March 24, 2025
Response to the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management
This comment addresses analytic flaws and ambiguities in the U.S. Department of Energy Report 2024 LNG Export Study: Energy, Economic, and Environmental Assessment of U.S. LNG Exports, December 2024 (“Report”). The analysis presented in the Report is sufficiently weak analytically that it should not be used for evaluation of federal energy policies as a general…
March 19, 2025
AI and Jobs: Measuring Impact and Building New Assessment Tools
Event Summary On March 19, AEI’s Brent Orrell and Shane Tews hosted a panel discussion featuring Alex Tamkin, an AI researcher at Anthropic, and Jason Owen-Smith, a sociologist at the University of Michigan, on how AI is shaping the labor market and workforce development policy. The conversation was moderated by Axios reporter Ashley Gold. The…
March 18, 2025
A Critique of Professor Cass R. Sunstein on the Social Cost of Carbon
This paper offers critical observations on the arguments presented by Professor Cass R. Sunstein in a recent opinion column on the Trump Executive Order of January 20, 2025. That executive order ended the use of estimates of the social cost of greenhouse gases (or carbon) by federal policymakers. Read the full paper below. Sunstein-SCC-Zycher-March-2025Download
March 13, 2025
Why Your Next Coworker Might Be an AI Agent
A number of leading AI CEOs, including Sam Altman, have suggested that 2025 will mark a transition from AI systems like ChatGPT, which answer questions, to AI agents capable of performing real-world tasks autonomously. A set of new research experiments provides a tantalizing glimpse of how AI agents might combine specialized expertise to tackle complex problems—just…
March 13, 2025
Trump vs. The Press
It’s time to push back against Donald Trump’s efforts to target, silence, and punish—via lawsuits, access restrictions, and exertions of Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulatory authority—press entities that oppose and supposedly harm him or that fail to embrace his narratives. Trump’s attacks on journalism proliferate precisely when he demonstrates what AEI’s Jack Landman Goldsmith recently called “indifference…
March 13, 2025
The Spectrum Exchange: Networks, Security, and Innovation (with Peter Rysavy)
Amid debates over spectrum allocation, critical questions about national security, communication infrastructure, and connectivity continue to take center stage. What does spectrum sharing involve? How does spectrum sharing enhance the efficiency of limited spectrum resources? And what impact does it have on deploying emerging technologies like 5G and AI-driven networks? In this episode, Shane Tews…
March 12, 2025
WEIRD Reactions to Privacy Regulation
In my last blog, I discussed the effects of WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic) psychology on attitudes toward Artificial Intelligence (AI). WEIRD societies have been shown to demonstrate very different approaches to trust than non-WEIRD societies. WEIRD societies have substituted trust in friends, families, and communities with trust in institutions that have enabled widespread trading with strangers….
March 12, 2025
Look Who’s Jawboning Now: The FCC
When attorney Robert Corn-Revere vents his views about issues affecting the First Amendment’s guarantees of free speech and press, it’s wise to attend. Currently chief counsel for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and a former partner at two leading law firms, Corn-Revere served as chief counsel for the late James Quello when he was chairman, a renowned…
March 7, 2025
WEIRD Attitudes Toward Artificial Intelligence—And Its Regulation?
The pioneering work of psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, alongside behavioral economists Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein and practitioners such as Lord Mervyn King, leaves little doubt that individuals—when making decisions in the face of uncertainty—act a little weirdly. Specifically, they exhibit a host of cognitive biases that lead to poor decisions. These biases include: Subsequently, work by Joseph Henrich and others has shown that, while…
March 6, 2025
Rebuilding the Transatlantic Tech Alliance: Why Innovation, Not Regulation, Should Guide the Way
As artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and digital infrastructure reshape global power dynamics, the relationship between the United States and the European Union stands at a critical crossroads. Yet the EU’s pride in being the world’s leading digital regulator introduces significant challenges for transatlantic cooperation and hurts European consumers. While the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR),…