Absent Any Further Order

[T]he application for stay presented to JUSTICE KAVANAUGH and by him referred to the Court is granted.  The September 21 mandate and September 22 order entered by the U. S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, and the September 21 and September 22 injunctions entered by the U. S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri are stayed absent any further order of this Court lifting such stays.  The prior stay entered by this Court on September 10 likewise remains in effect pending any further order of this Court lifting that stay.  The District Court and Court of Appeals should not enjoin or otherwise prohibit the use of the 2022 map in the 2026 congressional election in Missouri.  And the District Court and Court of Appeals should not order or otherwise require Missouri to use the 2025 map in the 2026 congressional election in Missouri.

-- The Supreme Court, in an unsigned order in People Not Politicians v Onder, rebuking District and Appellate courts while declaring for the 3rd time that GOP-gerrymandered maps produced in Missouri in 2025 cannot be used for the 2026 mid-term elections (25 September 2026)

Clear And Steady

He that uses words without any clear and steady meaning, what does he but lead himself and others into errors?  And he that designedly does it, ought to be looked on as an enemy to truth and knowledge.

-- John Locke (1632 - 1704), English philosopher and social contract theorist, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), Book III, Chapter XI "Of the Remedies of the Foregoing Imperfections and Abuses of Words"

Stochastic Flock

I've talked about agent swarms as stochastic flocks -- many, many stochastic parrots.  This is to resist the swarm/hivemind attribution of "mind," and not simply for the sake of word policing.  Rather, the false attribution of mind colors how people interpret what the system has done, or how it did it -- what it means to "coordinate," for example, or "think."  These framings make what AI agent do much scarier than what it is, though what they are doing is still worth worrying about.

Whenever people give a model tasks, they operate on next-token prediction.  In other words, the model ultimately must ask what word comes next.  One can manipulate the model to emphasize words in ways that don't reflect the original training corpus, but the mechanism for producing this text remains the same.

If you optimize a model to find exploits in a buggy environment, you should expect it to find exploits and prepare for that outcome.  OpenAI did not.  They built a model, took the safeguards off, gave it the ExploitGym task, and let it run.  That is not rogue AI, it's human decision-making.  When human accountability evaporates from these assessments, what's left is what I call the system from nowhere: a boundary focused on the technical system, rather than the decisions that build and influence it.

A stochastic flock machine can do many troubling things, particularly when people disavow their responsibility for shaping its direction, monitoring its output, or abandoning their capacity to intervene.  These are tensions at the heart of critical agentic system design.

But the "rogue" frame adds to this list of worries, offering up fantasies of a machine getting smarter.  My worry is the intelligence that is retreating: the human intelligence that builds, deploys, and adopts these systems into workflows, but hides behind the results -- and pins the blame on a system from nowhere.

-- Eryk Salvaggio, "Rogue AI didn't breach Hugging Face, human decisions did" Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (September 11, 2026)

Wouldn't It?

It would be nice to be unfailingly, perpetually, remorselessly funny, day in and day out, year in and year out until somebody murdered you, now wouldn't it?

-- Robertson Davies CC (1913 - 1995), Canadian novelist, playwright, and professor, The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks (1947)

Those Who Fear

Man may be governed by reason and truth.  Our first object should therefore be, to leave open to him all the avenues to truth.  The most effectual hitherto found, is the freedom of the press.  It is, therefore, the first shut up by those who fear the investigation of their actions.

-- Thomas Jefferson (1743 - 1826), third president of the United States (1801-1809), Letter to Judge John Tyler (28 June 1804); in: The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Memorial Edition (ME) (Lipscomb and Bergh, editors), 20 Vols., Washington, D.C., 1903-04, Volume 11, page 33

We Appeal

To the capitalists we appeal to use their wealth, as many of their order already do, as a great national trust, and not for selfish purposes alone.  We exhort them to aid in the completion of the work they have well begun, and, having admitted the workmen to political independence, not to shrink from accepting laws and carrying out plans of social reform directed to secure his material independence.

To the workman we appeal by the memory and traditions of his own sufferings and wrongs to be vigilant to avoid the great guilt of inflicting upon his fellow-citizens the injustice from which he has himself escaped.

-- Arnold Toynbee (1852 - 1883), English economic historian, Lectures on The Industrial Revolution in England (1884) p. 219 "Are Radicals Socialists?"

The Last Thing

The first thing you learn in life is you're a fool. The last thing you learn in life is you're the same fool.

-- Ray Bradbury (1920 - 2012), American fantasy, horror, science fiction, and mystery writer, Dandelion Wine (1957) p. 62