California’s SB-1386 revolutionized data breach notifications globally, proving that state-level regulation can drive widespread change even without federal action. I was on the front-lines in Silicon Valley detecting and preventing breaches in 2003 and remember a positive sea-change after California passed a law, like it was yesterday. In this light, OpenAI’s opposition to California’s proposed AI regulation SB-1047 (Safe and Secure Innovation for Frontier Artificial Intelligence Models Act) appears shortsighted and out of touch with very important recent historical precedent.
While OpenAI cites concerns about innovation and talent retention, these arguments echo past objections to groundbreaking regulations that have since become industry standards without problem. Their hollow-sounding stance seems more like an attempt to avoid oversight rather than a genuine concern for progress.
Conversely, Anthropic’s evolving, more receptive approach to the revised bill demonstrates a nuanced understanding of regulatory dynamics and the potential for well-crafted legislation to foster responsible innovation.
Importantly, technologies like W3C’s Solid project (solidproject.org) already offer innovative solutions that could help AI companies meet the proposed bill’s requirements. Solid’s decentralized data architecture provides users with unprecedented control over their data, enabling easy opt-out mechanisms, transparent data usage tracking, and even simplified implementation of “kill switches” for AI systems.
OpenAI’s failure to recognize or advocate for such existing technological solutions further underscores their misalignment with forward-thinking approaches to AI governance. By embracing rather than resisting thoughtful regulation and leveraging innovative technologies like Solid, companies can position themselves at the forefront of responsible AI development.
In essence, Anthropic’s engagement with regulators and openness to adaptive solutions aligns with the historical pattern of California’s regulatory leadership driving positive industry-wide change. Meanwhile, OpenAI risks finding itself on the wrong side of history, missing an opportunity to shape responsible AI practices that could become global standards.
American history is full of censorship and denials, as evidenced perhaps best by the KKK controlling the Oklahoma narrative for so long.
The massacre took place over two days in 1921, a long-suppressed episode of racial violence that destroyed a community known as Black Wall Street and ended with as many as 300 Black people killed, thousands of Black residents forced into internment camps overseen by the National Guard and more than 1,200 homes, businesses, schools and churches destroyed.
It’s 2024 and American families are still just now learning what happened 100 years ago to their relatives under extremist violent racism directed and spread by President Woodrow Wilson.
The three are among 11 sets of remains exhumed during the latest excavation in Oaklawn Cemetery, state archaeologist Kary Stackelbeck said Friday.
“Two of those gunshot victims display evidence of munitions from two different weapons,” Stackelbeck said. “The third individual who is a gunshot victim also displays evidence of burning.”
Evidence of burning. The U.S. government is clearly implicated in racist executions, concentration camps, mass graves, and even burning the bodies… a decade before Nazi Germany. Why do you think Hitler openly boasted Henry Ford was his big inspiration, or why Hitler named his personal train the “Amerika”? Nazi Germany looked to the American violent systemic suppression of non-whites as a rough blueprint for genocode.
The Tulsa victims were decorated veterans and successful business people, targeted within just one area in a large coordinated nation-wide terror campaign that had lasted years (e.g. “Red Summer” in nearly 30 cities); to remove and block all prosperity of American Blacks. It was made easy to hide under President Wilson and his toxic nativist “America First” slogan. For example, he had ordered all Blacks segregated and removed from positions of government. He even sent federal troops to round up and murder Black farmers in Arkansas after they organized meetings, so the very act of group speech to represent Black voices was systematically interrupted and criminalized.
President Wilson replied… that he had made “no promises in particular to Negroes [sic], except to do them justice.” […] Many African American employees were downgraded and even fired. Employees who were downgraded were transferred [out of sight].
Perhaps most notable, to those wondering what happened after this KKK President finished his second term in 1921, Warren Harding was elected in a landslide and gave a 10 minute speech June 6 at Lincoln University calling on Americans to educate themselves better and never forget the Tulsa Massacre.
Much is said about the problem of the races, but let me tell you that there is nothing that government can do which is akin to educational work. One of the great difficulties with popular government is that citizenship expects at the hands of government that which it should do for itself. No Government can wave a magical wand and take a race from bondage to citizenship in half a century. All that the Government can do is to afford an opportunity for good citizenship.
The colored race, in order to come into its own, must do the great work itself, in preparing for that participation. Nothing will accomplish so much as educational preparation. I commend the valuable work which this institution is doing in that direction. It is a fine contrast to the unhappy and distressing spectacle that we saw the other day out in one of the Western States. God grant that, in the soberness, the fairness and the justice of this country, we shall never have another spectacle like it.
Spectacle, what spectacle? His point about a magical wand and things taking time is notable. Harding was calling out Tulsa’s massacre in a Presidential address, like it was front of mind for all Americans. Somehow this brief moment in time, the magic of that message, was soon lost within the momentum of Wilson’s KKK empire.
Tulsa officials immediately moved to competely erase the massacre from records, going so far as to build a new white supremacist meeting center (“Klavern”) directly on top of the firebombed Black business and homes.
It was a pattern of long-term and coordinated oppression that was being repeated throughout the country.
A horrible “contagion” had been spread across America after 1915, as thousands of KKK domestic terrorism and disinformation cells sprouted under President Wilson.
Each red dot represents a local Klan chapter, known as a Klavern, created between 1915 and 1940. Source: Virginia Commonwealth University
Around the same time as the national KKK “poison” network was busy re-writing American history to forget Tulsa, Harding in October gave a speech in Alabama that clarified his thoughts in ending the long problem of American institutionalized racism.
I would say let the black man vote when he is fit to vote: prohibit the white man voting when he unfit to vote. Especially would I appeal to the self-respect of the colored race. I would inculcate in it the wish to improve itself: distinct race, with a heredity, a set of traditions, an array of aspirations all its own. […] I would accent that a black man can not be a white man, and that he does not need and should not aspire to be as much like a white man as possible in order to accomplish the best that is possible for him. He should seek to be, and he should be encouraged to be, the best possible black man, and not the best possible imitation of a white man.
Prohibit the white man voting? By August 1923 he was dead, with no real explanation.
Mrs. Harding refused all entreaties to allow the doctors to conduct an autopsy and instead ordered that her husband be embalmed shortly after his death. Dr. Wilbur was especially frustrated by this refusal because the press and a bereaved public blamed the president’s doctors for incompetence, malpractice and even plots of poisoning the president.
Remember? Never forget? I dare you to find even one American who remembers President Harding’s first name or the year he took office, let alone his speeches on racism and the Tulsa massacre.
How spaceX successfully designed the world’s first reusable rocket
No. No. And… Nope. The whole history of SpaceX seems to be littered with ugly disinformation.
SpaceX Unveils Plan for World’s First Fully Reusable Rocket
It’s not even remotely true that SpaceX would be first, yet it still floats around as an unchallenged headline.
Apparently they’ve just been throwing more money at propaganda than anyone before, with more marketing and attention seeking fiction to generate funding, not actually solving much else by comparison.
Boeing’s Reusable Aerodynamic Space Vehicle (RASV) developed in the 1970s would have taken off and landed horizontally, like an aircraft, and would have featured the rapid turnaround, ease of maintenance, economy of operation, and abort capability found in the commercial airplane industry. RASV would launch several dozens (if not hundreds) of times, would be able to fly again shortly after landing (in two weeks or even in 24 hours or less), and would use small flight and operational teams.
What made the Clipper Graham [DC-X] unique was that it combined the development of rocket-powered single-stageto-orbit transport with aircraft-like operations and a program approach that featured a modest budget, an accelerated timetable, a small managerial team, and minimal paperwork. No other single-stage-to-orbit project had been run before in this “faster, cheaper, smaller” fashion. Also, the Graham Clipper was the first rocket-powered vehicle, experimental or not, to demonstrate aircraft-like operations.
A full-scale pre-production orbital prototype was planned (DC-Y), meant to be followed by the production DC-1.
Allegedly when SpaceX was created, Elon Musk told Jess Sponable that it was to continue the prior DC-X project success. Sponable had in fact participated in multiple reusable rocket vehicle projects at USAF, DARPA and elsewhere including the X-33 and X-34, just to be clear about the many priors to SpaceX. The point is that a disinformation tweet from Elon Musk might generate millions of views instantly and headlines in papers, all poisoning history, yet an interview a year ago with Jess about real facts has only 115 views so far…
…[DC-X] did the rotation maneuver that SpaceX did so dramatically in recent years in 1996 or 1995… a lot of [our DC-X reusable rocket] data was provided to Elon Musk at SpaceX…
While DC-X was by far the most famous in the mid 1990s — literally entered into a space hall of fame — somehow SpaceX has been allowed to lie. It constantly spread misleading information, without any corrections or shame, as if it was initiating the same concepts and maneuvers at least two decades late in the 2010s.
The first flight of the DC-X from the “Clipper-Site” was on August 18, 1993, at Northrup Strip, now known as White Sands Space Harbor, on White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico. The team actually built a mini-spaceport along the edge of the Northrop Strip. It incorporated all the functions of an operational spaceport. It was a breathtaking vertical launch that left the spectators in attendance in awe. “The DC-X launched vertically, hovered in mid-air at 150 feet, and began to move sideways at a dogtrot. After traveling 350 feet, the onboard global-positioning satellite unit indicated that the DC-X was directly over its landing point. The spacecraft stopped mid-air again and, as the engines throttled back, began its successful vertical landing. Just like Buck Rogers,” said an article from the Ada Joint Program Office of the U.S. Government.
Politics killed the DC-X reusable rocket for various reasons. The concept went dormant until after President Bush mistakenly withdrew from the ABMT and then the idea was restarted in a new arms race… driving DoD innovations into a highly unaccountable private company that has become known for its failures: SpaceX.
Awkward.
Apparently everything Musk does turns out a giant origination scam, stealing ideas and public money to fraudulently redirect investors away from real engineering into his political pockets.
It was pointed out to me recently that a paper (written by Tesla and SpaceX engineers) published by Elon Musk in 2013 credited the Hyperloop concept of a vacuum tube train to “The Limit of Rapid Transit” by Robert Goddard in 1909.
That’s a start. Goddard was a prodigious inventor who experimented a lot with vacuum and propulsion.
Some say the next big splashy Hyperloop advocate was in 1950s France.
The idea of the Aérotrain emerged in the mind of Jean Bertin during the 1950s.
Experiments conducted by Frankel and his team in the early 90s showed that it worked. “We built a half mile long tube at the playing fields of MIT, evacuated it, and then shot things through it in order to measure what sort of velocities we could obtain,” says Frankel. “We started with ping pong balls, and then went to mechanical models.” His team found that creating a near vacuum in the pipe would allow speeds of up to 930 km/h (580mph) – twice as fast as in an air filled tube.
The results were enough for the team to propose a rail system between Boston and New York…. Ultimately, the huge cost of building such a system was its downfall along with the fact that the top speed was equivalent to existing bullet trains…
Spoiler alert. Hyperloop concepts have failed miserably for at least 100 years because so complicated, expensive and in reality not much faster than existing trains.
In fact, when Elon Musk claimed to be proposing a competitive new transit idea, MIT slapped it down as a poorly-scoped hybrid of others’ ideas that would fail.
The idea of pushing pods along with air in a pneumatic tube has been around for at least 150 years. […] Unusual approaches to transportation like this one have, of course, had a difficult time getting implemented.
MIT really hinted at the fact that Musk was fraudulently proposing a highly expensive and experimental Hyperloop as the exact opposite: cheap and easy.
[Hansman] says Musk’s cost estimates are too optimistic. “It would be enormously expensive. And I think there are a huge number of technical challenges.” [Sussman says] “…given our inability to put together the package to do high-speed rail, which is proven technology, it’s hard to see how a chancy solution—given that it’s never been implemented—would fare,”
Ouch. Hyperloop has indeed fared terribly and delivered nothing, while trains are at least on track for 2030 (pun not intended).
Why did Musk lie and then deliver nothing? Politics. He wanted at that time to kill public transit funding in California, stop trains, by soaking attention up with a fictional future product that would never be delivered. It was the hydrogen highway tactic but targeted.
Wait, did MIT also say 150 years? Goddard was 1909, so something is off by like 40 years.
Digging around I noticed several people call out George Medhurst, who suggested compressed air to create car propulsion (including a 1799 design patent on a system of iron pipes for “atmospheric rails”).
That’s early!
And then in 1845 a London and Croydon Railway experiment ran a vacuum train, where atmospheric pressure propelled its cars. It ended with a familiar note.
…ultimately a failure due to the difficulty of maintaining a high pressure in the tubes with the ever complex valves requiring unaffordable levels of maintenance…
Wow, that sounds almost exactly like products from Elon Musk 2012-2024, no? Difficult and unaffordable maintenance is surely Tesla’s byline.
All I’m saying is that if you look at the long line of Hyperloop type inventors, someone could and should have predicted that a very old idea with well known problems would suffer the same fate.
[Burning through $300m in six years, by] 2020, Hyperloop One successfully conducted a crewed test run hitting 100 mph.
Pathetic. Hyperloop One squeezed out a pokey 100 mph before shutting down operations without a single buyer. What a waste of time and money. But do you know what’s even more pathetic?
The concept of the hyperloop – ultra high-speed transportation via pods or capsules travelling in near-vacuum tubes – originated in 2013 with a white paper by Elon Musk.
Almost nothing in that Musk glorification sentence is true. And the fact someone could write such nonsense might have something to do with why the Hyperloop was ever allowed to divert attention from actual high speed trains and fail so spectacularly… yet again.
