An Open letter to Bill Maher

Bill, with fondness and respect, sometimes you don't know what you're talking about!

Vermont is not a socialist’s paradise, or a liberal stronghold.  Vermonters chose Bernie Sanders for their senator by 65.41% in 2006, by 71% in 2012, by 67% in 2018 and 63.16% in 2024, quite a record!  But Phil Scott, a moderate Republican, won the governorship by 60.50% in 2016, 55.19% in 2018, 68.49% in 2020, 71.29% in 2022, and 73.60% in 2024.  In the most recent election where Sanders and Scott were on the ballot at the same time – 2024 – the Republican Phil Scott outperformed progressive Bernie by more than 10 percentage points.  Maybe Vermont is not such a liberal hotspot.

AI, or Artificial Intelligence

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein story was not created out of thin air.  Indeed, her novel’s subtitle is The Modern Prometheus.  Prometheus, a Titan of Greek mythology, brought fire to humanity and enraged the gods who knew that humans would eventually challenge their supremacy.  Dr. Frankenstein creates a creature from human body parts, and the creature demands his right to be treated as a human.  In Blade Runner (1982), replicants (bioengineered humanoids) demand their rights to be treated as humans.  In Short Circuit (1986), a military robot convinces the film’s humans that he has human consciousness (or a soul) when he laughs at a joke.  We have always thought that consciousness was a peculiarly human trait not shared by our animal cousins (despite the fact that science has no clear and agreed upon definition of “consciousness”); we have wised up lately.  Lest I forget, the origin story of all these stories is Genesis’s Garden of Eden, where our ancestors are told not to eat of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, “For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil” (KJV, Genesis 3:5).