Skip to main content

Home/ History Readings/ Group items tagged priorities

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Javier E

Opinion | The Red Wave Didn't Just Vanish - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rms-republicans-democrats.html

shared by Javier E on 17 Dec 22 - No Cached
  • On Election Day, a small but crucial percentage of Republican voters deserted their party, casting ballots for Democratic nominees in several elections that featured Trump-backed candidates at the top of the ticket. These Trump-driven defections wrought havoc on Republican ranks.
  • at key battleground states that were critical to continued Democratic control of the Senate. In Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire, party-line voting among Republicans consistently fell below the party’s national average, according to exit poll data.
  • In New Hampshire and Pennsylvania, the Republican vote for the Republican Senate candidate was seven percentage points below the national average, and the Republican vote for the Democratic Senate candidate increased by the same amount; in Arizona, support for the Republican Senate nominee fell among Republicans by six points, and support for the Democratic candidate rose by the same amount again; in Nevada, the drop in support for the Republican candidate was two percentage points, and the increase for the Democratic nominee was once again the same.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • the major finding of the survey “is that democratic norm violations of the sort many Republicans ran on are an electoral loser.”
  • Republican candidates, Westwood added, “running on platforms that supported democratic norm violations were standing behind a policy that seems to only resonate with Trump and a small minority of Republican voters.
  • A publicly released post-election analysis by Neil Newhouse and Jim Hobart, partners at the Republican polling firm Public Opinion Strategies, found, for example, that a far higher percentage of Democrats, 81 percent, believe “Republicans represent a threat to democracy that, if not stopped, will destroy America as we know it,” than Republicans (69 percent) believe the same thing about Democrats
  • the election outcomes are consistent with the interpretation that the candidates most closely associated with Trump suffered a penalty. Voters rejected all the Trump-endorsed secretary of state nominees in important swing states. Republicans unexpectedly lost seats in districts where Republican incumbents who supported Trump’s impeachment had been denied renomination. Republicans closely linked to Trump lost elections in winnable swing states
  • Both Democrats and Republicans, Westwood said,overestimate the extent to which the other side supports democratic norm violations by up to five times. There is a real risk that damage to our country could occur not because of support for norm violations but as a pre-emptive strike based on the faulty assumption that the other side has abandoned democracy.
  • abortion, which worked to the advantage of Democrats, “was more of a factor than the pre-election polls indicated,” with almost as many voters, 31 percent, saying it was a high-priority issue as the 32 percent who identified rising prices and inflation, an issue that benefited Republicans
  • Almost identical percentages identified concern over democratic backsliding, at 25 percent, a pro-Democratic issue, as the 26 percent who identified jobs and the economy, a pro-Republican concern.
  • through 2020, a larger percentage of Republicans considered themselves “to be more a supporter of Donald Trump” than “a supporter of the Republican Party.” That came to an end in January 2021, and by this month, 67 percent said they were “more a supporter of the Republican Party,” more than double the 30 percent who said they were “more a supporter of Donald Trump.”
  • Crime, Greenberg wrote,was a top issue for many Democratic base voters. A quarter of Blacks and half of Hispanics and Asians voters trusted Republicans more than Democrats to address the issue. With Democrats trailing Republicans by 10 points on crime, Democrats have a lot of work to do.There is another word of caution for Democrats. The party’s single most important achievement in 2022 was to maintain control of the Senate, preventing Republicans from blocking Biden’s judicial and executive branch appointments.
  • n 2024, however, 23 seats in the Democratic caucus will be up for grabs — including two independent seats (Angus King in Maine and Bernie Sanders in Vermont) — making it that much harder for Democrats to keep their thin majority. Eight of these Democratic seats are in purple or red states (Montana and West Virginia, for example), offering multiple opportunities to the Republican Party
  • In contrast, all 10 of the Republican-held seats up for election in 2024 are in solidly red states.
Javier E

How the cult of Xi Jinping stopped China admitting zero-Covid didn't work | World | The... - 0 views

www.thetimes.co.uk/...ero-covid-didnt-work-x2fbm7s2q

china pandemic history politics policy

shared by Javier E on 01 Jan 23 - No Cached
  • Vaccinations were simply not a priority of zero-Covid policy, whose primary aim was to contain if not eliminate the virus. The health system remains ill equipped and underfunded, with a shortage of critical care facilities. There is also a chronic shortage of fever-reducing drugs such as ibuprofen, even though China is the world’s biggest producer of them.
  • Why was China so ill prepared? The answer lies in the nature of Xi’s increasingly autocratic rule. Zero-Covid was part of the cult of Xi. It defined everything in China, and to question it was to question him — dangerous in today’s China. It is hard to say what precisely triggered his abrupt reversal at the height of winter when the dangers of rapid spread are greatest. The economy is certainly faltering badly, but the popular conclusion in China is that the protests forced Xi’s hand. That could have profound consequences, since an emboldened population will be potentially troubling for a party whose survival relies in part on fear of challenging its rule.
Javier E

Google Devising Radical Search Changes to Beat Back AI Rivals - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...google-search-engine-ai.html

AI google rivalry development commercial

shared by Javier E on 17 Apr 23 - No Cached
  • Google’s employees were shocked when they learned in March that the South Korean consumer electronics giant Samsung was considering replacing Google with Microsoft’s Bing as the default search engine on its devices.
  • Google’s reaction to the Samsung threat was “panic,” according to internal messages reviewed by The New York Times. An estimated $3 billion in annual revenue was at stake with the Samsung contract. An additional $20 billion is tied to a similar Apple contract that will be up for renewal this year.
  • A.I. competitors like the new Bing are quickly becoming the most serious threat to Google’s search business in 25 years, and in response, Google is racing to build an all-new search engine powered by the technology. It is also upgrading the existing one with A.I. features, according to internal documents reviewed by The Times.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • Google has been worried about A.I.-powered competitors since OpenAI, a San Francisco start-up that is working with Microsoft, demonstrated a chatbot called ChatGPT in November. About two weeks later, Google created a task force in its search division to start building A.I. products,
  • Modernizing its search engine has become an obsession at Google, and the planned changes could put new A.I. technology in phones and homes all over the world.
  • Magi would keep ads in the mix of search results. Search queries that could lead to a financial transaction, such as buying shoes or booking a flight, for example, would still feature ads on their results pages.
  • Google has been doing A.I. research for years. Its DeepMind lab in London is considered one of the best A.I. research centers in the world, and the company has been a pioneer with A.I. projects, such as self-driving cars and the so-called large language models that are used in the development of chatbots. In recent years, Google has used large language models to improve the quality of its search results, but held off on fully adopting A.I. because it has been prone to generating false and biased statements.
  • Now the priority is winning control of the industry’s next big thing. Last month, Google released its own chatbot, Bard, but the technology received mixed reviews.
  • The system would learn what users want to know based on what they’re searching when they begin using it. And it would offer lists of preselected options for objects to buy, information to research and other information. It would also be more conversational — a bit like chatting with a helpful person.
  • The Samsung threat represented the first potential crack in Google’s seemingly impregnable search business, which was worth $162 billion last year.
  • Last week, Google invited some employees to test Magi’s features, and it has encouraged them to ask the search engine follow-up questions to judge its ability to hold a conversation. Google is expected to release the tools to the public next month and add more features in the fall, according to the planning document.
  • The company plans to initially release the features to a maximum of one million people. That number should progressively increase to 30 million by the end of the year. The features will be available exclusively in the United States.
  • Google has also explored efforts to let people use Google Earth’s mapping technology with help from A.I. and search for music through a conversation with a chatbot
  • A tool called GIFI would use A.I. to generate images in Google Image results.
  • Tivoli Tutor, would teach users a new language through open-ended A.I. text conversations.
  • Yet another product, Searchalong, would let users ask a chatbot questions while surfing the web through Google’s Chrome browser. People might ask the chatbot for activities near an Airbnb rental, for example, and the A.I. would scan the page and the rest of the internet for a response.
  • “If we are the leading search engine and this is a new attribute, a new feature, a new characteristic of search engines, we want to make sure that we’re in this race as well,”
Javier E

Wrong Case, Right Verdict - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...678551

rule of law history US trump

shared by Javier E on 31 May 24 - No Cached
  • If Trump does somehow return to the presidency, his highest priority will be smashing up the American legal system to punish it for holding him to some kind of account—and to prevent it from holding him to higher account for the yet-more-terrible charges pending before state and federal courts. The United States can have a second Trump presidency, or it can retain the rule of law, but not both.
Javier E

OpenAI Whistle-Blowers Describe Reckless and Secretive Culture - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ai-culture-whistleblowers.html

shared by Javier E on 10 Jun 24 - No Cached
  • A group of OpenAI insiders is blowing the whistle on what they say is a culture of recklessness and secrecy at the San Francisco artificial intelligence company, which is racing to build the most powerful A.I. systems ever created.
  • The group, which includes nine current and former OpenAI employees, has rallied in recent days around shared concerns that the company has not done enough to prevent its A.I. systems from becoming dangerous.
  • The members say OpenAI, which started as a nonprofit research lab and burst into public view with the 2022 release of ChatGPT, is putting a priority on profits and growth as it tries to build artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., the industry term for a computer program capable of doing anything a human can.
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • They also claim that OpenAI has used hardball tactics to prevent workers from voicing their concerns about the technology, including restrictive nondisparagement agreements that departing employees were asked to sign.
  • “OpenAI is really excited about building A.G.I., and they are recklessly racing to be the first there,” said Daniel Kokotajlo, a former researcher in OpenAI’s governance division and one of the group’s organizers.
  • Other members include William Saunders, a research engineer who left OpenAI in February, and three other former OpenAI employees: Carroll Wainwright, Jacob Hilton and Daniel Ziegler. Several current OpenAI employees endorsed the letter anonymously because they feared retaliation from the company,
  • At OpenAI, Mr. Kokotajlo saw that even though the company had safety protocols in place — including a joint effort with Microsoft known as the “deployment safety board,” which was supposed to review new models for major risks before they were publicly released — they rarely seemed to slow anything down.
  • So was the departure of Dr. Leike, who along with Dr. Sutskever had led OpenAI’s “superalignment” team, which focused on managing the risks of powerful A.I. models. In a series of public posts announcing his departure, Dr. Leike said he believed that “safety culture and processes have taken a back seat to shiny products.”
  • “When I signed up for OpenAI, I did not sign up for this attitude of ‘Let’s put things out into the world and see what happens and fix them afterward,’” Mr. Saunders said.
  • Mr. Kokotajlo, 31, joined OpenAI in 2022 as a governance researcher and was asked to forecast A.I. progress. He was not, to put it mildly, optimistic.In his previous job at an A.I. safety organization, he predicted that A.G.I. might arrive in 2050. But after seeing how quickly A.I. was improving, he shortened his timelines. Now he believes there is a 50 percent chance that A.G.I. will arrive by 2027 — in just three years.
  • He also believes that the probability that advanced A.I. will destroy or catastrophically harm humanity — a grim statistic often shortened to “p(doom)” in A.I. circles — is 70 percent.
  • Last month, two senior A.I. researchers — Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike — left OpenAI under a cloud. Dr. Sutskever, who had been on OpenAI’s board and voted to fire Mr. Altman, had raised alarms about the potential risks of powerful A.I. systems. His departure was seen by some safety-minded employees as a setback.
  • Mr. Kokotajlo said, he became so worried that, last year, he told Mr. Altman that the company should “pivot to safety” and spend more time and resources guarding against A.I.’s risks rather than charging ahead to improve its models. He said that Mr. Altman had claimed to agree with him, but that nothing much changed.
  • In April, he quit. In an email to his team, he said he was leaving because he had “lost confidence that OpenAI will behave responsibly" as its systems approach human-level intelligence.
  • “The world isn’t ready, and we aren’t ready,” Mr. Kokotajlo wrote. “And I’m concerned we are rushing forward regardless and rationalizing our actions.”
  • On his way out, Mr. Kokotajlo refused to sign OpenAI’s standard paperwork for departing employees, which included a strict nondisparagement clause barring them from saying negative things about the company, or else risk having their vested equity taken away.
  • Many employees could lose out on millions of dollars if they refused to sign. Mr. Kokotajlo’s vested equity was worth roughly $1.7 million, he said, which amounted to the vast majority of his net worth, and he was prepared to forfeit all of it.
  • Mr. Altman said he was “genuinely embarrassed” not to have known about the agreements, and the company said it would remove nondisparagement clauses from its standard paperwork and release former employees from their agreements.)
  • In their open letter, Mr. Kokotajlo and the other former OpenAI employees call for an end to using nondisparagement and nondisclosure agreements at OpenAI and other A.I. companies.
  • “Broad confidentiality agreements block us from voicing our concerns, except to the very companies that may be failing to address these issues,”
  • They also call for A.I. companies to “support a culture of open criticism” and establish a reporting process for employees to anonymously raise safety-related concerns.
  • They have retained a pro bono lawyer, Lawrence Lessig, the prominent legal scholar and activist
  • Mr. Kokotajlo and his group are skeptical that self-regulation alone will be enough to prepare for a world with more powerful A.I. systems. So they are calling for lawmakers to regulate the industry, too.
  • “There needs to be some sort of democratically accountable, transparent governance structure in charge of this process," Mr. Kokotajlo said. “Instead of just a couple of different private companies racing with each other, and keeping it all secret.”
« First ‹ Previous 521 - 525 of 525
Showing 20▼ items per page