Please try the URL privacy information feature enabled by clicking the flashlight icon above. This will reveal two icons after each link the body of the digest. The shield takes you to a breakdown of Terms of Service for the site - however only a small number of sites are covered at the moment. The flashlight take you to an analysis of the various trackers etc. that the linked site delivers. Please let the website maintainer know if you find this useful or not. As a RISKS reader, you will probably not be surprised by what is revealed…
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/11/opinion/driverless-cars-san-francisco.html In San Francisco this month, a woman suffered traumatic injuries from being struck by a driver and thrown into the path of one of hundreds of self-driving cars roaming the city's streets. San Francisco's fire chief, Jeanine Nicholson, recently testified that as of August, autonomous vehicles interfered with firefighting duties 55 times this year. Tesla's autopilot software, a driver-assistance system, has been involved in 736 crashes and 17 fatalities nationwide since 2019. For all the ballyhoo over the possibility of artificial intelligence threatening humanity someday, there's remarkably little discussion of the ways it is threatening humanity right now. When it comes to self-driving cars, we are driving blind.
Two planes were moments from colliding in Texas, a harrowing example of the country's fraying air-safety system, a *New York Times* investigation found. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/11/business/air-traffic-control-austin-airport-fedex-southwest.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2023/10/10/austin-near-miss-military-private-jet/
Israel’s military and espionage services are considered among the world's
best, but on Saturday, operational and intelligence failures led to the
worst breach of Israeli defenses in half a century.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/10/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-security-failure.html
[This is way beyond the ability of RISKS to encompass. See
* Thomas Friedman, This Hamas-Israeli Fight Will Send Shock Waves
Far Away, NYTimes opinion, 9 Oct 2023
[Almost Everything is Interrelated. PGN]
* Bret Stephens, The Yom Kippur War Led to Peace. This One Can. too.
NYTimes opinion, 9 Oct 2023
* The Editorial Board, The Attack on Israel Demands Unity and Resolve,
10 Oct 2023
* Thomas Friedman, Israel Has Never Needed to be Smarter Than Now,
NYTimes opinion, 11 Oct 2023
* The Anti-Israel Left Needs to Take a Hard Look at Itself
NYTimes opinion, 11 Oct 2023
PGN]
Scott Pelley didn’t exactly do his homework Scott Pelley: Does humanity know what it's doing? Geoffrey Hinton: No. Gary Marcus: I tend to agree. When it comes to AI in particular, we are getting way ahead of our skis, rushing forward a technology we don’t fully understand. For all the differences we have had over the years, I salute you for speaking out. Geoffrey Hinton: I think we're moving into a period when for the first time ever we may have things more intelligent than us. Scott Pelley: You believe they can understand? Geoffrey Hinton: Yes. Scott Pelley: You believe they are intelligent? Geoffrey Hinton: Yes. Gary Marcus: As it happens I sharply disagree with all three of the points Geoff just made. To be sure, it’s all partly definitional. But I don’t we are all that close to machines that are more intelligent than us, I don’t think they really understand the things that they say, and I don’t think they are intelligent in the sense of being able to adaptively and flexibly reason about things they haven’t encountered before, in a reliable way. What Geoff has left out is any reference to all of the colossally stupid and ungrounded things generative AI systems do routinely, like fabricating the other night that Liz Cheney had replaced Kevin McCarthy as Speaker, by 220-215 vote that never happened, or learning that Tom Cruise's is the son of Mary Pfeiffer and yet not being able to infer that Mary Pfeiffer is Tom Cruise’s mother, or claiming that two pounds of feathers weigh less than one pound of bricks. Geoff himself wrote a classic paper about trying to get neural networks to infer family relationships, almost forty years ago; it’s embarrassing to see these systems still struggle on such basic problems. Since they can’t reliably solve them, I don’t think we should attribute "understanding” to them, at least not in any remotely deep sense of the word understanding. Emily Bender and Timnit Gebru have called these systems “stochastic parrots”, which in my view is a little unkind to parrots -“ but also vividly captures something real: a lot of what we are seeing now is a kind of unreliable mimicry. I really wish you could have addressed both the question of mimicry and of reliability. (Maybe next time?) I don’t see how you can call an agent with such a loose grip on reality all that intelligent, nor how you can simply ignore the role of mimicry in all this. https://open.substack.com/pub/garymarcus/p/what-was-60-minutes-thinking-in-that
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/your-medical-devices-are-getting-smarter-can-the-fda-keep-up-acc182e8?mod=tech_lead_story (use https://history-computer.com/how-to-read-articles-behind-a-paywall/ to bypass paywall). The WSJ's headline is oxymoronic. The FDA is attempting to adapt medical device regulations to accommodate AI's ability to learn and, thereby, improve patient outcomes by evolving device capabilities without re-qualification processes as traditional practiced. The medical industrial complex's adoption of AI promotes extractive profit while compromising improved patient outcome experience, a recipe to accelerate consumer brand outrage and trust erosion. Medical device safety is an important FDA mission objective, but annual medical device reporting (MDR) for popular implanted devices are disturbing for at least two reasons: (1) The product code report densities, which aggregate MDRs for similar devices among manufacturers, tend to grow each year. These increments usually indicate greater deployment; and, (2) aggregate device implantation numbers are NOT published annually, but MDRs are required. Informed consumer device comparisons are impossible. We know the equivalent of "product defect escapes," but not the total number of deployed devices. Read too many inappropriate shock, accelerated battery depletion, and defibrillator over-sensing MDRs and a suspicion arises: black-box AI will NOT favorably impact patient outcome expectations. False negative/positive event density and under-performing device area under curve (AUC) values will harm patient quality of life. AI can't detect if a defibrillator electrode cauterized after implantation. Electrode fracture? Could it learn enough to automatically (and safely) adjust amplifier gain without human inspection of the ECG waveform? Can AI tell if a defibrillator electrode dislodged? Patient syncope? Pericarditis? Sanitize AI training datasets bias, strengthen corporate governance accountability by limiting indemnification privileges for medical device CxOs and boards, and apply and rigorously enforce NIST SP 800-53 control families to manufacturer's SDLC to yield greater patient benefit and build brand trust. Suppress defect escape. Spare consumers from the hackneyed "AI-enhanced, smart defibrillator" TV advertisements. Softw are toxic waste is neither smart nor enhanced. What follows are CSV records extracted from the FDA's TPLC (Total Product Life Cycle) platform from 01JAN2020 to 30SEP2023 for "top-10" device and product MDRs on product codes LYJ, LWS, and DXY. See https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/c fTPLC/tplc.cfm and set the Year to 2020 and populate the Product Code to retrieve the records below. Device: Stimulator, autonomic nerve, implanted for epilepsy Product Code: LYJ MDR Year,MDR Reports,MDR Events 2020,1688,1688 2021,1764,1764 2022,1584,1584 2023,1327,1327 Device Problems,MDRs with this Device Problem,Events in those MDRs Adverse Event Without Identified Device or Use Problem,3447,3447 Fracture,1396,1396 High impedance,691,691 Low impedance,177,177 Premature Discharge of Battery,159,159 Naturally Worn,140,140 Device Contamination with Body Fluid,138,138 Corroded,99,99 False Alarm,82,82 Premature End-of-Life Indicator,79,79 No Clinical Signs, Symptoms or Conditions,1891,1891 Convulsion, Clonic,1172,1172 No Known Impact Or Consequence To Patient,706,706 Seizures,496,496 Post Operative Wound Infection,312,312 Appropriate Clinical Signs, Symptoms, Conditions Term / Code Not Available,257,257 Unspecified Infection,172,172 Implant Pain,169,169 Neck Pain,161,161 Paralysis,144,144 Device: Implantable pacemaker pulse-generator Product Code: DXY MDR Year,MDR Reports,MDR Events 2020,546,546 2021,560,560 2022,784,784 2023,688,688 Device Problems,MDRs with this Device Problem,Events in those MDRs Adverse Event Without Identified Device or Use Problem,511,511 Premature Discharge of Battery,249,249 Over-Sensing,248,248 Failure to Interrogate,138,138 Pacing Problem,134,134 Pacemaker Found in Back-Up Mode,131,131 Failure to Capture,123,123 Signal Artifact/Noise,111,111 High Capture Threshold,111,111 Under-Sensing,100,100 Patient Problems,MDRs with this Patient Problem,Events in those MDRs No Clinical Signs Symptoms or Conditions,1244,1244 Unspecified Infection,320,320 No Known Impact Or Consequence To Patient,199,199 Insufficient Information,181,181 No Consequences Or Impact To Patient,123,123 Shock from Patient Lead(s),77,77 Arrhythmia,63,63 Syncope/Fainting,59,59 Discomfort,33,33 Device: Implantable cardioverter defibrillator (non-crt) Product Code: LWS Definition: These devices treat tachycardia (fast heartbeats) with RV defibrillation therapy as necessary. MDR Year,MDR Reports,MDR Events 2020,16910,16910 2021,19659,19659 2022,23463,23463 2023,22052,22052 Device Problems,MDRs with this Device Problem,Events in those MDRs Over-Sensing,18722,18722 Premature Discharge of Battery,13154,13154 High impedance,12928,12928 Adverse Event Without Identified Device or Use Problem,12535,12535 Inappropriate/Inadequate Shock/Stimulation,10956,10956 Signal Artifact/Noise,10003,10003 Fracture,5760,5760 Impedance Problem,4502,4502 Battery Problem,4397,4397 High Capture Threshold,4255,4255 Patient Problems,MDRs with this Patient Problem,Events in those MDRs No Clinical Signs, Symptoms or Conditions,42509,42509 Unspecified Infection,10309,10309 Electric Shock,6623,6623 No Known Impact Or Consequence To Patient,5189,5189 No Consequences Or Impact To Patient,4556,4556 Shock from Patient Lead(s),3538,3538 Insufficient Information,3370,3370 No Code Available,3335,3335 Sepsis,1619,1619 Pocket Erosion,885,885
Gian Volpicelli (with Mark Scott contributing), POLITICO Europe, 9 Oct 2023 For fans of democracy, the rise of super-charged generative artificial intelligence couldn't have come at a worse time. The United States, European Union parliament, United Kingdom, Poland, the Netherlands and potentially Ukraine will all hold elections in the next 16 months. Those working to keep election integrity intact are warily eyeing the advent of generative AI as a way to stoke up already heavily polarized political debates, threats of foreign influence and fake news. For years, AI tools capable of forging convincing images, audio and videos of existing individuals—so-called deepfakes - have drawn warnings of what havoc such an arsenal could wreak in the hands of disinformation peddlers.But it wasn't until advanced AI models - like text-creating ChatGPT and image-conjuring DALL-E-2—became widely available in late 2022 that the danger became palpable. "The combination of AI and disinformation is the nightmare," the European Commission's digital honcho V=ECra Jourov=E1 said at the end of September when discussing the EU's code of practice on online disinformation. Henry Adjer, a visiting researcher at the University of Cambridge specializing in deepfakes, said "these [AI] applications were previously prohibitively expensive or difficult to access for an everyday person. Now they're in consumer-facing apps, on websites, often free or very cheap," Adjer said. With generative AI, falsehoods can be churned out quickly, convincingly and at scale. A new generation of AI-powered disinformation is expected to worsen existing societal divisions that have made many voters more polarized than ever before. Last month's Slovak election, which handed a victory to populist Robert Fico, gave an early taste of the confusion AI-generated disinformation could sow. Two eleventh-hour audio clips circulating online purportedly revealed Liberal politician Michal =A9ime=E8ka discussing how he planned to rig the election and hatching plans to—God forbid—increase the price of beer. Slovak fact-checkers attempted to verify the clips' authenticity and eventually concluded they were likely created via AI. By the time they'd reached that conclusion, the clips had already been shared thousands of times. In Poland, which goes to the polls on October 15, centrist opposition party Civic Platform has been criticized for an attack ad on X mixing real footage of right-wing Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki with AI-generated clips of his voice. (Civic Platform flagged that the ad contained AI content in a separate post.) Similarly, U.S. Republican presidential hopeful, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, ran an ad where real pictures of his rival Donald Trump and his pandemic-era health care adviser Anthony Fauci appeared side by side with AI-generated photos of Trump and Fauci hugging and kissing. It's happening outside of Europe and the U.S. too. In Sudan, AI-made audio clips went viral on TikTok. In Venezuela, state media outlets have used software from U.K.-based firm Synthesia to create clips of nonexistent Western journalists praising the country's economic performance. "There are 60 of our 70 countries in which we found an example of the use of generative AI to manipulate political social information," said Allie Funk, a research director at nonprofit Freedom House, which this month published a report<https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-net/2023/repressive-power-artificial-intelligence> on AI's nefarious effects on democracy. Platforms such as TikTok and Google have recently instituted policies to restrict or stave off AI-generated content, with Google requiring the disclosure of AI use in political ads. Funk, however, was careful not to call generative AI "a game changer." While deepfake-detection tools are imperfect and online platforms are struggling to quickly root out AI-generated falsehoods, none of the cases witnessed so far have had a significant electoral influence. But others warned the speed, ease and wide availability of the booming generative AI models is moving the needle for election integrity. Especially when it comes to conversational bots able to create high-quality text. "These technologies will allow you to scale up 'friendships' in a new way," said Carl Miller, a researcher at the Demos think tank. "Imagine you could build thousands of parallel, meaningful conversations with a target audience, where you don't just spam disinformation, but very gently introduce false ideas."
Amid concerns the rise of artificial intelligence will supercharge the spread of misinformation comes a wild fabrication from a more prosaic source: Amazon's Alexa, which declared that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. Asked about fraud in the race—in which President Biden defeated former president Donald Trump with 306 electoral college votes—the popular voice assistant said it was stolen by a massive amount of election fraud, citing Rumble, a video-streaming service favored by conservatives. The 2020 races were “notorious for many incidents of irregularities and indications pointing to electoral fraud taking place in major metro centers,'' according to Alexa, referencing Substack, a subscription newsletter service. Alexa contended that Trump won Pennsylvania, citing Can Alexa answers contributor. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/10/07/amazon-alexa-news-2020-election-misinformation/ [Risks? As I noted recently, we have completely lost the sense of ground truth, and there seems to be no path back to sanity. Once again, the truthiness has been exposed: No Virginia, There is No Sanity Clause. PGN]
The edited White House news release has sparked false headlines that rose to the top of Google search results. https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/verified-accounts-spread-fake-news-release-biden-8-billion-aid-package-rcna119372
On 6 Oct 2023, the FAA proposed a new airworthiness directive requiring operators of thousands of aircraft to update Garmin autopilot software to address a flaw causing the autopilot to make unintended flight-control According to the agency, the AD was issued in response to an incident involving an F33A Bonanza experiencing “an un-commanded automatic pitch trim runaway when the autopilot was first engaged.” The proposed rule states: “The affected autopilot system software does not properly handle certain hardware failures of the pitch trim servo. This could result in an automatic uncommanded pitch trim runaway and loss of control of the airplane.” https://www.avweb.com/aviation-news/ad-mandates-garmin-autopilot-software-fix/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2023/tesla-autopilot-crash-analysis/?utm_source=alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=wp_news_alert_revere&location=alert Risks? People spewing blame in all directions, calling the analysis a hit job by *The Post*, slamming them for rehashing old news, etc. Plus blaming the truck driver. And defending Tesla, saying that driver shouldn't have engaged full self-driving. Well, yeah—but car shouldn't have allowed doing it on road it wasn't meant for. And saying that it's OK for a couple people to be killed using it as long as overall it's alleged to be safer than human driving. One risk *not* addressed in article is sides of such trailers lacking protection against cars running under as the Tesla did. And traveling 70 mph I'm not sure what's sometimes added for that protection would have let the driver survive.
https://www.npr.org/2023/10/11/1204822946/facial-recognition-search-engine-ai-pim-eyes-google Imagine strolling down a busy city street and snapping a photo of a stranger then uploading it into a search engine that almost instantaneously helps you identify the person. This isn't a hypothetical. It's possible now, thanks to a website called PimEyes, considered one of the most powerful publicly available facial recognition tools online.
Cameras, cops and paranoia: How Amazon’s surveillance network alters L.A. neighborhoods https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2023-10-11/cameras-cops-and-paranoia-how-amazons-surveillance-network-alters-l-a-neighborhoods
At MWC Las Vegas, telecom industry execs suggested ways to pull out of a tech deployment parking lot. Connected cars as a trailing indicator The program opened with TechInsights analyst Roger Lanctot outlining the box that automakers have put themselves in by sticking with LTE -” by that research firm's estimates, 5G won't show up on most new light-duty vehicles produced until 2027. And that looked optimistic compared to Qualcomm's estimate of 2028 for 5G to cross 50%, as shared by product-management VP Jeff Arnold in a later talk Thursday. "If an automaker, I can do most of the applications we're talking about with LTE," Lanctot said. But while that's been cheaper in the short run, over the long term it will yield vehicles left offline, a risk carmakers should know from the forced retirement of GM's first-generation, AMPS-only OnStar system: "LTE ain't gonna be around for 15-20 years." https://www.lightreading.com/5g/connected-cars-dirty-little-secret-they-re-the- trailing-edge-of-5g-adoption
Terrific idea! How come it's taken this long for a utility to utilize the advantages of a *distributed* power system to reduce the need for long-distance power transmission? I'm still waiting for one of the cellphone companies to start paying homeowners to put nano cellsites on their roofs in order to avoid having to build stand-alone cellsites/towers. Vermont Utility Plans to End Outages by Giving Customers Batteries Ivan Penn, 9 Oct 2023 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/09/business/energy-environment/green-mountain-h ome-batteries.html Many electric utilities are putting up lots of new power lines as they rely more on renewable energy and try to make grids more resilient in bad weather. But a Vermont utility is proposing a very different approach: It wants to install batteries at most homes to make sure its customers never go without electricity. The company, Green Mountain Power, proposed buying batteries, burying power lines and strengthening overhead cables in a filing with state regulators on Monday. It said its plan would be cheaper than building a lot of new lines and power plants. The plan is a big departure from how U.S. utilities normally do business. Most of them make money by building and operating power lines that deliver electricity from natural gas power plants or wind and solar farms to homes and businesses. Green Mountain--a relatively small utility serving 270,000 homes and businesses--would still use that infrastructure but build less of it by investing in television-size batteries that homeowners usually buy on their own. "Call us the un-utility," Mari McClure, Green Mountain's chief executive, said in an interview before the company's filing. "We're completely flipping the model, decentralizing it." Like many places, Vermont has been hit hard this year by extreme weather linked to climate change. Half a dozen severe storms, including major floods in July, have caused power outages and damaged homes and other buildings. Those calamities and concerns about the rising cost of electricity helped shape Green Mountain's proposal, Ms. McClure said. As the company ran the numbers, it realized that paying recovery costs and building more power lines to improve its system would cost a lot more and take a lot longer than equipping homes with batteries. Green Mountain's plan builds on a program it has run since 2015 to lease Tesla home batteries to customers. Its filing asks the Vermont Public Utility Commission to authorize it to initially spend $280 million to strengthen its grid and buy batteries, which will come from various manufacturers. The company expects to invest an estimated $1.5 billion over the next seven years--money that it would recoup through electricity rates. The utility said the investment was justified by the growing sum it had to spend on storm recovery and to trim and remove trees around its power lines. The utility said it would continue offering battery leases to customers who want them sooner. It will take until 2030 for the company to install batteries at most homes under its new plan if regulators approve it. Green Mountain says its goal to do away with power outages will be realized by that year, meaning customers would always have enough electricity to use lights, refrigerators and other essentials. "We don't want the power to be off for our customers ever," Ms. McClure said. "People's lives are on the line. That is ultimately at the heart of why we're doing what we're trying to do."
Google continues to push ahead with its ill-advised scheme to force passkeys on users who do not understand their risks, and will try push all users into this flawed system starting imminently. In my discussions with Google on this matter (I have chatted multiple times with the Googler in charge of this), they have admitted that their implementation, by depending completely on device authentication security which for many users is extremely weak, will put many users at risk of their Google accounts being compromised. However, they feel that overall this will be an improvement for users who have strong authentication on their devices. And as for ordinary people who already are left behind by Google when something goes wrong? They'll get the shaft again. Google has ALWAYS operated on this basis—if you don't fit into their majority silos, they just don't care. Another way for Google users to get locked out of their accounts and lose all their data, with no useful help from Google. With Google's deficient passkey system implementation—they refuse to consider an additional authentication layer for protection—anyone who has authenticated access to your device (that includes the creep that watched you access your phone in that bar before he stole it) will have full and unrestricted access to your Google passkeys and accounts on the same basis. And when you're locked out, don't complain to Google, because they'll just say that you're not the user they're interested in. "Thank you for choosing Google." [and then the next day: More on Google passkeys To be clear, there's nothing inherently wrong with the concept of passkeys -- IF implemented properly. The problem is that Google's specific implementation sucks so badly and puts so many users at risk, and that combined with their horrific account recovery procedures that 1qlock so many innocent users away from their data permanently, is a recipe for many already disadvantaged non-techie users to be even further shafted. -L
The targeting came as Vietnamese and American diplomats were negotiating a major cooperation agreement intended to counter growing Chinese influence in the region. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/10/09/vietnam-predator-hack-investigation/
https://www.engadget.com/californias-right-to-repair-bill-is-now-californias-right-to-repair-law-232526782.html
[Monty also noted: California's newest law will make it easier to
delete personal online data
https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/11/23912548/california-delete-act-personal-data-single-request-online-data-brokers
PGN]
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-10-04/airbnb-guest-refuse-pay-leave-luxury-rental
The warning uses language copied from a previous faux warning that was spread following earthquakes in Morocco. https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/misinformation/whatsapp-says-warnings-cyberattack-targeting-jewish-people-are-baseles-rcna119463
The same chaotic day FTX declared bankruptcy, someone began stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from its coffers. A WIRED investigation reveals the company's “very crazy night” trying to stop them. By the evening of 11 Nov 2023 , FTX's staff had already endured one of the worst days in the company's short life. What had recently been one of the world's top cryptocurrency exchanges, valued at $32 billion only 10 months earlier, had just declared bankruptcy. Executives had, after an extended struggle, persuaded the company's CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried, to hand over the reins to John Ray III, a new chief executive now tasked with shepherding the company through a nightmarish thicket of debts, many of which it seemed to have no means to pay. FTX had, it seemed, hit rock bottom. Until someone—a thief or thieves who have yet to be identified -” chose that particular moment to make things far worse. That Friday evening, exhausted FTX staffers began to see mysterious outflows of the company's cryptocurrency, publicly captured on the Etherscan website that tracks the Ethereum blockchain, representing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of crypto being stolen in real time. “Holy sh*t,” one former FTX staffer, who asked not to be named because they weren't authorized to speak about internal company matters, remembers thinking. “After all this, we’re being hacked?” According to its own accounting, FTX would ultimately lose between $415 million and $432 million worth of its cryptocurrency holdings to those unidentifie thieves, numbers it has publicly confirmed as part of its bankruptcy process. What FTX hasn't previously revealed is how close it may have come to losing vastly more—how its staff and outside consultants raced to move more than $1 billion worth of crypto to more secure storage before it could be stolen by the malevolent presence on its network—even, at one point, scrambling to send close to half a billion dollars to a physical USB drive in one consultant's office in an effort to keep it out of the thieves' hands. https://www.wired.com/story/ftx-1-billion-crypto-heist/
As Mark Twain famously wrote: "Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't."*--Following the Equator*, Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar False news is carefully crafted to be titilating and to spread quickly while also promoting a particular political viewpoint. True news is carefully selected to be titilating and to spread quickly while also promoting a particular political viewpoint. But false news is crafted from the set of all plausible news stories, while true news is selected from the set of events which actually happened. This latter set is much smaller than the former, which explains why the false news spreads faster than the truth: it is easier to craft spreadable false news than to select spreadable true news. Truth is not an advantageous trait in news stories. This research seems to be empirical confirmation of Alvin Plantinga's "evolutionary argument against naturalism". Plantinga's argument is that natural selection does not directly select for true beliefs, but rather for advantageous behaviours: truth is not an advantageous trait. This means that the probability that our minds are reliable under a conjunction of philosophical naturalism and naturalistic evolution is low or inscrutable. Therefore, to assert that naturalistic evolution is true also asserts that one has a low or unknown probability of being right. Therefore, naturalism is self-defeating.
We had a solar electric system installed on our roof late in 2022. Having read about problems transferring leases and realizing that we might not live in our house to see the end of a lease (we are both in our 80s), I decided we should buy the system instead of leasing it. We chose solar electric, not out of a concern for the environment nor to save money on our electric bills. Instead, we chose it because our declining health requires us to have medical equipment operating on electricity, 24/7 for my wife and while I am sleeping. Southern California Edison (SoCalEd), however, might fail several times a year, summer or winter with no regard for the weather. Sometimes the failure lasts less than 5 minutes; sometimes it lasts several hours. Thus, we included a 12-hour backup battery in the installation. The only problem with the installation was that the backup battery was the primary source of electricity at night even when SoCalEd was available. This drained the battery. This year, we bought an electric automobile and had a different contractor install a charging station. I told that contractor about the battery problem, which they fixed in less than 24 hours with no extra charge. I monitor the performance of the system through a Web site owned by SolarEdge, which supplies solar electric equipment but does not do installations. SolarEdge supplied some of the equipment in my system but not all. Not being an installer or a lessor, I feel comfortable trusting the validity of what I see on SolarEdge's Web site. It indicates that so far in 2023, I have exported about three times more electricity to SoCalEd than I have imported. Interestingly, charging my EV on a day with intense sunshine requires me to import some of the electricity. On the other hand, I am exporting electricity while our central air-conditioner maintains an inside temperature of 78 while the outside temperature is over 100.
I wonder if Google finds some of its "roads" by algorithmically interpreting Google Maps air photos. I frequently see railways and pedestrian/bicycle trails on abandoned railways overprinted with a grey line suggesting a road.
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