accused Google of being 'treasonous' for its dealings with China.

He said that Google is mistaken by assuming that its A.I. technology won’t be used for military purposes by the Communist country.

‘A.I.’s military power is the simple reason that the recent behavior of America’s leading software company, Google — starting an AI lab in China while ending an AI contract with the Pentagon — is shocking,’ Thiel writes in The New York Times.

Thiel writes that Google was being 'naive' by thinking that its AI technology would not be put to use by the Chinese military. The image above shows a military parade staged by the People's Liberation Army in Zhurihe, China in July 2017

‘As President Barack Obama’s defense secretary Ash Carter pointed out last month, “If you’re working in China, you don’t know whether you’re working on a project for the military or not”.’

Thiel noted that Google opened an A.I. research center in the Chinese capital in 2017.

The lab was opened in 2017, the same year that the Chinese Community Party amended its constitution to require that all research done in China be shared with the People’s Liberation Army, according to Thiel.

Thiel said that the decision by Google to open a lab in China is all the more shocking given that last year the company canceled an A.I. contract with the Pentagon after employees protested.

The defense program, Project Maven, set off a revolt inside Google, as factions of employees opposed Google technology being used in warfare.

The dissidents said it clashed with the company’s stated principle of doing no harm and cited risks around using a nascent artificial intelligence technology in lethal situations.

Thiel said that Google is working with China despite the fact that the ‘Communist Party is not shy about declaring its commitment to domination in general and exploitation of technology in particular.’

Thiel also faulted the United States government, saying that over the course of the past five decades its ‘attitude toward China’s leaders has been one of warm indulgence.’

The billionaire entrepreneur praised President Trump for being the ‘first president since Richard Nixon to pay attention and run a reality check on China.’

Thiel also faulted Wall Street for ‘making excuses for Google’s naivete’ because China has bought up America’s financial assets by ‘using dollars we send abroad that never get used to buy American goods.’

He says that while this has led to an explosion of wealth in the American finance industry, the average worker has suffered.

‘An archipelago of inward-looking, parochial places like Wall Street and Silicon Valley have done exceedingly well for themselves while their fellow citizens have been left behind in a stagnant economy,’ Thiel writes.

Thiel writes that while Google claims it is ‘committed to significantly improving the lives of as many people as possible,’ it should first focus inward.

‘By now we should understand that the real point of talking about what’s good for the world is to evade responsibility for the good of the country,’ he writes.

Last month, Peter Thiel suggested that 'super left wing' Google employees are anti-American and prefer communist China to the US.

The billionaire also said the tech giant is working with China but not the US military, an allegation which Google disputes.

Thiel, 51, made the comments during a July 15 interview with Tucker Carlson on Fox News, where he was asked why Google might work with China but not the US.

Thiel said: 'There’s probably a broad base of Google employees that are ideologically super left wing, sort of woke, and think that China’s better than the US or that the US is worse than China.'

Google told DailyMail.com that Thiel was wrong in his assumptions. 'As we have said before, we do not work with the Chinese military,' the company said.

'We are working with the U.S. government, including the Department of Defense, in many areas including cybersecurity, recruiting and healthcare.'

After making the pro-China allegation, Thiel, who sits on Facebook's Board of Directors, hedged a bit by saying, 'It’s more anti-American than anything,' in an effort to paint Google workers as more against the US than for China.

Thiel elaborated a bit on Carlson's show, bringing up Google ending its contract to work with the Department of Defense on Project Maven in March, after 3,000 employees signed a petition urging the company to pull out of the initiative.

He added: 'I think the Chinese are competent enough that the Ministry of State Security is likely to have infiltrated Google, and I think the Google management has the sort of decision of either letting the software go out the front door or figuring it'll get stolen anyway and go out the back door.'

Thiel said he would like to ask Google CEO Sundar Pichai the following three questions: 'How many foreign intelligence agencies have infiltrated Google? Have the Chinese in particular infiltrated? And why are you working with Communist China and not the US?'

SOURCE 





Should a Conservative Consulting Firm Be Forced to Promote Socialism?

ThinkRight Strategies is a political consulting and marketing firm. It exists to partner with political candidates and organizations to promote messages, views, policies, platforms, and causes that advance their conservative principles. These principles include free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional values, and a strong national defense.

But the government is threatening their work.

Ann Arbor passed an ordinance that makes it illegal for businesses to “discriminate” based on “political beliefs.” That means if ThinkRight creates advocacy material for Republican candidates to promote limited government, lower taxes, and the sanctity of life, it must also create advocacy material for Socialist candidates to promote government control, higher taxes, and abortion on demand.

In today’s political environment, how is this even possible?!? But there’s more…

The law even keeps Grant and Jacob from explaining on their website that they cannot advance certain political beliefs.

If Grant and Jacob violate this ordinance, they face fines of up to $500 per day. Ann Arbor could also require them to pay the city’s enforcement costs and force them comply via court orders.

The government should exist to protect freedom, not take it away. That’s why Grant and Jacob decided to file a lawsuit against Ann Arbor.

This law should concern us all – no matter what political beliefs you hold.

If the government can force conservative political consultants to promote a Democrat’s progressive platform, it could compel a Democratic speech writer to write campaign speeches for Donald Trump. It could punish a pacifist painter for declining to paint banners for a pro-war rally. It could punish a pro-abortion photographer for declining to capture promotional photos for a pro-life march. The possibilities are endless.

Maybe the government should focus on what it’s supposed to do – protect freedom – and stop trying to force people to express messages that violate their own convictions.

SOURCE 







No Epidemic of Racist Cops

New study once again finds no systematic racism within the nation's law enforcement.

Democrat presidential candidates aim to placate the “social justice” crowd by regurgitating the false “cops are racist” narrative, as well as advance their plans to bring about “real” criminal-justice reform. (Because, evidently, the reform President Donald Trump spearheaded won’t do.) Joe Biden claims that blacks will finally be able to “walk the streets of America” without fear of being harassed — or even worse, shot — by the police. Pete Buttigieg once noted the equitable idea that all lives matter only to later walk it back by asserting that the country needed to “move policing out from the shadow of systemic racism.” Beto O'Rourke has also parroted the anti-police talking point, arguing that the reason cops shoot blacks is “solely based on the color of their skin.”

The Left’s narrative is as devoid of logic as it is of facts. A recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences provides yet more evidence that contradicts the popular smear that white police officers are more likely to shoot black suspects than white suspects. In fact, the data makes a case for just the reverse. We must’ve missed the White Lives Matter protesters.

This latest study comports with earlier studies that have also found no evidence of rampant systematic racism against blacks within law enforcement. But facts aren’t likely to deter the Democrat presidential hopefuls. They insist on promoting racial identity-based policing reforms based on the false idea that matching the composition of police departments to the racial diversity of their communities will produce “better” police.

In fact, it has proven detrimental. As the Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald explains, “This effort to increase minority representation will not reduce racial disparities in shootings, concludes the PNAS study, since white officers are not responsible for those disparities; black crime rates are. Moreover, lowered hiring standards risk bad police work and corruption. A 2015 Justice Department study of the Philadelphia Police Department found that black officers were 67 percent more likely than white officers to mistakenly shoot an unarmed black suspect; Hispanic officers were 145 percent more likely than white officers to mistakenly shoot an unarmed black suspect. Whether lowered hiring standards are responsible for those disparities was not addressed.”

The irony, of course, is that the more Democrats promote this law-enforcement smear, the more they end up hurting the very communities most plagued by violent crime. Just look at Baltimore.

SOURCE 
  




Australia: Seeking to protect borders is not hateful

Tim Costello has seen more human hardship than most of us could ­ imagine and he has done a great deal to relieve suffering in godforsaken places the world over. But — yes, there is always a but — his words about Australia’s refugee­ policy, published last week, demand a response­.

Costello compared Australia’s generous refugee intake unfavourably with Sweden’s, which spiked at close to 200,000 at the height of the European refugee crisis in 2015, when Middle Eastern refugees claimed asylum there. Sweden has since suffered from social problems, tightened its asylum­ laws and cut the intake dramatically.

Costello contrasted the height of Sweden’s influx to the 12,000 Syrian refugees welcomed­ by Australia about the same time. But this 12,000 were additional to the annual humanit­arian intake of about 18,000 people. Australia ­remains one of the longstanding and leading resettlement states for UN programs.

We should always be open to a discussion about the size of the ­intake but our record compared with other countries is something that should engender pride rather than shame. It is the restoration of strong border control that has enabled an expansion in the number of refugees accepted; previously boat arrivals effectively jumped the queue, which is why they were prepared to pay anything up to $US10,000 to people-smugglers.

There is no doubt that if you trawl the internet or seek out hard hearts you will find examples of fear and hatred in this nation. But clearly this is not a representative or accurate way to describe mainstream attitudes. Australian voters have supported strong border protection­ because they know the value of integrity in the immig­ration system; they have seen the tragedy and trauma of rampant people-smuggling and understand that sovereignty ­depends on ­secure borders and order, rather than creating chaos by outsourcing immigration to criminal smugglers. This is not hateful, pre­judiced­ or fearful — it is just sensible and fair.

Costello and others who put a humanitarian gloss on criminal people-smuggling cannot wish away the exploitation and tragic deaths, nor can they pretend away the injustice for legitimate refugee­s who have kept their identification papers (rather than destroy them) and waited for ­official ­resettlement, having either chosen not to engage smugglers or not having the cash to do so.

The real quandary in this global dilemma comes from figures ­quoted elsewhere in Costello’s piece. He said there are 65 million displaced people around the world. These numbers fluctuate and some displacements can be short-lived but there is no doubt that the number of legitimate refugee­s worldwide numbers in the tens of millions.

This exposes the silliness of the old argument about push factors — there are always push factors. What the numbers should do is provide a reality check for both bleeding-heart liberals and flint-hearted conservatives.

The numbers tell us that we cannot fix this problem simply by taking refugees — there are simply too many for the world’s resettlement nations to cope. But they also tell us that isolationism is no solution: while ever such misery occurs throughout the world, desperate people will find a way to cross border­s. In the era of globalisation, all nations own this challenge. The internal dysfunction and unspeakable horrors of Syria or Yemen soon become a problem for ­Europe; the traumas in Sudan or Sri Lanka, Myanmar or Venezuela, can quickly turn into dilemmas for Western nations such as ours.

Inevitably, even though it might be a long way off, the only sustainable solutions will be to ­ensure Syrians are safe in Syria, Sudanese can prosper in Sudan and people in Afghanistan and Pakistan can aspire to a bright ­future at home. Migration and tolera­nce, surely, will continue an ­upwards trajectory but they will require order.

Resettling refugees undoubtedly saves lives and creates hope, individual by individual. But we need to be more honest, robust and interventionist about the abominations that generate refugee­s in the first place.

SOURCE  

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here

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1 comment:

C. S. P. Schofield said...

"No Epidemic of Racist Cops"

No, probably not. There IS however a plague of authoritarian and greedy State and Local government that follows policies that hold down the poor. Occupational Licensing, revenue enhancing fine structures, and simple Leftwing idiocy create areas like Chicago and Detroit, where because of widespread poverty, police are placed on positions where they end up coming down hard on poor brown folk.

And there is a police mindset that surely doesn't help. No knock warrants and dynamic entry raids are flat out overused, often with tragic results. I have only met ONE arrogant cop in my life (and his department was getting shut of his as fast as they could jump through the legal hoops), but the militarization of the police and a widespread 'us cops vs them civilians' attitude are symptoms of something seriously wrong.

Police Officer is not an especially dangerous job (you could look it up). There is no excuse for the 'Anything to come off shift safe' attitude.