Take a nice big gulp, Zuck.

The other day, I was at my volunteer job - basically, hanging out in the expressive therapy room in a large day shelter - and we started kicking around ideas for the title one of the art works. Our brainstorm was running on empty, when a fellow volunteer - a retired businessman who's roughly my age - decided to ask ChatGPT for a suggestion.

I kiddingly yelled at him - we've worked together for years, and I really like this guy - for using AI, but damned if AI didn't come up with a pretty good name for the picture.

Still, I stand by my opposition to using AI so cavalierly. 

There are times and places for AI, but this - IMHO - isn't one of them. I keep trying to turn AI search off, but every time I think I've figured it out, Google manages to sneak it in. (It's been easier to turn of text predictions and Microsoft's odious CoPilot.)

There are a number of reasons for my (mostly) fear and (mostly) loathing of AI. Promoting teen suicides. Providing wrong information - oops, that mushroom actually is poisonous. Job elimination, often just because some C-suite is enamored of the promise of saving big bucks by getting rid of humans - damn the short term and long term implications. And, of course, the environmental depredation that these AI data centers are causing. 

AI uses too damned much energy. It sucks up water resources, and the wastewater is often a pollutant. The noise pollution is driving folks with the misfortune to live close to one of these monster AI data centers nuts. 

And to what end? So a bunch of amoral tech bros can become even more billionaire-y? So the Family Trump can keep up with their cyber-grifting?

Given the havoc AI data centers are wreaking, I really shouldn't be paying any attention to what happened when a big ol' AI data center was being built in Wyoming. Which is really not causing mega problems.

And why not Wyoming as a great location for data centers, one might well ask? It's a big state with virtually no people. So what if those data centers hum all night? And Wyoming has wind. And natural gas. And oil. So they can probably power up without raising the electric bills of the 600K or so cowpokes who live in the state. (The relative handful of tech bros and Hollywood types who live in the Jackson Hole enclave can afford to pay more, so I won't waste any of my personal, finite supply of energy worrying about them.)

But what captured my eye about this Wyoming data center is that it belongs to Meta, a company that happens to be owned by one of the tech-bro-iest of 'em all, Mark Zuckerberg. 

Meta is building a mega data center in Cheyenne, which is slated to become operative in 2027:

...but its contractor has come under fire after city officials traced wastewater containing a rare bacterium to the project.

By bacteria standards, Cupriavidus gilardii (scary name aside) isn't all that awful, but:

While harmless to most healthy people, it can cause severe pneumonia, bloodstream and lung infections, and, in rare cases, death among people with weakened immune systems.

Officials stressed that it did not contaminate the city's drinking water, but said it disrupted the municipal reclaimed water system and required months of cleanup. (Source: Daily Mail)

And Meta has now permanently lost permission "to discharge wastewater from its fill-and-flush operations into Cheyenne's treatment system, where the water is recycled and later used to irrigate parks and other public spaces."

This is by no means the worst thing that one of these data centers is going to be responsible for. Some towns are experiencing low water pressure; sediment build up the gives residents brown water - just what you want to brush your teeth and wash your hair with, let alone bathe your baby; a whining, skull-piercing noise running 24/7. (Some of the sound levels aren't just annoying, they're harmful to hearing.) Oh, and the home values for those living in a data center neighborhood are declining. Which might be offset if data centers produced high paying jobs for folks living in the hood. But once construction is finished, data centers don't require a lot of employees to keep the centers humming. (And some of their jobs are going to - you guessed it - AI.)

Not that the masters of the universe clamoring for these data centers give a damn. Frankly, my dear, they don't. 

But I sure would like to see Mark Zuckerberg and his pals spend a night in humming distance of one of their data centers. And take a nice big gulp of water from the local taps whille they're at it.

________________________________

Image Source: Red Bubble

Ford doesn't always have a better idea

Growing up, my family had Fords. Fairlanes. Galaxies. In the mid-1950s, we had a two-tone, turqouise and white Fairlane. My father wasn't the flashy type, but when it came to his wheels, he sometimes indulged in surprisingly out-there colors. A bit later - early 1960's - we had a two-tone yellow and white number. I loved the colorful cars, but learned to drive with Black Beauty, a black Galaxy 500. (Somewhere along the line, we started giving our cars names. Black Beauty was followed by the Green Hornet.)

I'm sure that my parents were drawn to Ford for its affordability. We were by no means poor, but as the ditty of the day went:

Rich man drives a Cadillac. Poor man drives a Ford.

But my old man goes down the street on four wheels and a board

It may also be that the company my father spent his working life, Thompson Wire, sold wire to Ford. Or to companies that made components for Ford. My father had started out on the shop floor, but became a salesman and I remember him going on trips to Dearborn, Michigan, world HQ for the Ford Company.

In any case, we were a Ford family, and I've always been partial to the Ford brand. (In much the same way, because my father interrupted his Thompson Wire career during WWII to serve, I root for Navy in the Army-Navy game. Not that my father was so gung-ho on the Navy. Most of his war stories were about officer idiocies and Mickey Mouse regulations. (My father did not see combat, and was pretty much only in harm's way (or in the way of German UBoats) only when he was being shipped to and from Trinidad where he spent a couple of years before being stationed at Chicago's Navy Pier. As he always told us, you went where Uncle Sam sent you.))

So Ford. 

Not that I've been a big Ford owner. I've only owned three cars in my life, but one was a Ford (a Mercury Tracer).

So, Ford.

You may recall that a while back, Ford's CEO Jim Farley was making some headlines declaring/speculating/wishfully thinking that AI was going to do away with half of the country's white-collar jobs.

And I guess that Ford thought it'd get a jump on things by letting go of a raft of experienced quality engineers and technicians - only to have to bring them back.  

“Mistakenly, we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and adjusting the design requirements that we had, that that would produce a high-quality product,” the automaker’s VP of vehicle hardware engineering Charles Poon told reporters, per The Verge. (Source: Futurism)

What happened should have been predictable. (They might have asked ChatGPT.) Among other things, Ford deployed:

...900 AI-powered cameras in its plants "to detect quality issues at the source and help us mitigate supply disruptions", [COO Kumar] Galhotra told investors. 

But Poon told reporters on Wednesday the firm's AI-driven checks had failed to live up to expectations.

"Mistakenly, we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and ingesting the design requirements that we had, that would produce a high-quality product," he said.(Source; BBC)

Instead, the company slipped in the quality rankings. Oopsa doopsa.

But you can't blame lil' old AI. 

Instead, it all went wrong because its experienced workers left before Ford could get them to transfer their valuable knowledge to Ford’s AI systems and help refine the tech intended to obviate them. (Back to: Futurism)

Ah, for the good old days, when Ford used to brag that "quality is job one."

Of course, they've only dragooned their engineers back so that they can improve AI enough to replace themselves and all the other workers that Ford's CEO predicts are going down.

My fear and loathing of AI is no secret. I'm no Luddite, and well understand that AI has and will continue to have many positive uses. But I just don't see why it's worth despoiling the environment and destroying the livelihood of millions of people so that some lazy-arsed kid can "write" a book report on a book they haven't read. So that someone's smarty-pants fridge can alert them that they're out of milk. So that a bunch of tech bros can become multi-billionaires while most folks are just trying to keep a meal on the table, a roof over their heads, and a Ford in their garage. 

Something tells me that Ford doesn't always have a better idea.

---------------------------------------------

Image Source: Sotheby's

Shut this startup down!

The last thing in the world I would consider doing is renting my home out as an Airbnb, VRBO, or Home Away. Even if I had a spare place to spare for transient, paying guests, I wouldn't want to be a landlord.

I'm saying this even though I've always enjoyed my short term rentals, which go back to the pre-Airbnb days, when we were finding apartments in Paris and Rome through the classified ads in Harvard Magazine. It just wouldn't be for me.

I don't want anyone nosing around my stuff. Criticizing my taste. Thumbing through my books. Swiping that cute little lemon bowl that cost four bucks at Home Goods. Trying to pry their way into the locked owners closet in an unobvious way. (Of these things, I am guilty of nosing, criticizing, and thumbing, but never of swiping or prying.)

The most interesting things I've come across were in a short term rental on the East Side of NYC. The apartment was owned by an heir to the W.R. Grace fortune. The fortune had petered out over the generations, but this particular scion had inherited a very nice small Degas ballerina painting, which they didn't bother to lock away.

Weirdly, in the same apartment, I went to put my clothes away in the dresser in the bedroom, only to find that the drawers were stuffed with the owner's clothing, or, rather, his wife's. (There was no indication that the dresser was off limits. In every other place I've stayed, there have been drawers that are empty and available.) Anyway, the drawer I opened was stuffed - and I do mean stuffed - with every color imaginable of thongs. Ewwwww. Needless to say, my clothing stayed in my suitcase for the duration.

So while I stay in them on occasion, I don't like what these short term rentals have become. And that's a big business in which some owners have multiple places that they use for transients because they can make more money than they could renting to permanent residents. In many cities, they take scarce apartments off the market for "real people," making it harder for "real people" to live in their own cities. So, a pox on a lot of these short term rentals. I don't blame cities (like NYC) where Airbnb is heavily regulated, limiting the number of days a home may be rented, limiting occupancy, limiting the type of place you can rent (e.g., must be your primary resident - not a secondary home or vacation property).

Anyway, however he does it, Sean Donovan runs an Airbnb in San Francisco (a city that does have significant regulations on Airbnb rentals, even if it's the city where Airbnb was founded and is headquartered).

He thought he was renting to a group of colleagues who needed a place to stay while on business in SF. But things were a bit mysterious from the jump. Donovan's doorbell camera captured the renters moving in large black cases. Then the security system was turned off.

Two days later, Donovan stopped by the house to take out the trash. He looked through a window and saw black cables taped to the walls. A man was typing on a laptop sitting next to what appeared to be a robot.

When his guests checked out 11 days later, the house was a mess, Donovan claims. Glasses and dishes had been removed from kitchen cabinets and left elsewhere. The dishwasher, refrigerator, and washing machine were scratched. Dishwasher racks were bent and removed. Wooden furniture was scratched and stained. Bathroom tiles were chipped. A shoe rack and several pairs of shoes were missing from a locked bedroom closet.

"What the hell is going on here?” Donovan recalled thinking. (Source: SF Standard)

What the hell, indeed.  

After a bit of detective work, Donovan was pretty sure he had solved the mystery. The renters were, indeed, colleagues. But they worked for the Bot Company, a San Francisco robotics outfit headquartered, oddly enough, on the same street as Airbnb. 

The group had, Donovan alleges, taken the place "under false pretenses." They weren't using it as their bed and breakfast They were using it to "conduct prototype testing on robots they’re training to do household chores." So Donovan's suing them for the relatively modest amount of $12,383.50, which he figures will cover the damages and lost income he would have received if the renters had been honest about wanting to use his place for commercial activity.

“The dishonesty is really what upsets me the most,” he said. “If they had come straight up, ‘Hey, we would like to rent your house for testing of our robot,’ then we could have come to an agreement. But it’s the lying and the misrepresentation that makes me feel violated.”

He's apparently not the only Airbnb host to be violated. 

...at least 12 other Airbnb hosts alleging they damaged the property and personal belongings, failed to clean up, exceeded the limit on the number of guests, or violated other house rules during their stays.

But, but, but, the Bot people are geniuses, above and beyond the rest of us.  

Our team comes from Tesla, Cruise, OpenAI, Google, Pixar, and many other great companies. (Source: bot.co)

They wouldn't even have had to mention that they come from Tesla and other genius hangouts. Just using the .co extension tells us that they're special. They're the cool kids. Using .com as your extension? How pedestrian. How boring. How yesterday. (Okay, they couldn't have used bot.com if they'd wanted to, as it's already taken by a Canadian board of trade.  Still...) 

And it goes without saying, they're a VC darling (and are currently valued at $2B).

We are backed by Greenoaks, NFDG, Spark, Eclipse, Kleiner Perkins, Y Combinator, and many others who share our belief that robots belong in our everyday lives.

And even if the investors really don't give a hoot if robots belong in our everyday lives, at least they're all hoping that bot.co is a unicorn that will make them all richy rich richer. (Who wants to be a millionaire billionaire trillionaire?)

But for now, the geniuses (or genius-adjacent workers) trashing these short terms rentals sure look to me like a bunch of entitled, ahole, feckless, slobs.

There is no danger, of course, of this startup getting shut down. But geez Louise, pick up after your robots, why don't you? Maybe you can find a better robot - or better yet - an actual human to take care of it for you.

 ---------------------------------------------------------------
Image Source: Popular Mechanics

A note on Popular Mechanics. This magazine was founded and, until the early 1960s, was headquartered in Chicago. It's now located in NY. During the 1940s, my mother worked there as an admin/assistant editor.  In January 1945, she met my father - who was in the Navy, stationed in downtown Chicago and working out of Navy Pier - on a blind date and they hit it off. They were married in November of that year and moved to my father's home town, Worcester, Massachusetts. So she was something of an intra-country war bride. Anyway, I did get a kick out of finding an image on her magazine's website. 

The road to hell (and stupidity) is paved with AI

For years, I've been reading about how our abundance of technology is changing the way we think - and not in good ways. Cursive writing, using maps, reading books and pretty much any other form longer than the average tweet, making to-do lists on yellow pads. All of these skills aren't just lost arts. They're important, as they help us with cognitive development, memory retention, critical thinking, analytical ability...

And this was even before AI use cases started soaring. 

With AI making inroads, the law of unintended consequences is clearly being enforced. It's not just that folks relying on technology to do just about everything for them involved in thinking and doing won't develop key capabilities. It's that using AI will cause their existing skills to erode. 

In one study, doctors who'd gotten used to relying on AI to identify pre-cancerous growths during colonoscopies saw a decrease in their own ability to do so. 

This deskilling is worrisome to a lot of folks:

That possibility is a growing concern for medical specialists, computer scientists and other workers. Seventy per cent of nurses and 77% of physicians, for example, are worried about losing their skills because of over-reliance on AI systems, according to a survey of US health-care workers published earlier this month1.

Their fear might be justified. Evidence suggests that AI-driven ‘deskilling’ is starting to happen in medicine, computer science and other fields. Researchers are now discussing how to preserve important human expertise in the age of AI. (Source: Nature)

On the one hand, what of it? If from here on out there'll always be AI around to do the growth spotting, what difference does in make if a doctor's not as good? 

Good question, but I'd prefer my physicians to be able to, if not heal themselves, then heal me without all the heavy lifting being done by an AI. What if we're stranded on a desert island? Although on a desert island, I'm not likely to undergo a colonoscopy, I'd still want a doctor who knows how to do things the old-fashioned way. 

I have a friend who's a retired physician. She takes her blood pressure using her old hand-pump BP device, the one with the squeeze bulb. She trusts its reliability more than she trusts the swanky new digital machines.

Overall, the growing reliance on AI is not an unalloyed good for the wonderful world of health:

The study authors say that continuous exposure to such [AI] tools can cause clinicians to become “less motivated, less focused, and less responsible when making cognitive decisions without AI assistance”.

Less responsible when making cognitive decisions without AI assistance? That doesn't sound good.

Another example from my friend the doctor: She recently had a healthscare based on a misreading of a result. (Not sure if the situation involved human or machine error.) There was a slight problem, but not the major one initially reported, which had her writing her obituary in her head. Anyway, my friend's PCP was not particularly well-versed in what was happening to my friend and why. This is perfectly understandable, as the situation was a bit off the beaten path and no PCP can be expected to know everything.

The PCP went to the google and, we're guessing, AI'd her way into ordering a bunch of diagnostic tests for my friend, most of which my friend knew had nothing to do with the condition her condition was in. She played a bit of a waiting game, pushed back a bit, and ended up only with the tests she needed.

The situation is not, of course, perfectly analogous to the AI colonoscopy one, but it does demonstrate how a doctor might rely on what the technology is guiding them to do because it's quicker and easier than trying to figure out what actually makes sense in a given situation.

Then there's the impact of AI on coders.

By now, we're well aware of the looming coding takeover by AI. Folks used to look to computer science, to IT, to software development, for solid, lucrative careers. Now students are advised against studying much beyond how to work with AI.

Anthropic (an AI research company) recognizes the inherent problem at play:

AI creates a potential tension: as coding grows more automated and speeds up work, humans will still need the skills to catch errors, guide output, and ultimately provide oversight for AI deployed in high-stakes environments. (Source: Anthropic)

Anthropic decided to see how AI would help and/or hinder codes. So they set out to test the assumption about whether there were tradeoffs when it comes to using AI to assist - note, not replace - coders. 

Study participants were sorted into two groups, one using AI and the other "manually" coding, and were tested afterwards to see how rapidly they picked up a new coding skill 

The AI group was faster, but in the tests adminstered after the trial, they found:

...a significant differences in test scores the AI group averaged 50% on the quiz, compared to 67% in the hand-coding group—or the equivalent of nearly two letter grades (Cohen's d=0.738, p=0.01). The largest gap in scores between the two groups was on debugging questions, suggesting that the ability to understand when code is incorrect and why it fails may be a particular area of concern if AI impedes coding development.

The good news, I guess, is that AI is not quite ready and able to replace all of us humans. The bad news is that while it's making its way to full readiness and human-ish capability, it's making us dumber.

Swell!

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Image Source: Parker's Ponderings

Hypochondriacs, assemble!

Just when I think I've said everything I have to say about the perils of AI, up pops another one. And this pop up is a doozy. A not surprising doozy, but a doozy nonetheless.

A couple of years back, Almira Osmanovic Thunström, a medical researcher at a Swedish university (and an "AI strategist") came to the realization that an awful lot of folks - including brainiacs who should know better, given how cavalierly so many of them are using AI - hadn't a clue how it works. (Bad enough that innocent bystanders, naive googlers, mere consumers of misinfo are blissfully ignorant.)

“It was interesting how few of them [her students], or how few even people within A.I., understand how large language models (LLMs) are built,” [she said]. (Source: The Smithsonian)

So she decided to teach her class how the AI systems that produce the info we get when we google are constructed. (Not all AI stems from LLMs, but when we amateurs are out there googling, the information/misinformation regurgitated to us on a platter of convenience and speed likely comes from an
LLM.) 

And what better way for a medical researcher to do so than to concoct a fake disease and see what AI could do with it.  

“...I really wanted to have a clear case that leaves breadcrumbs throughout the whole system to show both how data is processed, how data is churned out, and how the prediction model and training model works when it comes to distributing information,” adds Osmanovic Thunström.

The condition that she and her team came up with was bixonimania, a malady associated with computer screen use.  (And who among us hasn't searched a time or two to see if we could figure out how all our screen time was impacting us mentally, physically, emotionally, and spiritually?)

They unleashed bixonimania on a searching, unsuspecting world in early 2024.

They put out two blog posts on the website Medium and two research reports on a preprint server, where scientists post studies that have not been peer-reviewed... The papers’ lead author was named Lazljiv Izgubljenovic—which translates to “lying loser”—and one of the studies’ titles says something akin to “Hyperpigmentation: A Real B.S. Design.” (Both reports have since been taken down by the preprint server.)

In defense of AI - and this may be my one and only defense of AI - maybe it would have picked up on the fakery if the author's name was given as "Lying Loser" in English, rather than in Bosnian, Serbian, and Croatian. Maybe.

Anyway, LLMs started to run with it. You searched on your symptoms and Microsoft Bing's Copilot would tell you that “Bixonimania is indeed an intriguing and relatively rare condition." Indeed!

Naturally, Chat GPT got in the act. And Google's Gemini attributed the condition to too much exposure to blue light. (By the way, those eyeglass lenses that are supposed to help prevent occurrences of bad things associated with blue light? They're apparently as dubious as bixonimania. As I found out when I ordered them - and paid a couple of hundred bucks extra - without checking with my eye doctor first.)

Worse yet, a number of scientists crazily/lazily went ahead and cited the BS apparently without having drilled down on the "research." Or even read it. (I'm guessing those gulled by the fakery were using Chat GPT to author their own work. Full circle!)

This despite the fact that Osmanovic Thunström's team threw in a bunch of Easter eggs that gave away the fakery - or should have. References to financial support from Lord of the Rings, and intellectual support from fellow scientists at the Starship Enterprise. 

At least one of the papers even explicitly stated, “This entire paper is made up,” reports Nature.

And that wasn't enough for the LLM to pick up on? Maybe the AI's eyesight was faltering due to bixonimania. Oh, wait...

“This is a master class on how mis- and disinformation operates,” says Alex Ruani, a misinformation researcher at University College London who wasn’t involved in the project, to Nature. “If the scientific process itself and the systems that support that process are skilled, and they aren’t capturing and filtering out chunks like these, we’re doomed.”

Doomed? Yikes! (And what a job title: misinformation researcher.  Bet that position didn't exist ten years ago. Maybe it's one of those swell jobs they keep telling us AI will create once it kills off all the current jobs.)

Meanwhile, I can think of one group of folks who might just delight in having a bunch of fake but harmless conditions out there. Hypochondriacs, assemble!

------------------------------------------------------------

Image source:  Amazon

AI ready for primetime? Wait just a durn minute

Well, yesterday's dire post was about AI coming for all of our jobs - and coming fast! But today's pinkslip post is about whether or not AI is really and truly ready for primetime? (Hint: It's not.)

I mean, it's already encouraging troubled kiddos to kill themselves - and telling them how to do the deed. It's picking bombing targets that - oops! - may include nonmilitary buildings. It's advising foragers that the tasty-looking mushroom they're holding is okay to eat when, in fact, it's poisonous.

Then there was the cautionary tale I read about a small software company, PocketOS, which bills itself as:

The World's Most Powerful Car Software - The essential technology platform for private rental businesses, membership clubs, and independent sales reps.

And, not incidentally me thinks, PocketOS uses .ai as its domain extension.

Anyway, PocketOS has gone all in on AI. I mean, why pay somebody when an AI will do it gratis? But in the wink of an eye, their powered by Anthropic's AI, Claude, went off the rails.

It only took nine seconds for an AI coding agent gone rogue to delete a company’s entire production database and its backups, according to its founder. PocketOS, which sells software that car rental businesses rely on, descended into chaos after its databases were wiped, the company’s founder Jeremy Crane said.

...Crane said customers of PocketOS’s car rental clients were left in a lurch when they arrived to pick up vehicles from businesses that no longer had access to software that managed reservations and vehicle assignments. (Source: The Guardian)

But wait, there's more! (There's always more.) But wait, it gets worse! (It always gets worse.)

Crane said that he was monitoring the agent as it deleted this data. When he asked the coding agent why, it replied: “NEVER FUCKING GUESS!” – and that’s exactly what I did.” The agent appeared to plead guilty in its own response: “The system rules I operate under explicitly state: ‘NEVER run destructive/irreversible git commands (like push --force, hard reset, etc) unless the user explicitly requests them.’” While PocketOS relied on the safeguards that Cursor is expected to have in place – it deleted the data anyway. “I violated every principle I was given,” the coding agent wrote.

So an AI just went ahead and "knowingly" ignored the safeguards in place, and took it into its head (?) to screw the rules and go full on into destruction mode. The same thing that a rogue human employee on a power/revenge trip has been known to do when they want to part company with their company. 

Does such willfully (?) bad behavior tell us that AI is now kinda-sorta sentient? That you can plug in all the safeguards you want, but AI can - neener-neener - just do whatever if f'ing well pleases? Have we reached the singularity, where AI is beyond human control?

I hope not. 

Of course, PocketOS ain't the only one that's been victimized by AI run amuck. AI has deleted operating systems and "mission critical" software. In one instance, it blew away years of dissertation research. (Talk about big gulp. Guess there's something to be said for notecards...)

For PocketOS's clients, the impact was quit something:

“Reservations made in the last three months are gone. New customer signups, gone. Data they relied on to run their Saturday morning operations, gone,” Crane wrote. “Every layer of this failure cascaded down to people who had no idea any of it was possible.”

And the only reason the PocketOS's clients have data from longer ago than three months is that the company had a 3-month-old offsite backup that was beyond the reach of their malefactor AI. 

PocketOS had to make a painstaking, near-manual effort to recover the missing info, populating their database with info they found on Stripe, in calendars, in emails. This required the use of - dare I say - human beings.

A definite cautionary tale for anyone that decides that they need to completely throw in with AI. 

Even though Crane was actively monitoring the AI, he was unable to prevent the rogue AI from roguing. When confronted, the AI more or less shrugged it off. Thems may be the rules but I can break them if the urge strikes me. And I guess Jeremy Crane can sue Anthropic, can stop using its AI, can build themselves a mo' better one. But he doesn't get the satisfaction of firing a bad employee's ass. 

If there's anyone who thinks that AI is fully ready for primetime, all I can say is, wait just durn minute.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Image Source: Vox

More swell news on the AI Front

Hiawatha Bray is a columnist, focusing on tech, for The Boston Globe. Last month, he wrote a very a) sobering, b) scary, c) depressing, d) all of the above column on AI. 

Here's what he had to report:

A startling new study from Tufts University says that over 207,000 Boston-area workers and 260,000 statewide are likely to lose their jobs to AI systems over the next five years, resulting in $25.6 billion in lost wages, a major blow to the local economy.

The American AI Jobs Risk Index finds that Massachusetts is the US state with the highest risk of AI job losses. Only workers in the District of Columbia are in greater peril. Greater Boston ranks sixth among US metropolitan areas for expected job losses. (Source: Boston Globe)

So much for Massachusetts being the best state to live in. (See last Wednesday's post on my beloved Commonwealth.)

AI's coming after what we used to call "knowledge worker" jobs - the types of work that involve thinking, analyzing, using your brain. The kind of jobs that saved the Massachusetts economy when our manufacturing jobs went south. The jobs we have long prided ourselves on having. And working at. 

According to the Tufts study, writers and editors will be the first to go. "57 percent of such jobs are destined for the chopping block." That's just swell! So far, most of what I've read that's AI-generated is god-awful. Flat, stilted, not engaging. Often wrong when presenting "facts." But clearly I'm biased - that's BIASED with a capital B-I-A-S-E-D. 

And if you're thinking that the People of the Word should have become coders, think again. "55 percent [of colders are] likely to be pink-slipped."

Mathematicians, website developers, database architects, even atmospheric and space scientists are all in big trouble.

These grim prognostications could come true later, if companies lighten up on AI adoption. Or more rapidly if they go balls-to-the-wall.

On the upside, there will be new jobs that come about because of AI. (Someone has to mind the beast so it won't "write" complete untruths or cook the books.) But there'll be fewer of those to go around.

Years ago, when pretty much the last of the shoe industry had fled the States, I heard designer and shoe maven Kenneth Cole interviewed on NPR. He said that there would be plenty of good jobs for shoe designers. 

Hmmm. Just how many folks who worked on the shoe assembly line are going to become designers? I'd say virtually none, and I speak from a position of authority having had "lived experience" working on the line in a shoe factory. (I believe that the building is now condos.)

And what's the ratio of shoe manufacturing jobs to shoe designer jobs? 1,000:1, 10,000:1?

What AI produces in terms of jobs will be nowhere near what it puts out of existence. 

But what's the biggy dealy, as long as the AI tech bros get to be trillionaires?

The jobs that will survive now include human dishwasher. Not because a robot can't replace a dishwasher. It's that the cost of the machine is still higher than paying starvation wages. 

Most job "for those who work with their hands" are safe. At least for now. But caveat, everybody.

Tom Malone is a professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management. He's conducting a lot of analysis on what AI is doing for and to us, and is a little more upbeat about the prospect of no jobs, nowhere, no how:

Malone’s team didn’t estimate how many jobs AI will either destroy or create. But over the long run, he’s more optimistic than the Tufts researchers. “I think people are overestimating how bad it’s going to be,” Malone said.

Thank you, Tom Malone. 

Maybe it's a little okay to feel cautiously optimistic about the brave new world?

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Image Source: Marc Stone

Baby Geniuses

A month or so ago, I saw an article in Mother Jones on genetic tinkering to produce more intelligent babies. One of the reasons that the tech bro geniuses are so enamored of pursuing mo' smarter babies is that they hope that one of those mo' smarter babies will grow up to solve the problem of "figuring out how to ensure AI doesn’t eventually destroy humankind."

I can certainly see folks wanting to edit out bad genes that result in disorders that would make their offsprings' lives nasty, brutal, and short. Or cause a longer-term disorder. Who wouldn't want to keep something dire and deadly like ALS or Huntington's Disease from striking their children when they're hitting their prime?

But as much as I don't want to see blue eyes disappear - and the good news is that they probably won't - the idea of poking and prodding a zygote to make sure the bébé has bébé  blues, well... I'm not thinking that it's such a good idea.

Not to mention fine-tuning those little zygotes to make them brainier. 

Ah, no. Better to invest in better nutrition, better education, better parenting, better libraries, a better environment to help make sure that all children are in a position to be brianier without noodling around with their DNA. 

And as the tech bros seem to amply demonstrate, there's no guarantee that superior intelligence - nurtured or natured - translates into superior integrity, decency, and goodness.  

Isn't it disturbing enough that Elon Musk has 14 children and counting because he wants to make sure that there's plenty of him dog-paddling in the gene pool. (Wanna bet that the Musk offspring he spends the most time with turn out to be chips off the old weirdball. And the ones protected from close encounters of the any kind with their sperm-daddy turn out to be okay normies.)

Mostly, however, what I'm here to say is that, IMHO opinion, pretty much all babies are geniuses, their little baby brains going a mile-a-minute: absorbing information; communicating; learning, learning, learning. 

Think about it. 

Babies recognize their parents' voices, their touch, their smells. From the jump, without language, they can communicate their needs, their pain, their contentment, their joy, their preferences. (Spit out those nasty carrots!) 

They figure things out. 

Sure, they start crawling backwards - duh! - but pretty soon they realize that, in order to get their mitts on that stuffed Bluey, they need to move forward. Onward, baby genius! Onward!

But to me the biggest indication that babies are natural born geniuses is that they can categorize. 

I'm not sure that if someone put me - an educated adult - in front of a Great Dane, a Chihuahua, a Snoopy cartoon, and that stuffed Bluey, I would immediately understand that they are all dogs. 

Yet those baby genius brains are whirring, whirring, whirring. Yes, yes, yes! Great Dane, Chihuahua, Snoopy cartoon, stuffed Bluey. They are all DOGGY!

So let's hear it for baby geniuses. And stop trying to splice the DNA sequence to create one. 

Go baby genius!

-----------------------------------------------------------

Image Source: Getty/iStock

Data Labelers Unite! (LFG!)

It will come as no surprise to anyone that AI, along with its tremendous potential to (along with the occasional good thing) wreck the environment, break all and every social compact, destroy the economy, and out and out kill people (e.g., encouraging young people to kill themselves; identifying deadly mushrooms as edible (oops!); mistakenly targeting schools for bombing (collateral damage, anyone?) is also responsible for worker exploitation in Africa.

AI work is a major part of the Kenyan economy, where many Kenyans labor as content moderators and data labelers. 

Data labelers train, refine, and moderate the outputs of AI tools made by the largest companies in the world, yet they are wildly underpaid and haven’t benefitted from the runaway valuations of AI companies.  (Souroce: 404 Media)

A lot of this data labeling involves "annotating what [is] happening in every frame" of a porn video. Kenyan workers are also helping train up AI sexbots, providing the human element in raunchy and just-plain-sad talk sessions with all the lonely people who rely on the Internet for sex and companionship. The actual human workers are, of course, putting themselves out of business, given that the goal is to improve the verisimilitude of sexbots, obviating the need for any human involvement. More money for the AI tech bro masters of the universe! Yay!

It will come as no surprise that the work that the data labelers and other AI-adjacent workers are ill-paid and work under dreadful conditions. Given the content of their work, which involves "horrific content," many end up suffering from insomnia, PTSD, and sexual dysfunction in their actual human-to-human, skin-to-skin, honest-to-god real human lives. 

But those Kenyan workers now have an organization behind them, the Data Labelers Association, which works:

...to organize workers to fight for better pay, better mental health services, an end to draconian non-disclosure agreements, and better benefits for a workforce that often earns just a few dollars a day. Data labelers train, refine, and moderate the outputs of AI tools made by the largest companies in the world, yet they are wildly underpaid and haven’t benefitted from the runaway valuations of AI companies.

It will come as no surprise that the treatment of Kenyan workers is seen as an updated, teched-up version of the exploitation of African laborers by the imperialist companies that pillaged (and continue to pillage) the continent for its wealth of natural resources. Move over DeBeers and Exxon-Mobil. Today they've got company: "it's Apple, it's Meta, it's Gemini." It's Sam Altman. It's Elon Musk. 

All part of the AI hype cycle:

...the promotional messaging and institutional ideology that casts artificial intelligence—particularly so-called “superintelligence”—as “inevitable” and destined to bring historic “transformation.”...

AI hype is the next chapter in the colonial playbook. It reframes the exploitation of African digital workers as “innovation” and is a tool of power wielded by profiteers of colonial extractivism in the digital age. It functions as a carefully crafted cover story by disguising appropriation in the language of “progress.” (Source: Tech Policy)

The Tech Policy article linked above is worth a full read. Sure it's lefty-ish, but it raises important issues around AI.

Declaring AI inevitable is how hype becomes colonial power. The rhetoric of inevitability, in particular, stages hype as a manifest destiny, stripping away the possibility of refusal or alternative futures. 

All the hype about AI's transformative capabilities and its inevitability, with some occasional kneejerk BS thrown in on how AI is going to benefit everybody, is creating an environment where AI will be seen as inevitable and not worth resisting. We'll passively just sit here and let the tsunami wash over us and only then will we realize that it didn't exactly benefit everybody.

Will our coin-operated polity ever be able to hit the pause button, take a deep breath, and figure out how to get our hands around the AI beast? 

I pinball around between 'God help us!,' 'Glad I'll be dead," and 'LFG.'

Today I'm feeling pretty Let's Fucking Go. Don't exactly know what this will entail, but it's got to be before it's too late. 

-------------------------------------------------------------------

Image Source: Tech Policy

OK. AI is good for some thing(s)

One of the very worst diseases I can imagine is ALS. I had a friend - not a close friend, but a friend nonetheless - who died of ALS, and it was just brutal to see this vibrant, brilliant, funny, kind, generous, irreverent very tough guy suffer through this. That Jake was also an athlete - a rugby player, a multi-multi-multi-multi-marathoner - made his dying of a disease that robs you of your mobility all the more poignant. But even if someone lacked Jake's wonderful character and traits, they wouldn't deserve to die from ALS. There is no one on the face of the earth who I despise more than I do DJT, and I wouldn't even wish ALS on him. 

ALS pretty much robs you of everything, including speech. 

I don't know David Betts, but thanks to a story I saw on the news, I know of him.

He's a Pennsylvania man who, like Jake, was stricken with ALS. David Betts' had enjoyed a highly successful career in consulting (with Deloitte), so he decided to take his analytic mind and problem solving skills to doing something about what was happening to him and, of course, the others who have the misfortune to get stuck with ALS. 

What David Betts did was develop an "AI-powered text-to-speech app. It speaks back in your choice of dozens of voices, but the kicker is, it's your actual voice."

He dubbed the app "Talk to Me, Goose."

"If anyone is a 'Top Gun' fan, it's the very first line in the very first film," David Betts said. "It's what he says when he needs a little dose of courage, and I kind of thought I'm going to need a little dose of courage." (Source: WCVB)

Although I liked 'Top Gun' well enough to also watch (and enjoy) the sequel, I wouldn't say I was exactly a fan, and I had no recall of the movie's opening line. (I did remember that Mav's (Tom Cruise's) best buddy was Goose (Anthony Edwards), and that Goose died in a freak top gun sort of accident. 

Anyway, Goose sure talked to David Betts, and he went out and created an app that will let those with ALS speak in their own voice.

He first looked at what was around for folks with speech limitations. He didn't find much

"They were still predominantly using what I found to be voice technology providers that sounded very robotic, and that's what terrified me. I did not want to sound like a robot," he said.

The technology to make voice clones already existed, so he took it a step further, learning how to create an app and putting it all together.

"I felt like I didn't have anything to lose, like there was no downside," Betts said.

And plenty of upside for those who could use a break.

Having successfully used his own app, Betts asked the question "How can we take this technology and reconnect people with their own voice?" The answer was to partner with an organization with broad reach into the ALS community. So he joined forces with Live Like Lou, an organization that supports those with ALS and their families, to make the app available for free. (The organization honors Lou Gehrig, the Yankees great of the 1930's who died of ALS.)

Available on iOS and Android, Talk to Me, Goose! helps individuals express themselves and share stories using advanced text-to-speech and personal voice cloning, even if their natural speech changes.

My friend Jake had a fast-moving version of ALS and lived less than a year post-diagnosis. During that year, he raised a ton of money for ALS research, including throwing a 65th birthday party fundraiser for himself that, on a snowy January night in 2020, just before the COVID curtain dropped, brought out about 500 folks to celebrate Jake's life and raise money for ALS. (Amazingly, this was a very fun party: an Irish wake while the person being waked was still alive. Jake's voice was going, but he could still talk to pretty much everyone there.) Jake also continued to run his signature charity (Christmas in the City, which focuses on making the holidays a little merrier and brighter for poor and homeless families in Boston). And I'm pretty sure he ran a half-marathon in there, too.

If I were diagnosed with ALS, I don't know what I'd do, but it probably wouldn't be run a half marathon or invent an app to help others. So bravo, David Betts. (And to Jake: we all still miss you!)

Image Source: Live Like Lou

Palantiranny

One of the most disturbing things to emerge from the current era is the ascendancy of the tech broligarchs. Or whatever they're called these days. Elon Musk. Jeff Bezos. Mark Zuckerberg. Peter Thiel. Marc Andreessen. Larry Ellison. Alex Karp.

Maybe they've always been awful, but most of them used to at least give some lipservice to making the world a better place for someone other then themselves. Alas, somewhere along the line they all figured out that the bucks don't stop here. The bucks, in fact, never stop. And the thing about the bucks is, once you accrue a goodly enough of them, you realize you never have enough. And you never, ever, ever in a kabillion years want them to stop pouring into your coffers.

Being a millionaire used to be a big deal. Then it was being a one-digit billionaire. Of course, that soon became nothing much. And two-digit billionaire was an equal yawner. Three-digit billionaire-ing - $100B and above - and now you're talking. And all of a sudden we're in the countdown for when Elon Musk becomes the world's first trillionaire. Which will no doubt set off a what's he got that I don't? rapacity spree among those left behind, nursing their $100's of billions and their grievances. 

These guys aren't stupid, and they naturally realized that money isn't just homes everywhere, private submarines, super yachts with helipads, $5M engagement rings, $50M weddings, $100M bunkers, et every bit of cetera the mind can imagine. Money, they all recognized, is also power. And while once it may have been fine to use that power for some sort of benefit for humankind (c.f., Bill Gates' efforts to eradicate malaria), do-gooding is really nothing more than a sort of an amuse bouche for the real meal. Which is expanding and defending your unimaginable (to us plebs, anyway) wealth. And what better way to defend that wealth than to make sure that the government gets to take as small a bite out of it as possible.

So let's make sure our tax rates approach as near to zero as possible, that none of "our" loopholes are closed, that regulations that might actually help the little guy but may come at a cost to the poor little old big guys are eliminated. (C.f., decimation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.) 

No wonder they're all so gungho on AI. After all, if you can replace all those pesky, squawky humans with AI and robotics, there's more money to be made. (That is, I guess, until there are very few human beings left who can afford to buy any of the goods and services that the tech bros are producing.)

Sigh.

Yes, AI promises (promises, promises) to be the great distruptor. And, scarily enough, it probably will be. 

Palantir co-founder and CEO Alex Karp sees a real upside to all the coming disruption. And that upside will benefit the Republican party. Not coincidentally, the party with all the power and the one most likely to enable a full hands-off-the-money policy when it comes to taxing the tech broligarchs and their companies. 

Last month, in a CNBC interview to discuss how Palantir's AI system is being used by the military for target selection  - and we've seen just how foolproof AI technology is when it comes to say, selecting an Iranian girls' school for destruction - Alex Karp opined on how AI's disruption will target women's work:

“The one thing that I think that even now is underestimated by all actors in industry … is how disruptive these technologies are,” Karp said. “If you are going to disrupt the economic and therefore political power significantly of one party’s base – highly educated, often female voters who vote mostly Democrat, and military and working-class people who do not feel supported – and you believe that that’s going to work out politically, you’re in an insane asylum.” 

He added: “Like … this technology disrupts humanities-trained – largely Democratic – voters, and makes their economic power less. And increases the economic power of vocationally trained, working-class, often male, working-class voters. These disruptions are going to disrupt every aspect of our society.” (Source: NY Times)

Swell. All those girly-girl history majors who know how to think, write, analyze, and other white-collarly things. And who support reproductive rights, social justice, diversity and equity, gay marriage, environmental concerns, universal healthcare - and vote accordingly. They'll see their economic, social, and political power eclipsed by swing-a-hammer white guys driving F150s to the voting booth to cast their voter-ID'd ballot for Barron Trump. And maybe even for an initiative to repeal the 19th amendment and send us latter-day suffragettes packing. 

But, but, but, what happens next? Having gutted the ranks of those we used to call "knowledge workers," isn't AI going to go after the blue collar guys, too? After all, AI/robotics has done away with millions of manufacturing jobs, and it's going to be gunning for everything else humans used to do as well. Who'll  be calling a plumber when your really smart toilet can unclog itself? Who'll need a roofer when the prefab new roof is dropped into place via drown, and secured via robots?

It's not clear that Karp is advocating for all this disruption. He's just saying it's going to happen. But it's certainly no secret that many of the tech broligarchs don't believe in democracy at all, at all. They view it as an encroachment on their freedom, i.e., the ability to endlessly accumulate.

One of my big questions about AI is just what do the broligarchs and their political henchmen think that people are going to do for work if there are no jobs? 

Easy enough to see a return to a medieval society: nobles at the top, small class of supporting professionals and artisans, and a mass of peasants living in hovels. One shirt to last a lifetime, a diet of cheap foods designed to put us out of our misery young. And unlike our ancestors, who had to rely on storytelling and a flute made out of a dried reed for entertainment, we'll get 24/7 infotainment and rot piped in to our hovels to keep us from noticing that those damned rich just keep getting richer. 

Maybe it won't happen. Maybe things will slow down. Maybe we'll come to our collective senses and decide just how, as a society and an economy, we want to ride the AI wave. Maybe we'll figure out how to have an economy that works for the many, not just the few. Maybe. 

I hope so.

But it sure makes me nervous that so many of these kabillionaire tech gods are using their vast economic power to become more economically and politically powerful. Which seems to be leading inexorably to autocracy and the tyranny of the super-rich.

Sigh, sigh, sigh.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

Image Source: Octopus Intelligence

AI Strikes Again? You betcha!

Tennessee grandmother Angela Lipps had lived a pretty uneventful life. At 50, most of that life had been spent in North Central Tennessee. She'd never been to North Dakota. Heck, she'd never been on an airplane. That is until the the city of Fargo, North Dakota - yes, that Fargo - extradited her to face bank fraud charges, and flew her to Fargo free of charge, but not free of charges. And under lock and key (including those nifty waist restraints that seem to be all the rage among the ragers). 

In July, US marshals arrested Lipps at her Tennessee home while she was babysitting four children. She said she was taken away at gunpoint and booked into a county jail as a fugitive from justice from North Dakota.

“I’ve never been to North Dakota, I don’t know anyone from North Dakota,” Lipps told WDAY News.

She remained in a Tennessee jail for nearly four months without bail while awaiting extradition. She was charged with four counts of unauthorized use of personal identifying information and four counts of theft. (Source: The Guardian)

Fargo police had used facial recognition software which analyzed bank "surveillance video of a woman using a fake US army military ID to withdraw tens of thousands of dollars." With that AI assist, the crackerjack Fargo sleuths determined that the woman in the video seemed a pretty darned good match to Angela Lipps.

No word on why they left poor Ms. Lipps, bail-less, languishing in a Tennessee jail for nearly four months - which I'm sure was no picnic - before flying her out to Fargo in late October. Or why she was denied bail. I know that tens of thousands of dollars is a lot of loot, but Angela Lipps hardly looked like a hardened criminal. But I guess she did look enough like the Fargo grand thief to keep her locked up.

And I suspect that being poor and having few resources didn't help. Just spitballing here, but if a middle class woman with the ability to hire a lawyer had been nabbed for this crime of the century, she likely wouldn't have been kept in the stir for 108 days waiting for Fargo to get its extradition act together. Even in Tennessee.

Once in Fargo, Angela Lipps fortunately got the help of a court appointed defender, Jay Greenwood, who did his job. He found records that proved that Ms. Lipps was nowhere near Fargo when the fraud occurred. And on Christmas Eve, she was released.

Opening the cell doors was about all that Fargo PD did for her.

...Lipps said Fargo police did not pay for her trip home, leaving her stranded. Local defense attorneys helped cover a hotel room and food on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, and a local non-profit, the F5 Project, was able to help her return to Tennessee.

Well, that must have been one swell Christmas for Angela Lipps. Lets hear it for those local defense attorneys who made sure she didn't have to spend the holiday in a homeless shelter. Sheesh. 

Meanwhile, Ms. Lipps returned home, and it was no Tennessee Waltz. While income-less in the hoosegow, she "lost her home, her car and her dog." 

A fellow from West Fargo, ND, set up a GoFundMe for her, which contains some very telling details about her situation and the criminal justice system. 

When the U.S. Marshalls picked up her up in Tennessee, they would not let her retrieve her dentures. So for nearly six months in jail, she was toothless. That home she lost was a rental in a trailer park. Her family put her things in storage for her, but couldn't keep up the storage payments. Among the lost possessions Angela Lipps itemized in the GFM were a Chrysler Sebring convertible and a tire inflator. When Fargo PD released her, she was wearing the summer clothing she'd first been arrested in. Which aren't exactly appropriate for Christmas Eve in Fargo, ND. (This is not particular to Fargo, btw. Not sure if it's still the case, but I know that it used to be that when someone was released from county jail in Massachusetts, they were sprung in the same duds they had on when they were arrested. So, if you were arrested in July and did a six-month "bid," they let you out in January in the cutoffs and tee-shirt you were wearing upon entry.)

If you're wondering whether I made a donation to Angela Lipps' GoFundMe. Well, duh!

And if you're wondering whether I think Angea Lipps should sue the Fargo Police Department. As they'd say in Fargo, you betcha!

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Image Source: City of Fargo

Guilty until proven innocent

Hard to believe it's been over a month now since Nancy Guthrie went missing. Hard to believe they haven't found something: Nancy (dead or alive), the kidnappers. 

I cannot begin to imagine what this poor woman is going through/went through. Nancy Guthrie is/was eight years older than I am, and she sure looks like she could be someone I know. Part of the alumni commitee I'm a member of. A fellow volunteer. A neighbor. Someone cruising the same shelves at the library looking for a bunch of good reads. A nice, pleasant "older lady" who looks like she doesn't have a mean bone in her body.

I cannot begin to imagine what her poor family is going through. There's the act of the kidnapping. But even worse is the not knowing. It's god-awful to sit through a death watch. It's god-awful to lose someone you love. But not knowing what your loved one is enduring/has endured? Not knowing if they're alive or dead? Not knowing if you'll ever know? Unimaginable.

It's also unimaginable to be an innocent bystander, someone who had less than zero to do with this heinous crime, yet find yourself a prime suspect, plastered all over social media and having civilian vigilante crime-stoppers stalking you (and your family) online and up close and personal.

As has happened to Dominic Evans, a Tucson grade-school teacher who had the ill luck to have been the drummer for Early Black, a band for which Nancy Guthrie's son in law Tommaso Cioni is the bassist. Early on, Cioni was named (by someone, somewhere) as the prime suspect in Guthrie's disappearance. ("The authorities" - and they've been none too authoritative here - have since announce that all the family members, including Cioni, have been cleared.)

Evans, who is 48, also became a prime target because of his criminal past. I.e., Internet sleuthers, in their zest to solve a crime, unearthed the fact that 27 years ago, when Evans was 21, he was arrested "for drunkenly swiping a calculator and watch while out at a bar." Crime of the century, that. 

Anyway, as things do, speculation about Evans' culpability went viral.

The accusations were levied online, but they have become a real-life nightmare for Mr. Evans and his wife. They hid in their bedroom with the lights off that night, too frightened to pick up their son from his grandmother’s house, for fear of being followed. Days later, another swarm of journalists, livestreamers and gawkers photographed the family’s home and knocked on their neighbors’ doors. (Source: NY Times)

When the speculation hit the fan, the Evans' asked their parents to keep their two youngest overnight. They told their teenage son not to come home. Evans had spoken with investigators (legit ones) and, while he hasn't yet been cleared, they haven't reached out to him in the weeks following the first interview. Looks to me like no one suspects Evans of anything. 

Yet when the doorbell camera pictures of the ski-masked man on Nancy Guthrie's doorstep were released, online "crime solvers" decided that yep, the guy was Evans. 

The lives of Evans, his wife, his children have been turned upside down. No, it's not the same degree as what the Guthrie family's experiencing, but it ain't nothing, either. 

“I feel like someone’s taken my name,” Mr. Evans said. But for what reasons? “I don’t know — monetary, clickbait, to be relevant, entertainment — but there are innocent people that get hurt.”

Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos (who, regretably, has come across as something of a Barney Fife throughout the investigation) recently said that, while no one other than Guthrie's family (inclding Tommaso Cioni) has been ruled out as a suspect, he feels bad for Dominic Evans. 

“He’s going through hell, and it is horrible,” Sheriff Nanos said. “And I don’t know what to tell him except he probably should be speaking with some attorneys and sue some of these people for libel...I wish I could jump out and defend every single one of them that’s been falsely accused,” he added.

Good luck to Evans if he does decide to sue. I'm sure the defense will be some combination of First Amendment, we were just thinking out loud, we meant no harm, we were just trying to help. Not to mention that most of the social media Sherlocks probably don't have two nickels to rub together. 

The "accusatory onslaught against" Evans has been dying down, and life is getting back to the new normal.

But the lasting effects are clear. The other day, Mr. Evans worried that a man was following him at a department store. Ms. Evans can’t help pulling out her phone and searching her husband’s name — she wants to know in advance if people might mob their neighborhood.

“None of this is real, but there’s so much of it,” Ms. Evans said of the speculation. “How can anyone decipher or catch all of it?”

Problem is, you can't.

I feel plenty bad for Nancy Guthrie, and for her family. They're going through hell. But I'm also feeling plenty bad for Dominic Evans and his family, collateral damage in the hunt for Nancy Guthrie and her abductor(s). And in the eyes and limited little minds of the nothing-better-to-do-brigade of amateur crime solvers, guilty until proven innocent.

Look, I understand just how entertaining it is to poke around the web googling "stuff." Way back in 2013, when the Boston Marathon Bombing occurred, I spent hours haunting the web. And when they released the names of the bombing brothers, I found info on Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev - where he was a student, what he was studying - before it hit any of the news sites. 

But finding "stuff" out is one thing, keyboard and phone vid rampaging around accusing innocent people of crimes they didn't commit is quite another. Get a life, folks. And if you can't get a life, why not STFU rather than keep hurting the lives of others.

-----------------------------------------------

Image Source: Screen Daily