This is an old obscure story but, with all the talk lately about robots manufactured by and for militant racists (e.g. Tesla), I thought it would be worth revisiting.

Disney made a robotic President Lincoln in 1964, which lectured audiences for dramatic effect. It since has been used as a model to train U.S. troops.

Having watched the facial animation progression from Wathel’s first efforts in 1955, thru Jack Gladish’s first Chinaman, then the 1964 Lincoln [through today]… We first implemented this sort of work in our projects for the US Marines in the Infantry Immersion Trainer at Camp Pendleton. We created a series of animatronic townspeople to populate the immersive training environment—some of them were slated to be hostile combatants.

Did I just read that a fake Lincoln was staged as a hostile combatant for Marines to train against?

Awkward.

Allegedly the justification for turning Disney’s Lincoln into enemy combatant was that animatronics were easier to build than using human actors. Does this mean no actors were willing to play Lincoln as an enemy of the Marines for some particular reason?

I mean the underlying theme of this story reminds me of…

…Camp Pendleton in Oceanside, California was a hotbed of KKK activity–an open secret that was tolerated or aided by Marine Corps brass… white marine Klansmen openly distributed racist literature on the base, pasted KKK stickers on barracks doors and hid illicit weapons in their quarters…

Camp Pendleton, racist hotbed of the KKK, trained Marines with an animatronic staged as their enemy combatant… based on President Lincoln? What would President Lincoln say about that?

Were they training Marines on assassinating him? Here’s a 1977 interview of a Marine about their environment.

Q. Do you think the Klan has been rooted out of Pendleton?

A. Definitely not. Definitely no. It’s still here and they’re still organizing here. They might have calmed down a little bit; kept their stuff under cover a little bit more, but as far as being rooted out–no.

Lincoln blithely portrayed as the basis for enemy combatants seems to fit a sad narrative. Misuse of technology easily can poison human U.S. troops against democracy.

Robots manufactured by and for militant racists is a fascinating chapter of disinformation tools in American history, no?

Absolutely scathing analysis is coming from Forbes, alleging Tesla robotics are just a clumsy fraud.

…while it’s cool to see a company like Tesla tinkering with robotics, it seems like we still have a long ways to go before we’re sharing our homes with robot servants—a promise of the future we’ve been waiting on for over a century. Optimus doesn’t appear have capabilities beyond anything we could do in 1964…

Just one century? That sounds like the original mechanical Turk story from the 1700s, if we really want to go back in time. And three centuries of such experience is why wise Germans tend to call Tesla products today “Getürked” (fraud).

Consider now how little has changed since the 1700s, in terms of charlatans and con-artists.

Fun fact: Driverless cars — road robots — run the same long timeline as other modern robots. They all basically are post-WWII science fiction.

Heavily promoted in the 1960s as our inevitable future, the buzz almost entirely died out by the 1970s (not least of all because the Cuban Missile Crisis and Vietnam War destroyed trust in automation systems).

This is not to say hard problems can’t be solved. Rather that the people actually solving hard problems will fail wherever charlatans roam unregulated, because fraud destroys markets.

Attention-obsessed charlatans tend to burn so brightly they suck all the oxygen out of innovation, undermining authentic engineers as a perceived threat to false status.

Without fraud there would be no Tesla.

Lord Acton was wrong about a lot of things, especially his views on power.

Lets start with the unavoidable fact that Acton hated the idea of abolitionists spreading power to individuals, as he worried greatly about white male slaveholders abruptly losing their concentration of power (treatment of Blacks as property instead of humans).

In other words, Acton hypocritically framed states’ rights as wrong when they abolished slavery (Kansas). Instead he maintained that slaveholders were the noble ones for centralizing power into an elitist Confederacy to deny abolitionist states’ rights — he unmistakably and incorrectly rejected the individual’s right in order to express his strong preference for preservation and expansion of white supremacist tyranny.

Next, from this important context, let’s look at Acton’s most famous phrase taken from one of his letters to Bishop Creighton in 1887.

Power tends to corrupt. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Wrong.

…for some people, power seems to bring out their best. […] In sum, the study found, power doesn’t corrupt; it heightens pre-existing ethical tendencies.

That’s a relatively new study that blows Acton out of the water, and here’s another one:

I demonstrate that when powerholders attribute their power internally, they tend to participate in more self-interested work behaviors, but when they attribute their power externally, they tend to participate in more global prosocial behaviors.

And here’s another one:

Power doesn’t corrupt people, people corrupt power

Acton provably and easily seems a terrible fool.

Really these studies just confirm what we already should have known all this time. New research continues to tell us basically the same things the great American politician Robert G. Ingersoll, had been campaigning about and published in 1895:

Nothing discloses real character like the use of power. It is easy for the weak to be gentle. Most people can bear adversity. But if you wish to know what a man really is, give him power. This is the supreme test. It is the glory of Lincoln that, having almost absolute power, he never abused it, except on the side of mercy.

Funny how Americans probably won’t recognize one of their best men, the famous Ingersoll. Honestly, how well do you know Ingersoll’s writings and what he did for America?

Robert Green Ingersoll (1833-1899), known as The Great Agnostic, traveled the country for more than thirty years lecturing to capacity crowds on more than twelve hundred occasions. He usually talked for three or four hours straight with no notes. His topics ranged from Shakespeare to Reconstruction, from science to religion. His biggest crowds turned out to hear him denounce religion and the Bible. He was no doubt one of the greatest orators in American history.

He was ahead of his time on social issues such as women’s rights, birth control, and equality of the races. Frederick Douglass is said to have stated that , of all the great men of his personal acquaintance, there were only two in whose presence he could be without feeling that he was regarded as an inferior–Abraham Lincoln and Robert Ingersoll. Yet, his name has been all but forgotten.

Abraham Lincoln and Robert Ingersoll. Two names that should never be forgotten.

At the same time, it seems far too many people to this day are regularly exposed to Acton’s wrong-headed British white-supremacist nonsense.