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April 21, 2025
Don’t Let the Senate Undercut U.S. Leadership In Crypto
“America First” is more than a slogan—it’s a guiding principle. For the Trump administration, it should guide policy across the board, including in the fast-moving world of cryptocurrencies. With the Trump administration now working to secure American leadership in digital assets, Congress must avoid undermining progress by giving foreign competitors a regulatory edge. Like it or not,…
April 19, 2025
What a Novel-Writing Organization’s Demise Teaches Us About AI
During a recent tour for my newly released book on what Jewish tradition teaches us about artificial intelligence, the third-most common question I received—after “What’s your book about?” and “What made you write it?”—was “Did you use AI to write your book?” Each time, I would answer that third question with an unequivocal “no.” But I would…
April 18, 2025
The Dangerous Road to a “Master File”—Why Linking Government Databases Is a Terrible Idea
A concerning development from the Trump administration has privacy advocates sounding alarm bells nationwide: a plan to consolidate data from dozens of government agencies into what would amount to a comprehensive “master file” on all American citizens. While proponents claim this massive data integration effort will help eliminate waste and fraud, the potential consequences for…
April 17, 2025
The Rigidity Cycle and the Pacing Problem
I was listening to Tyler Cowen’s Conversations With Tyler podcast with Jennifer Pahlka, rich and full of detail relevant to my previous post on the pacing problem. In addition to recommending this good conversation, I echo Tyler’s recommendation of Jen’s book Recoding America: Why Government is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better….
April 17, 2025
The New Rules for Experts
My friend and AEI colleague Tony Mills — director of the AEI Center for Technology, Science, and Energy — has been on a tear lately. Today, I share four of Tony’s essays published in the past month on public trust in science, reform of NIH, COVID’s long-term costs, and how virologists lost the gain-of-function debate. Enjoy, and see you…
April 17, 2025
Judge McFadden’s First Amendment Ruling Against the White House: Infusing Modern Speech Doctrines with History and Tradition
I recently addressed today’s debate over the Press Clause’s meaning 234 years after the First Amendment’s ratification. The rift involves whether the clause is “a technology-specific provision” that safeguards “everyone’s right to use a particular type of mass communication technology and its modern analogs,” or whether it protects the press as an institution that receives…
April 16, 2025
Bastiat and What is Not Seen in Tech Policy
Over at The Dispatch, AEI Senior Fellow Jonah Goldberg recently praised Frédéric Bastiat’s classic essay, “That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen.” Goldberg cited the piece to critique the Trump administration’s seemingly-attractive-but-deeply-flawed approach to trade. I’ve found that this short 1850 treatise is equally illuminating when assessing 21st century tech policy. As…
April 15, 2025
Making DOGE Constitutional
The “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) has been hard to pin down. In the wake of last year’s election, Elon Musk and his erstwhile partner, Vivek Ramaswamy, gestured toward some of the effort’s contradictory impulses in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. “We will serve as outside volunteers, not federal officials or employees,” they insisted. But “unlike government…
April 15, 2025
Censorship is Anti-American
On March 25, Rumeysa Ozturk, a graduate student at Tufts University — “a Fulbright scholar working on a PhD in child study and human development on an F-1 student visa” — was detained by six plain clothes government officials as she walked down a Boston street. Yesterday, The Washington Post reported that a State Department memo, prepared…
April 15, 2025
The AI Race Accelerates: Key Insights from the 2025 AI Index Report
The 2025 AI Index Report, recently released by Stanford’s Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), offers an insightful overview of the current state and trajectory of artificial intelligence (AI). While the comprehensive report spans an extensive 456 pages, here are the top six observations that stood out: 1. AI Nears Human-Level Performance AI research accelerated dramatically in…