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Continued hype is necessary for the industry, because so much money flowing in essentially allows the big players, like OpenAI, to operate free of economic worry and considerations

The money involved is staggering—Anthropic announced they would compete with OpenAI and raised 2 billion dollars to train their next-gen model, a European counterpart just raised 500 million, etc. Venture capitalists are eager to throw as much money as humanely possible into AI, as it looks so revolutionary, so manifesto-worthy, so lucrative.

While I have no idea what the downloads are going to be for the GPT Store next year, my suspicion is it does not live up to the hyped Apple-esque expectation.

given their test scores, I’m willing to say GPT-4 or Gemini is smarter along many dimensions than a lot of actual humans, at least in the breadth of their abstract knowledge—all while noting even leading models still have around a 3% hallucination rate, which stacks up in a complex task.

A more interesting “bear case” for AI is that, if you look at the list of industries that leading AIs like GPT-4 are capable of disrupting—and therefore making money off of—the list is lackluster from a return-on-investment perspective, because the industries themselves are not very lucrative.

What are AIs of the GPT-4 generation best at? It’s things like:writing essays or short fictionsdigital artchattingprogramming assistance

As of this writing, the compute cost to create an image using a large image model is roughly $.001 and it takes around 1 second. Doing a similar task with a designer or a photographer would cost hundreds of dollars (minimum) and many hours or days (accounting for work time, as well as schedules). Even if, for simplicity’s sake, we underestimate the cost to be $100 and the time to be 1 hour, generative AI is 100,000 times cheaper and 3,600 times faster than the human alternative.

The issue is that taking the job of a human illustrator just. . . doesn’t make you much money. Because human illustrators don’t make much money

While you can easily use Dall-E to make art for a blog, or a comic book, or a fantasy portrait to play an RPG, the market for those things is vanishingly small, almost nonexistent

While I personally wouldn’t go so far as to describe current LLMs as “a solution in search of a problem” like cryptocurrency has famously been described as, I do think the description rings true in an overall economic/business sense so fa

Was there really a great crying need for new ways to cheat on academic essays? Probably not. Will chatting with the History Buff AI app (it was is in the background of Sam Altman’s presentation) be significantly different than chatting with posters on /r/history on Reddit? Probably not

Search is the most obvious large market for AI companies, but Bing has had effectively GPT-4-level AI on offer now for almost a year, and there’s been no huge steal from Google’s market share.

What about programming? It’s actually a great expression of the issue, because AI isn’t replacing programming—it’s replacing Stack Overflow, a programming advice website (after all, you can’t just hire GPT-4 to code something for you, you have to hire a programmer who uses GPT-4

Even if OpenAI drove Stack Overflow out of business entirely and cornered the market on “helping with programming” they would gain, what? Stack Overflow is worth about 1.8 billion, according to its last sale in 2022. OpenAI already dwarfs it in valuation by an order of magnitude.

The more one thinks about this, one notices a tension in the very pitch itself: don’t worry, AI isn’t going to take all our jobs, just make us better at them, but at the same time, the upside of AI as an industry is the total combined worth of the industries its replacing, er, disrupting, and this justifies the massive investments and endless economic optimism.

It makes me worried about the worst of all possible worlds: generative AI manages to pollute the internet with cheap synthetic data, manages to make being a human artist / creator harder, manages to provide the basis of agential AIs that still pose some sort of existential risk if they get intelligent enough—all without ushering in some massive GDP boost that takes us into utopia

If the AI industry ever goes through an economic bust sometime in the next decade I think it’ll be because there are fewer ways than first thought to squeeze substantial profits out of tasks that are relatively commonplace already

We can just look around for equivalencies. The payment for humans working as “mechanical turks” on Amazon are shockingly low. If a human pretending to be an AI (which is essentially what a mechanical turk worker is doing) only makes a buck an hour, how much will an AI make doing the same thing?

, is it just a quirk of the current state of technology, or something more general?

What’s written on the internet is a huge “high quality” training set (at least in that it is all legible and collectable and easy to parse) so AIs are very good at writing the kind of things you read on the internet

But data with a high supply usually means its production is easy or commonplace, which, ceteris paribus, means it’s cheap to sell in turn. The result is a highly-intelligent AI merely adding to an already-massive supply of the stuff it’s trained on.

Like, wow, an AI that can write a Reddit comment! Well, there are millions of Reddit comments, which is precisely why we now have AIs good at writing them. Wow, an AI that can generate music! Well, there are millions of songs, which is precisely why we now have AIs good at creating them.

Call it the supply paradox of AI: the easier it is to train an AI to do something, the less economically valuable that thing is. After all, the huge supply of the thing is how the AI got so good in the first place.

AI might end up incredibly smart, but mostly at things that aren’t economically valuable.

NIMROD NOVIK: The group that worked on it, called Commanders for Israel’s Security, it’s over 500 Israeli retired generals, as well as their equivalents from the Mossad, Shin Bet Security, National Security Council, the entire Israeli security establishment. And we formed a team. We felt that Israeli policy was far too reactive and far too conservative for the good of the country, national security, short and long-term.

We had not anticipated the trauma of Oct. 7, but we certainly anticipated things getting from bad to worse, unless Israel changes course.

we came up with a plan that suggested even though a two-state solution, as you said, is not on this side of the horizon, but given that eventually, it’s the only solution that we believe serves Israel’s security and well-being long-term, as a strong Jewish democracy, we mapped out what can and should be done in the coming two, three years to reverse the slide towards the disaster of a one-state solution.

NIMROD NOVIK: There were primarily two governing concepts, if you will, of the Israeli policy. Again, calling it policy is giving it more credit than deserved. Israeli government have been reluctant to determine the end game of our relationship with the Palestinians. Where do we want to see ourselves and them two years, five years, 50 years from now? No decision has been made since the Oslo era.

As a result, what we’ve seen was a policy based on insisting on separating the Gaza Strip, ruled by Hamas from the West Bank, ruled sort of by the Palestinian Authority. Separation was one principle

And the other one was dubbed status quo, even though it was an illusion, because nothing was static about it. As a matter of fact, creeping annexation has been accelerating under various governments.

The more territory was taken by settlements, the more extreme settlers were conducting violent raids into Palestinian civil populations. The more the Palestinian Authority, internally defective, becoming more and more authoritarian, more and more detached from its own constituents, less responsive, less capable of governance, losing control over large swaths of West Bank territory, forcing the I.D.F. to enter more and more

It was a slide into a state where the Palestinian Authority would cease to function as the promise of the nucleus of a Palestinian state.

If we look at it today, it’s already perhaps the municipal government of the city of Ramallah, rather than of the West Bank, and weakening the Palestinian Authority by choking it financially. By not allowing it to demonstrate to its people that it is the vehicle that will bring them one day to their aspiration of statehood, on the one hand, and making sure that Hamas controls Gaza, the two tracks spelled disaster.

So I must confess, we had not anticipated that the disaster will look the way it did on Oct. 7, but we certainly realized that the policy in Gaza of rounds of violence every year, every two years, every 18 months, and buying off relative tranquility by funding Hamas through the auspices of Qatar, allowing it to arm and rearm, the inherent contradictions in the policy were quite apparent

There’s a right-wing one-state solution. I think when you mentioned the finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, I think if you read things he has written in the past, he is looking for a one-state solution. He wants to crush Palestinian dreams of statehood and repress Palestinians sufficiently that they stop believing they can ever have anything better and eventually content themselves to Israeli rule and live quietly within that in order to gain better lives.

NIMROD NOVIK: I’ll put it bluntly. I believe that a two-state solution is inevitable, not because we wish it and not because it’s nice, not because Palestinians deserve self-determination — which they do, but that’s not a historic imperative. I believe that the two-state solution is inevitable because these two people are not going to live happily ever after under one roof.

For that to happen, for the two people to stay in one state, one of two things have to happen. Either Israelis will agree to grant Palestinian equal rights in that one state and therefore become a minority, or at least, a slim majority in our own country, and that’s never going to happen. Israelis are not going to agree to be less than the overwhelming majority in our own country.

Or Palestinians will agree forever to forgo equal rights, which I suspect is as unreasonable expectation as the other. So we will separate.

NIMROD NOVIK: Civil separation with overall security control — continued security control until a two-state agreement ushers in alternative security arrangements, is a concept that basically suggests reversing the creeping annexation, which is no longer creeping. It’s now galloping.

So the idea is to start reversing the slide towards one-state reality in the opposite direction, of reducing the friction between the two populations, increasing the capacity of the P.A. to perform, while maintaining the overall security controlled by Israel until a deal is struck.

You often hear when you talk to people in Israel about different paths that could be taken. Well, we don’t have anybody to negotiate with. The Palestinian Authority doesn’t have credibility. Hamas wants our destruction

And a core premise of the report is that there are things Israel can do unilaterally, that it doesn’t need a partner to do things that will make the situation better from its perspective and create conditions maybe for deals in the future. So tell me what is in Israel’s power here. What would you actually recommend to do tangibly?

NIMROD NOVIK: It’s not a genetic deformation of the Palestinians that they cannot govern themselves. This is nonsense. We had a period after the second intifada, the years 2007, 2008, where the Palestinian Authority, there was a prime minister by the name of Salam Fayyad. First, he was finance minister, later on prime minister, who revitalized the Palestinian Authority in a dramatic way. The authority was on the rise. People were proud in it, its own population. They could have won elections at that point.

And then Netanyahu was elected in 2009. Now, obviously, we are the strongest party. We hold most of the cards by far. And when we decide that we are going to choke the Palestinian Authority, the Palestinian Authority will choke

Now the second trend that happened was that Mahmoud Abbas, President Abbas, known as Abu Mazen, the early Abu Mazen was a very different person than the late one with whom we are dealing today. He became increasingly nondemocratic, authoritarian, autocratic, paranoid, removing from his vicinity and from position of power all the best and brightest that were working during that era

. Things went from bad to worse, Israel doing its share in weakening the P.A. and the P.A. leadership became more claustrophobic. All these can change.

At the moment, the West Bank is a Swiss cheese. It’s 169 islands of Palestinian-controlled areas surrounded each by Israeli-controlled territory. So we wanted to reduce that by half so that contiguity will have a security, law and order, and economic well-being effect.

We suggested a host of economic measures that enable the Palestinian Authority to deliver for the people, which is the opposite of what’s happening now, when our minister of finance is choking the Palestinian Authority by withholding funds that are theirs by the agreement Israel collects taxes for the Palestinian Authority, VAT and others. And we are supposed to automatically transfer them to the Palestinian Authority. It’s the main chunk of their budget.

Ultimately, a reassessment will be in order, not just of where the Russian armed forces are, but where they are going.

Another area where Russia fell flat was its inability to scale up operations. What its army could do on a lesser scale in 2014 and 2015, it could not replicate across Ukraine. From communications to logistics, combined arms and beyond, Russia’s armed forces lacked experience in large-scale operations prior to the invasion, and it showed.

The Russian armed forces will take years to recover from this blunder but, at the same time, failure is often a better teacher than success.

this shift in perceptions should not mislead NATO members into the belief that, in a different context, Russia would be easily defeated.

The conflict serves as a fresh reminder that sustained conventional war hinges on the availability of manpower, materiel, ammunition and defence industrial capacity to sustain it.

It follows that the alliance should not take a dismissive attitude towards Russia, or become complacent. Despite significant losses, the Russian army will rebuild sooner or later. Sanctions will affect Russia’s defence industry, but writing Russia off as a military power would be the wrong lesson to learn from this war.

Why this, why now?

One answer is simple misapprehension: People steeped in the most alarmist forms of activism and argument may believe, wrongly, that we’re on track for the imminent collapse of human civilization or the outright extinction of the human race.

Another answer is ideological: The ideas of white and Western guilt are particularly important to contemporary progressivism, and in certain visions of ecological economy, removing one’s potential kids from the carbon-emitting equation amounts to a kind of eco-reparations.

I still suspect the fear of suffering and dying per se is more important than the kind of suffering and death being envisioned — that it’s the general idea of bearing a child fated to extinction that’s most frightening, not the specific perils of climate change.

the psychological roots of the procreation-amid-climate-change anxiety.

Or, rather, an image of men in a godless universe.

the problem of meaning in a purposeless cosmos clearly hangs over the more secularized precincts of our society, lending surprising resilience to all kinds of spiritual impulses and ideas but also probably contributing to certain forms of existential dread.

to the extent that every child deliberately conceived is a direct wager against Pascal’s dire analysis, it would make sense that under such shadows, anxieties about the ethics of childbearing would be particularly acute.

Against these anxieties, my colleague’s column urges a belief in a future where human agency overcomes existential threats and ushers in a “welcoming” and even “thrilling” world. This is a welcome admonition; I believe in those possibilities myself.

But the promise of a purposive, divinely created universe — in which, I would stress, it remains more than reasonable to believe — is that life is worth living and worth conceiving even if the worst happens, the crisis comes, the hope of progress fails.

The child who lives to see the green future is infinitely valuable; so is the child who lives to see the apocalypse. For us, there is only the duty to give that child its chance to join the story; its destiny belongs to God.

I think that the age of the New Democrats, which was a very successful political project for the Democratic Party, has come to an end. The assumption of that politics, which began in earnest in the late 1980s and early 1990s, was that the Cold War had been settled, that democracy had prevailed, that the West was ascendant. But with China’s decision to take the route that they’ve gone on, with Russia now having waged this intense insurgency against the West, the assumption that that system is going to prevail in the world is now under question.

Rosenberg: Any honest assessment of the New Democrat project has to view it as wildly successful, because when I went to work for Clinton in 1992, Democrats had lost five out of the six previous presidential elections. And the central project of the New Democrats was to make the Democratic Party competitive at the presidential level again. Since then, we’ve won more votes in seven of eight presidential elections

I think that it’s birthing now for the United States a different era of politics, where we must be focused on two fundamental, existential questions. Can democracy prevail given the way that it’s being attacked from all sides? And can we prevent climate change from overwhelming the world that we know?

I want to try to write a book and to take the perspective of having been part of the beginning of the last big shift in American politics, the emergence of the New Democrats, and start imagining what’s going to come next for the center left in the United States and around the world.

Simon Rosenberg:

We’ve also seen three Democratic presidents that have served [since then]—Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden have also made the country materially better during their presidencies.

what’s the main lesson you take from his emergence?

Rosenberg: Yeah, it’s obviously disappointing. The emergence of what I call “Greater MAGA” has been a dark period in our history.

You have to recognize just how central to that is this narrative of the white tribe rallying around itself, and the sense of grievance, the sense of loss, the sense of decline. That’s what MAGA is. That’s all it is

We know from history, we know from other countries, when countries go into sectarian or tribal warfare, it can destroy a country, pull it apart. And Trump has created a domestic argument here that could potentially destroy the U.S. Look at Marjorie Taylor Greene this week—advocating for the country to split into two, red and blue.

Part of the reason I’m taking a step back from NDN is that I don’t think that we have yet figured out how to talk to the American people about the nature of the conflict we’re in right now, with rising authoritarianism around the world, the weakening of democratic institutions here and in other places.

My hope is that because Biden won’t be able to legislate very much for the next two years, he’ll spend his time talking to the American people and the West about the necessity of winning this conflict.

Rosenberg: The threat is still here. Look, I think [Florida Governor] Ron DeSantis is even more MAGA than Trump. This idea that in 2024, Republicans are going to end up with a moderate, center-right candidate and distance themselves from the insanity of the Trump years, that’s just fantasy talk.

DeSantis has decided to double down on extremism and on MAGA. We will learn in the next year and a half about how it all plays out. But I think he misread the room; he’s misread the moment in history. He needed to become an anti-Trump; instead, he became more Trump than Trump

In this last election, there were really two elections. There was a bluer election inside the battlegrounds, and there was a redder election outside the battlegrounds. We actually gained ground in seven battleground states: Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania. It’s an extraordinary achievement given high inflation, a low Biden approval rating, traditional midterm dynamics. My view is, that happened because the fear of MAGA has created a supercharged grass roots; our candidates are raising unprecedented amounts of money; we have more labor to work in these races than we’ve ever had before. And where we have these muscular campaigns, we were able to control the information environment. And also push turnout up through the roof.

But outside the battlegrounds, we fell back in New York and California, and in Florida and Texas, the four biggest states in the country. And the admonition to us is that we are still not competitive enough in the national daily discourse;

Republicans, because of this incredible noise machine that they built, are still far louder than we are. Democrats have to become obsessive about being more competitive in the daily political discourse in the country.

We have to build more media institutions. Republicans use ideological media to advance their politics in a way that we’ve never done. And we’re going to have to match that to some degree.

The second piece is that average Democratic activists have to recognize that they need to become information warriors daily

I think the way we have to think of the war room now, it’s 4 million proud patriots getting up every day, spending a little bit of their day putting good information into our daily discourse to try to crowd out the poisonous information and right-wing propaganda. There’s a lot that average citizens can do in this.

The key is to defeat MAGA in such a definitive and declarative way that Republicans move on to a different kind of politics and become something more like a traditional center-right political party.

We must stick together as a party because what will cause far-right political parties to succeed is when the prodemocracy coalition splits, and we can’t allow that to happen. As much as sometimes we want to have interfamily battles, those are self-indulgent at this point.

I don’t think that this emerging criticism is entirely wrong, but it’s only half right. The goal should be to expand, not to reposition. There are four areas that I think we have to bear down on in the next two years for a potential Democratic expansion: young voters, Latinos, Never-MAGA or -Trumpers, and young women, post-Dobbs.

The No. 1 job is we just need more young people voting, period. It’s more registration, more communications, targeting them more in our campaigns. In the Democratic Party, young people are still at the kids’ table; they have to become the center of our politics now.

I think that we’re favored in the presidential election. For us to win next year, the economy has to be good. And we have to look like we’ve been successful in Ukraine. Those two things are going to be paramount in him being able to say, “I’ve been a good president, and I may be a little bit old, but I still got 90 miles an hour on my fastball, and I’m able to get the job done right versus they’re still a little bit too crazy.”

What the Republicans should be worried about is we’ve had three consecutive elections where the battleground states have rejected MAGA. And so, if the Republicans present themselves as MAGA again, which looks almost inevitable, it’s going to be hard for them to win a presidential election in 2024 given that the battleground has muscle memory about MAGA and has voted now three times against it.

Today, there are many more people like Claudia who regret transitioning, and who feel their mental health problems were ignored when their condition was put in a neat box marked ‘gender dysphoria’.

some mental health professionals were deeply concerned with the medicalisation of children. They believed these children required talking therapies, not irreversible hormonal and surgical interventions. But these staff were in a difficult position: they were under pressure from ‘powerful lobbies’ to opt for medication

the service was coming under pressure to recommend the prescription of drugs more often and more quickly, and that the independence of professional judgement was also coming under increasing pressure. Young patients may threaten suicide if their anxieties are not immediately addressed. Parents and others may threaten to complain and there are powerful lobbies from older patients pressing for the use of medication, which even more worryingly, is now available without regulation via the internet.

Clinicians feared the consequences if they refused to comply with what patients, and their parents, wanted. Sonia Appleby, a former safeguarding lead, told Barnes that those who spoke out against the transition of children were ‘demonised’.

What Friedman believed in was capitalism, or what he called “economic freedom.” Political freedom might come — but capitalism, he said, could do just fine without it.

the corporate funders of “Free to Choose” set out to make their case.

it was still a time when capitalism’s most enthusiastic supporters evidently felt the need to win the public over to a vision of free markets and minimal government

The documentary series “Free to Choose,” which aired on public television in 1980

He and other observers are trying to make sense of what might happen next — and, befitting our current bewilderment, they offer a range of perspectives. Some, like Wolf, hope the relationship can be repaired; others argue that the pairing has always been fraught, if not impossible.

he has also read his Marx and Engels, looking askance at their solutions while commending them for how “brilliantly” they described capitalism’s relentlessness and omnivorousness. Left to its own devices, capitalism expands wherever it can, plowing its way through national boundaries and local traditions — making it marvelously dynamic or utterly ruinous, and not infrequently both.

In Wolf’s case, his anguished tone reflects the scale of his own disillusionment. Born in 1946 in postwar England, he recalls in his preface how “the world seemed solid as I grew up.” He describes the feelings of “confidence” in democracy and capitalism that flourished with the collapse of the Soviet Union

Yet the “democratic capitalism” that Wolf wants to preserve was, even by his own lights, short-lived. Democracy itself — or “liberal democracy” with universal suffrage, which Wolf says is the kind of democracy he means — is a “political mayfly.” Democratic capitalism ended, in his account, with the financial crisis of 2008

Robert Reich has offered another measure, arguing that democratic capitalism, at least in the United States, began with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and ended with Reagan, when “corporate capitalism” took over.

The left-wing German sociologist Wolfgang Streeck stakes out a decidedly different position, suggesting that the tendency to equate “democratic capitalism” with a few decades of postwar plenty is to misinterpret a “historical compromise between a then uniquely powerful working class and an equally uniquely weakened capitalist class

In “How Will Capitalism End?” (2016), Streeck argues that it’s not compromise but the cascade of crises following the postwar boom — inflation, unemployment, market crashes — “that represents the normal condition of democratic capitalism.” Where Wolf wistfully invokes a “delicate flower,” Streeck writes contemptuously of a “shotgun marriage.”

the historian Gary Gerstle explores in his fascinating and incisive “The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order” (2022). Before the New Deal order started to falter in the late 1960s and ’70s, Gerstle writes, a majority of Americans believed that capitalism should be managed by a strong state; in the neoliberal order that followed, a majority of Americans believed that the state should be constrained by free markets. Each order began to break down when its traditional ways of solving problems didn’t seem to work

capitalism, according to Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, has obtained the status of civic religion. In “The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market,” the authors argue that industry groups and wealthy donors have engaged in a concerted campaign to promote “market fundamentalism” — “a vision of growth and innovation by unfettered markets where government just gets out of the way.”

The main implication of “The Big Myth” seems to be that “market fundamentalism” is so horrifically egregious — enriching the few and despoiling the planet — that Americans had to be plied with propaganda to believe in it.

as Gerstle’s book shows, neoliberal ideas proved so seductive because they also happened to dovetail with the stories that Americans wanted to tell about themselves, emphasizing individuality and freedom.

A new generation of swashbuckling billionaires entertain the prospect of secession, using their money to realize fantasies of escape, whether through seasteading or spaceships. The book quotes one seasteading enthusiast declaring, “Democracy is not the answer,” but merely “the current industry standard.”

Slobodian’s excellent if discomfiting new book, “Crack-Up Capitalism” (forthcoming in April), explores other neoliberal evasions of the nation-state: tax havens, special economic zones, gated communities — enclaves that are “freed from ordinary forms of regulation.

in “Globalists” (2018) the historian Quinn Slobodian argues that neoliberals have found ways not just to liberate markets but to “encase” them in international institutions, thereby shielding capitalist activities from democratic accountability. He observes that neoliberals were especially alarmed after World War II by decolonization, adopting a condescending “racialized language” that pitted “the rational West,” with its trade rules and property laws, against a postcolonial South, “with its ‘emotional’ commitment to sovereignty.”

“Choosing not to do stories is a form of bias,”

Four outlets mentioned the lawsuit in some way, but did not mention the comments from Fox News hosts. One of those, The Gateway Pundit, published three articles that included additional unfounded allegations about Dominion, including a suggestion that security vulnerabilities at one election site using Dominion machines could have led to some fraud, despite no evidence that votes were mismanaged.

The majority — 18 in all, including Fox News itself — did not cover the lawsuit at all with their own staff.

“The things you ignore and the things you choose to highlight are an important part of how you show whether you are a serious news organization.”

Mainstream news organizations often report on themselves when they are at the center of a scandal, Mr. Rosenstiel said, because they get “much more credit when they expose the lens on themselves as aggressively as they would anyone else.”

The lone on-air mention of the case on Fox News has been by Howard Kurtz, who hosts the weekly Fox News show “MediaBuzz.” He addressed the Dominion case on the air this week, telling viewers: “I believe I should be covering it.”“But,” he continued, “the company has decided as part of the organization being sued, I can’t talk about it or write about it, at least for now. I strongly disagree with that decision, but as an employee I have to abide by it.”

There are no legal orders barring media organizations from covering lawsuits they are involved in. And Mr. Rosenstiel pointed to a long history of past suits and scandals covered by the news organizations involved. The Washington Post, for example, ran a deeply reported article on how and why a reporter had made up a character in an article that won a Pulitzer Prize in 1981. The prize had been withdrawn a few days earlier after the fraud was uncovered

Fox’s lawyers might fear that anything said on the air could be used against the company at the trial

“From an ethical perspective, I’d say it’s a real disservice to their viewers on Fox not to be covering this,” she said.

Newsmax and The Washington Examiner — two of the four outlets reviewed by The Times that mentioned Dominion’s lawsuit but not the specific comments by Fox News’s hosts — have focused on Rupert Murdoch’s private messages, including that he saw Newsmax as a potential threat to Fox News

The hosts’ comments have also not been a focus of users on right-wing social media. Instead, many users on sites like Gab and Truth Social accused Mr. Murdoch of disloyalty to former President Donald J. Trump

One of the articles by The Gateway Pundit that advanced voter fraud narratives about Dominion was the most-shared story about the case on right-wing social media, according to data from Pyrra Technologies, a company that monitors the right-wing internet.

When users on right-wing social networks discussed the Fox News hosts, many criticized Mr. Carlson, Mr. Hannity and others for not fully believing the election fraud lies they appeared to endorse, Pyrra found.

Now with Putin’s recognition of the separatist regimes, he has, perhaps, set the stage for a wider conflict; and the United States and its allies in NATO would have no choice but to respond with sanctions. But sanctions, such as those imposed after Russia seized Crimea, are unlikely to deter Putin. And really draconian sanctions, such as those used against Iran, could plunge Europe and the U.S. into a recession.

On the basis of this entirely unrealistic view of the world, the U.S. has stumbled into crises that it didn’t know it was creating.

The conflict with Russia over Ukraine would seem to have called for what Richard Nixon called “playing the long ball.” Nixon had played the long ball — defied prevailing opinion — by going to China

The United States might have stepped back from the years of provocations and resets to propose a “grand bargain” with Russia that would resolve or at least ease the conflict — one based, perhaps, on a neutral Ukraine or on the enforcement of the Minsk II agreement.

it seems to me that without such a bargain, we could be headed for another foreign policy disaster — one that will have repercussions in the United States and Western Europe as well as in Russia and Ukraine. Think war, skyrocketing energy prices, recession, refugees and a Russian-Chinese alliance against the United States and its allies.

two uncomfortable facts

First, a number of influential people, both in business and in politics, are deeply financially enmeshed with Russian kleptocrats. This is especially true in Britain.

Second, it will be hard to go after laundered Russian money without making life harder for all money launderers, wherever they come from — and while Russian plutocrats may be the world champions in that sport, they’re hardly unique: Ultrawealthy people all over the world have money hidden in offshore accounts.

As I wrote in my book, at my most partisan moment I once gave a speech in which I said words that shame me to this day. 

we forget a fundamental truth—our own maladies often make us unable to see the world clearly. Or, as Jesus said, “You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.” In so many ways, we’ve become the People of the Plank, blind to the pain we’ve inflicted on the public even as we try desperately to protect ourselves from them.

Early church fathers were far, far more concerned with the faith and virtue of the church than the maladies of the Romans. 

“I believe the two greatest threats to the United States are university leftists at home and jihadists abroad.”

In Iraq, the reality was so profoundly different that words can barely begin to describe all the distinctions

I didn’t exactly become post-partisan upon my return (that came later), but I gained the perspective that permitted me to start the process of pulling the plank from my own eye.

it’s opened my eyes to many truths that were new to me. Among them, the church should be focused much more on its own virtue than the virtue of the rest of the world.

In addition, if there were no grounds for Christians to live with a “spirit of fear” at the height of the Roman Empire, there are no grounds for us to live with a spirit of fear in our nation today. Yet fear seems to dominate Christian political activism—including fear of the left, of CRT, and sometimes even fear for the very existence of a free church in the United States of America.

sad experience with Christian leaders teaches us that their professed identity tells us little to nothing about their actual virtue, and virtue should be the guiding concern of Christians in politics, not identity. 

I now see that my young desire for “more Christians in politics” and “more respect for Christians in public life” was part of the plank in my eye. Indeed, it helped make me gullible and tribal.

I was often eager to critique secular cultures and slow to respond when my own narratives came under credible attack. 

While some of the most important fights for justice have been led by Christians—including the civil rights and pro-life movements—some of the most destructive political and cultural forces have been loudly and proudly led by Christians as well. 

In fact, two of the most destructive political and cultural movements of this new century—vaccine refusal that has cost hundreds of thousands of lives, and an effort to overturn an election that could have ruptured our republic—were disproportionately dominated by the most outspoken Christian voices.

Here’s what’s hard. Refusing to lie for a president. Refusing to yield to a mob. Resisting the fury of a furious time. And if Christians can’t succeed in that most basic, though often profoundly dangerous, task, then no, we don’t need more Christians in politics. We need more people who possess and demonstrate character and moral courage.

Per real estate company Redfin, rent prices jumped a record 15 percent year over year in January. 

The new projection, released on Monday, was carried out by the Earth4All collective of leading environmental science and economic institutions, including the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Stockholm Resilience Centre and the BI Norwegian Business School. They were commissioned by the Club of Rome for a followup to its seminal Limits to Growth study more than 50 years ago.

“This gives us evidence to believe the population bomb won’t go off, but we still face significant challenges from an environmental perspective. We need a lot of effort to address the current development paradigm of overconsumption and overproduction, which are bigger problems than population.”

Previous studies have painted a grimmer picture. Last year, the UN estimated the world population would hit 9.7 billion by the middle of the century and continue to rise for several decades afterwards.

But the authors caution that falling birthrates alone will not solve the planet’s environmental problems, which are already serious at the 7.8 billion level and are primarily caused by the excess consumption of a wealthy minority.

The report is based on a new methodology which incorporates social and economic factors that have a proven impact on birthrate, such as raising education levels, particularly for women, and improving income.

In the business-as-usual case, it foresees existing policies being enough to limit global population growth to below 9 billion in 2046 and then decline to 7.3 billion in 2100.

too little too late: “Although the scenario does not result in an overt ecological or total climate collapse, the likelihood of regional societal collapses nevertheless rises throughout the decades to 2050, as a result of deepening social divisions both internal to and between societies. The risk is particularly acute in the most vulnerable, badly governed and ecologically vulnerable economies.”

In the second, more optimistic scenario – with governments across the world raising taxes on the wealthy to invest in education, social services and improved equality – it estimates human numbers could hit a high of 8.5 billion as early as 2040 and then fall by more than a third to about 6 billion in 2100. Under this pathway, they foresee considerable gains by mid-century for human society and the natural environment.

“By 2050, greenhouse gas emissions are about 90% lower than they were in 2020 and are still falling,” according to the report. “Remaining atmospheric emissions of greenhouse gases from industrial processes are increasingly removed through carbon capture and storage. As the century progresses, more carbon is captured than stored, keeping the global temperature below 2C above pre-industrial levels. Wildlife is gradually recovering and starting to thrive once again in many places.”

What specific things, besides stopping industrial espionage, could China do to increase trust? Giving American companies, financial institutions, more opportunities to make money, opening up its various sectors more aggressively — that will allow more dialogue, more cooperation

That’s one thing. Second, it’s understandable for the United States to push back on some of the industrial espionage.

What are the biggest blind spots the Chinese leadership has when it comes to understanding American policies toward the country? I think the Chinese leaders have this notion that the United States is doing everything it can to try to stop China from growing. Or they believe that whatever China does is not going to elicit more trust.

the leadership is convinced that there’s no way out of this. I’m not sure that is the case. And then also, the United States thinks that China wants to displace it.

That “despite” is doing a lot of work. It reminds me of that line, “Other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?” I was trying to say that those are all things that we believe to be essential for sustained economic growth. I was saying that despite all that, China still performed well.

you also write about in the book: “Despite the limits China imposes on free-market forces, the absence of a free press, independent judicial system and the individual right to vote, we see there are other mechanisms in place to respond to the needs of its citizens and to address the threats posed by inequality.”

The key issue is not “human-competitive” intelligence (as the open letter puts it); it’s what happens after AI gets to smarter-than-human intelligence. Key thresholds there may not be obvious, we definitely can’t calculate in advance what happens when, and it currently seems imaginable that a research lab would cross critical lines without noticing.

Many researchers steeped in these issues, including myself, expect that the most likely result of building a superhumanly smart AI, under anything remotely like the current circumstances, is that literally everyone on Earth will die. Not as in “maybe possibly some remote chance,” but as in “that is the obvious thing that would happen.”

It’s not that you can’t, in principle, survive creating something much smarter than you; it’s that it would require precision and preparation and new scientific insights, and probably not having AI systems composed of giant inscrutable arrays of fractional numbers.

Absent that caring, we get “the AI does not love you, nor does it hate you, and you are made of atoms it can use for something else.”

Without that precision and preparation, the most likely outcome is AI that does not do what we want, and does not care for us nor for sentient life in general. That kind of caring is something that could in principle be imbued into an AI but we are not ready and do not currently know how.

The likely result of humanity facing down an opposed superhuman intelligence is a total loss

To visualize a hostile superhuman AI, don’t imagine a lifeless book-smart thinker dwelling inside the internet and sending ill-intentioned emails. Visualize an entire alien civilization, thinking at millions of times human speeds, initially confined to computers—in a world of creatures that are, from its perspective, very stupid and very slow. A sufficiently intelligent AI won’t stay confined to computers for long. In today’s world you can email DNA strings to laboratories that will produce proteins on demand, allowing an AI initially confined to the internet to build artificial life forms or bootstrap straight to postbiological molecular manufacturing.

There’s no proposed plan for how we could do any such thing and survive. OpenAI’s openly declared intention is to make some future AI do our AI alignment homework. Just hearing that this is the plan ought to be enough to get any sensible person to panic. The other leading AI lab, DeepMind, has no plan at all.

An aside: None of this danger depends on whether or not AIs are or can be conscious; it’s intrinsic to the notion of powerful cognitive systems that optimize hard and calculate outputs that meet sufficiently complicated outcome criteria.

I didn’t also mention that we have no idea how to determine whether AI systems are aware of themselves—since we have no idea how to decode anything that goes on in the giant inscrutable arrays—and therefore we may at some point inadvertently create digital minds which are truly conscious and ought to have rights and shouldn’t be owned.

I refrained from signing because I think the letter is understating the seriousness of the situation and asking for too little to solve it.

the thing about trying this with superhuman intelligence is that if you get that wrong on the first try, you do not get to learn from your mistakes, because you are dead. Humanity does not learn from the mistake and dust itself off and try again, as in other challenges we’ve overcome in our history, because we are all gone.

If we held anything in the nascent field of Artificial General Intelligence to the lesser standards of engineering rigor that apply to a bridge meant to carry a couple of thousand cars, the entire field would be shut down tomorrow.

We are not on course to be prepared in any reasonable time window. There is no plan. Progress in AI capabilities is running vastly, vastly ahead of progress in AI alignment or even progress in understanding what the hell is going on inside those systems

Many researchers working on these systems think that we’re plunging toward a catastrophe, with more of them daring to say it in private than in public; but they think that they can’t unilaterally stop the forward plunge, that others will go on even if they personally quit their jobs.

This is a stupid state of affairs, and an undignified way for Earth to die, and the rest of humanity ought to step in at this point and help the industry solve its collective action problem.

When the insider conversation is about the grief of seeing your daughter lose her first tooth, and thinking she’s not going to get a chance to grow up, I believe we are past the point of playing political chess about a six-month moratorium.

The moratorium on new large training runs needs to be indefinite and worldwide. There can be no exceptions, including for governments or militaries. If the policy starts with the U.S., then China needs to see that the U.S. is not seeking an advantage but rather trying to prevent a horrifically dangerous technology which can have no true owner and which will kill everyone in the U.S. and in China and on Earth

Here’s what would actually need to be done:

Shut down all the large GPU clusters (the large computer farms where the most powerful AIs are refined). Shut down all the large training runs

Put a ceiling on how much computing power anyone is allowed to use in training an AI system, and move it downward over the coming years to compensate for more efficient training algorithm

Track all GPUs sold. If intelligence says that a country outside the agreement is building a GPU cluster, be less scared of a shooting conflict between nations than of the moratorium being violated; be willing to destroy a rogue datacenter by airstrike.

Frame nothing as a conflict between national interests, have it clear that anyone talking of arms races is a fool

Make it explicit in international diplomacy that preventing AI extinction scenarios is considered a priority above preventing a full nuclear exchange, and that allied nuclear countries are willing to run some risk of nuclear exchange if that’s what it takes to reduce the risk of large AI training runs.

when your policy ask is that large, the only way it goes through is if policymakers realize that if they conduct business as usual, and do what’s politically easy, that means their own kids are going to die too.

second, the people inventing them think they are potentially incredibly dangerous: ten percent of them, in fact, think they might extinguish the human species. They don’t know exactly how, but think Sorcerer’s Apprentice (or google ‘paper clip maximizer.’)

One pundit after another explains that an AI program called Deep Mind worked far faster than scientists doing experiments to uncover the basic structure of all the different proteins, which will allow quicker drug development. It’s regarded as ipso facto better because it’s faster, and hence—implicitly—worth taking the risks that come with AI.

That is, it seems to me, a dumb answer from smart people—the answer not of people who have thought hard about ethics or even outcomes, but the answer that would be supplied by a kind of cultist.

(Probably the kind with stock options).

it does go, fairly neatly, with the default modern assumption that if we can do something we should do it, which is what I want to talk about. The question that I think very few have bothered to answer is, why?

But why? The sun won’t blow up for a few billion years, meaning that if we don’t manage to drive ourselves to extinction, we’ve got all the time in the world. If it takes a generation or two for normal intelligence to come up with the structure of all the proteins, some people may die because a drug isn’t developed in time for their particular disease, but erring on the side of avoiding extinction seems mathematically sound

Allowing that we’re already good enough—indeed that our limitations are intrinsic to us, define us, and make us human—should guide us towards trying to shut down this technology before it does deep damage.

The other challenge that people cite, over and over again, to justify running the risks of AI is to “combat climate change,

As it happens, regular old intelligence has already give us most of what we need: engineers have cut the cost of solar power and windpower and the batteries to store the energy they produce so dramatically that they’re now the cheapest power on earth

We don’t actually need artificial intelligence in this case; we need natural compassion, so that we work with the necessary speed to deploy these technologies.

Beyond those, the cases become trivial, or worse

All of this is a way of saying something we don’t say as often as we should: humans are good enough. We don’t require improvement. We can solve the challenges we face, as humans.

It may take us longer than if we can employ some “new form of intelligence,” but slow and steady is the whole point of the race.

Unless, of course, you’re trying to make money, in which case “first-mover advantage” is the point

I find they often answer from something that sounds like the A.I.’s perspective. Many — not all, but enough that I feel comfortable in this characterization — feel that they have a responsibility to usher this new form of intelligence into the world.”

here’s the thing: pausing, slowing down, stopping calls on the one human gift shared by no other creature, and perhaps by no machine. We are the animal that can, if we want to, decide not to do something we’re capable of doing.

n individual terms, that ability forms the core of our ethical and religious systems; in societal terms it’s been crucial as technology has developed over the last century. We’ve, so far, reined in nuclear and biological weapons, designer babies, and a few other maximally dangerous new inventions

It’s time to say do it again, and fast—faster than the next iteration of this tech.

If all of this sounds familiar, it’s because we basically saw this same environmental dynamic play out several years ago with tech’s last big obsession: Crypto and web3. In that case, Bitcoin emerged as the industry’s obvious environmental sore spot due to the vast amounts of energy needed to mine coins in its proof of work model. Some estimates suggest Bitocin alone requires more energy every year than Norway’s annual electricity consumption.

rs of criticism from environmental activists however led the crypto industry to make some changes. Ethereum, the second largest currency on the blockchain, officially switched last year to a proof of stake model which supporters claim could reduce its power usage by over 99%. Other smaller coins similarly were designed with energy efficiency in mind. In the grand scheme of things, large language models are still in their infancy and it’s far from certain how its environmental report card will play out.

Three years since its start we are still more likely to see the pandemic in partisan rather than world-historical terms. And the grandly tragic story of the pandemic takes on a profoundly different shape and color depending on the nature of its first act.

In a world where a natural origin was confirmed beyond all doubt, we might look back and narrate the pandemic as one particular kind of story: a morality tale showcasing the incomplete triumph of modern civilization and the enduring threats from nature, and highlighting the way that, whatever we might have told ourselves in 2019 or 2009 about the fortress of the wealthy world, pandemic disease remained a humbling civilization-scale challenge no nation had very good answers for.

in a world where a lab-leak origin had been confirmed instead, we would probably find ourselves telling a very different set of stories — primarily about humanity’s Icarian hubris, or perhaps about scientists’ Faustian indifference to the downside risks of new research, or the way in which very human impulses to cover up mistakes and wrongdoing might have compounded those mistakes to disastrous global effect.

It would have been, “We brought this on ourselves.” Or perhaps, if we were feeling xenophobic rather than humbly human, “They brought this on us,”

the pandemic would probably have joined nuclear weapons as a conventional illustration of the dark side of human knowledge, perhaps even surpassed them — 20 million dead is nothing to trifle with, after all, though it remains less than the overall death toll of World War II or even the Great Leap Forward.

the horror would also offer a silver lining: If human action was responsible for this pandemic, then in theory, human action could prevent the next one as well.

It is as though we’ve decided both that the pandemic was “man-made” and that its emergence was a kind of inevitability we can’t do much about.

if the figures are even mostly reliable, they reflect a remarkable indifference on the part of the country to the source of a once-in-a-century disease disaster

a definitive confirmation of a lab origin probably would not mean that responsibility lay in any simplistic way with China. But that isn’t to say the case wouldn’t have been made, probably in a variety of forms — calls for “reparations,” demands for global provision of free vaccines — that would only have contributed additional antagonism and resentment to the world stage, further polarizing the great-power landscape.

It would be as though following a catastrophic earthquake, we didn’t bother to sort out whether it had been caused by local fracking but instead argued endlessly about the imperfections of disaster response

as we piece together a working history of the past few years, you might hope we’d grow more focused on nailing the story down.

it seems likely to me that in the very earliest days of 2020, with cases exploding in China but not yet elsewhere, knowing that the disease was a result of gain-of-function research and had escaped from a lab probably would have produced an even more significant wave of global fear

it is hard to think “superbug” and not panic.

presumably, many fewer people contemplating the initial news would’ve assumed that the outbreak would be largely limited to Asia, as previous outbreaks had been; public health messengers in places like the United States probably would not have so casually reassuring; and even more dramatic circuit-breaking responses like a monthlong international travel ban might’ve been instituted quite quickly

As the pandemic wore on, I suspect that effect would have lingered beyond the initial panic. At first, it might’ve been harder to decide that the virus was just something to live with if we knew simultaneously that it was something introduced to the world in error.

And later, when the vaccines arrived, I suspect there might have been considerably less resistance to them, particularly on the American right, where anxiety and xenophobia might have trumped public-health skepticism and legacy anti-vaccine sentiment

the opposite counterfactual is just as illuminating

The question and its unresolvability have mattered enormously for geopolitics,

n a world where neither narrative has been confirmed, and where pandemic origins are governed by an epistemological fog, I worry we have begun to collate the two stories in a somewhat paradoxical and self-defeating way

The disease and global response may well have accelerated our “new Cold War,” as Luce writes, but it is hard to imagine an alternate history where a known lab-leak origin didn’t move the world there much faster.

On the other hand, the natural logic of a confirmed zoonotic origin would probably have been to push nations of the world closer together into networks of collaboration and cooperation

the direction of change would have most likely been toward more integration rather than less. After all, this is to some degree what happened in the wake of the initial outbreaks of SARS and MERS and the Ebola outbreaks of the past decade.

Instead, the geopolitics remain unsteady, which is to say, a bit jagged

The United States can weaponize a narrative about lab origin — as China hawks in both the Trump and Biden administrations have repeatedly done — without worrying too much about providing real proof or suffering concrete backlash.

And China can stonewall origin investigations by citing sovereignty rights and a smoke screen story about the disease originating in frozen food shipped in from abroad without paying much of an international price for the intransigence or bad-faith argumentation, either.

each has carried forward a gripe that needn’t be substantiated in order to be deployed.

ambiguity also offers plausible deniability, which means that without considerably more Chinese transparency and cooperation, those pushing both stories will find themselves still making only probabilistic cases. We’re probably going to be living with that uncertainty, in a political and social world shaped by it, for the foreseeable future