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The president’s frustration over the fitful cease-fire talks came as Israel’s Channel 12 reported on Friday that Mr. Netanyahu had clashed with his own security chiefs, who accused him of changing the terms of the proposal to make it harder to reach a deal.

The subsequent phone conversation between Mr. Biden and Mr. Netanyahu on Thursday was a tough one. The president was extremely direct and forthright, according to the U.S. official, telling the prime minister that it was time to get the deal over the finish line.

Analyzing data covering a near universe of Americans born from 1978 to 1992, the researchers found that when employment among the poor parents of children in a community improves, those children are better off economically as adults

it doesn’t rely on whether a child’s own parents are employed: Outcomes also improve for children who simply grow up in a neighborhood where more parents have jobs. In other words, their own parents might be unemployed, but if their schoolmates’ parents work, their outcomes will be better.

: In places where parental employment deteriorates, the opposite happens—children do worse as adults.

“Growing up in a community where employment rates are higher for people in your race and class—if those employment rates are higher, the kids who grew up in those environments do better in the long run,”

For poor white children born in 1978, vast swaths of the U.S. were a land of opportunity. Apart from some areas, such as Appalachia and Rust Belt areas of Michigan and Ohio, these children overall had a good chance of making it to a higher rung on the income ladder than their parents. 

For poor white children born in 1992, the map was more constrained. While some parts of America, such as the upper Midwest, remained bastions of opportunity, much of the U.S. did worse. Children with parents at the 25th percentile who grew up in Milwaukee had lower income when they turned 27 in 2019—an inflation-adjusted $30,619—than their older counterparts had.

This dynamic, playing out across the country, led to a significant widening of the income gap between poor and well-off white children. A white child born to parents at the 25th percentile in 1978 made, on average, an inflation-adjusted $10,383 less at age 27 than a child born to parents at the 75th percentile. But for children born in 1992, that income difference was 27% larger at $13,202.

In contrast to the environment for poor white children, few places in America provided poor Black children born in 1978 much opportunity for advancement.

Kent County, Mich., is a little more than 100 miles directly east of Milwaukee, and home to Grand Rapids, another old-line manufacturing city. Black children born to parents at the 25th percentile by income in 1978 who grew up in Kent had an average household income of $17,029 at age 27. That put them at the 28th percentile by income, leaving them on essentially the same rung as their parents.

But poor Black children born in 1992 who grew up in Kent County did better. On average, a Black child at the 25th percentile in that birth cohort had inflation-adjusted household income of $23,547 at age 27, or 38% more than their 1978 counterpart. 

One thing that changed for poor white children compared with poor Black children was the relative share of their parents who were employed. 

In Milwaukee County, for example, the share of the parents of low-income white children who were employed went from 69.1% for children born in 1978 to 55.6% for children born in 1992—a 13.5 percentage point decline. Those employment declines were likely driven by the loss of more than a third of the county’s manufacturing jobs during those years. Children born at the 25th percentile in 1992 reached the 44th percentile on average, 4 percentage points lower than those born in 1978.

And this pattern of falling parental employment and worsening outcomes repeated itself across much of the country. In counties where employment rates among poor white parents fell sharply, such as Philadelphia County, Pa., the income ranks of poor white children in adulthood fell too. Mobility tended not to deteriorate as much for poor white children growing up in counties such as Sumner, Tenn., where parental employment held up better.

the experience in Kent was the general pattern across the country, with employment rates for the parents of poor Black children falling less than their poor white counterparts, or gaining. And as was the case with poor whites, the new research finds that changes in parental employment rates in a community were strongly associated with changes in children’s outcomes.

the researchers emphasize that it is not a zero-sum game, with mobility for poor Black people improving only because mobility for poor white people is falling: Indeed, places where opportunity for Black children improved most are also where white children did best.

The Israeli military relies on reservist soldiers, some of whom have described growing exhaustion as Israel manages conflicts for months on end on multiple fronts, including the border with Lebanon and in the West Bank. An end to fighting in Gaza would give Israeli forces a respite that analysts say is needed, especially if fighting with Hezbollah escalates further.

Israel Ziv, a retired Israeli general and veteran of multiple wars, said tensions between the Israeli military and security establishment and Netanyahu are at a record high.“The IDF feels and the security echelon feels that we exhausted the purpose of the war. We reached the maximum tactical peak that we can achieve,” he said. “As long as Rafah was there, they could say finish the job. OK it’s finished now.”

Netanyahu has rejected a series of proposals for possible alternatives to Hamas, including an American plan to bring in the Palestinian Authority and Arab calls for a Palestinian unity government that would include Hamas. Some military analysts and former Israeli officials have questioned whether installing a new government in Gaza was ever possible, given that Hamas has managed to survive the Israeli military assault.

“We need to make a decision,” said Ziv. “Even a bad decision, that’s OK. Let’s say [we] occupy Gaza in the next few years because we need to clear up the last few terrorists. OK, it’s a bad decision, but it’s a decision. The military needs to know.”

The dispute between Netanyahu and the military centers in part on how officials define a defeat of Hamas. An Israeli military official said the army considers a battalion “dismantled” not when all its fighters are killed, but when its command structure and ability to carry out organized attacks are eliminated. 

Military analysts say that Hamas’s militia forces are likely to survive the Israeli military operation even in Rafah, in part because the Israeli army’s approach leaves many lower-ranking Hamas fighters in place. Hamas’s top leadership in the enclave, including its leader, Yahya Sinwar, have also eluded Israeli forces throughout the war.

“Hamas is preserving its forces in Rafah rather than engaging the Israel Defense Forces, likely because Hamas does not believe Israel’s Rafah operation will be decisive,” said an assessment this week from the Institute for the Study of War and the American Enterprise Institute’s Critical Threats Project.

AIs like ChatGPT rapidly got better in their early days, but what we’ve seen in the past 14-and-a-half months are only incremental gains, says Marcus. “The truth is, the core capabilities of these systems have either reached a plateau, or at least have slowed down in their improvement,” he adds.

the gaps between the performance of various AI models are closing. All of the best proprietary AI models are converging on about the same scores on tests of their abilities, and even free, open-source models, like those from Meta and Mistral, are catching up.

AI could become a commodity

A mature technology is one where everyone knows how to build it. Absent profound breakthroughs—which become exceedingly rare—no one has an edge in performance

companies look for efficiencies, and whoever is winning shifts from who is in the lead to who can cut costs to the bone. The last major technology this happened with was electric vehicles, and now it appears to be happening to AI.

the future for AI startups—like OpenAI and Anthropic—could be dim.

Microsoft and Google will be able to entice enough users to make their AI investments worthwhile, doing so will require spending vast amounts of money over a long period of time, leaving even the best-funded AI startups—with their comparatively paltry warchests—unable to compete.

Many other AI startups, even well-funded ones, are apparently in talks to sell themselves.

That difference is alarming, but what really matters to the long-term health of the industry is how much it costs to run AIs. 

the bottom line is that for a popular service that relies on generative AI, the costs of running it far exceed the already eye-watering cost of training it.

Changing people’s mindsets and habits will be among the biggest barriers to swift adoption of AI. That is a remarkably consistent pattern across the rollout of all new technologies.

That’s because AI has to think anew every single time something is asked of it, and the resources that AI uses when it generates an answer are far larger than what it takes to, say, return a conventional search result

For an almost entirely ad-supported company like Google, which is now offering AI-generated summaries across billions of search results, analysts believe delivering AI answers on those searches will eat into the company’s margins

Google, Microsoft and others said their revenue from cloud services went up, which they attributed in part to those services powering other company’s AIs. But sustaining that revenue depends on other companies and startups getting enough value out of AI to justify continuing to fork over billions of dollars to train and run those systems

three in four white-collar workers now use AI at work. Another survey, from corporate expense-management and tracking company Ramp, shows about a third of companies pay for at least one AI tool, up from 21% a year ago.

OpenAI doesn’t disclose its annual revenue, but the Financial Times reported in December that it was at least $2 billion, and that the company thought it could double that amount by 2025. 

That is still a far cry from the revenue needed to justify OpenAI’s now nearly $90 billion valuation

the company excels at generating interest and attention, but it’s unclear how many of those users will stick around. 

AI isn’t nearly the productivity booster it has been touted as

While these systems can help some people do their jobs, they can’t actually replace them. This means they are unlikely to help companies save on payroll. He compares it to the way that self-driving trucks have been slow to arrive, in part because it turns out that driving a truck is just one part of a truck driver’s job.

Add in the myriad challenges of using AI at work. For example, AIs still make up fake information,

getting the most out of open-ended chatbots isn’t intuitive, and workers will need significant training and time to adjust.

the industry spent $50 billion on chips from Nvidia to train AI in 2023, but brought in only $3 billion in revenue.

None of this is to say that today’s AI won’t, in the long run, transform all sorts of jobs and industries. The problem is that the current level of investment—in startups and by big companies—seems to be predicated on the idea that AI is going to get so much better, so fast, and be adopted so quickly that its impact on our lives and the economy is hard to comprehend. 

Mounting evidence suggests that won’t be the case.

Still others believe that the advent of civil rights laws created, in essence, a second Constitution entirely, one that privileges group identity over individual liberty.

Protestant Christian nationalists tend to have a higher regard for the American founding, but they believe it’s been corrupted. They claim that the 1787 Constitution is essentially dead, replaced by progressive power politics that have destroyed constitutional government.

Catholic post-liberals believe that liberal democracy itself is problematic. According to their critique, the Constitution’s emphasis on individual liberty “atomizes” American life and degrades the traditional institutions of church and family that sustain human flourishing.

The original Constitution and Bill of Rights, while a tremendous advance from the Articles of Confederation, suffered from a singular, near-fatal flaw. They protected Americans from federal tyranny, but they also left states free to oppress American citizens in the most horrific ways

if your ultimate aim is the destruction of your political enemies, then the Constitution does indeed stand in your way.

Right-wing constitutional critics do get one thing right: The 1787 Constitution is mostly gone, and America’s constitutional structure is substantially different from the way it was at the founding. But that’s a good thing

its guardrails against tyranny remain vital and relevant today.

Individual states ratified their own constitutions that often purported to protect individual liberty, at least for some citizens, but states were also often violently repressive and fundamentally authoritarian.

The criminal justice system could be its own special form of hell. Indigent criminal defendants lacked lawyers, prison conditions were often brutal at a level that would shock the modern conscience, and local law enforcement officers had no real constitutional constraints on their ability to search American citizens and seize their property.

Through much of American history, various American states protected slavery, enforced Jim Crow, suppressed voting rights, blocked free speech, and established state churches.

As a result, if you were traditionally part of the local ruling class — a white Protestant in the South, like me — you experienced much of American history as a kind of golden era of power and control.

The Civil War Amendments changed everything. The combination of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments ended slavery once and for all, extended the reach of the Bill of Rights to protect against government actions at every level, and expanded voting rights.

But all of this took time. The end of Reconstruction and the South’s “massive resistance” to desegregation delayed the quest for justice.

decades of litigation, activism and political reform have yielded a reality in which contemporary Americans enjoy greater protection for the most fundamental civil liberties than any generation that came before.

And those who believe that the civil rights movement impaired individual liberty have to reckon with the truth that Americans enjoy greater freedom from both discrimination and censorship than they did before the movement began.

So why are parts of the right so discontent? The answer lies in the difference between power and liberty

One of the most important stories of the last century — from the moment the Supreme Court applied the First Amendment to state power in 1925, until the present day — is the way in which white Protestants lost power but gained liberty. Many millions are unhappy with the exchange.

Consider the state of the law a century ago. Until the expansion of the Bill of Rights (called “incorporation”) to apply to the states, if you controlled your state and wanted to destroy your enemies, you could oppress them to a remarkable degree. You could deprive them of free speech, you could deprive them of due process, you could force them to pray and read state-approved versions of the Bible.

The argument that the Constitution is failing is just as mistaken as the argument that the economy is failing, but it’s politically and culturally more dangerous

Powerful people often experience their power as a kind of freedom. A king can feel perfectly free to do what he wants, for example, but that’s not the same thing as liberty.

Looked at properly, liberty is the doctrine that defies power. It’s liberty that enables us to exercise our rights.

Think of the difference between power and liberty like this — power gives the powerful freedom of action. Liberty, by contrast, protects your freedom of action from the powerful.

At their core, right-wing attacks on the modern Constitution are an attack on liberty for the sake of power.

An entire class of Americans looks back at decades past and has no memory (or pretends to have no memory) of marginalization and oppression. They could do what they wanted, when they wanted and to whom they wanted.

Now they don’t have that same control

Muslims, Sikhs, Jews, Buddhists and atheists all approach the public square with the same liberties. Drag queens have the same free speech rights as pastors, and many Americans are livid as a result.

when a movement starts to believe that America is in a state of economic crisis, criminal chaos and constitutional collapse, then you can start to see the seeds for revolutionary violence and profound political instability. They believe we live in desperate times, and they turn to desperate measures.

“You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.” So much American angst and anger right now is rooted in falsehoods. But the truth can indeed set us free from the rage that tempts American hearts toward tyranny.

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.

The root causes of silence are not social solidarity but fear and futility. People bite their tongues when they doubt that it’s safe and worthwhile to speak up. Leaders who want to make informed decisions need to make it clear they value candid input.

Mr. Biden has done the opposite, declaring first that only the Lord almighty could change his mind and then saying that he’ll drop out only if polls say there’s no way for him to win. That sends a strong message

If you’re not an immortal being or a time traveler from the future, it’s pointless to share any concerns about the viability of his candidacy.

Showing openness can raise people’s confidence, but it’s not always enough to quell their fear. In our research, Constantinos Coutifaris and I found that it helps for leaders to criticize themselves out loud. That way, instead of just claiming that they want the truth, they can show that they can handle the truth.

Although it can help to assign devil’s advocates, it’s more effective to unearth them. Genuine dissenters argue more convincingly and get taken more seriously.

It’s time for Mr. Biden’s team to run an anonymous poll of advisers, governors and lawmakers. The results of the poll could be given to an honest broker — someone with a vested interest in winning the election rather than appeasing the president

To avoid pressure from the top, I might try a fishbowl format, asking Mr. Biden to listen first and speak last.

Over the past week, I’ve raised these ideas with several leaders close to the president who reached out for advice. They’ve each made it clear that they’re afraid to put their relationship on the line and they don’t think Mr. Biden will listen to them

I’ve reminded them that they’re lucky to have a president who doesn’t punish dissenters with an indefinite prison sentence or a trial for treason. That diffusion of responsibility is a recipe for groupthink — if everyone leaves it to someone else, no one will end up speaking up.

“President Biden, I know you believe that politicians shouldn’t let hubris cloud their judgment. I’m worried that people are telling you what you want to hear, not what you need to hear. We know the good things that could happen if you run and win, but we also need to discuss the good things that could happen if you don’t run. You could be hailed as a hero like George Washington for choosing not to seek another term. Regardless of the result, you could make history through your selfless stewardship of the next generation. Personally, I don’t know if that’s the right decision. I just want to make sure it gets due consideration. Would you be open to hosting a meeting to hear the dissenting views?

AlphaGo’s victory demonstrated the unbridled potential of A.I. to achieve superhuman mastery of skills once considered too complicated for machines.

Mr. Lee, now 41, retired three years later, convinced that humans could no longer compete with computers at Go. Artificial intelligence, he said, had changed the very nature of a game that originated in China more than 2,500 years ago.

As society wrestles with what A.I. holds for humanity’s future, Mr. Lee is now urging others to avoid being caught unprepared, as he was, and to become familiar with the technology now. He delivers lectures about A.I., trying to give others the advance notice he wishes he had received before his match.

“I faced the issues of A.I. early, but it will happen for others,” Mr. Lee said recently at a community education fair in Seoul to a crowd of students and parents. “It may not be a happy ending.”

Mr. Lee is not a doomsayer. In his view, A.I. may replace some jobs, but it may create some, too. When considering A.I.’s grasp of Go, he said it was important to remember that humans both created the game and designed the A.I. system that mastered it.

What he worries about is that A.I. may change what humans value.

His immense talent was apparent from the start. He quickly became the best player of his age not only locally but across all of South Korea, Japan and China. He turned pro at 12.

“People used to be in awe of creativity, originality and innovation,” he said. “But since A.I. came, a lot of that has disappeared.”

By the time he was 20, Mr. Lee had reached 9-dan, the highest level of mastery in Go. Soon, he was among the best players in the world, described by some as the Roger Federer of the game.

Go posed a tantalizing challenge for A.I. researchers. The game is exponentially more complicated than chess, with it often being said that there are more possible positions on a Go board (10 with more than 100 zeros after it, by many mathematical estimates) than there are atoms in the universe.

The breakthrough came from DeepMind, which built AlphaGo using so-called neural networks: mathematical systems that can learn skills by analyzing enormous amounts of data. It started by feeding the network 30 million moves from high-level players. Then the program played game after game against itself until it learned which moves were successful and developed new strategies.

Mr. Lee said not having a true human opponent was disconcerting. AlphaGo played a style he had never seen, and it felt odd to not try to decipher what his opponent was thinking and feeling. The world watched in awe as AlphaGo pushed Mr. Lee into corners and made moves unthinkable to a human player.“I couldn’t get used to it,” he said. “I thought that A.I. would beat humans someday. I just didn’t think it was here yet.”

AlphaGo’s victory “was a watershed moment in the history of A.I.” said Demis Hassabis, DeepMind’s chief executive, in a written statement. It showed what computers that learn on their own from data “were really capable of,” he said.

Mr. Lee had a hard time accepting the defeat. What he regarded as an art form, an extension of a player’s own personality and style, was now cast aside for an algorithm’s ruthless efficiency.

His 17-year-old daughter is in her final year of high school. When they discuss what she should study at university, they often consider a future shaped by A.I.“We often talk about choosing a job that won’t be easily replaceable by A.I. or less impacted by A.I.,” he said. “It’s only a matter of time before A.I. is present everywhere.”