Bruce Yandle warns of a “bootleggers and Baptists” coalition to regulate AI. A slice:
In May 2023, OpenAI founder Sam Altman testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee about ChatGPT. Altman demonstrated how his company’s tool could massively reduce the cost of retrieving, processing, conveying, and perhaps even modifying the collective knowledge of mankind as stored in computer memories worldwide. A user with no special equipment or access can request a research report, story, poem, or visual presentation and receive in a matter of seconds a written response.
Because of ChatGPT’s seemingly vast powers, Altman called for government regulation to “mitigate the risks of increasingly powerful AI systems” and recommended that U.S. or global leaders form an agency that would license AI systems and have the authority to “take that license away and ensure compliance with safety standards.” Major AI players around the world quickly roared approval of Altman’s “I want to be regulated” clarion call.
Welcome to the brave new world of AI and cozy crony capitalism, where industry players, interest groups, and government agents meet continuously to monitor and manage investor-owned firms.
The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board is no fan of the United ‘Auto’ Workers. A slice:
Still, it’s apparent that many workers aren’t interested in what the union is selling, which is less about job security than progressive priorities that extend well past the workplace. Mr. Fain presents himself as the vanguard of left-wing politics, as when he denounced Israel’s effort to destroy Hamas in Gaza. The UAW “has been calling for a ceasefire for six months,” he said recently. Why should line workers in Tuscaloosa pay dues for that?
Unions keep losing labor-market share, and official figures show the downward slide hasn’t stopped. Last year 10% of workers were union members, down from 10.1% in 2022. In the private economy, the rate was unchanged at 6%. But among public workers it fell to 32.5%, from 33.1%. Such annual changes might look small, but that’s how erosion works, a little at a time. In 2000 the private workforce was 9% unionized, and for public employees it was 36.9%.
Megan McArdle: “Women are having fewer babies. That’s bad news for retirees.” A slice:
That base reality is often obscured by the terms of the debate — by the arguments over the solvency of the trust funds, the size of cost-of-living adjustments, the merits of Social Security vs. traditional employer pensions vs. (comparatively) newfangled 401(k)s. But if you drill down to fundamentals, all retirement plans represent the same thing: a legal claim on the output of some future worker. Fewer workers per retiree means less output to claim — and more bitter political fights between workers and retirees.
Pierre Lemieux pushes back against the today’s ghosts of J.K. Galbraith and Vance Packard.
Randy Holcombe reports that the Fed won’t meet its inflation target this year.
