The Week Magazine July 1, 2022

“I know a person when I talk to it,” said Google engineer Blake Lemoine. “It doesn’t matter whether they have a brain made of meat in their head. Or if they have a billion lines of code.” Lemoine made this recent pronouncement just before Google put him on administrative leave, peeved that he publicly claimed that a Google artificial intelligence program, LaMDA, had become “sentient,” and deserved the same legal rights as a person. Nearly all computer scientists dismiss Lemoine’s claim (see Technology, p.20), and insist that LaMDA’s uncanny conversational ability is a sophisticated illusion: Its algorithms draw on the billions of lines of text and conversation in its memory to predict sequences of words, facts, and ideas a real person would use. Evidently, Lemoine fell under LaMDA’s spell when…

What happened State election officials this week described how Donald Trump and his allies relentlessly pressured them to help overturn President Biden’s election win—and the life-altering threats and harassment they suffered when they refused to break the law. In the fourth hearing held by the panel investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, Rusty Bowers, Republican speaker of Arizona’s House of Representatives, outlined how Trump attorney John Eastman pressed him to replace the state’s electors with a pro-Trump slate; when he said that would be illegal, Eastman told him, “Just do it and let the courts sort it out.” The cost of refusal was steep, said Bowers, who described Trump supporters repeatedly swarming his house, calling him a pedophile, and upsetting his terminally ill daughter. Georgia Secretary of State Brad…

What happened The Supreme Court ruled this week that Maine may not withhold state-funded tuition vouchers from religious schools, furthering the court’s trend toward prioritizing the protection of religious expression over the separation of church and state. Maine has a state program to help pay for private school for students from remote rural communities that lack public schools, and in Carson v. Makin, the court’s six conservatives held that two Christian schools could not be barred from participating. By excluding religious schools, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote, the state engaged in “discrimination against religion.” Maine’s attorneys argued that the two schools themselves discriminated against LGBTQ people and non-Christians, but Roberts countered that most private schools, even secular ones, “do not have to accept all students” and their curricula “need…

What happened The Republican Party of Texas declared last week that Joe Biden is merely the “acting” president and was “not legitimately elected” in 2020—one of several extreme resolutions that left moderate Republicans fretting over the party’s lurch to the right. Roughly 8,000 GOP activists at the Houston convention also called for the repeal of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and declared homosexuality “an abnormal lifestyle choice,” blocking an established group that represents gay Republicans from having a booth at the event. The party platform, which includes a call for Texas schoolchildren to learn about “the humanity of the preborn child,” carries no force of law but signals the Texas GOP’s political agenda. The resolution disavowing Biden’s victory, based on unfounded claims of “substantial election fraud,” drew praise from…

“Ginni Thomas has a lot of explaining to do,” said Jamelle Bouie in The New York Times. We already knew that the conservative activist and wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was an enthusiastic supporter of the plot to overturn the 2020 presidential election, after publication of dozens of text messages in which she urged President Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, to bypass the will of the American people and install Trump for a second term. If her contacts with Meadows were “shocking,” the new information that emerged last week is “explosive.” Not only did Ginni Thomas email two dozen Arizona Republicans urging them to overturn President Biden’s victory in the state, but she also contacted conservative attorney and Trump adviser John Eastman—a key architect of the…

Good week for: Working the refs, after Myles Copeland, a firefighter who plays for the Toledo Glass City basketball team, performed CPR and saved the life of a referee who suffered a heart attack during a game. “When you’re off the job,” Copeland said, “you’re really not off the job.” Ecclesiastical clarifications, with a 30-page ruling from a Church of England tribunal that the Rev. Clive Evans violated “acceptable church practice” when he stripped to his underwear to perform a “full immersion” baptism and also pinched two women’s bottoms. Atmospherics, after Ben & Jerry’s pledged that its cows will be fed a new diet to reduce the methane—a greenhouse gas—in their flatulence. “This is a big deal,” the ice cream company said. Bad week for: Political gravity, after President Joe…