August 21, 2025
What Does Agentic AI Mean for Interoperability, User Freedom, and Privacy?
Agentic AI, or automated systems that are capable of completing tasks and making decisions without human intervention, requires interoperability to remain innovative and competitive. But what does this degree of data access mean for user privacy? And how can this technology provide us with greater agency over our lives? In this episode of Explain to…
August 20, 2025
A Takeover of the IPCC
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has just released the names of its authors for its seventh assessment report (AR7). The author list for its Chapter 3 — Changes in regional climate and extremes, and their causes — suggests strongly that the IPCC will be shifting from its longstanding focus on detection and attribution (D&A) of extreme events…
August 20, 2025
Prison Call Order Delays Reform of Market Ripe for Disruption
Earlier this summer, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) unexpectedly delayed implementation of its 2024 prison call order until 2027. The order, which was mandated by Congress and had bipartisan support in the agency and on Capitol Hill, sought to correct long-standing market distortions through a combination of cost-based pricing and competition-friendly rules. The delay was…
August 19, 2025
When Fact Checkers Stop Checking Facts
A recent Washington Post headline claimed its tech columnist, Geoffrey Fowler, had shown that “Meta’s new crowdsourced system to fight falsehoods [has] failed to make a dent.” The claim would fail a proper fact check. Meta launched its new program—Community Notes—on April 7 to replace third-party fact-checking. If you took the Post’s headline at face…
August 15, 2025
Too Big to Fail
In 2024, Nature published “The Economic Commitment of Climate Change,” by Kotz et al. (KLW24). A press release accompanying the paper’s publication announced that it projected enormous future GDP losses due to climate change, much more than almost all other studies: Even if CO2 emissions were to be drastically cut down starting today, the world economy is already committed…
August 15, 2025
Dial-Up Internet May Be History, but It Still Conditions Our Current Internet Experience
This week’s announcement that AOL will be discontinuing its dial-up internet access service on September 30 triggered a bout of nostalgia in me—an internet dinosaur who first dialed up to ARPANET in 1980. Most of today’s internet users have never experienced the electronic cacophony as modems performed their ritual handshake, or viewed online interaction as…
August 14, 2025
Illinois Bans AI Therapy. Questions about Enforcement Remain.
Last week, my home state of Illinois became one of the first in the nation to ban AI therapy when Governor Pritzker signed the Wellness and Oversight for Psychological Resources Act (WOPR) into law. The bill, which is a clear nod to the 1983 film WarGames and its ominous supercomputer, signals lawmakers’ wariness about artificial…
August 14, 2025
Who Owns Information? Governments Are Asking the Wrong Question.
Who should control data? The question is increasingly central to policy debates in Washington, Brussels, and Silicon Valley. It’s being asked in antitrust lawsuits, AI regulation proposals, and sweeping data governance laws. But there’s a problem: The question is built on a faulty understanding of what information is—and what it takes to make it useful….
August 13, 2025
Reading the Mind of the Machine: Why GPT-5’s Chain-of-Thought Monitoring Matters for AI Safety
When OpenAI released GPT-5 last week, most coverage focused on the model’s performance gains, including fewer hallucinations, stronger multilingual abilities, and state-of-the-art results in health tasks. But buried deep in the 59-page system card is something far more consequential for AI safety: a section describing how OpenAI is monitoring GPT-5’s internal reasoning (“chain-of-thought”) in real-world…
August 13, 2025
Understanding Why the Supreme Court’s Ruling in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton Is Narrow
With the US Supreme Court now considering in NetChoice v. Fitch whether to reinstate an injunction blocking enforcement of Mississippi’s online age-verification and parental-consent law, it’s vital to understand the narrowness of the Court’s recent ruling in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton. The Court in Free Speech Coalition upheld, against a First Amendment challenge, a…