4 Proud Boys found guilty of seditious conspiracy, latest AI warning: 5 Things podcast

On today's episode of the 5 Things podcast: Proud Boys, including leader Enrique Tarrio, guilty of seditious conspiracy for Jan. 6

Several Proud Boys have been found guilty of seditious conspiracy for the Jan. 6 Capitol attack. Plus, banking anxieties continue, USA TODAY World Affairs Correspondent Kim Hjelmgaard reports on protests over proposed reforms in Israel, an autopsy reveals Tyre Nichols was killed by blunt force trauma to the head, and USA TODAY Domestic Security Correspondent Josh Meyer looks at the latest debate around artificial intelligence.

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Hit play on the player above to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript below. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.

Taylor Wilson: 

Good morning. I'm Taylor Wilson and this is 5 things you need to know Friday, the 5th of May 2023. Today, a verdict for the Proud Boys. Plus, more bank anxiety, and we hear the latest from protests in Israel.

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Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio and three lieutenants were found guilty yesterday of entering a seditious conspiracy against the US government, leading to the January 6th, 2021 Capitol attack. A fifth Proud Boy was acquitted of the charge. Prosecutors said Tarrio was the leader of the plot, despite not being in Washington that day. His arrest two days before the insurrection on unrelated charges and the stabbing of several Proud Boys at a protest in December 2020 served as motivators to try and stop the certification of the 2020 presidential election, according to the government. Tarrio's attorneys argued that he was just the government's scapegoat. They said the true culprit of January 6th was former President Donald Trump.

PacWest Bancorp saw its shares plunge earlier this week, dropping more than 39% at one point. The bank said yesterday that it was considering asset sales and has been approached by several parties about a deal. The bank insists that it has not experienced a high number of customer withdrawals in the wake of the failure and sale of First Republic Bank after a modern day bank run. But anxiety over regional bank stability appeared to spread late this week. Comerica slumped more than 8% and TD Bank Group and First Horizon called off a planned merger citing regulatory hurdles.

Months long protests for and against proposed judicial reforms in Israel will continue this weekend, with tens of thousands expected on the streets of Tel Aviv and elsewhere. Many of the protests are accusing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's right wing coalition of using the reforms to get around the checks and balances of government, and of turning Israel into more of a religious state that could even amount to a dictatorship. Others say they just want their views reflected by a parliament they elected. I sat down with USA TODAY World Affairs Correspondent Kim Hjelmgaard, who recently traveled to Israel, to learn more. Kim, thanks for hopping on 5 Things.

Kim Hjelmgaard: 

Thanks for having me.

Taylor Wilson: 

Protests have erupted across Israel over these proposed judicial reforms. Some folks opposed to the reforms have said if they're enacted, Israel will not be a democracy anymore. Others even suggest the reforms would make Israel a dictatorship. What's your general perspective on that?

Kim Hjelmgaard: 

My general perspective is that Israel is a pretty healthy democracy. Like all democracies, it's not perfect. Constitutional legal scholars say there is space for reform. And this is one of the things that the people who are leading these reforms are saying, look, we can't get laws passed that sort of reflect what our constituents want. The ability to, for example, have separate concerts for men and women, or we can't get laws passed that would allow us to kind of sufficiently build the infrastructure of settlements in the West Bank.

However, it's kind of problematic because if you look at something like a settlement in the West Bank, these things are not legal by international standards. They're often built on Palestinian land.

One of the things about these proposed reforms that the protestors are so angry about has to do with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He's in the middle of a corruption case and he's on trial for it. He's suddenly taken an interest in these reforms because they kind of essentially enable him, through a majority in parliament which his government controls, to kind of get a get out of jail free card a bit. So let's say Netanyahu's convicted, there is the possibility that he can't be removed from power. So the protestors are kind of saying this is just not a healthy thing for a democracy.

Taylor Wilson: 

Kim, you mentioned the international community. What is the US government's stance on these reforms and on all of the protests that have happened in recent months?

Kim Hjelmgaard: 

US government, as some listeners may be aware, is Israel's biggest source of foreign military aid. The US was the first country in the world to recognize Israel as a country, and the Biden administration has expressed quite publicly, quite loudly, that it does not like the look of these reforms. It feels that they are not democratic, that they're problematic for various reasons.

Taylor Wilson: 

And finally, Kim, what's next for these reform proposals and the protests in the coming months?

Kim Hjelmgaard: 

Well, things have kind of been stalled since before the Passover holiday, which was last month, when essentially the Parliament went on recess. And Netanyahu, he was kind of faced with this growing escalating insurrection from the Israeli public. There was a series of kind of walkouts from different labor unions, teachers, airport workers went on strike. And they kind of reached this moment where Netanyahu was like, whoa, he needed to calm things down before all of Israeli society kind of unraveled. And so he paused it.

Parliament came back last week. The protestors are still there. The political establishment in Israel is kind of talking about how they're going to try to reach some kind of compromise on this. And nothing has really changed, and it is a kind of standoff where both sides are digging in. But over the last couple of weeks, pro-reform people have started to protest in bigger numbers. A week ago there was about 200,000 of them that showed up outside of the Knesset, which is the Israeli parliament.

So I think everyone in Israel, as far as I can tell, is kind of scratching their heads going, this is not getting any better. In fact, it's getting worse. And one of the places where it could go is another election. And Israel has had five elections since 2019, I believe it is, because they couldn't agree with each other about exactly how to move this country forward. So who knows where that would end up.

Taylor Wilson: 

All right. USA TODAY World Affairs Correspondent Kim Hjelmgaard. Thanks so much.

Kim Hjelmgaard: 

Thanks for having me.

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Taylor Wilson: 

An autopsy revealed yesterday that Tyre Nichols was killed by blunt force trauma to the head. The 29-year-old motorist died earlier this year after being brutally beaten by Memphis Police Officers. Nichols' family viewed the autopsy report this week, some four months after Tyre's death. Their attorney, Ben Crump, said the manner of death was homicide. Attorneys said the report was similar to an independent January autopsy that found Nichols suffered extensive bleeding.

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Artificial intelligence. No matter how you feel about it, the technology is here. That includes chatbots like ChatGPT, which recently passed a hundred million monthly active users, according to Reuters and others. I spoke with USA TODAY Domestic Security Correspondent Josh Meyer to learn more. Hi there, Josh.

Josh Meyer: 

Good to be here. How are you?

Taylor Wilson: 

Good, thanks. Thanks for hopping back on. Josh, the Biden White House is concerned about AI being developed by the tech sector and then unleashed on the public with little to no guardrails on how it might be used. What did they say this week?

Josh Meyer: 

The Biden administration did have a meeting at the White House, led by Kamala Harris, with some of these tech leaders to talk about some of the reforms that the White House says are needed, including more transparency in the way these companies develop these technologies, giving access to the work in progress by critics and the public, just so they can weigh in on what's happening.

And also, the Biden administration last October released what they called the AI Bill of Rights. That's designed to sort of put more safeguards in place. Right now, that's just a recommendation. And so some critics that say the Biden administration hasn't gone far enough say that that needs to be mandatory, that these companies aren't going to really do much on their own, and that they're going to have to be forced to comply more and to do more in terms of protecting the safety, security, and the privacy of Americans as we go forward.

Taylor Wilson: 

And there have been several prominent tech leaders warning about this recently, including the so-called godfather of AI. So Josh, who is the godfather of AI?

Josh Meyer: 

The godfather of AI is a guy named Geoffrey Hinton. He's a renowned researcher, vice president at Google. He's also a Toronto professor, and he's spent the last couple of decades at the forefront of innovating and research and development into artificial intelligence and related topics, including ChatGPT.

Taylor Wilson: 

And what are some of his concerns about this technology?

Josh Meyer: 

He said that his concerns have mostly come about in the last few months, and one of the concerns is that it is becoming so advanced so quickly. One of the things that it's learning to do is simple reasoning. He said that he's concerned that somebody could actually take over the world and push humanity toward extinction.

He was at a seminar yesterday and one of the things that jumped out at me, and everybody else that was there, was he was asked by the panel's moderator, "What's the worst case scenario that you think is conceivable?" And without hesitation, Hinton said, "I think it's quite conceivable that humanity is just a passing phase in the evolution of intelligence."

Taylor Wilson: 

Strong words, I would say. Geez.

Josh Meyer: 

Yeah. And then he went on to say that even if we think that we're in control of the technology and we can just turn it off, he said it could easily be brought back to life again on another machine if given the proper instructions. And this is another quote from him at the MIT Technology Review conference yesterday. Hinton said, "And it may keep us around for a while to keep the power stations running, but after that, maybe not." So food for thought.

Taylor Wilson: 

Yeah, food for thought. So do other experts agree with this pretty pessimistic outlook?

Josh Meyer: 

Actually, after he said that, I wanted to find people that would take exception to it, and I talked to a lot of people. I looked around and a lot of people share his concerns. I did find some people that are a little bit more skeptical, including a longtime trusted source of mine who said, "I think that it's overstated. People need to take a step back. Take a deep breath."

I talked to a guy named Michael Hamilton, who's the co-founder of Critical Insight Risk Management. He's a former advisor to the Department of Homeland Security on tech issues. And he said that computer assisted machine learning, including artificial intelligence, will never be the kind of sentient, self-aware and all-knowing technology that people are afraid of, and that created the Terminator of movie fame. He said basically, artificial intelligence is an extremely sophisticated programming platform that can only go as far as humans allow it.

Taylor Wilson: 

Josh, one concern is that AI could wipe out thousands, maybe millions of jobs by making them obsolete. What does he say on that point?

Josh Meyer: 

Oh yeah, he's very concerned about that. And so is the White House, as a matter of fact, when they rolled out this new initiative. They said that's one of their biggest concerns. And they want to make sure that the developers of AI, which include Google, Microsoft, and some other companies, that they keep that in mind and make sure that there's guardrails there to prevent that kind of thing from happening.

But we do live in a capitalist economy. According to Hinton, he actually spoke very specifically about it, and he said that, we live in a world where profit comes first and the rich could get richer and the poor get poorer because of ways in which AI is used to do menial tasks that are often done by human beings at a lower range of the pay scale. He said, "It's going to cause huge increases in productivity. My worry is for those increases in productivity to put people out of work and make the rich richer and the poor poorer. And as you do that," Hinton said, "you make that gap bigger and society gets more and more violent."

Taylor Wilson: 

Josh Meyer, thanks so much.

Josh Meyer: 

Sure.

Taylor Wilson: 

And happy Cinco de Mayo. The date marks Mexico's victory over the French empire at the Battle of Puebla in 1862.

Thanks for listening to 5 Things. We're produced by Shannon Rae Green, and our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Special thanks to Cherie Saunders and Alexis Gustin. I'm Taylor Wilson back tomorrow with another episode of 5 Things.