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Edwards thought young people would be worried about immediate threats, like AI-powered surveillance, misinformation or autonomous weapons that target and kill without human intervention — problems he calls “ultraserious.” But he soon discovered that some students were more focused on a purely hypothetical risk: That AI could become as smart as humans and destroy mankind.

In these scenarios, AI isn’t necessarily sentient. Instead, it becomes fixated on a goal — even a mundane one, like making paper clips — and triggers human extinction to optimize its task.

To prevent this theoretical but cataclysmic outcome, mission-driven labs like DeepMind, OpenAI and Anthropic are racing to build a good kind of AI programmed not to lie, deceive or kill us.

the brief return of one of my favorite discursive topics—are the kids all right?—in one of my least-favorite variations: why shouldn’t each of them have a smartphone and tablet?

Smartphones offer a tactile portal to a novel digital environment, and this environment is not the kind of space you enter and leave

complaints about screen time merely conceal a desire to punish hard-working parents for marginally benefiting from climbing luxury standards, provide examples of the moral panic occasioned by all new technologies, or mistakenly blame screens for ill effects caused by the general political situation.

Hyper Voisins, thanks both to its size and the sheer diversity of its activities, goes much further. About 5,000 people, he believes, is the maximum, but, with his group as a model, he has proposed to Paris authorities that they encourage 150 more to be set up. “That would be 750,000 people, a third of the population,” he said. “We would change the face of Paris and turn it into a convivial city.”

Among the 1,000 diners, there were also a few hundred from other parts of the city, who are welcome to sign up and come along.

Roberdeau now praises the scheme for having changed her life: a few years ago, after she was widowed, her daughter, worried about how long she could go on living alone, tried to persuade her to move into a retirement home nearer to her in Charente-Maritime, 300 miles to the south. “I didn’t want to leave the area or the apartment where I spent the last years with my husband,” said Roberdeau. Thanks to the support she gets from her neighbours, she has been able to remain.

It’s true that voters who cited inflation as their biggest concern tended to vote Republican — more than seven in 10, according to CNN’s exit poll. But if you think about it, that statistic raises problems of cause and effect. Did people concerned about inflation tend to vote Republican, or did people who were already going to vote Republican tend to identify inflation as their key issue? Probably some of both.

NBC News asked a somewhat different question: Which party do you trust more to handle inflation? Republicans were favored — but by only 52 percent to 44 percent, which strikes me as a surprisingly narrow margin, given the historical tendency of voters to blame the party holding the White House whenever bad things happen.

What were the political consequences of Bidenomics?

The only reason we do not currently have a financial crisis, with a crash and with bailouts, is because regulators have withstood enormous pressure to allow interconnection and linkages between the crypto activities and the core of the financial and banking system,” he said. Because of their regulators’ stance, American banks are not collateralizing loans with cryptocurrencies, for instance. They are not freely trading crypto derivatives.

Meanwhile, an aversion to U.S. regulation has kept crypto businesses, many of which are based offshore, from getting more deeply involved in American finance. “If you are registered with the SEC and regulated by the SEC, you are required to have segregation of customer accounts,” Kelleher explained. “You’re required to have books and records. You’re required to have codes of conduct that include prohibitions on or identification of conflicts of interest. You’re prohibited from commingling funds. You’re required to have margin capital, and you have liquidity requirements.” Crypto companies “did not want that,”

It’s a Ponzi scheme. When there was tulip mania, at least when you lost all your money, you still had a tulip.”

For years, I saw myself not as a global-warming denier (a loaded term with its tendentious echo of Holocaust denial) but rather as an agnostic on the causes of climate change and a scoffer at the idea that it was a catastrophic threat to the future of humanity.

It’s not that I was unalterably opposed to the idea that, by pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, modern civilization was contributing to the warming by 1 degree Celsius and the inches of sea-level rise the planet had experienced since the dawn of the industrial age. It’s that the severity of the threat seemed to me wildly exaggerated and that the proposed cures all smacked of old-fashioned statism mixed with new-age religion.

Hadn’t we repeatedly lived through previous alarms about other, allegedly imminent, environmental catastrophes that didn’t come to pass, like the belief, widespread in the 1970s, that overpopulation would inevitably lead to mass starvation? And if the Green Revolution had spared us from that Malthusian nightmare, why should we not have confidence that human ingenuity wouldn’t also prevent the parade of horribles that climate change was supposed to bring about?

Legally, it appears as though LAION was able to scour what seems like the entire internet because it deems itself a nonprofit organization engaging in academic research. While it was funded at least in part by Stability AI, the company that created Stable Diffusion, it is technically a separate entity. Stability AI then used its nonprofit research arm to create A.I. generators first via Stable Diffusion and then commercialized in a new model called DreamStudio.

hat makes up these data sets? Well, pretty much everything. For artists, many of us had what amounted to our entire portfolios fed into the data set without our consent. This means that A.I. generators were built on the backs of our copyrighted work, and through a legal loophole, they were able to produce copies of varying levels of sophistication.

eing able to imitate a living artist has obvious implications for our careers, and some artists are already dealing with real challenges to their livelihood.

A global survey published in Lancet Planetary Health in 2021 reported that among an international cohort of more than 10,000 people between the ages of 16 and 25, 60 percent described themselves as very worried about the climate and nearly half said the anxiety affects their daily functioning.

Since young people expect to live longer with climate-related crises than their parents will, “they feel grief in the face of what they’re losing,” Pinsky says.

Young survivors of weather-related disasters report high rates of PTSD, depression, sleep deficits, and learning issues.

“I’ve been running my research lab for almost 30 years,” says Jennifer Doudna, a biochemist at the University of California, Berkeley. “And I can say that throughout that period of time, I’ve just never experienced what we’re seeing over just the last five years.”

“You cannot imagine what you’re going to see over the next 30 years. The pace of advancement is in an exponential phase right now.”

surveying the recent landscape of scientific breakthroughs, she says the last half-decade has been more remarkable still: “I think we’re at an extraordinary time of accelerating discoveries.”

Michael Podhorzer, a longtime political strategist for labor unions and the chair of the Analyst Institute

Podhorzer recently laid out a detailed case for thinking of the two blocs as fundamentally different nations uneasily sharing the same geographic space.

in truth, we have never been one nation. We are more like a federated republic of two nations: Blue Nation and Red Nation. This is not a metaphor; it is a geographic and historical reality.”

Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey who is challenging Donald J. Trump for the Republican presidential nomination, said Mr. Trump’s rhetoric of intolerance — as evident today as it was during his presidency — had fueled the surge of bigotry confronting Jews and Muslims after Hamas’s brutal Oct. 7 attack on Israel and the fierce Israeli response in Gaza.

And Mr. Trump’s lopsided adherence to the wishes of Israel’s right-wing government, while widely praised in Republican circles, secured only the “low-hanging fruit” of Middle Eastern diplomacy during his presidency, Mr. Christie said, denigrating one of Mr. Trump’s chief foreign policy accomplishments.

He argued that Mr. Trump’s lack of “intellectual curiosity” and foreign policy ambition had led his administration to give up the pursuit of a more elusive peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

Today, Friedman might seem to belong to a bygone world. The Trumpian wing of the Republican Party focuses on guns, gender, and God—­a stark contrast with Friedman’s free-market individualism. Its hostility to intellectuals and scientific authority is a far cry from his grounding within academic economics.

The analysts associated with the Claremont Institute, the Edmund Burke Foundation, and the National Conservatism Conference (such as Michael Anton, Yoram Hazony, and Patrick Deneen) espouse a vision of society focused on preserving communal order that seems very different from anything Friedman, a self-defined liberal in the style of John Stuart Mill, described in his work.

Jennifer Burns, a Stanford historian, sets out to make the case in her intriguing biography Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative that Friedman’s legacy cannot be shaken so easily. As she points out, some of his ideas—­the volunteer army, school choice—­have been adopted as policy; others, such as a universal basic income, have supporters across the political spectrum.

there was widespread concern that the pandemic would leave lasting economic scars. After all, the 2008 financial crisis was followed by a weak recovery that left real gross domestic product in many countries far below the pre-crisis trend even a decade later. Indeed, as we approach Covid’s four-year mark, many of the world’s economies remain well short of full recovery.

But not the United States. Not only have we had the strongest recovery in the advanced world, but the International Monetary Fund’s latest World Economic Outlook also points out that American growth since 2019 has actually exceeded pre-Covid projections.

let’s take a moment to celebrate this good economic news — and try to figure out what went right with the U.S. economy.

the most important international development on President Biden’s watch has been the erosion of America’s deterrence. The war in Ukraine and the escalating chaos and bloodshed across the Middle East demonstrate the human and economic costs when American power and policy no longer hold revisionist powers in check.

if the erosion of America’s deterrent power leads China and North Korea to launch wars in the Far East, it would be a greater catastrophe by orders of magnitude

a war over Taiwan would be far more serious for the world economy than the war in Ukraine or even a wider regional war in the Middle Eas

philosophy has a geography. To be in the places these thinkers knew, visit their cities, sail their seas and find their landscapes is to know something about them that cannot be found otherwise; and despite that locatedness, and despite their age, the frame of mind of these first thinkers remains astonishingly and surprisingly illuminating today.

Greece in the centuries between 700 and 500 was not land-based. It essentially existed at sea and, where it touched the land, it appeared and manifested itself as the cities from which these philosophers came.

What we think of now as the mainland of Greece, then filled with communities of farmer-warriors, played essentially no part. Recorded philosophy was almost entirely a harbor phenomenon, a byproduct of trading hubs on the margins of Asia

Mr. Andreessen outlines a vision of technologists as the authors of a future in which the “techno-capital machine” produces everything that is good in the world.

In this vision, wealthy technologists are not just leaders of their business but keepers of the social order, unencumbered by what Mr. Andreessen labels “enemies”: social responsibility, trust and safety, tech ethics, to name a few.

this view is already enshrined in our culture. Major tent-poles of public policy support it.

On a Monday morning in April, Sam Altman sat inside OpenAI’s San Francisco headquarters, telling me about a dangerous artificial intelligence that his company had built but would never release. His employees, he later said, often lose sleep worrying about the AIs they might one day release without fully appreciating their dangers.

He wanted me to know that whatever AI’s ultimate risks turn out to be, he has zero regrets about letting ChatGPT loose into the world. To the contrary, he believes it was a great public service.

Altman can still remember where he was the first time he saw GPT-4 write complex computer code, an ability for which it was not explicitly designed. “It was like, ‘Here we are,’ ”