Zachary Karabell warns of the dangers of AI fear-mongering. A slice:
The point isn’t that AI is without its existential risks. It is that the future here is, as futures are, unknown, and the decisions made today will shape what happens next. If false certainty of impending doom determines those actions, the ability of this new technology to help solve core human challenges — such as disease, climate change, population decline and the nature of work — will be constrained.
There is a past lesson in how nuclear power was managed in most countries. Because nuclear weapons threaten human existence and nuclear power plant accidents can be catastrophic, the nuclear regulatory framework was constructed primarily to mitigate harm. That may have helped prevent nuclear war, but it also constrained the deployment of and innovation in nuclear energy, which is both cleaner and cheaper than oil and gas. Cultural fear created a deep animus that never dissipated.
John Puri ponders the Declaration of Independence. A slice:
In John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, from which Thomas Jefferson took obvious inspiration, a natural law of justice exists before any government is instituted. In a precursor to the Declaration’s retelling, men exist in a state of nature with equal rights to life, liberty (or self-direction), and property acquired through exertion. Each person may exercise these rights freely, but only within the bounds of others’ rights. When one man violates the rights of another — by harming him, enslaving him, or stealing from him — he enters an unjust state of war, and his victim has the right to uphold the natural law by punishing his aggression.
But as we contemplate academia’s degradation of the electorate, we must not forget the rest of the far-reaching damage it does. Education departments that instill poisonous ideologies in schoolteachers have depressed children’s test scores in reading and math to historic lows. Journalism, law and medical schools put woke indoctrination ahead of competent professional training.
The FAA should be the regulator of air safety, just as the Federal Railroad Administration is the regulator of rail safety and the Federal Highway Administration and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration regulate road safety. The FAA should not own or operate the systems it regulates. Imagine if the FHA, which sets standards for traffic lights, also operated all of them nationwide, and that replacing any of the lights required asking Congress for money. Nobody would think that was an arrangement for safer streets.
So long as air traffic control remains within the FAA, the agency will be unaccountable and subject to the whims of politicians. Spinning off ATC, as 98 countries have done successfully for decades, would be good for taxpayers and, most importantly, for passenger safety.
Ramesh Ponnuru offers the following from the Department of Things Not to Worry About:
The Atlantic has an article by Jean Chatzky arguing that senior citizens are too cautious about spending money, which is bad both for themselves and for the economy. The concern about the negative effect of oversaving on an economy goes back to Keynes — but even Keynes was concerned about it only in the context of a zero-interest-rate economy. He was wrong, but we’re obviously not in that situation today.
