April 8, 2024
Addictive Design: The Legislative and Litigation Synergy Driving Florida’s Social Media Crackdown
When Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill last month banning anyone “younger than 14 years of age” from holding accounts with certain social media platforms, it garnered coverage in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and USA Today. The New York Times deemed the law “one of the more restrictive measures that a state has enacted so far in an escalating nationwide…
April 4, 2024
Open App Markets Act: A Misguided Approach That Could Stifle America
Rumor has it the Open App Markets Act (OAMA) could make a comeback in Congress. Its supporters posit that large tech companies, such as Apple and Alphabet, are throttling competition and innovation. Yet these arguments run contrary to objective evidence. And the stakes are high—not only does OAMA-like legislation risk undoing Congressional efforts to address the TikTok challenges, it…
April 3, 2024
Biden’s EPA Can Justify His New EV Rules Only by Cooking the Books
Before federal regulations are implemented, they must be justified with an extensive analysis of costs and effects. The new Environmental Protection Agency rule forcing a massive shift toward electric vehicles is no exception. Weighing in at 1,181 pages, it is accompanied by an additional 884 pages of “regulatory impact analysis.” The EPA analysis justifying this rule is…
April 2, 2024
An AI Healthcare Coalition Suggests a Better Way of Regulating AI
In the rapidly evolving landscape of artificial intelligence (AI), the dialogue often veers between the extremes of stringent regulation, like the European Union’s AI Act, and laissez-faire approaches that risk unbridled technological advances without sufficient safeguards. Amidst this polarized debate, the Coalition for Health AI (CHAI) has emerged as a promising alternative approach that addresses the ethical,…
April 2, 2024
The Re-Emergence of Huawei?
Despite draconian export controls and blacklisting by the United States, the Chinese telecoms giant, Huawei, is alive and well—at least for now. Huawei’s current relatively strong competitive state comes from a variety of sources: Yes, Chinese government subsidies and huge home markets helped greatly, but there are also other factors such as Huawei’s own resilience and forward…
April 1, 2024
Journalism and Generative AI: Exploring Limitations and Apprehensions Within the News Industry
My AEI colleague Mark Jamison recently asserted that “traditional news journalists are toast” because the “cost of authoring written content” has plunged in just two years from “around $100 per 1000 words” to only four cents. That’s due to “advanced large language models such as ChatGPT and Claud 2 [that] have revolutionized content creation, driving costs down by a…
March 28, 2024
“Away for the Day”: Regulating Cell Phone Use in New Zealand Schools
On March 26, New York University social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, well-known for The Coddling of the American Mind, released a new book, The Anxious Generation, where he attributes the transition from a play-based childhood to a phone-based childhood as being responsible for the “epidemic” of Generation Z young people suffering from anxiety, depression and fragility. Haidt claims that “a great…
March 28, 2024
The Quest for a ‘Clean Economy’ Collides with Reality
“There are no solutions,” the celebrated economist Thomas Sowell once wrote, “only trade-offs.” Nowhere is this wise maxim truer these days than in the realm of green energy, where the headlong quest for a carbon-free economy has collided with other cultural, social, and environmental forces. Want to extract lithium, a critical component of the batteries that…
March 22, 2024
Why Do Men Dominate Chess?
For years now, sports experts and culture warriors alike have been fiercely contesting the issue of whether transwomen (males who live and identify as women) should be eligible to compete in the female categories of numerous sports—including rugby, swimming, weightlifting, and disc golf. But last August, this debate entered an unexpected domain: the game of…
March 22, 2024
Would It Even Be Constitutional to Pause AI?
A year ago today, the Future of Life Institute released a letter calling for a 6-month pause in the training of artificial intelligence (AI) systems more powerful than GPT-4. The signers included Elon Musk and Apple Co-founder Steve Wozniak, alongside tech critics like Tristan Harris, who all agreed that AI labs must “immediately pause for at least…