As usual, the world’s biggest liars and would-be tyrants want to root out “misinformation” and protect “democracy.”
In this case, however, the liars and would-be tyrants in President Joe Biden’s administration, led by Vice President Kamala Harris, lack the competence to carry out an assigned task.
Thus, according to NBC News, Biden has turned to one of his predecessors, former President Barack Obama.
On Monday, Biden announced an executive order designed to impose government regulation of artificial intelligence.
“To realize the promise of AI and avoid the risk, we need to govern this technology,” the president chillingly said.
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That order marked the culmination of a secret yet lengthy process in which the man Biden served as vice president played a leading role. In fact, NBC News reported that Obama “quietly advised the White House over the past five months.”
The former president held Zoom meetings with White House aides and dealt directly with tech companies. In conversations with tech-industry leaders, Obama emphasized issues such as “information integrity, bias and discrimination,” according to the report.
Of course he did.
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In a statement posted to Medium this week, Obama even had the galactic chutzpah to pose as a guardian of truth.
“We’ve already seen what can happen when our shared basis of facts begins to erode, for example, affecting everything from politics and the economy to public health,” the former president wrote with his characteristic blend of dishonesty and condescension.
Obama’s involvement on this issue merely highlights another of Harris’ failures.
In May, Biden named the vice president his AI “czar” and tasked her with spearheading the administration’s AI oversight campaign. At the time, Elon Musk and others subtly mocked the appointment, noting Harris’ general incompetence.
On Wednesday, the vice president delivered a speech at an AI summit in London. A comically inept speaker, Harris nonetheless managed to squeeze several establishment lies into one rhetorical question.
“And when people around the world cannot discern fact from fiction because of a flood of A.I.-enabled mis- and disinformation, I ask: Is that not existential for democracy?” Harris said, according to The New York Times.
Naturally, “people around the world” need the government to protect them from “fiction.”
“As history has shown, in the absence of regulation and strong government oversight, some technology companies choose to prioritize profit over the well-being of their customers, the safety of our communities and the stability of our democracies,” Harris said.
Do demons write these speeches? Who else could tell such lies? If history shows anything, it shows that people in search of truth must not look to the government.
Fortunately, Harris’ appearance in London merely highlighted her ineptitude. Now that we know the extent of Obama’s involvement on AI, we know what Biden really thought about his “czar.”
If she did not strike most Americans as an insufferable, cackling fraud, we might even feel sorry for her. After all, if the most catastrophically incompetent president since James Buchanan holds a low opinion of her abilities, what could an overt critic of the vice president possibly add besides pity?
Meanwhile, this AI story also confirms that Obama has not exactly kept his distance from the Biden administration.
NBC News cited White House “aides” who called it the “first time Biden has tapped his former boss to help shape a key policy initiative,” but those “aides” could hardly say otherwise. After all, Biden’s obvious cognitive decline has led to speculation that Obama already exercises more influence than most former presidents.
Either way, we need not imagine Obama in the role of a puppet master. Whether he does or does not influence the Biden White House, Obama’s worldview nonetheless persists there.
In Harris’ lies about “misinformation” and “democracy,” we hear the echo of Obama’s “shared basis of facts.” And in Biden’s executive order, we see Obama’s authoritarian instinct.
