Dave Gilbert

If you want to know why we need open source AI—and why it would be a calamitous thing if the U.S. government regulated it out of existence—take a look at Anthropic's new monitoring program. Every conversation you have with Claude is logged and scrutinized to make sure your conversations with Claude are "safe." Now just wait till government bureaucrats start defining safety and start demanding reports from Anthropic on the unsafe conversations you have.

Luxury beliefs, according to @robkhenderson , "confer status on the upper class at very little cost, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes." One such luxury belief is that the compassionate thing to do is to allow drug dealers and junkies to live in squalor in urban neighborhoods. The children of rich San Francisco liberals do not live in the Tenderloin.

This started as a comment I posted with a screenshot of a Wall Street Journal piece on consent pledges and sober monitors at college parties: "We’ve progressed from an older co-ed era where women and men stayed relatively socially segregated on campus with choreographed and chaperoned social encounters, through 2nd/3rd-wave reforms where sexual liberation and equality required breaking down all barriers and spaces and treating women and men exactly the same, to a dawning recognition that women need special protection while insisting that none of the old barriers should be re-erected or spaces re-segregated. The problem is that this new software is so full of contradictions that bugs will appear faster than we can patch them." The story below imagines what that might look like a few years from now. It also draws on the open letter from more than 200 Cornell faculty on sexual assault at the university [cornellsun.com/article/2026/…] and Heather Mac Donald’s response to it in City Journal [city-journal.org/article/cor…]. I wrote it with the help of Claude Opus 5.5. *** TECHNOLOGIES OF CONSENT "It has been employed in a whole series of relationships: children and parents, students and educators, patients and psychiatrists, delinquents and experts. . . . They have been recorded, transcribed, assembled into dossiers, published, and commented on." —Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, trans. Robert Hurley (Vintage, 1990), p. 63 "But you could not have pure love or pure lust nowadays. No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred." —George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four *** Patch Notes To get into the Sigma Chi spring mixer at Hollis University in April 2033, Priya Raman had to breathe into the kiosk by the door, wait for her wristband to turn green, and recite the Community Consent Pledge to a tablet that scored her diction. The pledge had started a decade earlier as something students at Stanford wrote for themselves and read off a poster, but it now ran to eleven clauses, including the one about consent being revocable at any time and the newer one, added after the Ithaca years, in which every guest promised to report what they witnessed. The tablet docked her for mumbling clause nine, so she said it again. Inside, two sober monitors in orange vests stood by the stairs, and her roommate Dana was working the room with a lanyard that said CONSENT CAPTAIN. The house belonged to the university now, as every Greek house had since the Housing Consolidation of 2029, and the cameras in the common rooms fed a dashboard at the Office of Community Standards. Nobody had settled whether cameras belonged in hallways outside bedrooms. The fraternity had filed its Event Risk Plan ten business days in advance, along with a guest list, a floor plan marked with “visibility zones,” and a training certificate for each officer. For one semester the office had also required a balanced gender ratio at registered parties, on the theory that a house full of men inviting a handful of women created what the guidance called “predatory imbalance,” and then quietly dropped the rule after two complaints arrived in the same week, one arguing that it presumed everyone was one of two sexes and the other arguing that it turned women’s attendance into a commodity fraternities competed for. Priya was there on a half shift. Consent captains rotated through parties the way RAs once rotated through dorm duty, and since the faculty senate votes of 2030, when Hollis adopted universal designated reporting for anyone holding a campus leadership role, captains were reporters too. Anything she saw, she owned. That week her history seminar, Coeducation and Its Discontents, had read the 1958 Hollis Handbook for Women. Professor Harwick had put two lists side by side on a slide. On the left were the old parietal rules: women signed out on cards at the front desk, male visitors were allowed only on Sunday afternoons, doors stayed open the width of a book, and the housemother locked the building at eleven. On the right were the current ones: students checked out of residence halls through the geofenced WalkSafe app, overnight guests were registered forty-eight hours ahead, the first-year “visibility guideline” asked that doors stay ajar after midnight when a guest was present, and a residential safety fellow lived on every floor. The 2033 list also included the Quiet Hours Protective Zones, which were formally open to all students of every gender, though everyone understood whom they were meant to protect, so that men who entered them after ten generally brought an escort or a reason. “We spent fifty years taking the left column apart,” Harwick said, “because it treated women as people who needed supervision and men as people who needed watching. And we’ve rebuilt most of it, except that now nobody’s allowed to say who’s being protected from whom.” The readings for the second half of the week included the 2026 faculty open letter from Cornell and, for contrast, a City Journal essay by Heather Mac Donald that had called the faculty response a “paroxysm of hysterical irrationality.” Half the class had refused to discuss it, and a third had admitted they liked it more than they expected to. A student named Theo had pointed out that the essay and the letter agreed on one thing, which was that the institution was failing women, and disagreed about whether the women or the institution needed fixing. Theo was not at seminar that Thursday because it was not his week. In February, he and Sasha Kim had broken up badly at three in the morning, and at 3:04 each of them had opened Mutual, the university’s consent check-in app, and revoked consent for their last encounter. Mutual logged revocations as reports, and since each revocation named the other person, the system opened two cases, with each student listed as complainant in one and respondent in the other. Supportive measures followed automatically, including a mutual no-contact order. Because they were both enrolled in Harwick’s seminar, the scheduling software split the class into alternating weeks, so Sasha came on odd weeks and Theo on even ones, and the remaining eleven students now took the same course twice. The Office of Community Standards had promised a fix for the “reciprocal case” problem in the next release. The other thing that wasn’t working was harder to fix. The Climate Analytics dashboard that flagged parties and residence halls for extra monitoring was barred by policy from using sex as a risk variable, because the university’s nondiscrimination rules forbade treating male students differently from female ones. The model had found its way around that by learning from everything correlated with sex: height and shoe size from athletic department records, voice register from the pledge kiosks, membership in particular clubs. Students joked that the safest thing a tall baritone could do for his record was join an a cappella group. The registrar’s office insisted the model was gender-neutral, and in the narrowest sense it was. Near midnight, Priya’s friend June came down the stairs with a guy Priya recognized from orientation, Marcus, a quiet economics major who had once lent her a calculator. June’s band was amber, which meant she was past the threshold for registering consent in Mutual without a second check. Marcus looked at Priya’s lanyard with what she realized was relief. “Can you witness?” he asked. “So it’s on record. I just want it on record.” Mutual had a witness feature, and a consent captain’s confirmation counted for more than anyone else’s. Priya also knew that once she touched the screen, she would have entered a report-adjacent record of whatever came next, and that if anything later went wrong between June and Marcus, she would be the first person interviewed, by two investigators from the outside firm Hollis used for any case that involved a student leader. June leaned in. “Don’t log me,” she said quietly. “Are you a reporter tonight?” Students had learned to ask that question the way people once asked about pronouns. Half the faculty now wore green Confidential Listener badges, negotiated by the faculty union in exchange for dropping its opposition to universal reporting, and students had learned to look for the badge before saying anything that mattered. Priya didn’t have a badge, and she was on shift, so she was a reporter. She did the only thing she could think of that didn’t involve a screen. She told Marcus to text June in the morning, told June that she was walking her home, and walked her back across the quad to Linden Hall, three feet apart on the path because June kept drifting toward the grass. The WalkSafe app chimed as they crossed the geofence, logging Priya as the escort. At the door of Linden, which was a Quiet Hours Protective Zone after ten, the safety fellow on duty buzzed them in, looked at June’s amber band, and wrote something on her tablet. Priya stayed until June was asleep, with the door open the width of a book because she wasn’t sure what the guideline said about a guest who was also a captain, and then she sat in the hall and filled out the shift log, which asked her to describe any interventions in the free-text box. She typed “walked a friend home” and then deleted it, because it read as an intervention, and typed “no incidents” instead, which meant she had now filed a false report, which as a designated reporter she was not permitted to do. In the morning the app pushed an update. Mutual 7.4.1, release notes -Fixed: simultaneous revocations no longer generate reciprocal cases. Reciprocal cases are now merged into a single “mutual concern,” which is assigned to the student who revoked second. -Fixed: witness confirmations by consent captains now display a disclosure reminder before submission. -Improved: Climate Analytics now excludes shoe size. -Known issue: students escorting other students into Protective Zones may be logged as both escort and visitor. A fix is in progress. -Known issue: shift logs reporting “no incidents” on nights with a WalkSafe escort event are being flagged for review.

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We've progressed from an older co-ed era where women and men stayed relatively socially segregated on campus with choreographed and chaperoned social encounters, through 2nd/3rd-wave reforms where sexual liberation and equality required breaking down all barriers and spaces and treating women and men exactly the same, to a dawning recognition that women need special protection while insisting that none of the old barriers should be re-erected or spaces re-segregated. The problem is that this new software is so full of contradictions that bugs will appear faster than we can patch them.

The skills that an AI agent swarm needs to defend against an attack are exactly the same skills required to perpetrate one. If we regulate that knowledge out of our frontier AI models, then U.S. companies, including banks and healthcare companies, will have no ability to resist attacks from unconstrained agent swarms controlled by foreign powers over whom we have no regulatory control.

When Democrats take full control of government again, which they will sooner or later, I expect structural changes designed to uproot the nationalist neo-Buchananites (MAGA) from governance and move the Uniparty Overton window further left: an end to the filibuster, statehood for DC and Puerto Rico, and a bigger Supreme Court, all of which the DNC chair and party resolutions have already endorsed. And given how Democrats talk about policing misinformation on social media, expect AI to be heavily regulated to enforce the Uniparty message.

Somewhere Roger Corman is annoyed he never thought of this one. He’d have gotten Dick Miller to play the judge.