Monday Miscellany, 5/26/25

Technology reporter Noor Al-Sibai quotes him in an article for Futurism:

“When a generative AI system does something, like summarize a financial document, we have no idea, at a specific or precise level, why it makes the choices it does — why it chooses certain words over others, or why it occasionally makes a mistake despite usually being accurate.”

Al-Sibai explains, “all the image and text generators that have exploded in popularity over the last few years work under the same principle of feeding in a gigantic pile of data and letting statistical systems mine it for patterns that can be reproduced.”  The results can neither be predicted nor controlled.

“This lack of understanding,” says Amodei, “is essentially unprecedented in the history of technology.” His company, Anthropic, is currently trying to solve this puzzle.

“Powerful AI will shape humanity’s destiny,” he says, “and we deserve to understand our own creations before they radically transform our economy, our lives, and our future.”

If You Want Guidance with Medical Ethics, Don’t Ask a Bioethicist

Wesley J. Smith explores what has happened to the field of medical ethics, which used to be about helping patients, the medical profession, and lawmakers think through the moral issues that arise in modern medicine. But now, he says, the field has shifted:

The mainstream bioethics movement took a hard turn into a crassly secular and utilitarianish direction that now widely rejects human exceptionalism, sees some patients as nonpersons, and is increasingly focused on political and cultural issues like acting as “ethics facilitators” in war zones and fighting climate change–issues well beyond the field’s original portfolio.

These days, the predominate ideology among bioethicists (except for those with a modifier in front of the term like “Catholic” or “pro-life”) is radically progressive about issues such as abortion, legalizing assisted suicide, imposing gender ideology, enabling radical reproductive technologies, and promoting DEI policies in medical school and hospitals.

Smith cites a survey of bioethicists published in the American Journal of Bioethics that found that 80.22% of those in that profession believe bioethics should “incorporate social justice concerns”; 75.85% belief that social justice should be a “key aim” of bioethics scholarship; and 57.26% believe that the profession should move away from “individual-level concerns” to move towards “collective-level issues” such as social justice.

What are the social justice issues bioethicists emphasize? Scoring 80% or more were racism, xenophobia, tolerance, minorities, poverty, gender equality, women’s rights, and persons with disabilities (at last a medically-related issue).

Smith concludes, “bioethics is increasingly a field focused on cultural and ideological advocacy, mostly approached (with exceptions) from the woke side of the street. Or to put it more bluntly, bioethical advocacy is becoming mostly progressive politics, no more, no less.”

The exceptions he notes, though, are noteworthy:  you can still get good ethical reflection from bioethicists who “identify” as Catholic or pro-life.  (I would hope we could extend that to “Christian.”)

Europe’s Teen Terrorists

Europe is facing a serious and disturbing problem: a surging number of terrorists.  And they are teenagers.

You may recall how the Taylor Swift concerts in Vienna had to be canceled because the CIA uncovered a suicide-bomber plot that could have killed hundreds of young concert-goers. The would-be perpetrators were Muslim immigrant boys aged 17, 18, and 19.

Eight months after the conflict broke out between Israel and Hamas, 60 terrorists were arrested in Europe, two-thirds of whom have been teenagers.  Over a two-year period, from 2022 to 2024, in Belgium, teenagers have been responsible for one out of three terrorist attacks. In the UK, the number is one out of five.

The Wall Street Journal published a story on the topic by Sune Engel Rasmussen entitled Teenaged Terrorists Are a Growing Threat to Europe’s Security, with the deck, “Law enforcers are overwhelmed and warn that a new generation of extremists is being radicalized online.”

Rasmussen interviews a 19-year-old Chechen who was arrested for plotting with three accomplices aged 15 to 17 to replicate the attack on a Paris theater that killed 90 people.  He told the court, “I didn’t think I was doing anything wrong.”

Rasmussen says that most of the young terrorists are motivated by Islamic extremism.  A few right-wingers are cited, but we are told that the two groups emulate each other.

We blogged about criminal gangs in Sweden recruiting children to commit murder for hire.  That is similarly depraved, but it’s driven by adults.  These young terrorists are planning attacks on their own, whipped up by online propaganda and social media.  Rasmussen writes,

With only a superficial understanding of ideology, most young extremists initially find an attraction to violent narratives online, driven by individual grievances and vulnerabilities, such as psychological distress, loneliness and marginalization, experts say. Online, they find a community around collective crises and traumatic events, such as fear of migration or the war in Gaza, which they connect to their personal struggle.

“People associate themselves with the suffering. And they want to do something about it,” said Kevin Volon, spokesperson for Belgium’s Coordination Unit for Threat Analysis, a governmental center that analyzes extremist threats. Groups of young radicals usually organize online without a formal leader or religious authority.

Rasmussen doesn’t discuss the obvious common denominator.  Virtually all of these teen jihadists are unassimilated immigrants.  I would think that condition would be hard for adolescents to bear, stirring all kinds of resentments and grievances, as well as searching for a community that could give them a sense of belonging. Unchecked immigration is harmful not just to the host country but also to the immigrants, especially children.