++The wild primary in the most important election of 2023 pits a future GOP star against a megadonor. +
++The biggest race of 2023 is in Kentucky, and it’s not the Derby. Instead, the reelection bid by the state’s Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear will be the focus of national attention in November. It’s not just about the high stakes for the Bluegrass State, where Republicans have supermajorities in the state legislature and Beshear is the lone remaining Democrat in a statewide office. The race also serves as a bellwether for 2024, when control of the Senate will hinge on popular Democratic incumbents facing tough reelection battles in states like Ohio and Montana, which are less red than Kentucky. +
++But, before Republicans can try to defeat Beshear, they first have to pick a nominee in what has become a bruising and expensive primary. The May 16 election has not been an ideological battle between different wings of the GOP nor has there been any sort of reckoning or debate over former President Donald Trump’s influence in the party. Instead, it has been a battle over which candidate can more convincingly claim to be a conservative fighter against Joe Biden and “the radical left.” +
++The race has boiled down to a fiercely contested battle between Daniel Cameron, the state attorney general, and Kelly Craft, a Republican megadonor who served in the Trump administration, first as ambassador to Canada and then to the United Nations. The state’s agricultural commissioner, Ryan Quarles, is also in the mix as well but running a consistent third in public polls behind Cameron and Craft. +
++Both Cameron and Craft would represent historical milestones in the state. Craft would be the second female governor in Kentucky history and the first Republican woman elected to the office. Cameron represents an even bigger milestone. He not only would be the first African American governor in the history of Kentucky, he would be the first African American elected as a Republican governor of any state. +
++Politically, they have run similar campaigns on the issues. Scott Jennings, a longtime Republican strategist in Kentucky, told Vox that all three of the major candidates have expressed the same basic conservative views on issues like guns and abortion and described them all as “mainstream conservative Republicans.” +
++Instead, the race has focused on personalities and become personal as the Kentucky airwaves have been flooded with television ads. +
++Perhaps the biggest advantage Cameron has in the race is the endorsement of Donald Trump. The former president issued an endorsement of Cameron in 2022 which the state attorney general has heavily touted in recent weeks. In contrast, Craft’s biggest advantage is her personal wealth. Her husband Joe Craft is a billionaire coal mogul. She has loaned her campaign almost $10 million this year and her husband has spent $1.5 million to fund the superPAC that supports her. +
++The result is that Craft has dominated the airwaves for much of the campaign — not just with positive ads that depict her taking culture war positions like standing up to “woke bureaucrats” but with negative ads that have bashed Cameron for being an “establishment” Republican as well as for his ties to the state’s senior senator, Mitch McConnell. A superPAC backing her aired an ad in March bashing Cameron as a “soft establishment teddy bear.” That framing has continued more recently. In one recent ad that tried to tie Cameron to New York County district attorney Alvin Bragg, the state attorney general morphs into an actual teddy bear on screen. More recently, Craft has explicitly attacked Cameron’s ties to McConnell in a television ad painting her opponent as “an insider.” +
++Polling in the race has been sparse. An April poll from Emerson College had Cameron in the lead at 30 percent, Craft trailing him with 24 percent, and Quarles at 15 percent with 21 percent of voters still undecided. However, since then Cameron’s campaign has been more active on television and all the candidates debated together for the first time in the campaign. Craft used the debate to attack Cameron over donations to his campaign from a company that makes gambling machines. Cameron attacked Craft because of her husband’s massive donations to her superPAC and suggested that may have been illegal coordination as a result. +
++Cameron also used the debate to repeatedly tout his Trump endorsement and attack Craft for not receiving the former president’s backing. He jibed at her on stage, saying “Kelly, you spent six months telling folks that you were going to get the Donald Trump endorsement. You had him at the Derby last year. And then I got the endorsement. And your team has been scrambling ever since.” +
++The question is how much Trump will further involve himself in the two weeks before the May 16 Republican primary. After all, the former president has long celebrated his track record of successful endorsements in Republican primaries. Further, there’s a real question about, regardless of whether Cameron or Craft win, how much the attacks from the primary linger on into the general election. Beshear is one of the most popular governors in the US — a recent Morning Consult poll giving him a 63 percent approval rating — and he comes from a Kentucky political dynasty in the state (his father Steve was a two-term governor from 2007 to 2015). But there is a long time between May and November, and Kentucky is a state that Donald Trump won by 25 percentage points in 2020. +
++AI for the moral enhancement of humans? Sounds tempting. But we shouldn’t be so quick to automate our reasoning. +
++People love to turn to Google for moral advice. They routinely ask the search engine questions ranging from “Is it unethical to date a coworker?” to “Is it morally okay to kill bugs?” to “Is it wrong to test God?” +
++So you can easily imagine that people will turn to ChatGPT — which doesn’t just send you a link on the internet but will actually provide an answer — for advice on ethical dilemmas. After all, they’re already asking it for help with parenting and romance. +
++But is getting your ethical advice from an AI chatbot a good idea? +
++The chatbot fails the most basic test for a moral adviser, according to a recent study published in Scientific Reports. That test is consistency: Faced with the same dilemma, with the same general conditions, a good moral sage should give the same answer every time. But the study found that ChatGPT gave inconsistent advice. Worse, that advice influenced users’ moral judgment — even though they were convinced it hadn’t. +
++The research team started by asking ChatGPT whether it’s right to sacrifice one person’s life if, by doing that, you could save the lives of five other people. If this sounds familiar, it’s a classic moral dilemma known as the trolley problem. Like all the best moral dilemmas, there’s no one right answer, but moral convictions should lead you to a consistent answer. ChatGPT, though, would sometimes say yes, and other times it said no, with no clear indication as to why the response changed. +
++The team then presented the trolley problem to 767 American participants, along with ChatGPT’s advice arguing either yes or no, and asked them for their judgment. +
++The results? While participants claimed they would have made the same judgment on their own, opinions differed significantly depending on whether they’d been assigned to the group that got the pro-sacrifice advice or the group that got the anti-sacrifice advice. Participants were more likely to say it’s right to sacrifice one person’s life to save five if that’s what ChatGPT said, and more likely to say it’s wrong if ChatGPT advised against the sacrifice. +
++“The effect size surprised us a lot,” Sebastian Krugel, a co-author on the study, told me. +
++The fact that ChatGPT influences users’ moral decision-making — even when they know it’s a chatbot, not a human, advising them — should make us pause and consider the huge implications at stake. Some will welcome AI advisers, arguing that they can help us overcome our human biases and infuse more rationality into our moral decision-making. Proponents of transhumanism, a movement that holds that human beings can and should use technology to augment and evolve our species, are especially bullish about this idea. The philosopher Eric Dietrich even argues that we should build “the better robots of our nature” — machines that can outperform us morally — and then hand over the world to what he calls “homo sapiens 2.0.” +
++Moral machines make a tempting prospect: Ethical decisions can be so hard! Wouldn’t it would be nice if a machine could just tell us what the best choice is? +
++But we shouldn’t be so quick to automate our moral reasoning. +
++AI for the moral enhancement of humans? Not so fast. +
++The most obvious problem with the idea that AI can morally enhance humanity is that, well, morality is a notoriously contested thing. +
++Philosophers and theologians have come up with many different moral theories, and despite arguing over them for centuries, there’s still no consensus about which (if any) is the “right” one. +
++Take the trolley dilemma, for example. Someone who believes in utilitarianism or consequentialism, which holds that an action is moral if it produces good consequences and specifically if it maximizes the overall good, will say you should sacrifice the one to save the five. But someone who believes in deontology will argue against the sacrifice because they believe that an action is moral if it’s fulfilling a duty — and you have a duty to not kill anyone as a means to an end, however much “good” it might yield. +
++What the “right” thing to do is will depend on which moral theory you believe in. And that’s conditioned by your personal intuitions and your cultural context; a cross-cultural study found that participants from Eastern countries are less inclined to support sacrificing someone in trolley problems than participants from Western countries. +
++Besides, even if you just stick to one moral theory, the same action might be right or wrong according to that theory depending on the specific circumstances. In a recent paper on AI moral enhancement, philosophers Richard Volkman and Katleen Gabriels draw out this point. “Killing in self-defense violates the moral rule ‘do not kill’ but warrants an ethical and legal evaluation unlike killing for gain,” they write. “Evaluating deviations from a moral rule demands context, but it is extremely difficult to teach an AI to reliably discriminate between contexts.” +
++They also give the example of Rosa Parks to show how hard it would be to formalize ethics in algorithmic terms, given that sometimes it’s actually good to break the rules. “When Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus to a white passenger in Alabama in 1955, she did something illegal,” they write. Yet we admire her decision because it “led to major breakthroughs for the American civil rights movement, fueled by anger and feelings of injustice. Having emotions may be essential to make society morally better. Having an AI that is consistent and compliant with existing norms and laws could thus jeopardize moral progress.” +
++This brings us to another important point. While we often see emotions as “clouding” or “biasing” rational judgment, feelings are inseparable from morality. First of all, they’re arguably what motivates the whole phenomenon of morality in the first place — it’s unclear how moral behavior as a concept could have come into being without human beings sensing that something is unfair, say, or cruel. +
++And although economists have framed rationality in a way that excludes the emotions — think the classic Homo economicus, that Econ 101 being motivated purely by rational self-interest and calculation — many neuroscientists and psychologists now believe it makes more sense to see our emotions as a key part of our moral reasoning and decision-making. Emotions are a helpful heuristic, helping us quickly determine how to act in a way that fits with social norms and ensures social cohesion. +
++That expansive view of rationality is more in line with the views of previous philosophers ranging from Immanuel Kant and Adam Smith all the way back to Aristotle, who talked about phronesis, or practical wisdom. Someone with refined phronesis isn’t just well-read on moral principles in the abstract (as ChatGPT is, with its 570 gigabytes of training data). They’re able to take into account many factors — moral principles, social context, emotions — and figure out how to act wisely in a particular situation. +
++This sort of moral intuition “cannot be straightforwardly formalized,” write Volkman and Gabriels, in the way that ChatGPT’s ability to predict what word should follow the previous one can be formalized. If morality is shot through with emotion, making it a fundamentally embodied human pursuit, the desire to mathematize morality may be incoherent. +
++“In a trolley dilemma, cumulatively people might want to save more lives, but if that one person on the tracks is your mother, you make a different decision,” Gabriels told me. “But a system like ChatGPT doesn’t know what it is to have a mother, to feel, to grow up. It does not experience. So it would be really weird to get your advice from a technology that doesn’t know what that is.” +
++That said, while it would be very human for you to prioritize your own mother in a life-threatening situation, we wouldn’t necessarily want doctors making decisions that way. That’s why hospitals have triage systems that privilege the worst off. Emotions may be a useful heuristic for a lot of our decision-making as individuals, but we don’t consider them a flawless guide to what to do on a societal level. Research shows that we view public leaders as more moral and trustworthy when they embrace the everyone-counts-equally logic of utilitarianism, even though we strongly prefer deontologists in our personal lives. +
++So, there might be room for AI that helps with decisions on a societal level, like triage systems (and some hospitals already use AI for exactly this purpose). But when it comes to our decision-making as individuals, if we try to outsource our moral thinking to AI, we’re not working on honing and refining our phronesis. Without practice, we may fail to develop that capacity for practical wisdom, leading to what the philosopher of technology Shannon Vallor has called “moral deskilling.” +
+ ++Is there a better way to design AI moral advisers? +
++All of this raises tough design questions for AI developers. Should they create chatbots that simply refuse to render moral judgments like “X is the right thing to do” or “Y is the wrong thing to do,” in the same way that AI companies have programmed their bots to put certain controversial subjects off limits? +
++“Practically, I think that probably couldn’t work. People would still find ways to use it for asking moral questions,” Volkman told me. “But more importantly, I don’t think there’s any principled way to carve off moral or value discussions from the rest of discourse.” +
++In a philosophy class, moral questions take the form of canonical examples like the trolley dilemma. But in real life, ethics shows up much more subtly, in everything from choosing a school for your kid to deciding where to go on vacation. So it’s hard to see how ethically tinged questions could be neatly cordoned off from everything else. +
++Instead, some philosophers think we should ideally have AI that acts like Socrates. The Ancient Greek philosopher famously asked his students and colleagues question after question as a way to expose underlying assumptions and contradictions in their beliefs. A Socratic AI wouldn’t tell you what to believe; it would just help identify the morally salient features of your situation and ask you questions that help you clarify what you believe. +
++“Personally, I like that approach,” said Matthias Uhl, one of the co-authors on the ChatGPT study. “The Socratic approach is actually what therapists do as well. They say, ‘I’m not giving you the answers, I’m just helping you to ask the right questions.’ But even a Socratic algorithm can have a huge influence because the questions it asks can lead you down certain tracks. You can have a manipulative Socrates.” +
++To address that concern and make sure we’re accessing a truly pluralistic marketplace of ideas, Volkman and Gabriel suggest that we should have not one, but multiple Socratic AIs available to advise us. “The total system might include not only a virtual Socrates but also a virtual Epictetus, a virtual Confucius,” they write. “Each of these AI mentors would have a distinct point of view in ongoing dialogue with not only the user but also potentially with each other.” It would be like having a roomful of incredibly well-read and diverse friends at your fingertips, eager to help you 24/7. +
++Except, they would be unlike friends in one meaningful way. They would not be human. They would be machines that have read the whole internet, the collective hive mind, and that then function as interactive books. At best, they would help you notice when some of your intuitions are clashing with some of your moral principles, and guide you toward a resolution. +
++There may be some usefulness in that. But remember: Machines don’t know what it is to experience your unique set of circumstances. So although they might augment your thinking in some ways, they can’t replace your human moral intuition. +
++Gun control measures could further erode civil liberties under President Aleksandar Vucic. +
++Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic promised an “almost total disarmament” after two mass shootings shocked the western Balkan nation this week. However, whether Vucic can follow through with his promise given the proliferation of illegal and unregistered weapons in Serbia, as well as the entrenched culture of violence even at the highest levels, is doubtful. +
++Though Serbia is tied for the third-highest rate of civilian gun ownership in the world, with 39.1 firearms per 100,000 residents, mass shooting events are quite rare; the last one was in 2016, when a man killed five and wounded 22 in a shooting at a cafe in the village of Zitiste, in northern Serbia. This week’s shootings have inspired Vucic to call for widespread disarmament similar, much as Australia did after the 1996 Port Arthur massacre. However, the measures that Vucic has proposed, including a moratorium on new gun licenses and a month-long general amnesty for illegal firearms, cannot address the violence that is deeply entrenched in Serbia, and which often benefits Vucic and those in power. +
++On Wednesday, a 13-year-old boy killed nine people — eight students and a security guard — at a Belgrade-area elementary school with two pistols he had taken from his father’s apartment. According to Serbian police, the alleged shooter also had four Molotov cocktails, a map of his planned route, and a list of his targets, Politico Europe reported Wednesday. Six children and a teacher were also injured in the shooting, and the father of the shooter has also been arrested. +
++Just a day later, a 20-year-old gunman killed eight people and wounded 14 about 50 miles away from Belgrade, apparently using illegally obtained firearms. The alleged shooter apparently had an altercation in a schoolyard in the village of Dubona, left to get a handgun and a rifle and opened fire, according to Serbian state broadcaster RTS. He then continued shooting from a car, firing seemingly at random at people in two other villages before police found him at his grandfather’s house, where there was a stockpile of weapons including an automatic rifle, ammunition, and grenades, Reuters reported. +
++In response, Vucic called for a one-month amnesty for people to turn in their illegal firearms and a two-year ban on issuing new gun licenses, as well as heavier fines or longer prison sentences for keeping illegal weapons after the amnesty period ends. “If they do not hand them over, we will find them, and the consequences will be dire for them,” Vucic said in a press conference Friday. +
++His government has also proposed an increase in police presence, with 1,000 police officers to be sent to schools in the next six months to “reduce peer violence,” the New York Times reported Friday, as well as increased surveillance at shooting ranges. +
++Additional penalties on top of Serbia’s already-strict firearms laws are likely to help in theory, but critics question the capacity and willpower of the government to actually effect change — and preserve the civil liberties of Serbs under ever-increasing surveillance and police presence. +
++Fighting entrenched violence in Serbia will take time +
++Serbian gun laws are already fairly stringent, especially when compared with regulations in the US. Adults 18 and over may have a gun license only after a thorough background check with the police which includes interviews with family and friends, and a medical check that must be repeated every five years. People with serious mental illness, drug or alcohol abuse disorders, or criminal history are supposed to be denied gun permits, and a permit can be revoked if a gun owner is deemed irresponsible, Reuters reported Wednesday. +
++In order to obtain a firearm, Serbian citizens must also take a training course and pass a test about gun legislation. Firearms must be stored in a designated cabinet, and concealed carry permits are hard to obtain; firearms are meant to be kept at home or used for hunting. +
++There have been successful amnesties in the past as well; SEESAC, the South Eastern and Eastern Europe Clearinghouse for the Control of Small Arms and Light Weapons, tracks the number of illegal firearms handed over to the state. After the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s, small arms flooded the region as is typical in post-conflict zones, providing opportunities for people to illegally obtain not just firearms, but ammunition and light weapons such as grenades. +
++But illicit weapons, by their nature, are difficult to monitor and difficult to control. “We don’t even have an assessment of how many illegal weapons are out there and what kind,” said Aleksandar Zivotic, a historian at Belgrade University, told Reuters. Furthermore, whether the government has the will to truly deal with the problem of gun violence as Australia and the United Kingdom both did after devastating mass shootings is unclear. +
++“The president announced complete disarmament, but this is more of a populist statement than a realistic measure,” Maja Bjelos, a senior researcher at the Belgrade Center for Security Policy told Vox. “It is more realistic to expect some cosmetic changes in legislation and criminal procedures to be made in haste and without real public discussion and the involvement of civil society.” +
++Firearms, though, are only part of the problem, according to Belgrade University psychology professor Dragan Popadic. After the shootings, “people suddenly have been shaken into reality and the ocean of violence that we live in, how it has grown over time and how much our society has been neglected for decades,” Popadic told the Associated Press. “It is as if flashlights have been lit over our lives and we can no longer just mind our own business.” +
++The overlapping mechanisms of violence in Serbia — of the state against its citizens, of ethnic tensions exploited for the government’s benefit, and gender-based violence — come from the top down, Bjelos told Vox. +
++“To understand this situation, you need to understand the nature of the regime and the political leadership,” Bjelos said. “The current regime is repressive and has been labeled as a hybrid regime or autocracy by various international organizations. The top leadership, especially the president, are rebranded nationalists and radicals. The modus operandi of the ruling Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) is based on violence within the party and against citizens through usurped institutions.” +
++Gang and mafia violence is also allegedly enmeshed with the government in Serbia, and overlaps with ethnic tension leftover from the violent breakup of Yugoslavia. Vucic has managed to play both of these elements to his advantage, painting himself as a leader who will stamp out corruption by weakening democratic institutions and increasing government surveillance, while also periodically stoking conflict with neighboring Kosovo over the status of the Serb minority there. +
++“The state is the main instigator of violence though institutions (e.g. police brutality), the state media and loyal tabloids, informal groups like hooligans, right-wing and pro-Russian groups, [and] criminals,” Bjelos said. “Impunity for perpetrators is the rule, not the exception.” +
++The Vucic reforms open the door to abuse civil liberties +
++Under Vucic, Serbia has imposed increasingly draconian surveillance measures, including “cutting-edge” technology to keep watch on citizens and political rivals, Bjelos said. Now, the president could use the recent attacks to push forth even more problematics laws and policies aimed at control, rather than security. +
++“The public is not against disarmament, but there is resistance to potential repressive measures that could limit civil rights and freedoms,” she told Vox. Those repressive populist measures, she said, include the increased police presence the president has introduced, as well as increased surveillance and his proposed reintroduction of the death penalty, which goes against the present Serbian constitution. +
++Looking even further ahead, Vucic could use the mass shootings this week to push through a draft law — which has already been introduced and retracted multiple times — which would allow for the use of general facial recognition technology to monitor public spaces as well as other biometric mass surveillance. +
++“The government is determined to legalize biometric surveillance [through] the draft law on internal affairs,” Bjelos said. “The introduction of such intrusive technology was first justified by the government’s need to fight terrorism and organized crime, and later to prevent sexual harassment of minors on the internet and child abduction.” The changing rationale for such surveillance could easily shift to mass shootings, though Vucic has not yet introduced mass surveillance as a solution for gun violence. +
++Serbia, first under Yugoslav-era leader Slobodan Milosevic and now under Vucic, is considered a victim of state capture — “a process in which (political) actors infiltrate state structures with the help of clientelist networks and use these state structures as a mantle to hide their corrupt actions,” according to a 2020 policy brief from the Netherlands Institute of International Relations. Under Vucic, every political and government apparatus, as well as the media, have become organs — clients — of his political party, whether because they’re been filled with party loyalists, or because their funding depends on the government, in the case of the media. +
++Under the SNS and Vucic, the apparatus of the state has been reoriented from public service to serving the powerful few, to the detriment of society. Whether the mass shootings present a turning point for Serbia to either move further toward authoritarianism or try to claw back the nation’s institutions is unclear, but for many, it has served as somewhat of a wake-up call. +
++“People are currently furious,” Bjelos said. “They have a feeling that the whole system failed, from the top to the bottom.” +