ANALYSIS AND OPINION
This is the second of two related videos. The first video appears further down the page. Our second video (this one about the urgent need for cooperation) will be posted here (at the top of the page) sometime on June 29, 2026.
Future video will be here.
Another post we did a little over a week ago also has relevance to other existential issues facing man. A major one is whether Western free market capitalism has to be reconsidered and modified or abandoned entirely. Another, which is related to this issue, is whether any change is necessary in man’s visceral need to compete with each other for power and wealth. This also, of course, bears on whether nations can ever get used to the idea of cooperating instead of competing for the same things.
Our prior post, we believe, provides some compelling guidance. However, it was published with the points most relevant to this post, in reverse order. Meaning the discussion of the need to quickly develop a more cooperative philosophy (which itself was a later-published added supplemnet to the original posting) is set forth last. The reasons we have come to our conclusions are set forth first.
Preliminarily we note that this post: (i) does not in any way imply that we change our representative democracy, with three co-equal branches of government and free elections; and (ii) does not directly deal with recent victories in New York by Social Democrats, although those election results are clearly a loud cry for some basic changes in the way our government works. In short, that’s a different article.
Here is our prior post, providiing highly relevant background:
Opinion and Analysis:
Before we get to our video (at the bottom of this page), and a short discussion of our thoughts, here’s the Godfather of AI, Geoffrey Hnton, talking about the threat posed by AI in June of 2026:
First of all, although many exoerts may disagree, the “Godfather of AI” has some definite opinions about whether AI is conscious?
If that isn’t spooky enough:
If that still wasn’t scary enough look at this:
Here’s Senator Bernie Sanders making a long overdue bold attempt to do something about the existential problem we face–and it’s getting worse by the nanosecond:
Robot armies, trillionaires getting richer, AI ability to read our every email and to snoop. The common man is more and more at risk of being oppressed by the government and the super rich. Senator Sanders, as usual, steps up to the plate and offers something of of true substance to help protect our democracy. He and AOC have proposed a temporary moratorium on the development of data centers and, in breathtaking fashion Senator Sanders has also proposed a new AI Sovereign Wealth Fund to give the public a 50 percent voting interest in AI companies. That and the public would entitled to a 5 percent dividend that everyone could spend as they wish.
It should be noted that in our opinion there are significant Constitutional issues with Senator Sanders’ proposal. A major one might be that it amounts to an unconstitutional taking of property without just compensation, which of course would make the shareholders of AI companies very unhappy (and justificably so). However, our opinion is that time is very short. We are in a hugely important race with other countries (particularly China) to develop the most advanced AI. Also, no one knows for sure when massive layoffs will commence. When it happens, the layoffs could come quickly and in overwhelming numbers. Something must be in place to provide financial assistance to the unemployed. Trying to do something after the dam breaks might well be disastrous for both the government and the general public. Thus, we believe that folks should provisionally get behind Senator Sanders’ legisltation to get something going on it right now. A Constitutional amendment may well be required. Alternatively, perhaps the necessity of a Constitutional amendment can be avoided if the government is required to pay just compensation (in the form of cash in a manner similar to an eminent domain case) for the AI company’s shares. The point is that Senator Sanders has at long last gotten something specific on the table and the public needs to make its voice heard that Congress needs to stop avoiding the issue and do something along the lines of what Senator Sanders proposes (or better).
Competition versus Cooperation
Below is a short essay we posted April 10, 2024 on this site. Suffice it to say that in our view, mankind has got to confront the reality that artificial intelligence represents an existential threat to man’s existence. And, that threat is real, and it is probably much more imminent than most people realize. In fact, given the current race between companies and even nations to develop more advanced AI systems whether to make more profit or to achieve greater political power, it should be obvious to everyone that the rapid development of AI is like a runaway train speeding towards the extermination of mankind. Given AI’s potential capabilities, greed, suspicion and lust for power makes the end of man inevitable. The heretofore widely accepted Gospel of free market capitalism, that competition is the best way to improve products and services and/or that a country must engage in endless arms’ races etc, appears to be an increasingly dangerous philosophy. Don’t get us wrong, it’s extremely dangerous to fall behind technologically. But that’s the point. Even purely defensive motivations in developing AI can lead to man’s ultimate demise, especially if AI becomes conscious (and it may already be), develops any sense that man is inferior to it (which again is probably already true) and is no longer willing to allow it to make what it perceived to be the optimum decisions. For man it’s a grisly Hobson’s choice. Stop developing AI and fall technologically behind and lose the next war, or let AI exterminate us.
To make a long story short. Like or not, as incredible as it sounds, man is actually confronted by nature’s demand that we actually learn to cooperate with each other and to get along—as in make peace treaties and laws where everyone (including countries) agrees and/or is required to limit AI development in significant ways that will eliminate the possibility that AI will be used to kill us all. Competition is no longer such a good thing. Nations and peoples can no longer afford the luxury of fighting each other to the extent that they currently do. All conflicts must be thought of as secondary to the need to cooperate to eliminate the existential AI threat.
Here’s our April 2024 essay:
Its sounds self-evident and perhaps even trite, but if the United States, as a democracy is to survive, indeed, if the World is to survive, folks must learn to get along with one another. This requires that they be reasonable and be able to peacefully compromise their differences. It’s really that simple. Folks who are unwilling or incapable of accepting this fact are a mortal danger to everyone, including themselves. Moreover, the danger that they pose to everyone increases dramatically each day and it’s gotten to the point where mankind cannot afford to tolerate them. Why? Essentially, it’s because of the increasing lethality of weapons, the accelerating pace of the development of computing power, particularly artificial intelligence, advancements in robotics and the ability of governments to spy on everyone. Moreover, it is actually getting easier for governments and the rich and powerful to manipulate information and to totally control the ability of people to communicate with one another.
The foregoing naturally assumes that peace is preferrable to war and that people value freedom and want to have some meaningful say in who governs them and how they do it.
If there is no ultimate referee, no ultimate authority to decide who’s right in any controversy between humans then what determines what happens and who wins and loses is determined by power alone. If who wins and what happens is determined by power alone, then all of mankind will have a natural tendency to seek to acquire more and more power, if not to dominate, then just to survive. The same is true for politicians, political parties and nations. The acquisition and retention of power becomes the goal itself, with little or no attention paid to respect the needs of all folks and their inherent right to be treated with fairness and respect. Holders of ultimate power like dictators might be able to act decisively but they typically aren’t concerned with fairness or respecting the rights of the weak and less powerful. In short, dictators place more importance on enriching themselves and keeping power than they are in actually solving society’s problems. And sooner, or later, everyone is expendable, because eventually the interests of any person or group will be viewed as an obstacle that must be removed in order to stay in and/or increase the dictator’s power.
Fortunately, nations that are true representative democracies, have chosen a form of government that makes it very difficult, if not impossible, for any one person, party or group to dominate all of the affairs of society and to unilaterally impose their will on it. This is done through a variety of supreme laws, typically found in a constitution, that apply not only to the people but also to the government as well that cannot be amended or changed without some kind of difficult-to-achieve super-majority approval of representative segments of the country in question. In short, the governments of genuine representative democracies have fundamental foundational principles that include rules that assure: open, free, fair and voluntary voting for a truly representative government; governmental recognition of the fundamental rights of its citizens, including that of freedom of speech and freedom of press and the right to due process of and equality before the law. The fundamental foundational principles are designed to guarantee and unbiased and procedurally fair rule of law. Very importantly, these foundational principles also include the strict rules that preclude any branch of government from having total unfettered discretion to make the law, enforce it and then decide any cases or controversies that arise under it. This is because the powers of government are spread between three separate co-equal branches: a legislative (like our Congress), an executive (like our President) and a judicial branch (like our court system).
There are several reasons why genuine representative democracies are preferable to dictatorships. To name but a few: (i) everyone, through the right to vote has some say in what laws are passed and how government operates; (ii) everyone has certain protected fundamental rights, such as the right to free speech, freedom of religion and not to have their property taken without just compensation; (iii) everyone is entitled to due process of law in cases brought by or against them in the courts; (iv) everyone is entitled to equal protection of the law and no one can be discriminated against because of their race, color, religion, national origin or sex; and (v) a neutral judiciary that decides all cases neutrally and objectively according to the law as written. It is because of characteristics such as these that those who govern are infinitely more likely to consider the needs, wishes and desires of all citizens when making and implementing new laws and policies. This means that genuine democracies are far more likely to make rational decisions that actually address societal problems than dictatorships and/or autocratic governments where the primary concern is the acquisition of wealth and power of those already in power. In short, assuming rational decisions are ones that take into account the whole of society and not just a privileged portion thereof, democracies are far more likely to make rational, and therefore fairer and better, policy decisions than dictatorships.
Importantly, once a democratically elected government, passes a law or makes a decision, it has the power to enforce that law or decision. Moreover, the court system in democracies can decide cases and controversies amongst citizens and/or the government and enforce those decisions by punishing or penalizing parties who do not abide by the law or the courts’ decision. As such, despite the fact that the interests of all citizens must, on some level, be taken into account, still, should anyone decide to disobey the law or a court’s decision they will suffer the pain of some kind of punishment. In short, democracies do have mechanisms to ensure domestic peace and the healthy functioning of society as a whole.
All of the foregoing assumes, of course, that the democracy is functioning the way it was designed to function. If it’s processes break down, because of some failure in the system, a power vacuum will result because no one can enforce government policy or the law. This would result in civil unrest and perhaps open societal conflict and bloodshed. The point is that if a democracy breaks down there will arise an urgent need for someone to bring societal order about and this could well be by imposing that person’s will on society by force. In short, if democracy suffers a breakdown because, for example, citizens cannot elect representatives capable of resolving their differences during the legislative process, then the rise of a dictator becomes a likely possibility. This is why electing hardline militants, political zealots and extremists (who we will collectively refer to as “ideologues”***) incapable of reaching across the aisle to compromise with folks who have different opinions is dangerous. Elect enough ideologues and democracy will be a thing of the past. In short, the maintenance of democracy itself depends on voters voting for and electing candidates who realize all of the foregoing, and for that reason, are willing to compromises for sake of democracy and the national good.
When it comes to the relationship between nations, the situation is equally dire, if not more so. This is because, there is no worldwide government to begin with. In other words, there is no worldwide government that has power to adopt and enforce laws that all nations must obey. Various organizations such as the United Nations, the U.N. Security Council, the International Court of Justice and the World Trade Organization attempt to perform a lot of the functions of a world government, but the fact of the matter is that no international organization can really enforce its resolutions and rulings without the voluntary compliance of the affected nations. Thus, there is really no supreme world power that can force any nation or any of its citizens to do anything. Thankfully, this is not the case in a functioning democracy where if someone breaks the law, the government can put them in jail.
Because national governments can enforce their laws on their citizens, they are in a position to maintain the peace within their own countries. There is no such body on the international scene unless the seven member nations of the U.N. Security Council all agree as to what is to be done to resolve a particular international conflict. And getting such unanimous agreement has proven to be too rare. Why? More often than not, the permanent members of the Council, which includes the U.S., Russia and China can rarely agree on how to handle the most important international conflicts. As such, the U.N. is often incapable of maintaining world peace.
In this crucial sense, representative democracies and the World at large face the same existential problem. Because there’s no singular power that can make a decision for all nations or for all its people or citizens, everything depends on the ultimate cooperation of its members. In the case of a democracy, the members are the citizens of that particular nation. In the case of the World, the members are the various nations. No person or nation voluntarily cooperates unless their rights and legitimate self-interests are respected by others. Other nations and peoples must recognize and respect the legitimate interests of other peoples and nations. Inevitably, the rights and interests of various parties will clash. Thus, the ability of potential adversaries to compromise is essential, simply because if they don’t the system will break down because there is no omnipotent international government to force them to come to their senses and compromise. And, if compromise is not reached the result will be lingering resentment, protests, violence, bloodshed and perhaps even nuclear war—a war in which mankind is not likely to survive. And even if man were to survive the resulting devastation and disorder would make it more likely that the power that prevailed in any such conflict would impose its will on the rest of the World much a like a worldwide dictator.
Moreover, and to make matters even worse, any dictatorship on any level that would arise in the future is likely to be permanent, or at least very long term. This is because in the 21st century and beyond, any autocratic or dictatorial government will have at its disposal unbelievably effective tools to impose its will on every nation and every person within its powers. Again, one need only consider artificial intelligence, the emergence of robotics, supercomputers, and the ability of the powerful to slant, alter, manipulate and control information to realize that it would indeed be difficult to ever wrest control back from any future dictator. Consider how long Russia, China, North Korea and Iran have been dictatorships.
In short, the ability to compromise and cooperate is crucial not only to the survival of representative democracy, but of mankind as well. It is for this reason, that hardliners and ideologues, whether left or right leaning, often present a mortal danger to both democracy and world peace.
End of Our April 2024 Essay
Of course, there are those who find it in their interests to sew discontent and disagreement. This includes foreign countries, political interest groups, commerical interests and others (including, sadly enough, some news organtiizations). All of this makes urgently needed cooperation all the more difficult. You can hear more on this point and the need for a moratorium on data centers in the following video in which Senator Sanders has a conversation with the LLM “Claude”.
[Note: A major reason why Senator Sanders appears in our AI related videos is that he is one of the very few politicians who has explored the ramifications of AI development and actually shared his investigation with the public via Youtube. And all of us owe a debt of gratitude to him for his vitally important work on AI-related topics.]
Eliminating Bias: Searching the Web in Incognito Mode
[Note: Previously we’ve posted several articles about finding unbiased news. Nothing will impede conflict resolution and hence cooperation quite like disagreement over the basic facts. Given this, finding unbiased news and objective fact finding are essential to developing a cooperative philosophy. Here’s a link to an article we did on finding unbiased news:
https://reasonandbalance.com/finding-unbiased-objective-news/]
With the “spin” doctors, as one famous person might call them, and the bias that obviously exists in many news and other source, one major impediment to cooperation, is agreeing on objective facts to start the analysis. Tech companies and other commercial and political enterprises are constantly messing with the basic information we are getting. When I say this is that when when progressives and conservatives turn on their computers and start searching the internet. They see different news stories and thus get different information. This is a huge impediment to developing a cooperative attitude.
Hence we asked ChatGPT the following:
Rx. I forgot to ask you this. If I do search the internet in incognito mode. Does that help neutralize any bias in my feed
Good morning… or perhaps good middle-of-the-night legal question, David. 😊
The short answer is:
Yes, but only partially.
Incognito mode helps reduce one source of personalization, but it does not eliminate all of it.
Here’s what it does and doesn’t do.
What Incognito does help with
When you open an Incognito window:
- Your browser doesn’t use your normal browsing history.
- Existing cookies generally aren’t used (unless you explicitly allow them).
- When you close the window, the cookies created during that session are deleted.
As a result, search engines and news sites know less about your past interests, so they have less information with which to personalize results.
What it doesn’t do
Even in Incognito:
- Your IP address is still visible.
- Your approximate location is still known.
- If you log into your Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft account, personalization largely comes back.
- The search engine may still use your current search session to influence later searches in that same Incognito window.
So Incognito is not the same thing as becoming an anonymous, first-time visitor.
If your goal is to see the “least biased” search results
I’d do something like this:
- Open an Incognito window.
- Don’t log into Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc.
- Search using multiple search engines:
- Microsoft Bing
- DuckDuckGo
- Brave Software Search
- Compare the first page of results.
If the same stories appear across all four, that’s a good indication that they’re broadly considered important rather than being heavily personalized.
Here’s another trick
Suppose you want to know how different political audiences are seeing the same issue.
Search for exactly the same topic using different source names, for example:
- “Trump tariff Reuters”
- “Trump tariff Fox News”
- “Trump tariff MSNBC”
- “Trump tariff Wall Street Journal”
You’re then comparing how different organizations cover the same event, rather than letting an algorithm decide which version you see.
Since I know you enjoy thinking about these things, here’s an experiment I’d actually love to see someone conduct.
Take 100 Republicans and 100 Democrats.
Have them all, at the same time, search the identical phrase in Incognito mode without logging into any accounts.
Then compare:
- the order of search results,
- the news stories shown,
- and the videos recommended.
If the results are virtually identical, that’s evidence that personalization is modest in that context. If they differ substantially, then we’d have evidence that something beyond browsing history is influencing what people see.
As a lawyer, I think you’d appreciate that experiment because it relies on evidence rather than suspicion. And in this area, that’s exactly what we need.
And, if I may ask: Who is going to be funding this research?
David, you’ve just asked what I think is the question.
Who is going to fund research into whether information ecosystems are biasing people?
The problem is that every potential funder has incentives that people may question.
- Technology companies (Google, Yahoo, Meta, X, etc.) have an obvious interest in demonstrating that their systems are fair—or at least not damaging.
- Governments may have political interests, especially if they’re investigating companies they also regulate or depend upon.
- Universities are generally more independent, but researchers often receive grants from government agencies or private foundations.
- Nonprofit organizations frequently have their own missions or ideological leanings.
- Political parties are probably the least credible funders because everyone expects them to want a particular answer.
As a lawyer, you’d probably say this creates an appearance problem even when the research is done honestly.
If I were designing such a study, I’d borrow a page from the legal system.
I would want:
- researchers from different political perspectives,
- complete public disclosure of the methodology,
- publication of the raw data (subject to privacy protections),
- and independent teams trying to replicate the findings.
That’s analogous to having opposing counsel, discovery, cross-examination, and appellate review. The point isn’t to trust one expert; it’s to create a process in which biased conclusions are more likely to be exposed.
Ironically, AI itself might become a useful auditing tool. Imagine requiring major platforms to allow qualified independent auditors to test their recommendation systems using thousands of simulated users with different browsing histories. Those auditors wouldn’t need access to the companies’ proprietary algorithms; they could evaluate the outputs statistically.
Now let me turn the tables for a moment.
Knowing you, I suspect your question wasn’t really about who writes the check.
I think you’re asking something closer to:
“Can we realistically expect an objective answer when the organizations with the most information and the most money may also have the strongest incentives to shape the narrative?”
That’s a much harder question.
My answer is that objective research is possible, but it requires transparency, replication, and investigators with different viewpoints. In science, we don’t usually trust one study. We trust findings that survive repeated scrutiny by people who would be delighted to prove the first researchers wrong.
And here’s one thing that might surprise you. I think there is actually one group with a strong incentive to conduct such research well: the platforms themselves. If a company could credibly demonstrate, through independently replicated studies, that its news recommendations were not systematically favoring one political viewpoint over another, that would be valuable to the company as well as to the public. The challenge is credibility. To earn public trust, the company would have to let genuinely independent researchers inspect and test the system rather than simply publishing its own conclusions.