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Forget About "Who elected Musk?" -- Soon we'll need to ask "Who elected Grok?" [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-02-05
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Announcing Grok Grok is an AI modeled after the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, so intended to answer almost anything and, far harder, even suggest what questions to ask! Grok is designed to answer questions with a bit of wit and has a rebellious streak, so please don’t use it if you hate humor! A unique and fundamental advantage of Grok is that it has real-time knowledge of the world via the 𝕏 platform. It will also answer spicy questions that are rejected by most other AI systems.
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Well this is troubling. In many more ways, than I think most people realize.
No Joke.
‘Things Are Going to Get Intense:’ How a Musk Ally Plans to Push AI on the Government
404 Media has obtained audio of a meeting held by Thomas Shedd, a Musk-associate who is now heading a team of government coders. In the call one employee pushed back and said one of the planned moves is an “illegal task.”
www.404media.co — Feb 4, 2025
Thomas Shedd, a Musk-associate and now head of the General Services Administration’s Technology Transformation Services (TTS), told government tech workers in a meeting this week that the administration plans to widely deploy AI throughout the government . Shedd also said the administration would need help altering login.gov, a government login system, to further integrate with sensitive systems like social security “to further identify individuals and detect and prevent fraud,” which employees identified on the meeting as “an illegal task.” Shedd, who is a former Tesla engineer, said the government should “try to get consent,” regarding login.gov changes but that “we should still push forward and see what we can do.” WIRED and the New York Times previously reported on aspects of the meeting. 404 Media has now obtained audio of the full meeting and quotes it extensively below. Shedd told TTS workers that the administration would need help making radical changes to various government systems: “Things are going to get intense,” he said.
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“Things are going to get intense,” — is that another way of saying, that they plan to “Move fast and break things” …? Oh by the way, Login.gov is the highly secure system tht allows government employees to interact with their personnel records, their 401k, etc. It uses multi-factor validation to prevent ID-theft and hacking by bad actors, etc. Musk’s team apparently sees Login.gov as an obstacle that they need to breach “alter” ... Oh yeah, Login.gov is one of the primary ways Social Security earners get validated, so they can interact with benefits and services, that they currently receive; or will eventually receive. — This Wired article drills down into the some of the specifics — and more importantly — some of the dangers that this former Tesla Software Engineer is proposing/demanding ...
Elon Musk Ally Tells Staff ‘AI-First’ Is the Future of Key Government Agency
Sources say the former Tesla engineer now in charge of the Technology Transformation Services wants an agency that operates like a “startup software company.” www.wired.com — Feb 3, 2025
[...] The Monday meeting, held in-person and on Google Meet, comes days after WIRED reported that many of Musk’s associates have migrated to jobs at the highest levels of the GSA and the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). Prior to joining TTS, which is housed within the GSA, [Thomas] Shedd was a software engineer at Tesla, one of Musk’s companies. The transition has caused mass confusion amongst GSA staffers who have been thrown into surprise one-on-one meetings, forced to present their code —often to young engineers who did not identify themselves—and left wondering what the future of the agency’s tech task force will look like.
[...] In what he described as an “AI-first strategy,” sources say, Shedd provided a handful of examples of projects GSA acting administrator Stephen Ehikian is looking to prioritize, including the development of “AI coding agents” that would be made available for all agencies. Shedd made it clear that he believes much of the work at TTS and the broader government, particularly around finance tasks, could be automated. "This does raise red flags,” a cybersecurity expert who was granted anonymity due to concerns of retaliation told WIRED on Monday, who noted that automating the government isn’t the same as automating other things, like self-driving cars. “People, especially people who aren’t experts in the subject domain, coming into projects often think ‘this is dumb’ and then find out how hard the thing really is.”
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In most software projects, the devil is in the details. In the multiple layers of often conflicting business requirements. They typically take months, and even years, to fully define; and then turn into functional software and applications. Applications which typically get revised and improved through multiple, on-going upgrades. (What version of Windows, Apple Phone, Google, or even DailyKos.com — are we on these days anyways?)
Well, that requirements treadmill is even more complicated, when programmers are building out government software projects, because guess where those “requirements” come from? They have to be teased out of the minutia and the complexity of the Laws written, passed, and funded by Congress.
[Requirements are often summarized by the “subject matter experts” who understand those Laws from their years of experience. The very same experts, that Team Trump-Musk are now summarily firing — without cause.]
I wonder if those Musk AI-First agents, will have been trained on, understand, or even care about those complicated requirements — already ferreted out, already in-place? Or care about the nation’s Laws, upon which currently-functioning software system are based?
Given the Tech-bro engineers and faux geniuses prompting and directing those newly soon-to-be installed AI’s — I seriously doubt it …
Doubt that Grok gives a damn ... about consequences.
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Crash course in Government Dismantling already in progress …
What does this switch do … who cares. Try it. See what happens.
WHAT could possibly go wrong?
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