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June 11, 2025
Whose Experts?
In an op-ed yesterday in the Wall Street Journal, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), announced that he was sacking all of its members of “to re-establish public confidence in vaccine science.” He explained: [W]e are taking a bold step in restoring public trust by totally reconstituting the Advisory…
June 11, 2025
Why New York’s New AI Legislation Is Problematic
The goal of New York State’s Responsible AI Safety and Education (RAISE) Act—protecting people from AI harms—is admirable. But by assuming that AI models themselves are the key leverage point for ensuring safety, RAISE risks turning a technical challenge into a bureaucratic burden. Authored by State Assemblymember Alex Bores, the RAISE Act applies a list of requirements…
June 11, 2025
Pew Survey Shows Growing Skepticism Toward Federal Censorship of Online Speech
A recent Pew Research Center survey suggests slightly more public support––albeit still far from optimal––for a robust online marketplace of ideas in which the federal government and technology companies refrain from policing falsities. Conducted more than a month after Donald Trump retook the Oval Office, the survey queried 5,123 Americans. The findings put light tailwinds…
June 9, 2025
A Note on Roger Pielke Jr. and Extreme Greenhouse Gas Scenarios
My AEI colleague Roger Pielke Jr. posted some useful observations recently on the politicized use of extreme greenhouse gas (GHG) scenarios for purposes of the usual climate scaremongering and support of policies that I would describe as ideological opposition to fossil fuels. Roger takes particular aim at an extreme scenario called “Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5,” which Roger…
June 9, 2025
Let the Market Work
The Trump administration is trying to fix a market that isn’t broken—and in doing so, it risks breaking the parts that are working just fine. That’s the irony at the heart of the Department of Justice’s (DOJ’s) proposed remedies in its antitrust case against Google. Following the lead of the Biden DOJ, the Trump DOJ…
June 6, 2025
Are Software Jobs Collapsing?
The image below, which appeared in the Financial Times, has been gaining traction on the Internet because it seems to show what people in the software industry fear most: The introduction of new groups of AI models has collapsed the software industry. Beginning in 2022 and gaining momentum through 2023, the tech industry experienced a…
June 5, 2025
Innovation Shouldn’t Be a Liability in the United States
America’s antitrust enforcers say they want to protect innovation. But their current cases against Big Tech are only punishing it. The Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) have launched aggressive antitrust cases against companies like Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta, arguing that these firms are too dominant and that their success undermines competition. The government’s solution:…
June 5, 2025
Reclaimed Words and a Meta Oversight Board Decision Reveal Problems with Policing Online Hate Speech
To appreciate the complexities of policing online hate speech that underlie an April summary decision by Meta’s Oversight Board, let’s start with a musical detour through a 2017 US Supreme Court opinion called Matal v. Tam. The Court faced the First Amendment question in Matal of whether the US Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) could…
June 4, 2025
Expect an AI Shock to Change the Job Market, Not Destroy It
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, “The Real Story of the ‘China Shock‘,” economists James J. Heckman (a Nobel laureate at the University of Chicago) and Hanming Fang (University of Pennsylvania) argue that the turn-of-the-century trade disruption primarily shifted jobs from one region to another rather than eliminating them nationwide. Moreover, they contend that Chinese…
June 4, 2025
What is a “Worst Case” Climate Scenario?
The implausibly extreme and hugely popular climate scenario RCP8.5 made it into President Trump’s executive order last week on “Restoring Gold Standard Science.” Ironically, the Trump administration’s characterization of RCP8.5 did not quite reach the “gold standard,” and maybe not even a “bronze standard. “ The EO states: [Federal a]gencies have used Representative Concentration Pathway…