pilfered_words

Posted by Kelsey Piper

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/417904/gavi-rfk-jr-child-mortality-vaccines

https://www.vox.com/?p=417904

The deadliest country in the world for young children is South Sudan — the United Nations estimates that about 1 in 10 children born there won’t make it to their fifth birthday. 

But just a hundred years ago, that was true right here in the United States: Every community buried about a tenth of their children before they entered kindergarten. That was itself a huge improvement over 1900, when fully 25 percent of children in America didn’t make it to age 5. Today, even in the poorest parts of the world, every child has a better chance than a child born in the richest parts of the world had a century ago.

How did we do it? Primarily through vaccines, which account for about 40 percent of the global drop in infant mortality over the last 50 years, representing 150 million lives saved. Once babies get extremely sick, it’s incredibly hard to get adequate care for them anywhere in the world, but we’ve largely prevented them from getting sick in the first place. Vaccines eradicated smallpox and dramatically reduced infant deaths from measles, tuberculosis, whooping cough, and tetanus. And vaccines not only make babies likelier to survive infancy but also make them healthier for the rest of their lives. 

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., unfortunately, disagrees.

President Donald Trump’s secretary of health and human services (HHS), a noted vaccine skeptic who reportedly does not really believe the scientific consensus that disease is caused by germs, recently announced the US will pull out of Gavi, an international alliance of governments and private funders (mainly the Gates Foundation) that works to ensure lifesaving vaccinations reach every child worldwide. His grounds? He thinks Gavi doesn’t worry enough about vaccine safety (he does not seem to acknowledge any safety concerns associated with the alternative — dying horribly from measles or tuberculosis).

The Trump administration had already slashed its contribution to Gavi as part of its gutting of lifesaving international aid programs earlier this year, leaving any US contributions in significant doubt. But if Kennedy’s latest decision holds, it now appears that the US will contribute nothing to this crucial program.

The US is one of many funders of Gavi, historically contributing about 13 percent of its overall budget. In 2022, we pledged $2.53 billion for work through 2030, a contribution that Gavi estimates was expected to save about 1.2 million lives by enabling wider reach with vaccine campaigns.

That’s an incredibly cost-effective way to save lives and ensure more children grow into healthy adults, and it’s a cost-effective way to reduce the spread of diseases that will also affect us here in the US. Diseases don’t stay safely overseas when we allow them to spread overseas. Measles is highly contagious, and worldwide vaccination helps keep American children safe, too. Tuberculosis is becoming increasingly resistant to antibiotics, which makes it harder and more expensive to treat, and widespread vaccination (so that people don’t catch it in the first place) is the best tool to ensure dangerous new strains don’t develop. 

It is genuinely hard to describe how angry I am about the casual endangerment of more than a million people because Kennedy apparently thinks measles vaccines are more dangerous than measles is. The American people should be furious about it, too. If other funders aren’t able to cover the difference, an enormous number of children will pointlessly die because the US secretary of health and human services happens to be wildly wrong about how diseases work. 

But the blame won’t end with him. It will also fall on everyone else in the Trump administration, and on the senators who approved his appointment in the first place even when his wildly wrong views were widely known, for not caring enough about children dying to have objected. 

We’re destroying the greatest achievements of our civilization for no reason

Kennedy, it’s worth noting, is not even a long-standing Trump loyalist. He’s a kook who hitched his wagon to the Trump train a few months before the election. He doesn’t have a huge constituency; it wouldn’t have taken all that much political courage for senators to ask for someone else to lead HHS. A lot of his decisions are likely to kill people — from his decision to ban safe, tested food dyes and instead encourage the use of food dyes some people are severely allergic to because they’re “natural” to his courtship of American anti-vaxxers and his steps to undermine accurate guidance on American child vaccination.

Trump could still easily override Kennedy on Gavi, if Trump cared about mass death. But if it holds, pulling out of Gavi is likely to be Kennedy’s deadliest decision — at least so far. He reportedly may not believe that AIDS is caused by HIV, either, and he can surpass the death toll of this week’s decision if he decides to act on that conviction by gutting our AIDS programs in the US and globally. 

But whether or not the Gavi withdrawal is the deadliest, it certainly stands out for its sheer idiocy. (The Gates Foundation is going to heroic lengths to close the funding gap, and individual donors matter, too: You can donate to Gavi here.)

None of this should have been allowed to happen. Since Kennedy’s confirmation vote in the Senate passed by a narrow margin with Mitch McConnell as the sole Republican opposing the nomination, every single other Republican senator had the opportunity to prevent it from happening — if they were willing to get yelled at momentarily for demanding that our health secretary understand how diseases work. 

I am glad the United States does not have the child mortality rates of South Sudan. I’m glad that even South Sudan does not have the child mortality rates of our world in 1900. I’m glad the United States participated in the worldwide eradication of smallpox, and I was glad that we paid our share toward Gavi until the Trump administration slashed funding earlier this year. I’m even glad that mass death is so far in our past that it’s possible for someone to be as deluded about disease as Kennedy is. 

But I am very, very sick of seeing the greatest achievements of our civilization, and the futures of a million children, be ripped to shreds by some of the worst people in politics — not because they have any alternative vision but because they do not understand what they are doing.

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/417904/gavi-rfk-jr-child-mortality-vaccines

https://www.vox.com/?p=417904

Posted by Kelsey Piper

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/417325/artificial-intelligence-apple-reasoning-openai-chatgpt

https://www.vox.com/?p=417325

In 2023, one popular perspective on AI went like this: Sure, it can generate lots of impressive text, but it can’t truly reason — it’s all shallow mimicry, just “stochastic parrots” squawking. 

At the time, it was easy to see where this perspective was coming from. Artificial intelligence had moments of being impressive and interesting, but it also consistently failed basic tasks. Tech CEOs said they could just keep making the models bigger and better, but tech CEOs say things like that all the time, including when, behind the scenes, everything is held together with glue, duct tape, and low-wage workers. 

It’s now 2025. I still hear this dismissive perspective a lot, particularly when I’m talking to academics in linguistics and philosophy. Many of the highest profile efforts to pop the AI bubble — like the recent Apple paper purporting to find that AIs can’t truly reason — linger on the claim that the models are just bullshit generators that are not getting much better and won’t get much better. 

But I increasingly think that repeating those claims is doing our readers a disservice, and that the academic world is failing to step up and grapple with AI’s most important implications. 

I know that’s a bold claim. So let me back it up. 

“The illusion of thinking’s” illusion of relevance

The instant the Apple paper was posted online (it hasn’t yet been peer reviewed), it took off. Videos explaining it racked up millions of views. People who may not generally read much about AI heard about the Apple paper. And while the paper itself acknowledged that AI performance on “moderate difficulty” tasks was improving, many summaries of its takeaways focused on the headline claim of “a fundamental scaling limitation in the thinking capabilities of current reasoning models.”

For much of the audience, the paper confirmed something they badly wanted to believe: that generative AI doesn’t really work — and that’s something that won’t change any time soon.

The paper looks at the performance of modern, top-tier language models on “reasoning tasks” — basically, complicated puzzles. Past a certain point, that performance becomes terrible, which the authors say demonstrates the models haven’t developed true planning and problem-solving skills. “These models fail to develop generalizable problem-solving capabilities for planning tasks, with performance collapsing to zero beyond a certain complexity threshold,” as the authors write.

That was the topline conclusion many people took from the paper and the wider discussion around it. But if you dig into the details, you’ll see that this finding is not surprising, and it doesn’t actually say that much about AI. 

Much of the reason why the models fail at the given problem in the paper is not because they can’t solve it, but because they can’t express their answers in the specific format the authors chose to require. 

If you ask them to write a program that outputs the correct answer, they do so effortlessly. By contrast, if you ask them to provide the answer in text, line by line, they eventually reach their limits. 

That seems like an interesting limitation to current AI models, but it doesn’t have a lot to do with “generalizable problem-solving capabilities” or “planning tasks.” 

Imagine someone arguing that humans can’t “really” do “generalizable” multiplication because while we can calculate 2-digit multiplication problems with no problem, most of us will screw up somewhere along the way if we’re trying to do 10-digit multiplication problems in our heads. The issue isn’t that we “aren’t general reasoners.” It’s that we’re not evolved to juggle large numbers in our heads, largely because we never needed to do so.

If the reason we care about “whether AIs reason” is fundamentally philosophical, then exploring at what point problems get too long for them to solve is relevant, as a philosophical argument. But I think that most people care about what AI can and cannot do for far more practical reasons. 

AI is taking your job, whether it can “truly reason” or not

I fully expect my job to be automated in the next few years. I don’t want that to happen, obviously. But I can see the writing on the wall. I regularly ask the AIs to write this newsletter — just to see where the competition is at. It’s not there yet, but it’s getting better all the time.

Employers are doing that too. Entry-level hiring in professions like law, where entry-level tasks are AI-automatable, appears to be already contracting. The job market for recent college graduates looks ugly. 

The optimistic case around what’s happening goes something like this: “Sure, AI will eliminate a lot of jobs, but it’ll create even more new jobs.” That more positive transition might well happen — though I don’t want to count on it — but it would still mean a lot of people abruptly finding all of their skills and training suddenly useless, and therefore needing to rapidly develop a completely new skill set. 

It’s this possibility, I think, that looms large for many people in industries like mine, which are already seeing AI replacements creep in. It’s precisely because this prospect is so scary that declarations that AIs are just “stochastic parrots” that can’t really think are so appealing. We want to hear that our jobs are safe and the AIs are a nothingburger. 

But in fact, you can’t answer the question of whether AI will take your job with reference to a thought experiment, or with reference to how it performs when asked to write down all the steps of Tower of Hanoi puzzles. The way to answer the question of whether AI will take your job is to invite it to try. And, uh, here’s what I got when I asked ChatGPT to write this section of this newsletter:

Is it “truly reasoning”? Maybe not. But it doesn’t need to be to render me potentially unemployable.

“Whether or not they are simulating thinking has no bearing on whether or not the machines are capable of rearranging the world for better or worse,” Cambridge professor of AI philosophy and governance Harry Law argued in a recent piece, and I think he’s unambiguously right. If Vox hands me a pink slip, I don’t think I’ll get anywhere if I argue that I shouldn’t be replaced because o3, above, can’t solve a sufficiently complicated Towers of Hanoi puzzle — which, guess what, I can’t do either.

Critics are making themselves irrelevant when we need them most

In his piece, Law surveys the state of AI criticisms and finds it fairly grim. “Lots of recent critical writing about AI…read like extremely wishful thinking about what exactly systems can and cannot do.” 

This is my experience, too. Critics are often trapped in 2023, giving accounts of what AI can and cannot do that haven’t been correct for two years. “Many [academics] dislike AI, so they don’t follow it closely,” Law argues. “They don’t follow it closely so they still think that the criticisms of 2023 hold water. They don’t. And that’s regrettable because academics have important contributions to make.”

But of course, for the employment effects of AI — and in the longer run, for the global catastrophic risk concerns they may present — what matters isn’t whether AIs can be induced to make silly mistakes, but what they can do when set up for success. 

I have my own list of “easy” problems AIs still can’t solve — they’re pretty bad at chess puzzles — but I don’t think that kind of work should be sold to the public as a glimpse of the “real truth” about AI. And it definitely doesn’t debunk the really quite scary future that experts increasingly believe we’re headed toward. 

A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/417325/artificial-intelligence-apple-reasoning-openai-chatgpt

https://www.vox.com/?p=417325