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Indeed, one of the big stories of Supreme Court nominations this century is how divisive they've generally been with the American public. Since 2005, nominees who either got a Senate vote or withdrew their nominations averaged only a +10-point net popularity rating in their final polls. Compare that with nominees from 1986 to 1994, who averaged a +26-point net popularity rating in their final polls before their Senate vote or withdrawal of their nomination. This strong popularity for earlier nominees helps, at least in small part, to explain why most of them flew through their confirmation hearings and why many this century have generally had a harder time.

Still, it would be surprising if Jackson didn't get at least a few Republican votes. Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Rob Portman of Ohio seem the most likely given how often they've voted with Biden this Congress. The good news for Democrats is that even if Jackson doesn't get any Republican votes, the polarization would still help her. It is unlikely that any Democrat will vote against her. With the Senate Democratic Caucus controlling 50 seats and Vice President Kamala Harris breaking any tie votes, all Jackson needs for confirmation is Democratic support.

There were just 220 mentions of inflation by comparison. Yet, that's what voters care the most about. In a CBS News/YouGov poll from earlier this month, 46% said the "economy and jobs" or "inflation" were the most important issues facing the country. No other issue came close. This could explain why there's been a minimal "rally around the flag" effect for Biden following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. While the President's approval rating seemed to rise by a point or two initially, any rise has since flattened out. Biden's average approval rating stands in the low 40s with a disapproval rating in the mid 50s.

The fact that the economy has remained important to determining the temperature of the electorate shouldn't be surprising. Even with a global pandemic, the 2020 election result tracked well with what would have been expected with a lackluster, though not awful, economy. It's a reminder that what

Helping others: A Gallup study found strong growth across the world in people helping strangers, volunteering time to organizations and donating money to charities over the course of the pandemic, with participation in such activities increasing by nearly 25%.

I’ve seen arguments that it goes back to the 1978 Bakke decision, when the Supreme Court effectively greenlit affirmative action in the name of diversity.

the problem with Bakke isn’t that it allowed diversity to be a consideration in admissions decisions. It’s that university administrators turned an allowance into a requirement, so a kind of racial gerrymander now permeates nearly every aspect of academic life, from admissions decisions to faculty appointments to the racial makeup of contributors to essay collections

If affirmative action had been administered with a lighter hand — more nudge than mandate — it might have survived the court’s scrutiny last year. Instead, it became a pervasive regime that frequently got in the way of the universities’ higher goals, particularly the open exchange of ideas.

skin color was the first thing The Harvard Crimson noted in its story about her taking office, and her missteps and questions about her academic work gave ammunition to detractors who claimed she owed her position solely to her race.

This is the poisoned pool in which Harvard now swims. Whenever it elevates someone like Gay, there’s an assumption by admirers and detractors alike that she’s a political symbol whose performance represents more than who she is as a person

dehumanization is the price any institution pays when considerations of social engineering supplant those of individual achievement.

It may take a generation after the end of affirmative action before someone like Gay can have the opportunity to be judged on her own merits, irrespective of her color.

the damage that the social-justice model has done to higher education will take longer to repair. In 2015, 57 percent of Americans expressed high confidence in higher education, according to a Gallup survey. Last year, the number had fallen to 36 percent, and that was before the wave of antisemitic campus outbursts. At Harvard, early admission applications fell by 17 percent last fall.

Harvard also sets the tone for the rest of American higher ed — and for public attitudes toward it. One of the secrets of America’s postwar success wasn’t simply the caliber of U.S. universities. It was the respect they engendered among ordinary people who aspired to send their children to them.

That respect is now being eroded to the point of being erased. For good reason

People admire, and will strive for, excellence — both for its own sake and for the status it confers. But status without excellence is a rapidly wasting asset, especially when it comes with an exorbitant price. That’s the position of much of American academia today. Two hundred thousand dollars or more is a lot to pay for lessons in how to be an anti-racist.

the intellectual rot is pervasive and won’t stop spreading until universities return to the idea that their central purpose is to identify and nurture and liberate the best minds, not to engineer social utopias.

But what kind of men were featured? They’re all rich and powerful, and as a longtime fan of professional wrestling, I loved watching Hogan as a kid, but none of them are the kind of man I’d want my son to be. White was caught on video slapping his wife. Kid Rock has his own checkered past, including a sex tape and an assault charge related to a fight in a Nashville strip club. Hogan faced his own sex scandal after he had a bizarre sexual relationship with a woman who was married to one of his close friends, a radio host who goes by “Bubba the Love Sponge.”

We know all about Trump, but it’s worth remembering some of his worst moments — including a jury finding that he was liable for sexual abuse, his defamation of his sex-abuse victim, the “Access Hollywood” tape and the countless examples of his cruelly insulting the women he so plainly hates.

I highlight McRaven for a reason; he has perfectly articulated how to attack MAGA masculinity. Ten years ago, he gave one of the most powerful commencement speeches in recent American history. He addressed the graduates of the University of Texas, Austin, and three YouTube versions have racked up more than 70 million views combined.

It’s known — oddly enough — as the “Make Your Bed” speech. While it wasn’t aimed only at men, every person who forwarded it to me was a man. It appealed to universal values, but it connected with men I know at a deep and profound level.

McRaven draws on his SEAL training to teach students how to change the world. It begins with the small things, like accomplishing that tiny first task of making your bed, because “if you can’t do the little things right, you’ll never be able to do the big things right.”

Republican manliness was the capstone of the convention.

I wonder if Democrats should answer the Republican men’s night with a men’s night of their own — a night that features heroes instead of bullies and showmen, a night that answers the Republican appeal to men’s basest instincts with an appeal to their highest ideals.

Trumpist masculinity is rooted in grievance and anger. McRaven’s message centers on honor and courage.

When you center masculinity on grievance and anger rather than honor and courage, you attract men like Hogan and Kid Rock and White. Worse, that is how you mold the men in your movement, including men like Vance.

Many conservatives rightly decry the way in which parts of the far left tend to use the words “straight white male” as a virtual epithet, as if there were something inherently suspect in the identities of tens of millions of men and boy

if men feel that Democrats are hostile to them, they’ll go where they feel wanted, the gender gap will become a gender canyon, and more men will embrace Trumpism because that’s just what men do.

We aren’t simply electing women and men; we’re electing role models, and Trump has unquestionably been a role model for countless men. He has molded not just the policies but also the ethos of the Republican Party. But America’s men need different role models and a different ethos.

let’s return for the moment to the Navy SEAL who served his country for decades, who helped kill one of America’s deadliest foes and who declared to American college graduates, “You must have compassion. You must ache for the poor and disenfranchised. You must fear for the vulnerable. You must weep for the ill and infirm. You must pray for those who are without hope. You must be kind to the less fortunate.”

The address builds to a conclusion that is alien to Trumpist masculinity: “Start each day with a task completed. Find someone to help you through life. Respect everyone. Know that life is not fair and that you will fail often. But if you take some risks, step up when the times are the toughest, face down the bullies, lift up the downtrodden and never ever give up — if you do these things, the next generation and the generations that follow will live in a world far better than the one we have today.”

there’s a better way for men — for all of us. It’s rooted in honor, courage and love. Or as McRaven put it, “For what hero gives so much of themselves without caring for those they are trying to save?

Have such technological leaps been good? Harari has doubts. Humans have “produced little that we can be proud of,” he complained in Sapiens. His next books, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2015) and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018), gazed into the future with apprehension

Harari has written another since-the-dawn-of-time overview, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks From the Stone Age to AI. It’s his grimmest work yet

Harari rejects the notion that more information leads automatically to truth or wisdom. But it has led to artificial intelligence, whose advent Harari describes apocalyptically. “If we mishandle it,” he warns, “AI might extinguish not only the human dominion on Earth but the light of consciousness itself, turning the universe into a realm of utter darkness.”

Those seeking a precedent for AI often bring up the movable-type printing press, which inundated Europe with books and led, they say, to the scientific revolution. Harari rolls his eyes at this story. Nothing guaranteed that printing would be used for science, he notes

Copernicus’s On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres failed to sell its puny initial print run of about 500 copies in 1543. It was, the writer Arthur Koestler joked, an “all-time worst seller.”

The book that did sell was Heinrich Kramer’s The Hammer of the Witches (1486), which ranted about a supposed satanic conspiracy of sexually voracious women who copulated with demons and cursed men’s penises. The historian Tamar Herzig describes Kramer’s treatise as “arguably the most misogynistic text to appear in print in premodern times.” Yet it was “a bestseller by early modern standards,”

Kramer’s book encouraged the witch hunts that killed tens of thousands. These murderous sprees, Harari observes, were “made worse” by the printing press.

Ampler information flows made surveillance and tyranny worse too, Harari argues. The Soviet Union was, among other things, “one of the most formidable information networks in history,”

Information has always carried this destructive potential, Harari believes. Yet up until now, he argues, even such hellish episodes have been only that: episodes

Demagogic manias like the ones Kramer fueled tend to burn bright and flame out.

States ruled by top-down terror have a durability problem too, Harari explains. Even if they could somehow intercept every letter and plant informants in every household, they’d still need to intelligently analyze all of the incoming reports. No regime has come close to managing this

for the 20th-century states that got nearest to total control, persistent problems managing information made basic governance difficult.

So it was, at any rate, in the age of paper. Collecting data is now much, much easier.

Some people worry that the government will implant a chip in their brain, but they should “instead worry about the smartphones on which they read these conspiracy theories,” Harari writes. Phones can already track our eye movements, record our speech, and deliver our private communications to nameless strangers. They are listening devices that, astonishingly, people are willing to leave by the bedside while having sex.

Harari’s biggest worry is what happens when AI enters the chat. Currently, massive data collection is offset, as it has always been, by the difficulties of data analysis

What defense could there be against an entity that recognized every face, knew every mood, and weaponized that information?

Today’s political deliriums are stoked by click-maximizing algorithms that steer people toward “engaging” content, which is often whatever feeds their righteous rage.

Imagine what will happen, Harari writes, when bots generate that content themselves, personalizing and continually adjusting it to flood the dopamine receptors of each user.

Kramer’s Hammer of the Witches will seem like a mild sugar high compared with the heroin rush of content the algorithms will concoct. If AI seizes command, it could make serfs or psychopaths of us all.

Harari regards AI as ultimately unfathomable—and that is his concern.

Although we know how to make AI models, we don’t understand them. We’ve blithely summoned an “alien intelligence,” Harari writes, with no idea what it will do.

Last year, Harari signed an open letter warning of the “profound risks to society and humanity” posed by unleashing “powerful digital minds that no one—not even their creators—can understand, predict, or reliably control.” It called for a pause of at least six months on training advanced AI systems,

cynics saw the letter as self-serving. It fed the hype by insisting that artificial intelligence, rather than being a buggy product with limited use, was an epochal development. It showcased tech leaders’ Oppenheimer-style moral seriousness

it cost them nothing, as there was no chance their research would actually stop. Four months after signing, Musk publicly launched an AI company.

The economics of the Information Age have been treacherous. They’ve made content cheaper to consume but less profitable to produce. Consider the effect of the free-content and targeted-advertising models on journalism

Since 2005, the United States has lost nearly a third of its newspapers and more than two-thirds of its newspaper jobs, to the point where nearly 7 percent of newspaper employees now work for a single organization, The New York Times

we speak of “news deserts,” places where reporting has essentially vanished.

AI threatens to exacerbate this. With better chatbots, platforms won’t need to link to external content, because they’ll reproduce it synthetically. Instead of a Google search that sends users to outside sites, a chatbot query will summarize those sites, keeping users within Google’s walled garden.

a Truman Show–style bubble: personally generated content, read by voices that sound real but aren’t, plus product placement

this would cut off writers and publishers—the ones actually generating ideas—from readers. Our intellectual institutions would wither, and the internet would devolve into a closed loop of “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four,” as the software engineer Tom Eastman puts it.

Harari is Silicon Valley’s ideal of what a chatbot should be. He raids libraries, detects the patterns, and boils all of history down to bullet points. (Modernity, he writes, “can be summarised in a single phrase: humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power.”)

Individual AI models cost billions of dollars. In 2023, about a fifth of venture capital in North America and Europe went to AI. Such sums make sense only if tech firms can earn enormous revenues off their product, by monopolizing it or marketing it. And at that scale, the most obvious buyers are other large companies or governments. How confident are we that giving more power to corporations and states will turn out well?

He discusses it as something that simply happened. Its arrival is nobody’s fault in particular.

In Harari’s view, “power always stems from cooperation between large numbers of humans”; it is the product of society.

like a chatbot, he has a quasi-antagonistic relationship with his sources, an I’ll read them so you don’t have to attitude. He mines other writers for material—a neat quip, a telling anecdote—but rarely seems taken with anyone else’s view

Hand-wringing about the possibility that AI developers will lose control of their creation, like the sorcerer’s apprentice, distracts from the more plausible scenario that they won’t lose control, and that they’ll use or sell it as planned. A better German fable might be Richard Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung : A power-hungry incel forges a ring that will let its owner rule the world—and the gods wage war over it.

Harari’s eyes are more on the horizon than on Silicon Valley’s economics or politics.

In Nexus, he proposes four principles. The first is “benevolence,” explained thus: “When a computer network collects information on me, that information should be used to help me rather than manipulate me.”

Harari’s other three values are decentralization of informational channels, accountability from those who collect our data, and some respite from algorithmic surveillance

these are fine, but they are quick, unsurprising, and—especially when expressed in the abstract, as things that “we” should all strive for—not very helpful.

though his persistent first-person pluralizing (“decisions we all make”) softly suggests that AI is humanity’s collective creation rather than the product of certain corporations and the individuals who run them. This obscures the most important actors in the drama—ironically, just as those actors are sapping our intellectual life, hampering the robust, informed debates we’d need in order to make the decisions Harari envisions.

Taking AI seriously might mean directly confronting the companies developing it

Harari slots easily into the dominant worldview of Silicon Valley. Despite his oft-noted digital abstemiousness, he exemplifies its style of gathering and presenting information. And, like many in that world, he combines technological dystopianism with political passivity.

Although he thinks tech giants, in further developing AI, might end humankind, he does not treat thwarting them as an urgent priority. His epic narratives, told as stories of humanity as a whole, do not make much room for such us-versus-them clashes.

In December of last year, Netflix provided an unprecedented map of its library by releasing a comprehensive look at its viewer data for the very first time. It comes as an Excel file, less than a megabyte, and ranks 18,214 pieces of content in Netflix’s gargantuan library by the number of hours viewed during the first six months of 2023, rounded to the nearest 100,000

Netflix excluded titles with fewer than 50,000 viewer hours. At the top was “The Night Agent,” a sub-Clancy-quality thriller about an F.B.I. guy, with more than 812 million hours viewed. At the bottom was “선생 김봉두 (My Teacher, Mr. Kim),” a South Korean comedy from 2003 with 100,000 hours, though this placement is an artifact of Excel’s sorting through the vastness of the catalog. Roughly the last four thousand entries all have 100,000 hours viewed — this is as low as the scale goes — and are arranged alphabetically

Outside the very top, which is dominated by Netflix Originals and kids’ movies, it’s not totally clear why anything winds up anywhere.

to scan through it is to appreciate how the library’s sheer size has heightened the importance of chance in our consumption habits.

Your view into the catalog may feel like a grand vista, but in actuality you are peering through a keyhole. When I open up Netflix on my TV, I am immediately met with a carousel of 75 shows and movies New on Netflix; then the Top 10 TV Shows in the U.S. Today; beneath that a carousel of another 75 suggestions Because You Watched “Rebel Ridge”; beyond that, an algorithmic selection of 33 Today’s Top Picks for You; then Bingeworthy TV Dramas, 75 of them. Then there’s Your Next Watch, a combination of stuff my kid watches and stuff I might, 75 more. Next: The last 10 things we didn’t finish; then, a list of 75 more titles because I watched “Shot Caller.” Beyond that, no fewer than 30 more carousels of about 75 titles each. That’s a whole lot of TV, but it’s still just a small slice of the catalog.

What we’re paying for, in the end, is not any one show, or any three or 10 or 50 shows, but rather this fathomless sense of abundance.

Matt Stoller, the anti-monopolist writer, cited this same story in a blog post about Hollywood’s travails. His theory was that Hollywood has gotten so big that it can’t even discover what people really want anymore

As a contrast, he cites the success of “Back to the Future,” an odd movie that became an enormous hit, eventually earning hundreds of millions. But as Stoller points out, in 1985, this happened slowly: It opened small in July, in about 1,400 theaters, and crept up to 1,550 theaters by the end of August, staying in at least 1,000 theaters until the Christmas season. (A big-budget Hollywood movie released today typically opens in about 4,000 theaters and is gone in a few weeks.

The movie, Stoller writes, “was put into a market, where information circulated among buyers and sellers.” There was a constant interplay between the art and the audience (and the middlemen) that determined its reach and legitimacy. Now, in Stoller’s eyes, the public is instead subject to something like content gavage, delivered 4,000 theaters at a time.

Which isn’t to say that the streamers don’t make hits and that people don’t watch and enjoy a lot of streaming television, as Netflix’s 183 billion viewer hours in 2023 can attest.

The producer and writer James Schamus has lamented what he calls the “Uberfication” of Hollywood under the streamers: Netflix and the others have demoted the creative talent from sharing in profits to working for hire, like Uber drivers

he leash has been off for a decade now, and eventually you face the same problem Richie Rich did: When you’re drowning in cash, it’s always tempting to say yes.

to look at these Netflix numbers is to realize that high-quality television is not the necessary outcome of the streaming model but possibly the happy byproduct of an industry in transition — and at this point maybe something like a small subculture.

It was practically a rounding error in comparison to “FUBAR,” an Arnold Schwarzenegger series I’d never heard of, and the first season of a show called “Ginny & Georgia,” which came out in 2021 and is apparently one of the most popular shows on Netflix, with both seasons appearing in the Top 10, together accounting for nearly a billion viewer hours. Never heard of it. Don’t know anyone who has. Maybe that’s my problem, because I’m an out-of-touch magazine editor. But maybe it’s yours too.

the fact of the matter is that we all spent years basically having no idea what was going on in there and taking guidance from friends, social media, newspapers, magazines and websites — all similarly blinded

it makes you wonder about the Talmudic discourse that surrounds every episode of buzzy television shows, trying to use them to make sense of the zeitgeist. What if the geist of our zeit mostly involves bingeing some British murder mystery based on a Harlan Coben (?!) novel called “Fool Me Once”? That was the most-watched show on Netflix in the first half of this year.

There are some economists who fretted about ZIRP because it can enable so-called “zombie businesses”: companies that survive only because of the availability of cheap capital, who stagger along, refinancing debt, never failing — artificial, undead things. And I think about this concept when I look back at the tech world’s takeover of culture

these business strategies, and this river of money diverted to bring them to fruition, created a sort of zombie discourse in our culture, one that appeared vital and real, and then — coincidentally or not, over the last few years — started to dissolve before our eyes.

just as the old market signals had become obsolete, an entire meaning-making apparatus arose to take its place

New, synthetic replacements were conjured, with a constantly expanding supply of televised content to direct them at. And social media feeds made up of highly nonrepresentative samples of the public to put all of this back into, spraying the messages around this new ecosystem like light from a disco ball.

It’s hard not to wonder, looking back at it all, if this situation created a pack of zombies, and they started to follow one another down a strange course, one paved with a whole lot of, you know, “Nanette” — titles that implicate the viewer in ways that are more interesting to write about than they are to watch

All we can say for sure is that the gulf between elite and popular discourse that so famously opened up during this era was helped along by the intrusion of the tech world into pop culture.

But it can certainly account for the rise of so-called Mid TV: shows that look expensive, are reasonably smart and packed with talent and somehow manage to be, in the Times TV critic James Poniewozik’s words, “. . . fine?”

Uber, the undisputed heavyweight champion of the ZIRP era, has similarly ushered in a world that is obviously superior in many ways and subtly, almost imperceptibly worse in others — less distinct, less interesting and sometimes even less useful.

According to the latest data, there are now more than 100,000 ride-share vehicles in New York City, and Manhattan’s streets have never been harder to traverse

Ambulance response times are getting measurably worse by the month

more than half the cars on the road are for-hire: the city’s iconic yellow cabs now engulfed by an anonymous fleet of sedans and S.U.V.s summoned seamlessly through apps, serving the market so well that the streets have nearly ceased to function.

perhaps that is what will become of our entertainment landscape too: There’s always something available. More of it than ever before. More than you could have dreamed of. And it’s available to you at the tap of a button, like magic. The way you always hoped it would be. Whether it can always get you where you want to go is another question

They also claim that OpenAI has used hardball tactics to prevent workers from voicing their concerns about the technology, including restrictive nondisparagement agreements that departing employees were asked to sign.

“OpenAI is really excited about building A.G.I., and they are recklessly racing to be the first there,” said Daniel Kokotajlo, a former researcher in OpenAI’s governance division and one of the group’s organizers.

Other members include William Saunders, a research engineer who left OpenAI in February, and three other former OpenAI employees: Carroll Wainwright, Jacob Hilton and Daniel Ziegler. Several current OpenAI employees endorsed the letter anonymously because they feared retaliation from the company,

At OpenAI, Mr. Kokotajlo saw that even though the company had safety protocols in place — including a joint effort with Microsoft known as the “deployment safety board,” which was supposed to review new models for major risks before they were publicly released — they rarely seemed to slow anything down.

So was the departure of Dr. Leike, who along with Dr. Sutskever had led OpenAI’s “superalignment” team, which focused on managing the risks of powerful A.I. models. In a series of public posts announcing his departure, Dr. Leike said he believed that “safety culture and processes have taken a back seat to shiny products.”

“When I signed up for OpenAI, I did not sign up for this attitude of ‘Let’s put things out into the world and see what happens and fix them afterward,’” Mr. Saunders said.

Mr. Kokotajlo, 31, joined OpenAI in 2022 as a governance researcher and was asked to forecast A.I. progress. He was not, to put it mildly, optimistic.In his previous job at an A.I. safety organization, he predicted that A.G.I. might arrive in 2050. But after seeing how quickly A.I. was improving, he shortened his timelines. Now he believes there is a 50 percent chance that A.G.I. will arrive by 2027 — in just three years.

He also believes that the probability that advanced A.I. will destroy or catastrophically harm humanity — a grim statistic often shortened to “p(doom)” in A.I. circles — is 70 percent.

Last month, two senior A.I. researchers — Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike — left OpenAI under a cloud. Dr. Sutskever, who had been on OpenAI’s board and voted to fire Mr. Altman, had raised alarms about the potential risks of powerful A.I. systems. His departure was seen by some safety-minded employees as a setback.

Mr. Kokotajlo said, he became so worried that, last year, he told Mr. Altman that the company should “pivot to safety” and spend more time and resources guarding against A.I.’s risks rather than charging ahead to improve its models. He said that Mr. Altman had claimed to agree with him, but that nothing much changed.

In April, he quit. In an email to his team, he said he was leaving because he had “lost confidence that OpenAI will behave responsibly" as its systems approach human-level intelligence.

“The world isn’t ready, and we aren’t ready,” Mr. Kokotajlo wrote. “And I’m concerned we are rushing forward regardless and rationalizing our actions.”

On his way out, Mr. Kokotajlo refused to sign OpenAI’s standard paperwork for departing employees, which included a strict nondisparagement clause barring them from saying negative things about the company, or else risk having their vested equity taken away.

Many employees could lose out on millions of dollars if they refused to sign. Mr. Kokotajlo’s vested equity was worth roughly $1.7 million, he said, which amounted to the vast majority of his net worth, and he was prepared to forfeit all of it.

Mr. Altman said he was “genuinely embarrassed” not to have known about the agreements, and the company said it would remove nondisparagement clauses from its standard paperwork and release former employees from their agreements.)

In their open letter, Mr. Kokotajlo and the other former OpenAI employees call for an end to using nondisparagement and nondisclosure agreements at OpenAI and other A.I. companies.

“Broad confidentiality agreements block us from voicing our concerns, except to the very companies that may be failing to address these issues,”

They also call for A.I. companies to “support a culture of open criticism” and establish a reporting process for employees to anonymously raise safety-related concerns.

They have retained a pro bono lawyer, Lawrence Lessig, the prominent legal scholar and activist

Mr. Kokotajlo and his group are skeptical that self-regulation alone will be enough to prepare for a world with more powerful A.I. systems. So they are calling for lawmakers to regulate the industry, too.

“There needs to be some sort of democratically accountable, transparent governance structure in charge of this process," Mr. Kokotajlo said. “Instead of just a couple of different private companies racing with each other, and keeping it all secret.”

That willingness is not reassuring. For example, it is not far-fetched to imagine insurers wanting to get their hands on this type of medical information in order to hike premiums. Data brokers of all kinds will be similarly keen to obtain people’s real-time health-chat records. Altman made a point to say that this theoretical product would not trick people into sharing information.

. Neither Altman nor Huffington had an answer to my most basic question—What would the product actually look like? Would it be a smartwatch app, a chatbot? A Siri-like audio assistant?—but Huffington suggested that Thrive’s AI platform would be “available through every possible mode,” that “it could be through your workplace, like Microsoft Teams or Slack.

This led me to propose a hypothetical scenario in which a company collects this information and stores it inappropriately or uses it against employees. What safeguards might the company apply then? Altman’s rebuttal was philosophical. “Maybe society will decide there’s some version of AI privilege,” he said. “When you talk to a doctor or a lawyer, there’s medical privileges, legal privileges. There’s no current concept of that when you talk to an AI, but maybe there should be.”

So much seems to come down to: How much do you want to believe in a future mediated by intelligent machines that act like humans? And: Do you trust these people?

A fundamental question has loomed over the world of AI since the concept cohered in the 1950s: How do you talk about a technology whose most consequential effects are always just on the horizon, never in the present? Whatever is built today is judged partially on its own merits, but also—perhaps even more important—on what it might presage about what is coming next.

the models “just want to learn”—a quote attributed to the OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever that means, essentially, that if you throw enough money, computing power, and raw data into these networks, the models will become capable of making ever more impressive inferences. True believers argue that this is a path toward creating actual intelligence (many others strongly disagree). In this framework, the AI people become something like evangelists for a technology rooted in faith: Judge us not by what you see, but by what we imagine.

I found it outlandish to invoke America’s expensive, inequitable, and inarguably broken health-care infrastructure when hyping a for-profit product that is so nonexistent that its founders could not tell me whether it would be an app or not.

Thrive AI Health is profoundly emblematic of this AI moment precisely because it is nothing, yet it demands that we entertain it as something profound.

you don’t have to get apocalyptic to see the way that AI’s potential is always muddying people’s ability to evaluate its present. For the past two years, shortcomings in generative-AI products—hallucinations; slow, wonky interfaces; stilted prose; images that showed too many teeth or couldn’t render fingers; chatbots going rogue—have been dismissed by AI companies as kinks that will eventually be worked out

Faith is not a bad thing. We need faith as a powerful motivating force for progress and a way to expand our vision of what is possible. But faith, in the wrong context, is dangerous, especially when it is blind. An industry powered by blind faith seems particularly troubling.

The greatest trick of a faith-based industry is that it effortlessly and constantly moves the goal posts, resisting evaluation and sidestepping criticism. The promise of something glorious, just out of reach, continues to string unwitting people along. All while half-baked visions promise salvation that may never come.

But your product is incredible. But the gasoline, Elon, is the the cost of energy, not only gasoline. It’s the cost of heating your house and cooling your house. That has to come down. It’s gone up 100 percent, 150 and 200 percent. And that has to come down when that comes down. And we’re going to drill baby drill. You know, they stopped drilling and then they went back to drilling because they went back to the Trump policy.

DONALD TRUMP: But if they won the day after they get into office, we’re going to — this country will go out of business because they’re going to go to an energy policy that’s not sustainable. Wind and different things. You’re not going to have any. And I know you’re a big fan of the A.I.

And I have to say that A.I. and this is shocking to me, but A.I. requires twice the energy that the country already produces for everything. So what you’re going to have to build, we’re going to have to build a lot of energy if our country will be competitive with China, because that’s our primary competitor for this on the A.I.

DONALD TRUMP: Now, your cars don’t require too much gasoline. So, you know, you’re you have a good and you do make a great product. I have to say I have to be honest with you. That doesn’t mean everybody should have an electric car, but these are minor details.

we were sitting on the biggest pile of liquid gold anywhere in the world, bigger than Saudi Arabia, bigger than Russia. And we were going to drill and we were going to make so much money. We were going to supply Europe with oil. I had stopped the Russian pipeline and we were going to supply them with oil and gas.

ELON MUSK: I want to say something about, like, you know, maybe my views on climate change and oil and gas, because I think it’s probably different from what most people would assume, because my views are actually pretty, I think, moderate in this regard, which is that I don’t think we should vilify the oil and gas industry and the people that have worked very hard in those industries to provide the necessary energy to support the economy. And if we were to stop using oil and gas right now, we would all be starving and the economy would collapse.

So it’s you know, I don’t think it’s right to sort of vilify the oil and gas industry. And the world has a certain demand for oil and gas, and it’s probably better if the United States provides that than some other countries. And it would help with prosperity in the US. And at the same time, obviously, my view is, is like, we do over time want to move to a sustainable energy economy, because eventually you do run out of I mean, you run out of oil and gas.

ELON MUSK: It’s not there. It’s not infinite. And there is some risk. I think it’s not the risk is not as as high as, you know, a lot of people say it is with respect to global warming.

But I think if you just keep increasing the cost of a million in the atmosphere long enough, eventually, it actually simply gets uncomfortable to breathe, people don’t realize this. If you go, if you go past 1000 parts per million of CO2, you start getting headaches and nausea. And so we’re now in the sort of 400 range, we’re adding, I think, about roughly two parts per million per year. So I mean, still gives us what it means, like, we still have quite a bit of time.

But so there’s not like we don’t need to rush and we don’t need to like, you know, stop farmers from farming or, you know, prevent people from having steaks or right basic stuff like that. Like, leave the farmers alone.

DONALD TRUMP: How crazy is that? Where I mean, you have farmers that are not allowed to farm anymore and have to get rid of their cattle and the whole, the whole world.

DONALD TRUMP: But it’s largely taken its lead from us. I do say, though, I’ve heard in terms of the fossil fuel, because even to create your electric car and create the electricity needed for the electric car, you know, fossil fuel is what really creates that at the generating plants. And, you know, so you sort of can’t get away from it at this moment. I mean, someday you might be able to.

But I do hear we have anywhere from 100 to 500 years left. You know, much of it hasn’t even been found yet.

ELON MUSK: Yeah.

So I think we have, you know, perhaps hundreds of years left. Nobody really knows. But during that time, something will come around that will be very good.

ELON MUSK: And you know, that’s what Tesla is trying to move things towards. And I think we’ve made a lot of progress and progress in that regard. But when you look at our cars, we like we don’t believe that environmentalism, that caring about the environment should mean that you have to suffer. So we make sure that our cars are beautiful, that they drive well, that they’re fast, they’re, you know, sexy.

But I mean, my view is like if you just look at sort of the past million that increments every year, you know, you get sort of two or three past million every year of CO2. I mean, I think some of that it’s problematic if it accelerates, if you start going from two or three to, say, five. And then there may be some situations where you get a step change increase in the CO2. And I think we don’t — we don’t want to get too close to a thousand PPM because like that’s that’s actually makes it uncomfortable to agree, like just existing in a thousand PPM CO2 is on top of that’s like a that’s considered like an industrial hazard.

So so, you know, that’s you start getting headaches and stuff. So even without global warming, it’s not comfortable. So you don’t want to get too close to that.

ELON MUSK: But I mean, I think we’ve got I think we want to just move over and like and if if I don’t know, 50 to 100 years from now, we’re I don’t know, mostly sustainable. I think that’ll probably be OK. So it’s not like the house is on fire immediately, but I think it is something we need to to move towards and on, you know, on balance, it’s probably better to move there faster than slower.

But like I said, without vilifying the oil and gas industry and without causing hardship in the short term, I think this can be done without, you know, people can still have, you know, a stake and they can still drive gasoline cars and, you know, it’s OK.

It’s like it’s not — I don’t think we should vilify people for it, but I think we should just just generally lean in the direction of sustainability. And I actually think solar is going to be a majority of of us energy generation in the future and certainly trending that way. And so you get the solar power, mind that with with with batteries. So because obviously the sun doesn’t shine at night and and they use that to charge the electric cars and you have a long term sustainable solution.

ELON MUSK: Well, I mean, my estimate would be, you know, a little more aggressive than that. But it’s not the sort of like we’re all going to die in five years stuff that that’s obviously BS.

I mean, they’re cool. I mean, the sexy joke Model S, Model 3, Model X and Y spells out sexy is probably most expensive joke out there. But, you know, I just I don’t know, I like cheesy humor, you know, so and but I’m I’m a big fan of like, let’s have an inspiring future and let’s let’s work towards, you know, a better future and would do so without demonizing. Right.

DONALD TRUMP: I’m OK. You know, it’s very interesting. You use the word global warming and today they use the word climate change because, you know, you have some places that go up and so they were getting themselves in a little trouble with the word global warming because not every place is warming. Some places are going the opposite direction.

DONALD TRUMP: But I would think and I have no idea because that’s not my world. But I would think that this would be something that would be interesting. But, you know, the one thing that I don’t understand is that people talk about global warming or they talk about climate change, but they never talk about nuclear warming. And for me, that’s an immediate problem because you have, as I said, five countries where you have major nuclear and, you know, probably some others are getting there and that’s very dangerous.

That’s where you need a strong American president because you just you don’t want to have this proliferation. But you have five countries and getting where, you know, China is much less than us right now, but they’re going to catch us sooner than people think. They’re way lower. Russia and us are number one and we’re sort of tied.

And China is far behind, but they’re developing at a level that, you know, you’re not surprised to hear very fast. It’s going to they’ll end up catching up, maybe even surpassing. But to me, the biggest problem is not climate change. It’s not and everything’s a problem.

ELON MUSK: Yeah, actually, there’s a bad side of nuclear, which is a nuclear war, very bad side. But there’s there’s also, I think, nuclear electricity, absolutely underrated. And it’s actually, you know, people have this fear of nuclear, nuclear electricity generation, but it’s actually one of the safest forms of electricity generation.

It’s just a huge misunderstanding. And if you look at the injuries and deaths, you know, caused by, say, I mean, I’m not going to pick on coal mining, but just any kind of mining operation. And there’s a certain number of injuries and deaths per year, and you compare that to nuclear. Nuclear is actually way better.

ELON MUSK: So it’s underrated as an electricity source. And I think it’s something that’s worth reconsidering. But there’s so much regulation that people can’t get it done. So that, you know, —

DONALD TRUMP: Maybe they’ll have to change the name — the name is the rough name. There are some areas like that, like when you see what happened in Japan, the brand that we have to give it a good name, we’ll name it after you or something, you know. No, it has a branding problem.

DONALD TRUMP: You know, you realize it’s pretty bad,ELON MUSK: But it’s actually not that bad. So like after Fukushima happened in Japan, like people were asking me in California, you know, are we worried about like a nucleic cloud coming from Japan? I’m like, no, that’s crazy. It’s actually it’s not even dangerous in Fukushima. I actually flew there and ate locally grown vegetables on TV to prove it. And I donated a solar water treatment, solar powered system for a water treatment plant.

ELON MUSK: It’s like, you know, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed, but now they’re like full cities again. So it’s really not something that, you know, it’s not as scary as people think, basically. But let’s see.

2. They are interested in history and in geography, but do not accept either as fate. Political choices are decisive

3. Political choices have ultimately to be explained by struggles within elites and between elites and the populations they govern.

They will go on, as the Nobel citation explains, to combine an account of historical opportunities, provided by crises, with a study of elite dynamics and struggles between the population and the ruling elite.

because they operate in the sphere of economics it is often also cast in terms of models that formalize political economy in mathematical terms. To be honest it is not obvious what is gained by those exercises in formalization. But they are de rigeur in the discipline.

Already in 2009 James Robinson was pleading for an empirical approach to industrial policy.

hose institutions are decided by politics. And the most propitious institutions for long-run economic growth driven by innovation, are institutions based on rights and freedom

This is Acemoglu writing in 2012:

Boushey cites Acemoglu’s work from the 2010s where he moved beyond the consensus amongst economists that focused on carbon pricing and carbon taxing to insist on the need to use policy to promote the development of clean energy technology, thus enabling more rapid switching to renewable energy.

The head of President Biden’s CEA, Jared Bernstein, studied music and social work. He has no degree in economics. Some of Kamala Harris’ top economic advisers — from Brian Deese to Mike Pyle to Deanne Millison — are all lawyers. And on issues from free trade to immigration to tax policy to rent and price controls, both the Trump and Harris campaigns are throwing bedrock economic ideas in the trash can and embracing heterodox, populist ideas that might get you laughed at in economics courses.

I discuss the role of industrial policy in development. I make five arguments. First, from a theoretical point of view there are good grounds for believing that industrial policy can play an important role in promoting development

Second, there certainly are examples where industrial policy has played this role

Third, for every such example there are others where industrial policy has been a failure and may even have impeded development.

Fourth, the difference between these second and third cases rests in the politics of policy. Industrial policy has been successful when those with political power who have implemented the policy have either themselves directly wished for industrialization to succeed, or been forced to act in this way by the incentives generated by political institutions

These arguments imply that we need to stop thinking of normative industry policy and instead begin to develop a satisfactory positive approach if we are ever to help poor countries to industrialize.

The general conclusion, however, is extremely familiar. Technology and capital accumulation are key to economic growth. They themselves are shaped by institutions.

It is hardly surprising, therefore, that leading economic advisors in the Biden administration see them as kindred spirits. After all, the prevailing tone around the White House in recent years has been described by Allison Schrager at Bloomberg as Yale Law School economics.

The figure for whom this quip was coined was Jake Sullivan, who has had a huge influence in setting the economic agenda of the administration

the point has wider application

Clearly, AJR’s work over the last quarter century fits well with the new tone and self-conception of economics in policy-making in Washington today. Though highly competent in technical terms, they are not debating the finer points of monetary economics or time series econometrics. They are interested in the interface between economics, politics, law and institutions.

they share a worldview. They are skeptical of free trade. They bash big business. They see the decline of manufacturing not as a natural evolution of the economy but as a policy catastrophe that needs fixing. They support industrial policy, or a more muscular role for the government in shaping industry with policies like tariffs and subsidies

The President personally is enamored of the democracy v. autocracy framing. The more technical side of policy-making wagers that Western models of innovation and research will out perform their Chinese counterparts

The rise of the Yale Law School of Economics seems to say more about the political winds of our times and the declining popularity of economists and their ideas than anything. Free-market policies — sometimes called “neoliberalism” — are unpopular on both sides of the political aisle right now.

All this also means, that folks that I once described as gatekeepers - blue-blooded economists like Larry Summers, for instance - have lost influence.

Not that AJR are outsiders. But their arguments are capacious enough to embrace a variety of disciplines, to address big question and yet also avoid being excessively technically prescriptive. Their writing is policy relevant without intruding on the discretion of the actual policymakers.

Though Boushey and Bernstein point to more technical essays, in the current moment, it is actually’s AJR’s macrohistorical narrative that is most in keeping with the mood in Washington.

If there is a red thread running through the Biden administration it is a return to a neoconservative framing of the relationship between the US and China

China owes the growth it has so far achieved to the reforms of the 1980s and 1990s. In AJR’s terms these were a move towards a rights-based inclusive order. The slow down in recent year is then attributed to the failure to continue that reform momentum.

The link between the two levels is the presumption that “free societies” produce more first-class patents and top-class STEM researchers. This is precisely what Acemoglu’s “rights revolution” promises.

The historical narrative developed by Acemoglu and Robinson in books like Why Nations Fail, is very much in tune with this kind of thinking. Encompassing inclusive institutions brought about by political revolutions replace extractive elitist institutions and thus set the incentives for investment and private accumulation.

AJR do not simply dismiss the Chinese growth experience. As Acemoglu acknowledges: China has posed a “bit of a challenge” to that argument, as Beijing has been “pouring investment” into the innovative fields of artificial intelligence and electric vehicles.

The CCP in short acts as a non-liberal but inclusive regime. Its anti-corruption drives confirm this ambition and the work necessary to maintain that claim.

AJR are too realistic simply to deny these facts. But their claim is that though such structures can work for a while, in due course, if growth is to continue, there must be a transition.

They think a lot about dividing up the economic pie, Schrager says, and less about growing it

“Our analysis,” says Acemoglu, “is that China is experiencing growth under extractive institutions — under the authoritarian grip of the Communist Party, which has been able to monopolize power and mobilize resources at a scale that has allowed for a burst of economic growth starting from a very low base,” but it’s not sustainable because it doesn’t foster the degree of “creative destruction” that is so vital for innovation and higher incomes.

As Acemoglu remarked: “… my perspective is generally that these authoritarian regimes, for a variety of reasons, are going to have a harder time in achieving long-term, sustainable innovation outcomes,” he said.

“I think the conclusion of their work tells us that institutions are the most critical [to a country’s economic development]. This also has big implications for China’s way forward,” said prominent Chinese economist Xiang Songzuo, who added that the scholars’ conclusions were applicable to the China model. “Only by moving towards further marketising our economy, emphasising on the protection of intellectual property, private companies, fair market competition and upholding the spirit of entrepreneurship, can our economy attain sustainable growth, and our people can have higher incomes.”

tinkering with 77-article proposals from the NDRC does not do justice to the historical vision of Acemoglu and Robinson.

AJR’s agenda was once tightly formulated and specified. In recent years it has become increasingly wide-ranging. Whereas their aim at first was to insist on the exogenous importance of political institutions in economic development, increasingly their thinking has circled around the development of political institutions themselves and the interaction between politics, culture and the economy

As Cam and I discuss on the podcast, some of their arguments about culture are, frankly, hair-raising. With regard to China the issue they take to be at stake is the influence of Confucianism on Chinese institutions and, specifically, the prospects for the “rights revolution” and thus for innovation and long-run growth.

On the whole, their approach is non-dogmatic. Confucianism, they insist, offers many possibilities for the development of political culture and institutions. But for Acemoglu and Robinson what this entails is greater militancy.

While Confucius did say that “commoners do not debate matters of government,” he also emphasized that “a state cannot stand if it has lost the confidence of the people.” Confucian thought recommends respect and obedience to leaders only if they are virtuous. It thus follows that if a leader is not virtuous, he or she can – and perhaps should – be replaced. This perfectly valid interpretation of Confucian values underpins Taiwanese democracy

By contrast, CPC propaganda holds that Confucian values are utterly incompatible with democracy, and that there is no viable alternative to one-party rule. This is patently false. Democracy is as feasible in China as it is in Taiwan. No matter how strident the CPC’s bluster becomes, it will not extinguish people’s desire to participate in politics, complain about injustices, or replace leaders who misb

After reading those words you realize that the kind words from the Council of Economic Advisors undersell the association between the Biden administration’s agenda and AJR view of history. What are at stake here are not only freedom and prosperity, but injustice and ultimately nothing less than human desire

Regime changed advocated in the name of philosophical anthropology. As Cam remarked on the show, it makes one miss Frances Fukuyama and Kojève. Instead, the interpretation of modern history offered to us by this year’s Nobel prize winners in economics is an unreconstructed 21st-century Whiggery, fully in keeping with today’s neoconservative turn in America’s policy. It is Nobel sendoff for the Biden era.

On one end is doubling down on technology

On the other end is to focus on strengthening the real-world human communities and neighborhoods we live in. Seth advocates for the latter and provides us with a roadmap to get there.

A prototypical community consists of most or all of the following:

We note that the first generation to move its social life onto social media platforms immediately became the loneliest generation on record. There is a spectrum of approaches that we as a society can take to address the crushing loneliness of Gen Z and Gen Alpha

A set of shared values, norms, and goals—a common culture that unifies and constrains;

A common identity, ideally based on a common history and narrative and recognition of mutual interdependence

Shared rituals that celebrate the group, its past, and future;

High levels of trust;

High levels of commitment, with limited options for (or high costs to) exit;

Recognition of and respect for common authority figures who guide the group’s decision-making;

More affluent children had many of their activities organized for them by their parents, putting them in a variety of highly structured functional groups with different kids rather than repeatedly playing freely with their neighbors.

A diverse range of skills and personalities that can contribute complementary things of value (e.g., money, time, expertise) to the group;

Role models who exhibit the cultural behaviors that the group should ideally replicate or at least aspire to;

Exhibiting a high degree of inclusiveness by actively seeking to encompass every member who shares the same identity or location;

Capacity to strongly encourage through moral suasion certain norms of conduct and, if necessary, sanction misconduct.

As we can see from this list, a community requires a commitment to a certain social order—and usually to a place—that, by definition, must constrain some choices. In return for security, support, and belonging, members surrender some of their freedom.

This explains why creating community in America today is so difficult—few want to compromise their ability to make choices.

This is especially true among those with the resources and/or capacity to relocate as soon as a better opportunity beckons—the very people whose leadership and role-modeling communities can ill afford to lose.

Why Kids Need Real-World Community

Much of a child’s learning and formation is absorbed from the environment rather than directly taught by adults; behavior is better shaped by modeling than by lecturing.

The institutions (e.g., schools, churches, and parents’ groups) and norms (e.g., regular family dinners, neighborhood play dates, and the expectation that adults will monitor streets) around us shape our kids' lives in ways we sometimes fail to consider because they are subtle

Keystone actors and institutions that bridge and bond different members together;

As I documented in a previous essay at After Babel, unsupervised, child-directed play was in decline long before kids had smartphones. Why? Because place-based institutions and the communities they support were in decline

This oversupervision or “coddling”—the subject of the 2018 book co-authored by Greg Lukianoff and Jon—made the attractions of smartphones and social media even more appealing.

Many praise the myriad benefits that smartphones and social media are said to bring; online connection can give a person a sense of “community,” we are told.  We can find new friends, discover just about any idea imaginable, network, and even date through our phones. We can video chat with hundreds of people simultaneously from far-flung locations. We can pursue learning largely untethered from any physical space. Based on all of this, it would be easy to assume that place doesn’t matter.

I disagree. Physical place actually matters far more than we realize, especially as our lives become ever more placeless.

As Jon writes in The Anxious Generation, only real-world (place-based) social relationships and interactions have the four features that have characterized human interactions for millions of years. Such interactions are embodied, they are  synchronous, they involve one-to-one or one-to-several communications, and they have a high bar for entry and exit.

The challenge today is that smartphones and other digital devices bring so many interesting experiences to children and adolescents that they cause a serious problem: They reduce interest in all non-screen-based forms of experience.

today, the term “community” is often used in ways that are aspirational and limitless (e.g., many online advertisements for new social networks)—quite different from the original meaning of the term.

Why? Perhaps fewer individuals have any experience of what community really means. Young people are marketed to and formed by the twin pursuits of convenience and choice while simultaneously being told that a person’s chief purpose is to express themselves (usually through consumption)

First, you can select a place to live based on its social wealth.

Community differs significantly from friendships, social networks, or what is experienced online. Whereas communities offer mutual support in times of good and bad and are bolstered by robust institutions and norms encouraging frequent, positive interactions, care and concern for one another, and ample opportunities to work together towards common goals, the alternatives typically fall short on these elements. 

they fall far short of actually producing community, which requires overlapping institutions and activities, things that are very hard to achieve if you don’t share a physical place with one another. 

online communities are also voluntary, with many being platforms built for expression or personal advancement. Few provide the diversity of personalities, experiences, income levels, and outlooks that were common in most neighborhoods a few decades ago

This vision of the good life is part of the next generation’s socialization. It feels “natural” to them, and yet it does little to prepare them for the demands and delights of membership in a community.   

If you are a parent and want to join or build a community to enmesh your kids in, what can you do? Here are a few ideas to get started.

Few provide the incentives to earn recognition through the force of character rather than a performative act about oneself. Few provide multifaceted psychological and practical support when needed for members who feel vulnerable or fall into practical difficulties. 

we visited, stayed overnight, met lots of people, and asked lots of questions. In the end, we chose the D.C. suburb where I live now—a warm, welcoming, and institutionally rich place.

Second, consider how you can befriend neighbors and other parents in your immediate vicinity

Try the 8 Front Door Challenge, which helps you plan and host a Get-Together with neighbors closest to you

Participate in organizations or activities in your neighborhood. Spend time in places where people congregate locally

Organize a block party or play street. Create a neighborly block. 

Third, leverage local institutions to build neighborhood community. Schools are best placed for this because of their direct ties to local families and kids, but libraries, local businesses, houses of worship, and any other entity with strong ties to your locale can play an important role

Working with the local library to organize activities in or geared towards your specific neighborhood would create an opportunity for residents to meet one another.

In general, it’s always easier if you find allies among your neighbors, build partnerships with existing institutions, and leverage the assets (cultural, environmental, educational, economic, etc.) you already have locally. Think incrementally, building momentum step by step rather than thinking there is a magic bullet.

Their reasoning is straightforward: These companies have decided that the best way to make generative AI better is to build bigger AI models. And that is really, really expensive, requiring resources on the scale of moon missions and the interstate-highway system to fund the data centers and related infrastructure that generative AI depends on

“If we’re going to justify a trillion or more dollars of investment, [AI] needs to solve complex problems and enable us to do things we haven’t been able to do before.” Today’s flagship AI models, he said, largely cannot.

Now a number of voices in the finance world are beginning to ask whether all of this investment can pay off. OpenAI, for its part, may lose up to $5 billion this year, almost 10 times more than what the company lost in 2022,

Dario Amodei, the CEO of the rival start-up Anthropic, has predicted that a single AI model (such as, say, GPT-6) could cost $100 billion to train by 2027. The global data-center buildup over the next few years could require trillions of dollars from tech companies, utilities, and other industries, according to a July report from Moody’s Ratings.

Over the past few weeks, analysts and investors at some of the world’s most influential financial institutions—including Goldman Sachs, Sequoia Capital, Moody’s, and Barclays—have issued reports that raise doubts about whether the enormous investments in generative AI will be profitable.

generative AI has already done extraordinary things, of course—advancing drug development, solving challenging math problems, generating stunning video clips. But exactly what uses of the technology can actually make money remains unclear

At present, AI is generally good at doing existing tasks—writing blog posts, coding, translating—faster and cheaper than humans can. But efficiency gains can provide only so much value, boosting the current economy but not creating a new one.

Right now, Silicon Valley might just functionally be replacing some jobs, such as customer service and form-processing work, with historically expensive software, which is not a recipe for widespread economic transformation.

McKinsey has estimated that generative AI could eventually add almost $8 trillion to the global economy every year

Tony Kim, the head of technology investment at BlackRock, the world’s largest money manager, told me he believes that AI will trigger one of the most significant technological upheavals ever. “Prior industrial revolutions were never about intelligence,”

“Here, we can manufacture intelligence.”

this future is not guaranteed. Many of the productivity gains expected from AI could be both greatly overestimated and very premature, Daron Acemoglu, an economist at MIT, has found

AI products’ key flaws, such as a tendency to invent false information, could make them unusable, or deployable only under strict human oversight, in certain settings—courts, hospitals, government agencies, schools

AI as a truly epoch-shifting technology, it may well be more akin to blockchain, a very expensive tool destined to fall short of promises to fundamentally transform society and the economy.

Researchers at Barclays recently calculated that tech companies are collectively paying for enough AI-computing infrastructure to eventually power 12,000 different ChatGPTs. Silicon Valley could very well produce a whole host of hit generative-AI products like ChatGPT, “but probably not 12,000 of them,

even if it did, there would be nowhere enough demand to use all those apps and actually turn a profit.

Some of the largest tech companies’ current spending on AI data centers will require roughly $600 billion of annual revenue to break even, of which they are currently about $500 billion short.

Tech proponents have responded to the criticism that the industry is spending too much, too fast, with something like religious dogma. “I don’t care” how much we spend, Altman has said. “I genuinely don’t.

the industry is asking the world to engage in something like a trillion-dollar tautology: AI’s world-transformative potential justifies spending any amount of resources, because its evangelists will spend any amount to make AI transform the world.

in the AI era in particular, a lack of clear evidence for a healthy return on investment may not even matter. Unlike the companies that went bust in the dot-com bubble in the early 2000s, Big Tech can spend exorbitant sums of money and be largely fine

perhaps even more important in Silicon Valley than a messianic belief in AI is a terrible fear of missing out. “In the tech industry, what drives part of this is nobody wants to be left behind. Nobody wants to be seen as lagging,

Go all in on AI, the thinking goes, or someone else will. Their actions evince “a sense of desperation,” Cahn writes. “If you do not move now, you will never get another chance.” Enormous sums of money are likely to continue flowing into AI for the foreseeable future, driven by a mix of unshakable confidence and all-consuming fear.

While we have gained some skill sets (multitasking, technological savvy), other skills have suffered: the art of conversation, the art of looking at people, the art of being seen, the art of being present. Our conduct is no longer governed by subtlety, finesse, grace and attention, all qualities more esteemed in earlier decades. Inwardness and narcissism now hold sway.

Nonironic models include very young children, elderly people, deeply religious people, people with severe mental or physical disabilities, people who have suffered, and those from economically or politically challenged places where seriousness is the governing state of mind. My friend Robert Pogue Harrison put it this way in a recent conversation: “Wherever the real imposes itself, it tends to dissipate the fogs of irony.”

As a function of fear and pre-emptive shame, ironic living bespeaks cultural numbness, resignation and defeat. If life has become merely a clutter of kitsch objects, an endless series of sarcastic jokes and pop references, a competition to see who can care the least (or, at minimum, a performance of such a competition), it seems we’ve made a collective misstep. Could this be the cause of our emptiness and existential malaise? Or a symptom?

This ironic ethos can lead to a vacuity and vapidity of the individual and collective psyche. Historically, vacuums eventually have been filled by something — more often than not, a hazardous something. Fundamentalists are never ironists; dictators are never ironists; people who move things in the political landscape, regardless of the sides they choose, are never ironists.

Ironic living is a first-world problem. For the relatively well educated and financially secure, irony functions as a kind of credit card you never have to pay back. In other words, the hipster can frivolously invest in sham social capital without ever paying back one sincere dime.

The most pure nonironic models in life, however, are to be found in nature: animals and plants are exempt from irony, which exists only where the human dwells.

Moving away from the ironic involves saying what you mean, meaning what you say and considering seriousness and forthrightness as expressive possibilities, despite the inherent risks. It means undertaking the cultivation of sincerity, humility and self-effacement, and demoting the frivolous and the kitschy on our collective scale of values.

The loosely defined New Sincerity movements in the arts that have sprouted since the 1980s positioned themselves as responses to postmodern cynicism, detachment and meta-referentiality. (New Sincerity has recently been associated with the writing of David Foster Wallace, the films of Wes Anderson and the music of Cat Power.) But these attempts failed to stick, as evidenced by the new age of Deep Irony.

Brad Hintz, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein, said that LPL’s management had done a good job expanding the company and improving its compliance technology, allowing brokers with high standards to do well. But he said the scattered nature of its offices was an Achilles’ heel that exposed the company to lawsuits and regulatory risks.

Economic gains have still left 30.9 percent of Latvia’s population “severely materially deprived,” according to 2011 data released in December by Eurostat, the European Union’s statistics agency, second only to Bulgaria. Unemployment has fallen from more than 20 percent in early 2010, but was still 14.2 percent in the third quarter of 2012

“I’m always asking people here, ‘How can you put up with this?’ ” said Juris Calitis, a Latvian-born Anglican chaplain whose family fled Soviet occupation in the 1940s and who returned when the Soviet empire crumbled. “It is really shocking,” added Mr. Calitis, who runs a soup kitchen at his church in Riga’s old town. Latvians, he said, “should be shouting in the streets,” but “there is an acceptance of hard knocks.”

In contrast to much of Europe, Latvia today has no tradition of labor activism. “What can you achieve in the street? It is cold and snowing,” said Peteris Krigers, president of the Free Trade Union Confederation of Latvia. Organizing strikes, he said, is nearly impossible. “It is seen as shameful for people who earn any salary, no matter how small, to go on strike.”

Also largely absent are the leftist political forces that have opposed austerity elsewhere in Europe, or the rigid labor laws that protect job security and wage levels. In the second half of 2010, after less than 18 months of painful austerity, Latvia’s economy began to grow again.

Since 2008, Latvia has lost more than 5 percent of its population, mostly young people, to emigration. The recent exodus peaked in 2010, when 42,263 people moved abroad, a huge number in a country of just two million now, according to Mihails Hazans, a professor at the University of Latvia.

Alf Vanags, director of the Baltic International Center for Economic Policy Studies here, is skeptical. “The idea of a Latvian ‘success story’ is ridiculous,” he said. “Latvia is not a model for anybody.”

A better and more equitable way out of Latvia’s troubles, he believes, would have been a devaluation of the currency, an option closed to Greece and 16 other countries that use the euro. Latvia kept its currency pegged to the euro, putting itself in much the same straitjacket as euro zone nations.

“You can only do this in a country that is willing to take serious pain for some time and has a dramatic flexibility in the labor market,” he said. “The lesson of what Latvia has done is that there is no lesson.”

how will these intertwined systems of hardware and software be designed to meaningfully add to our lives and to society?

the idea that we are beginning to instrument our bodies and make them nodes on the network opens the opportunity to truly improve how we manage our health, how we assist the elderly, and how we express ourselves socially.

they can be activated by more subtle means such as tapping on objects or speaking. Or a device could recognize objects on its own and react accordingly.

they are simplifying tasks to their essence and creating new styles of interaction. For example, a function might be executed by tapping and speaking at the same time, or through natural gestures such as near-field “waving.”

The result should be a world where we have more pervasive access to computers yet fewer moments in our lives where we have to stop what we’re doing and operate a computer terminal. Essentially, we hope to take the computers out of computing.

This vision involves “a mix of dependence on others and obligations to them,” Levin writes, “and so a connection with specific people with whom you share some meaningful portion of the actual experience of life.”

Levin understands the allure of nostalgia; indeed, he believes that almost all contemporary politics is based on it

These competing nostalgias, though more sophisticated than Trump’s, are no less misguided, and lead to bad politics and policy.

Sure, there is plenty to long for, Levin says. In the early decades of the post-World War II era, the United States enjoyed “relative cultural cohesion, low economic inequality, high confidence in national institutions, and widespread optimism about the nation’s prospects” (especially if you were white and male). But that was a unique pivot point in U.S. history, a time when the country was straddling two opposing forces that would define the American century: consolidation and diffusion.

The first half of the 20th century, Levin contends, was an age of consolidation, with a peerless industrial economy, a strong centralized government and a relatively uniform cultural identity shaped by a powerful mass media.

In the century’s second half, by contrast, the U.S. economy became more diversified and deregulated, while cultural conformity broke down in favor of individualism and the politics of personal identity.

for a fleeting moment at midcentury, it enjoyed the best of both. “The social, political, and economic forms of American life at midcentury made possible a degree of prosperity and cohesion that in turn enabled many Americans to flourish,”

“Democrats talk about public policy as though it were always 1965 and the model of the Great Society welfare state will answer our every concern,”

Republicans talk as though it were always 1981 and a repetition of the Reagan Revolution is the cure for what ails us.”

This stale — and stalemated — debate leaves people discouraged with politicians who don’t seem engaged with their current struggles. “In the absence of relief from their own resulting frustration, a growing number of voters opt for leaders who simply embody or articulate that frustration,”

the nostalgia of the traditional political class is also pernicious and “blinding,” Levin argues, because it keeps us from grappling with the real problems assaulting us in the age of diffusion

“In liberating many individuals from oppressive social constraints, we have also estranged many from their families and unmoored them from their communities, work, and faith,”

“Rather than decrying the collapse of moral order, we must draw people’s eyes and hearts to the alternative.” Their incessant focus on religious liberty, for example, while important, may be counterproductive, “a fundamentally plaintive and inward-looking minority asking to protect what it has and in essence to be left alone,”

In unleashing markets to meet the needs and wants of consumers, we have freed them also to treat workers as dispensable and interchangeable.

In pursuing meritocracy, we have magnified inequality.”

The result is a bifurcated America, torn between wealth and poverty, order and disorder. “Increasingly, society consists of individuals and a national state, while the mediating institutions — family, community, church, unions, and others — fade and falter.”

he worries that the price of this new freedom has been high. “We have set loose a scourge of loneliness and isolation that we are still afraid to acknowledge as the distinct social dysfunction of our age of individualism, just as crushing conformity was the characteristic scourge of an era of cohesion and national unity,”

The answer to all this is the pursuit of what Levin describes as a “modernized politics of subsidiarity — that is, of putting power, authority and significance as close to the level of interpersonal community as reasonably possible.”

He is most concerned with the thicket of institutions in the middle — families, schools, religious organizations, all the things usually lumped together as civil society.

“we should see it as an effort to open up the space between them — the space where a free society can genuinely thrive.” Our objective should be to “channel power and resources to the mediating institutions of society and allow for bottom-up problem solving that takes a variety of specialized, adapted forms.”

It is a very Tocquevillian vision, with a dash of Catholic social teaching thrown in. No doubt, to yearn for the renewal of these traditional institutions is its own kind of nostalgia.

So how do we go about strengthening families, religious organizations, schools and all those mediating institutions?

He calls for a “mobility agenda,” with economic growth spurred by tax and regulatory reform

a more competitive and low-cost health-care system, lower budget deficits — all part of a standard conservative recipe.

He proposes education reform that includes more professional certificates, apprenticeships “and other ways of gaining the skills for well-paid employment that do not require a college degree.”

Levin’s intention here is less to offer detailed proposals than to shift the locus of policymaking itself — and to infuse it with greater humility. “There is not much that public policy can do,” he admits, “to create communities that do a better job of encouraging constructive behavior: it could, however, do less harm, and it could leave room for such communities to form, and protect the space in which they take root and grow.”

“In loosening the reins of cultural conformity and national identity we have weakened the roots of mutual trust.

Instead, social and religious conservatives should “assert themselves by offering living models of their alternative to the moral culture of our hyper-individualist age.”

In other words, less hectoring and lecturing, less trying to remake the culture at large, and more strengthening one’s “near-at-hand community,” Levin writes. He calls this approach “subcultural traditionalism

he sees it in “civic groups that channel their energies into making neighborhoods safe and attractive, or into helping the poor, or protecting the vulnerable, or assimilating immigrants, or helping fight addiction

in schools that build character and inculcate the values parents think are most important; in religious congregations that mold themselves into living communities of like-minded families, and that turn their faiths into works to improve the lives of others;

in the work of teachers and students who are committed to liberal learning and engagement with the deepest questions.”

Such a localized focus, Levin maintains, is not “an alternative to fighting for the soul of the larger society, but a most effective means of doing so.”

I suspect the fulfillment of Levin’s vision would require a party and a movement that grasp the exhaustion of their current approach. A November defeat, especially a landslide, might accomplish that

“Within French republicanism, which is today the dominant political language, the fear of fragmentation is very powerful and very real,” Mr. Chabal said in an interview. “This means any political process that is seen to encourage that — community leaders, accommodations to certain groups — is seen as a threat to the unity of the nation.”

In fact, he said, the differences between the two approaches are narrowing. In France, despite their allegiance to republican values, local politicians are compelled to deal with competing concerns of diverse communities. “It is the reality of a pluralistic society,” Mr. Chabal said. “Pressure groups are part and parcel of modern democracy.”

There is, instead, a practiced authenticity. The biggest stars — even Kylie Jenner — get ahead by giving you deep access to their real lives. As a result, much of what you see on Snapchat feels less like a performance than on other networks. People aren’t fishing for likes and follows and reshares. For better or worse, they’re trying to be real.

The diminution of personalization algorithms and virality also plays into how Snapchat treats news. Snapchat’s primary format is called a Story, a slide show of a user’s video clips that are played in chronological order. This, too, is an innovation; before Snapchat, much online content, from blogs to tweets, was consumed in reverse chronological order, from the most recent to the oldest. Snapchat’s Stories, which have since been widely copied, ushered in a more natural order — start at the beginning and go from there.

insiders at Snapchat noticed that Stories were an ideal vehicle for relaying news. They could be crowdsourced: If a lot of people were at a concert or sporting event or somewhere that breaking news was occurring, a lot of them were likely to be snapping what was happening. If Snapchat offered them a way to submit their clips, it could spot the best ones and add them to a narrative compilation of the event.

Snapchat began hiring producers and reporters to assemble clips into in-depth pieces.