August 26, 2024
VIPER’s Failure and the Future of Space Exploration
Earlier this year, NASA’s most advanced lunar rover—the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover or VIPER—seemed to be on track to the moon. Engineers integrated the VIPER’s final instrument of four in February. By April, the golf-cart-sized rover stood “taller and more capable than ever” after its mast was installed and it passed a crucial review. The fully assembled VIPER…
August 24, 2024
The Commerce Department Celebrates a “Milestone” in Restoring Advanced Semiconductor Manufacturing to the US—Intel, Not So Much
Recently, Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo proudly announced that the US had achieved a “milestone” in its drive to build secure advanced semiconductor plants within its borders. Specifically, the Department of Commerce has now received commitments from the five leading manufacturers of advanced semiconductor chips to build new facilities (fabs) in the US over the next decade. The manufacturers…
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 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 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…
August 15, 2024
Open AI Models: A Step Toward Innovation or a Threat to Security?
As AI models become more advanced, the conversation around their accessibility has intensified. At the heart of this debate is a crucial question: Should the “weights” of large language models be openly accessible to the public, or should they be closely guarded to prevent misuse? In the realm of AI, especially deep neural networks, weights…