June 21, 2024
Overregulation Threatens the Digital Economy
America has a vibrant history of innovation and entrepreneurship. This heritage laid the foundation for today’s bustling e-marketplace and its unparalleled successes. Ninety-five percent of Americans participate, creating over 10 percent of US gross domestic product. Nearly three-fourths of small businesses credit ecommerce for their survival through the pandemic. Fifty-three percent reported in 2023 that most of their sales growth…
June 20, 2024
Data Center Electricity Use I: Framing the Problem
Yesterday the silicon chip platform company Nvidia became the most valuable public company in the US, surpassing Microsoft: Nvidia became the U.S.’s most valuable listed company Tuesday thanks to the demand for its artificial-intelligence chips, leading a tech boom that brings back memories from around the start of this century. Nvidia’s chips have been the workhorses of…
June 20, 2024
The Death of Environmentalism at 20
Twenty years ago, Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus “dropped” (in Ted’s words) an essay at the annual meeting of the Environmental Grantmakers Association titled, The Death of Environmentalism (DoE). The DoE prompted a vigorous debate about environmentalism in the United States that continues today. Here is how the New York Times characterized the reaction to the essay in 2005: The…
June 19, 2024
Playing the Media Blame Game Two Years After the School Shooting in Uvalde, Texas
Who, beyond deceased shooter Salvador Ramos, bears legal responsibility for the mass shooting that killed 19 students and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, in May 2022? According to two recent lawsuits (one in California, one in Texas) three businesses that provide lawful services and goods––ones sheltered by the US Constitution’s First or Second Amendments––should be held civilly liable and compensate the victims’ families….
June 18, 2024
Transformative Growth with AI Is Likely. Explosive Growth Is Science Fiction.
A couple weeks back, Tim Lee, the author of the Understanding AI Substack, put out the following plea on X: “I really wish there were more economists involved in discussions of the implications of superintelligence.” He added, “The most obvious example is people predicting mass unemployment without thinking through the impact of high productivity on fiscal and monetary…
June 17, 2024
Billion Dollar Disasters on Steroids
Shortly after my paper Scientific integrity and U.S. “Billion Dollar Disasters” was accepted for publication, I was tipped off to a public but unnamed and well-hidden directory on the website of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that contained 17 (now 18) of the most recent versions of the “billion dollar disaster” (BDD) tabulation, dating to March 2020….
June 17, 2024
The AI Arms Race: Apple and OpenAI’s Partnership Raises the Bar for Privacy and a More Secure User Experience
Apple unveiled at its World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC24) Private Cloud Compute, or PPC, last Monday as a new way to manage the technical possibilities around security and privacy in cloud computing and artificial intelligence. This new cloud intelligence system is designed to prioritize privacy features that were previously limited to devices and will now be available…
June 14, 2024
Facing Cable Cord-Cutting, Cities Fight to Tax Broadband
Broadband has been a bright spot in America’s grim inflationary landscape. While consumer prices rose 4.9 percent last year, two recent reports show that consumer broadband prices fell, both in absolute terms and cost per gigabyte. But where many see a victory, some cities sense an opportunity. Stung by declining cable franchise fees, local governments are pushing to…
June 13, 2024
Generative AI and Child Sexual Abuse Material: An Early Cautionary Lesson and a Pledge from Tech Companies
It’s almost a truism that all technological innovations, generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) tools included, can be put to both good and evil uses. This post addresses a decidedly disturbing deployment of Gen AI that falls squarely into the latter category––using it to create sexually explicit images of minors. Indeed, the charges announced last month by the US Department…
June 11, 2024
The Economics of AI and the Impending Robot Takeover, Part I
Tim Lee, the author of the excellent Understanding AI Substack, recently took to X with a plea: “I really wish there were more economists involved in discussions of the implications of superintelligence.” He continued: The most obvious example is people predicting mass unemployment without thinking through the impact of high productivity on fiscal and monetary policy. There are…