Dear Commons Community,

Over the decades, The New York Daily News has not always been the kindest of New York’s newspapers to the City University of New York but in today’s editorial, there is well-deserved praise and support for our institution.   Here is the entire editorial.

The New York Daily News

Editorial

April 8, 2023

The CUNY Advantage

“There’s been a lot of hand-wringing about college rankings, with challenges to the dominance of the U.S. News & World Report methodology and all-important list, including spectacular scandals over misreported school data, and universities announcing they will cease participating altogether. That’s before we even get to the ideological battles over everything from a school’s relative free speech tolerance to its emphasis on sports to the detriment of academics.

But some schools are still better than others in different areas, so how to find the right way to examine it and compare? Focus on returning to basics and distilling what exactly makes a school effective. Academic rigor and the ability to get people to think critically and creatively are crucial, but tricky to measure. Where we can absolutely look at cold, hard facts are metrics like cost to attend and economic mobility, and on those metrics our own City University system blows everyone else out of the water.

We can thank our friends and sometimes rivals at The New York Times opinion page for the latest confirmation in the form of a nifty online tool that spits out rankings based on prioritization of different factors; in any combination that emphasizes factors like earnings, mobility, net price and economic diversity, CUNY schools feature multiple times in the top ten, with Baruch, City College and Hunter leading the pack.

On this page, we often cast a skeptical eye at public spending, with a view towards keeping government accountable for what we’re getting for our taxpayer dollar. That means criticizing leaders when that return is low, but also celebrating it when we’re really getting a lot of bang for the buck, and this certainly isn’t the first analysis to determine that CUNY schools are over-performing when it comes to some of the metrics that really count for their students and graduates.

Policymakers should keep this in mind as they ponder the system’s budget. Every dollar in is a dollar that is magnified and keeps New York’s economy humming along.”

Thank you to The New York Daily News editors for their support of CUNY – the people’s university!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times has a featured article this morning examining the race among big tech companies to develop artificial intelligence applications regardless of whether or not they generate misinformation and dangerous content.  Here is an excerpt.

In March, two Google employees, whose jobs are to review the company’s artificial intelligence products, tried to stop Google from launching an A.I. chatbot. They believed it generated inaccurate and dangerous statements.

Ten months earlier, similar concerns were raised at Microsoft by ethicists and other employees. They wrote in several documents that the A.I. technology behind a planned chatbot could flood Facebook groups with disinformation, degrade critical thinking and erode the factual foundation of modern society.

The companies released their chatbots anyway. Microsoft was first, with an event in February to reveal an A.I. chatbot woven into its Bing search engine. Google followed about six weeks later with its own chatbot, Bard.

The aggressive moves by the normally risk-averse companies were driven by a race to control what could be the tech industry’s next big thing — generative A.I., the powerful new technology that fuels those chatbots.

That competition took on a frantic tone in November when OpenAI, a San Francisco start-up working with Microsoft, released ChatGPT, a chatbot that has captured the public imagination and now has an estimated 100 million monthly users.

The surprising success of ChatGPT has led to a willingness at Microsoft and Google to take greater risks with their ethical guidelines set up over the years to ensure their technology does not cause societal problems, according to 15 current and former employees and internal documents from the companies.

The urgency to build with the new A.I. was crystallized in an internal email sent last month by Sam Schillace, a technology executive at Microsoft. He wrote in the email, which was viewed by The New York Times, that it was an “absolutely fatal error in this moment to worry about things that can be fixed later.”

When the tech industry is suddenly shifting toward a new kind of technology, the first company to introduce a product “is the long-term winner just because they got started first,” he wrote. “Sometimes the difference is measured in weeks.”

Last week, tension between the industry’s worriers and risk-takers played out publicly as more than 1,000 researchers and industry leaders, including Elon Musk and Apple’s co-founder Steve Wozniak, called for a six-month pause in the development of powerful A.I. technology. In a public letter, they said it presented “profound risks to society and humanity.”

Regulators are already threatening to intervene. The European Union proposed legislation to regulate A.I., and Italy temporarily banned ChatGPT last week. Regulators are already threatening to intervene. The European Union proposed legislation to regulate A.I., and Italy temporarily banned ChatGPT last week. In the United States, President Biden on Tuesday became the latest official to question the safety of A.I.

“Tech companies have a responsibility to make sure their products are safe before making them public,” he said at the White House. When asked if A.I. was dangerous, he said: “It remains to be seen. Could be.”

“Tech companies have a responsibility to make sure their products are safe before making them public,” he said at the White House. When asked if A.I. was dangerous, he said: “It remains to be seen. Could be.”

The issues being raised now were once the kinds of concerns that prompted some companies to sit on new technology. They had learned that prematurely releasing A.I. could be embarrassing. Five years ago, for example, Microsoft quickly pulled a chatbot called Tay after users nudged it to generate racist responses.

Researchers say Microsoft and Google are taking risks by releasing technology that even its developers don’t entirely understand. But the companies said that they had limited the scope of the initial release of their new chatbots, and that they had built sophisticated filtering systems to weed out hate speech and content that could cause obvious harm.

A.I. is here and we need to understand and control its deployment.  As this article indicates, major tech companies like Microsoft and Google may be too concerned with winning control of the market to do so.

Tony

Harlan Crow and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas (George W. Bush Presidential Center, Getty)

Dear Commons Community,

Bruce Maiman, a longtime radio broadcaster, had a guest essay yesterday entitled, “The Clarence Thomas Scandal Is What’s Wrong With Our Democracy.”  He reviews the ProPublica investigation that Supreme Court Justice Thomas has regularly taken lavish trips with billionaire and Republican donor, Harlan Crow, and has never disclosed them.   He examines  the ethical boundaries for people who have political power and influence and concludes:

“People of influence should avoid even the hint of impropriety in their dealings, especially those with the power to make and interpret laws. Isn’t this what the nation is dealing with now with Donald Trump? Have you ever seen the film “American Gangster”? Or “Serpico”? Those are based on true stories about corrupt cops who took drug money to look the other way. When they got caught, and they did, they went to jail.

Bad enough that Ginni Thomas has been deeply involved in conservative advocacy for many years, disturbingly so given who she’s married to. What Clarence Thomas has been doing for the past 20 years is even more brazen: a Supreme Court justice behaving as if he is above the law. And if it isn’t a question of law, how about a question of public trust?

The Supreme Court has maintained that they it does not have a code of conduct because it doesn’t need one. It’s clear now that the honorables have always needed one. One wonders, too, how many fellow justices looked the other way in the face of clear ethical violations.

I’m not even sure we need a rule to prohibit this sort of thing. Any citizen of even pedestrian knowledge can see this is entirely unacceptable. How can the high court have any credibility now? We can’t even call it a high court anymore, can we?

We want to believe that no one is above the law. Does that also hold for Supreme Court justices? What if it isn’t a law, but a question of ethics? Should we also live by a code that says an ethical violation should result in a punishment similar to illegal behavior?

The possibility always troubles us that public officials in service to the electorate and the nation might fall prey to temptation that can compromise their ethics. It’s one of many things that makes us suspicious about government, that makes us mistrust government. If that is an accurate reading of the electorate, then what do we say about people who violate those ethical standards. And what should we do about them?

The ProPublica investigation has given us yet another reason the Supreme Court enjoys little respect anymore and no longer deserves any. As if we needed another reminder that we are at the mercy of a tiny group of people.”

What’s wrong indeed!

Tony