April 28, 2025
A World with Smart AI but Not Human-Level AI
How long, if ever, before we achieve artificial intelligence that can pretty much do everything that a human worker can do currently? My short-hand way of gauging the speculative timeline relies, at least partially, on prediction markets. And the most recent message from them suggests tempering expectations, at least a bit. For example: The current…
April 25, 2025
A NEPA Update from the White House
This past January, the White House issued Executive Order (EO) 14154, “Unleashing American Energy,” which rescinded EO 11991 from May 1977. For nearly 50 years, EO 11991 served as a foundational document for national environmental law. It established the framework authorizing the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), which developed regulations for federal agencies to implement…
April 23, 2025
The Digital Markets Act: A Security Risk for Encrypted Communications
A recent controversy involving Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth presents a sobering, real-world example of the security risks posed by messaging platforms. Hegseth and other senior Trump administration officials discussed sensitive military plans over the unsecured Signal app—violating government security protocols. When The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, was inadvertently added to this group chat, sensitive operational…
April 23, 2025
The FCC’s Misguided Efforts to Police News Trump Disdains
Much is disturbing about the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. For starters, he was deported to an El Salvador prison due to what one Republican US Senator recently called “a screw-up” by the Trump administration and what the federal government confessed in a March 31 court filing was “an administrative error.” More troubling, of course,…
April 22, 2025
America’s AI Future Needs Faster Permitting
The United States leads the world in artificial intelligence, but it’s not guaranteed to stay there. The bottleneck isn’t talent, ideas, or capital—it’s electricity. Electricity is the binding constraint for building and using hyperscale data centers, essential for training today’s advanced AI models. The Department of Energy projects that data center electricity demand will nearly…
April 21, 2025
Trump Comes for Climate Research
Last week Politico published a scoop related to climate research under the Trump Administration: The Trump administration is canceling funding for the U.S. Global Change Research Program, the entity that produces the federal government’s signature climate change study, according to three federal officials familiar with the move. The move, which had been widely expected, is a potentially fatal…
April 21, 2025
The Nuclear Race to Power the AI Economy
America’s nuclear paradox: Yesterday’s reactors are being resurrected to power the future. For example: At Palisades, Michigan, engineers rush to repair steam generators before an October 2025 restart, while at Three Mile Island—where a 1979 meltdown once buried the country’s postwar nuclear ambitions—Microsoft has committed billions for carbon-free electricity to feed its voracious artificial-intelligence operations….
April 18, 2025
The Dangerous Road to a “Master File”—Why Linking Government Databases Is a Terrible Idea
A concerning development from the Trump administration has privacy advocates sounding alarm bells nationwide: a plan to consolidate data from dozens of government agencies into what would amount to a comprehensive “master file” on all American citizens. While proponents claim this massive data integration effort will help eliminate waste and fraud, the potential consequences for…
April 17, 2025
The Rigidity Cycle and the Pacing Problem
I was listening to Tyler Cowen’s Conversations With Tyler podcast with Jennifer Pahlka, rich and full of detail relevant to my previous post on the pacing problem. In addition to recommending this good conversation, I echo Tyler’s recommendation of Jen’s book Recoding America: Why Government is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better….
April 17, 2025
The New Rules for Experts
My friend and AEI colleague Tony Mills — director of the AEI Center for Technology, Science, and Energy — has been on a tear lately. Today, I share four of Tony’s essays published in the past month on public trust in science, reform of NIH, COVID’s long-term costs, and how virologists lost the gain-of-function debate. Enjoy, and see you…