The End of the World as Musk Knows It

Elon (“10-Gallon”) Musk on a mission to solve the border crisis, his latest step toward world domination.

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It’s hard to keep up with the strange things that now happen as a matter of course.

Just following the most recently reported exploits of the horror movie star who is Elon Musk is too much for me. He’s received approval for testing electronic gadgets inside human brains. He turned off his satellites to keep Ukraine from putting a dent in Russia’s navy. He’s getting ready to charge all the users of Twitter or the X Factor or whatever it’s called now. He got Amber Heard to dress up like a cosplay slut.

Musk ex-girlfriend Amber Heard costumed as “Overwatch” character Mercy. Musk recently released the photo so people would know it really happened. Heard said he wasn’t authorized to use the photo. I wasn’t, either.

Musk invited Hungarian President Katalin Novak to Austin to highlight the perils of the low white-people birth rate. Musk seems to be America’s loudest voice on the issue. 

Musk has reportedly done his part, siring 11 children from various sources, including those named X Æ A-12, Exa and Techno Mechanicus.

Elon Musk carrying his son X A E A-12 while entertaining Hungarian President Katalin Novak. (photo X-d by Novak)

Novak is the puppet of baby-loving Hungarian dictator Viktor Orban, but she crossed him up last spring when she vetoed one of his favorite bills. It would have helped anonymous whistle-blowers rat on same-sex couples. 

Orban really, really dislikes the gays.

Musk also hung out with Benjamin Netanyahu, discussing who knows what.

He said they were chatting about artificial intelligence, which he has remarked will likely lead to the extinction of human life on Earth.

He ought to know. He’s created his own AI arsenal, to add to the other disquieting things he does.

AI’s most foreboding prospect isn’t robots taking over the world. It involves Musk himself, in a way.

The age of AI will leave us even more confused about the ambiguities that define him and other powerful but unpredictable people. Then they will take over the world, not the robots. 

The robots might be better. At least they’re logical.

We’re lucky that currently, we know at least some of the perplexing things about the Muskrat and his pals because we read about them. Our sources of news, significantly reduced in power as they are, remain at least marginally capable of telling us what’s important about some of it.

For one thing, they explained that Musk didn’t ask for advice from the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense or the President about the satellite naval battle stuff. Instead, he asked the Russians.

Would they be real peeved if his satellites helped the Ukrainians sink their ships? And the Russkies said, Yes, we would! Better not let it happen! So Elon Muskovite didn’t.

If you want to know about things like this in the future, don’t depend on it. When it comes to muscular journalism, it’s soon to be extremely rare because of galloping improvements in AI, which will, unless prevented, largely take over the news business.

Don’t believe me, right? The concerns about AI in journalism are overblown, right?

You know this because you read it. In an article published by a corporation currently licking its chops at the prospect of saving big money on its news operations. 

Cutting journalism budgets to the quick is not a new concept. 

Thirty years ago, I worked for a newspaper owned by so-called “press baron” Conrad Black, and run for him by a prince of darkness named David Radler. Radler confidently intoned that the ideal newspaper office was “a three-man newsroom – one journalist and two advertising salesmen.”

And that’s largely what he did, though he cut the ad reps, too. Fewer people can always be made to each sell more, can’t they?

They could never sell enough for Black and Radler, so greedy that they went to prison for stealing carloads of money from the Sun-Times Media Group and The Daily Telegraph of London. When Radler got out of the joint, he went back to running newspapers. Black was much in demand for advice about how to do it. 

Conrad Black published a memoir in 2012, the year he was released from prison on a fraud sentence. He maintained stealing was just good business. He also wrote a biography of Donald Trump. Trump pardoned him.

They and most other people who own newspapers (and what passes for them nowadays) have always carved away personnel and infrastructure so they can make the traditional 20% annual return on investment. They were still getting it for a few years after the Internet cut the legs out from under the printing presses. They want it again.

You’re not reading the screed of an ink-stained wretch crying over never being able to make good money in journalism again. That ship sailed without me a long time ago. 

I’m just a chump who watched the owners of news outfits try computerized news writing decades ago, when algorithms were leagues away from being capable. Just the idea of it made them drool so much they had to try.

I have also seen American news organizations send videotapes of local public meetings to Manila, where starving Filipinos watched them, then sent back stories they’d written about what they think had happened. 

I have seen reporters given areas of responsibility five times what they had the day before, and then tenfold a few months later.

“I understand if you don’t want to do it, but you should understand that we have people lined up to take your place.”

And they're telling this to reporters who have been trained as professional tattletales. They don’t care. They want the stockholders to get a thrill seeing somebody plowing up the bottom line.

The big-time organizations aren’t immune. Maybe you noticed that The New York Times has just outsourced all of its sports coverage.

I was employed by that storied company a few decades ago, when it was making money hand over fist. But I sent my work product to the main office via Teletype, the same cumbersome technology my mother had used to transmit U.S. Navy orders 40 years before. Even in World War II, it was outmoded and susceptible to horrifying error.

No error is horrifying anymore. The public has been accustomed to constant mistakes of various types because everybody with a laptop can try to produce internet news and earn advertising money.

For every legit news organization on the net, there must be 10 others that publish copy that appears to be produced by third-graders. Heart-breakingly, it can be hard to tell which are which.

I defy you to find, on any day you choose, two news stories that don’t seem like they were copyedited by something simian. And it's distressingly easy to find an error in a headline. People used to get fired for screwing up a headline.

Alan Solomon Facebook photo

But that’s all small stuff. More compelling: Most of what used to be covered well by competing journals isn’t covered at all by anybody anymore. And the big stories? Most of those articles don’t question the premise of the activities they’re supposed to be describing. Many of those who do, do it badly.

Part of the reason is the public doesn’t need to wait for the next edition to roll off the presses, and the diligence of journalists that accompanies that delay. We all expect the first version of history to be ready in five minutes.

There will come a time, and it won’t be long, when an editor at a legacy newspaper, or somebody who is sort of like an editor, will feed a government press release into a software maw. A story will come out the aft end in a fraction of a second. It will be peppered with additions from other press releases and a smidgen of actual reporting, maybe from the pre-AI past.

As days go by, that minimal journalistic content will become outdated. The editor may or may not notice. It won’t matter much, because eventually, the software will contentedly just use its own past to reflect upon the present, and the future, too. And on and on.

The software will get better and better, but, of course, better only in the ways it can. But the best software will not necessarily be employed to cobble together what you read. That will likely be seen as too expensive.

In my local experience, the decision-makers at both the Sun-Times and Tribune rarely bought the word-processing or photo-editing software they used. They “tested” them, supposedly preparatory to purchase. When they came to the end of the trial periods, they just tested something else.

The scariest part of cold, heartless AI taking over news isn’t necessarily that it will do it too efficiently. It’s just as likely that the same old beancounters will make sure it doesn’t.