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August 22, 2024
AI’s Corporate Takeover? (With Mark Johnson)
As artificial intelligence continues to reshape industries, companies are grappling with the challenges of effectively leveraging AI tools. From data readiness to privacy concerns, the path to successful AI implementation is fraught with complexities. Yet the potential benefits—from revolutionizing health care to enhancing our daily interactions with technology—are too significant to ignore. Here to shed…
August 22, 2024
Social Media Platforms and Justice Thomas’s Tenacity on Compelled Disclosures and Common Carriers
Although the US Supreme Court recently ruled in three First Amendment cases involving social media platforms, Justice Clarence Thomas, its longest-serving member, wrote just once—a separate concurrence in Moody v. NetChoice. Daniel Lyons recently explained that Thomas’s concurrence mostly argued that facial challenges violate the case-or-controversy requirement of Article III of the US Constitution. That topic arose in Moody and the companion case of NetChoice v. Paxton because NetChoice facially attacked (rather than launching as-applied…
August 22, 2024
Data Center Electricity Use IV: Unrealistic Emissions Targets?
Large-scale, dynamic social and economic change is often more difficult, incremental, and slower than anticipated. Consider James Watt and Matthew Boulton in Birmingham in 1776, having invented and refined the double-acting steam engine. Watt patented the invention that year, a breakthrough that would ultimately become a hallmark of the British Industrial Revolution and propel its…
August 21, 2024
Billion Dollar Disasters: Not the Highest Standards
Last January, upon submission of my paper (since published) — Scientific integrity and U.S. “Billion Dollar Disasters” — I submitted a “request for correction” to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) under the agency’s policies for scientific integrity and information quality. Today, I heard back from NOAA and they largely agree with my concerns: “NOAA will…
August 20, 2024
Can We Childproof the Internet?
Child Online Safety bills are crafted with the intention of protecting minors from harmful content on the internet. However, they can infringe on First Amendment rights, affecting the freedom of speech and access to information, and cause other inadvertent harms. In this discussion, we explore the complexities and unintended consequences of age gating, including the…
August 19, 2024
Preserving Trust and Freedom in the Age of AI
As AI rapidly advances, an emerging challenge threatens to weaken the foundations of societal institutions: How can we maintain trust and accountability online when AI systems become indistinguishable from real people? A new proposal for “personhood credentials” (PHCs) aims to address this challenge while preserving privacy and civil liberties. The Problem: AI-Powered Deception at Scale….
August 19, 2024
The Promise of Geoengineering
It is memory-holed now, but acid rain was the largest environmental threat in the 1980s. Grisly pictures emerged, prompting research and then action by the government to reduce sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions. From 1980 when action started in earnest to 2015, SO2 emissions were cut by 80 percent in both the United States and Europe. This drive…
August 19, 2024
What Did You Expect?
About 20,000 years ago, the world was in an ice age. The era is called the Last Glacial Maximum and had global sea levels more than 120 meters (~400 feet) lower than they are today, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). There was no North Sea, English Channel, or Persian Gulf, and Australia…
August 16, 2024
NASA Cancels the VIPER Project, Reiterating the Need for Project Oversight
By early 2024, NASA had made significant progress on its ambitious lunar exploration project, the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER). NASA had unveiled VIPER in 2019 as a solution to a costly space exploration challenge: the expense of launching heavy materials, particularly water, into space. But on July 17th of this year, following a comprehensive…
August 15, 2024
Everyone Loses in Google’s Antitrust Ruling
Last week, US District Judge Amit P. Mehta handed down a significant ruling, finding that Google unlawfully maintained a monopoly in general internet search and search text advertising. This decision marks another chapter in a four-year saga initiated during the Trump administration, with Google already signaling its intent to appeal. The Department of Justice (DOJ) is spiking the…