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A loose coalition of Democrats and Freedom Caucus Republicans are pushing NDAA amendments that challenge Washington’s foreign policy orthodoxy.
The post The Military-Industrial Complex Is Finally Facing Intense Bipartisan Scrutiny appeared first on The Intercept.
SIGNATURE CHALLENGE:
SOMETHING WITH BREAD
VOICEOVER: For their signature challenge, the bakers were asked to prepare something, anything, with bread. Because, for the love of god, they need to eat today.
Val’s Bread-fast
PRUE: I appreciate the effort you put into getting out of bed and going to the refrigerator to feed yourself at a reasonable time of day. But you’ve applied the mustard to the slice of bread a bit unevenly. Details like this are important.
PAUL: It’s just yellow mustard on plain bread. I mean, the Dijon was sitting right next to it on the shelf, and you could have used that instead. It’s a shame, really.
Shanti’s Pa-jam-a Toast
SHANTI: This is what I eat when I haven’t gotten out of my pajamas all day.
PAUL: Nicely toasted. Proper jam distribution. Well done.
As regular readers will know, for a long time I’ve emphasized what are now being called tipping points, and in particular the tipping point where permafrost melt becomes self sustaining. As a matter of politics, I’ve been quite sure this would occur, since we aren’t likely to do anything about it.
It’s possible this model is wrong on the margins, but I’d be rather surprised if it’s wrong on the fundamentals. The danger has always been passing the point where humanity was in the driver’s seat. We started global warming climate change, but we can no longer stop it short of, perhaps, some hail-mary geo-engineering.
A world in which machines governed by artificial intelligence (AI) systematically replace human beings in most business, industrial, and professional functions is horrifying to imagine. After all, as prominent computer scientists have been warning us, AI-governed systems are prone to critical errors and inexplicable “hallucinations,” resulting in potentially catastrophic outcomes. But there’s an even more dangerous scenario imaginable from the proliferation of super-intelligent machines: the possibility that those nonhuman entities could end up fighting one another, obliterating all human life in the process. The notion that super-intelligent computers might run amok and slaughter humans has, of course, long been a staple of popular culture. In the prophetic 1983 film “WarGames,” a supercomputer known as WOPR (for War Operation Plan Response... Read more