I wanted to remark on this Washington Post editorial.

On Thursday, President Donald Trump abruptly pulled the plug on the signing of an executive order that would have given federal agencies an early look at the nation’s most powerful artificial intelligence models before their public release. That’s good news: Even the supposedly voluntary review system under consideration could have hardened into a government chokepoint on U.S. AI development.

Here are some additional significant snippets:

The order would reportedly have created a framework for leading AI labs to share their most advanced models with a coalition of national security agencies before public release. It would also have established a joint cybersecurity clearinghouse, run by both government agencies and private-sector representatives, tasked with finding and patching vulnerabilities in the nation’s digital infrastructure before adversaries could exploit them.

and

A coalition of more than 60 Trump allies, organized under the banner of Humans First and backed by Steve Bannon, wrote the president urging mandatory government approval of frontier AI systems before release. Kevin Hassett, the director of the National Economic Council, publicly floated an FDA-style regime earlier this month in which AI models would have to be “proven safe” before they could reach the public.

and

AI poses real cybersecurity risks, but they need to be addressed with care and precision. The president is right to be wary of creating a bureaucratic review regime that erodes America’s edge.

I’m going to divide my remarks into four sections:

• The problem
• The urgency
• What the creators don’t understand
• The solution

The problem

The snippets above call out the national security implications and the “safety” implications. In addition to those there are infrastructure issues and liability issues. The infrastructure issues are highlighted by this graph:

U. S. consumption increased rapidly from 1970 to about 2000, plateaued due to various efficiencies realized, and, driven largely by generative AI and electric vehicles, began to increase around 2020. The rapid build-out of data centers and increased adoption of EVs will ensure that growth continues for the foreseeable future.

At some point utilization will exceed the grid’s capacity. That is likely to produce a series of effects. First, producers may implement controlled voltage reductions of 5–8% to prevent cascading failures. Historically, that has frequently been followed by “rolling blackouts”. Together those will produce wear-and-tear on devices containing electric motors, such as refrigerators, air conditioners, and well pumps. The costs of these effects will not be borne by commercial consumers whose contracts ensure continuous use. They will be borne by household consumers.

Neither executive agencies nor Congress possess the technical knowledge or adaptive speed necessary for effective ex ante control of frontier AI systems. We are in terra incognita. The machine learning researchers who build these systems understand the architecture and the training process. They do not understand and have said publicly they do not understand what the systems have learned, why they produce the outputs they produce, or what they will do in novel situations. That is an accurate description of the current state of knowledge.

The urgency

Basically, we can’t wait for studies or well-formed regulations. The first lawsuits against gAI companies are already being filed. Regional power constraints associated with accelerated data-center growth are already emerging in several U.S. markets, particularly in Texas where data centers are being built. The pace at which data centers are being built is considerable.

What the creators don’t understand

The enormous irony in this is that not only do elected officials or any foreseeable regulatory agency lack the knowledge and understanding, the creators of gAI don’t have the understanding, either. I’ll flesh that out in a later post.

The solution

Fortunately, there is a prospective solution but it’s one I believe with be very controversial and result in considerable backlash: strict liability. Under a regime of strict liability those harmed by gAI would not need to show intent or negligence on the part of the AI companies—all they would need to show are involvement of the companies and harm.

The response of the companies and, presumably, some economists would in all likelihood be that would have a chilling effect. That is an alarmist claim. Strict liability would force the industry to price risk realistically rather than externalizing it. Strict liability would alter incentives but that is precisely its purpose. The companies could continue to proceed at their own pace. It would only ensure that the risks of their actions would be borne by those who benefit most—the companies rather than those who benefit least—ordinary household users and consumers of electricity.

Not being able to read easily, see clearly, or drive is really a pain. Yesterday I walked over to Whole Foods and picked up a few things. That much I can do.

I’m not experiencing any discomfort at this point. At least I’m able to walk around. I wear the eyeglasses I bought from Amazon when I do—it’s a bit of a strain but I can see reasonably clearly when I do.

I figure I have about two more weeks of this incapacitation before I get a new pair of glasses which will enable me to read, watch television, and drive.

Well, it’s done. I now have artificial vision. I noticed almost immediately that my vision without glasses was clearer than it had been since I was in fourth grade. Colors were truer. Everything is still out of focus but not as out of focus as it used to be.

My old prescription is now completely obsolete and it will be a month before it makes any sense to get a new one. Following my ophthalmologist’s instructions I purchased a pair of “cheaters” from Amazon. They’re not perfect but they give me hope that my vision will be easily correctible.

So, now reading is difficult and driving impossible. This will be the longest time I’ve been unable to drive since when I worked in Germany more than 50 years ago. I didn’t drive at all when I was there—I didn’t need to.

I’m only able to type this post because I’m a touch typist. At my high school you had to pass a touch typing test to graduate. Thank you, SLUH.

I’ve been sitting on this post for a while.

Chicago is a city of neighborhoods. You hear that a lot, and it’s true. Chatham, Sauganash, Bronzeville, South Shore all have distinct characters, histories, and loyalties. What they increasingly share is a Walgreens closing. ABC7 ran a story last month about Chatham residents furious over the upcoming closure of the Walgreens at 86th and Cottage Grove. The story is mostly a string of quotes from upset residents, and the upset is real. One man managing kidney transplants and diabetes who takes 14 pills a day, a woman in an electric wheelchair who lives down the block. These are sympathetic people facing a genuine inconvenience, maybe worse.

But the story raises questions it never bothers to ask. I did some quick checking, the kind of thing a reporter could do in twenty minutes. After this closure, Chatham still has three major chain drugstores and several independent local pharmacies. This is not a pharmacy desert. The nearest replacement Walgreens is 1.3 miles away, and Walgreens is even offering 90 days of free prescription delivery to ease the transition.

Here’s some useful context ABC7 didn’t offer: I live in Sauganash, a neighborhood with a very different demographic profile than Chatham. Right now, today, I am as far from my nearest Walgreens as Chatham residents will be after the closure. Nobody is writing outrage stories about Sauganash.
One alderman called this “pharmaceutical genocide.” Another called for charging Walgreens with “first degree corporate abandonment.” That’s vivid language. But Walgreens isn’t a public utility. It’s a company that expanded aggressively into neighborhoods across Chicago for decades, then, when shrinking its footprint made business sense, started closing stores. That’s what large national chains do. They have no covenant with the neighborhood. They never did.

The actual story here isn’t Walgreens’s betrayal. It’s that somewhere along the way, communities stopped patronizing local pharmacies and shifted their loyalty and their prescriptions to national chains that were cheaper and more convenient. The local pharmacist who knew your name and would make a delivery in a pinch got replaced by a corporation that optimizes for shareholder value. When that corporation decides your neighborhood is no longer worth the trouble, you discover that the relationship was always one-sided.

Chatham’s anger is understandable. But the lesson isn’t that Walgreens owes the neighborhood more. It’s that neighborhoods can’t outsource their civic infrastructure to companies whose headquarters are in Deerfield and whose loyalty runs exactly as deep as the profit margin.

Tomorrow (at an ungodly hour) I have my second cataract surgery scheduled. I don’t have as much foreboding about it as I did the first but I don’t look forward to it nonetheless.

My left eye, the one that has already been operated on, is presently in a bizarre inbetween state. There is a notable difference among the vision using that eye alone, the vision using both eyes (with or without glasses), and the vision with my right eye (with or without glasses). With my left eye without my glasses I can read from a distance of about nine inches or closer but the lines of print are sort of wavy. With my glasses I can’t read at all using that eye. With my right eye I can read fairly normally with or without my glasses. My vision is slightly fuzzy now with or without my glasses.

Colors as seen by my left eye are noticeably different. They’re brighter, clearer. As seen by my right eye I now perceive a sort of yellowish tinge to them.

I suspect that this “inbetween” condition will continue for the next month (at least) until I get my new prescription glasses. That will make my regular considerable volume of reading that much more difficult if not completely impossible.

For someone like me, accustomed to spending much of every day reading, that prospect is more disorienting than the surgery itself

Although reading is difficult for me at this point, I’ve been trying to remain current on President Trump’s trip to China. It saddens me that so much of the commentary might well have been predetermined, written before the president set out. Rather than reading commentary I suggest you read the news reports (such as they are). Here’s CNN’s report on Trump’s reception on his arrival:

President Donald Trump has just landed in Beijing to an arrival ceremony replete with the pomp and pageantry the US president is known to appreciate.

In a show of the importance of the trip, China’s leader Xi Jinping has dispatched a high-level official to lead the welcome delegation — Chinese Vice President Han Zheng.

Han is widely seen as Xi’s envoy for diplomatic events and last year attended Trump’s presidential inauguration. He is a retired member of the Politburo Standing Committee, the Chinese Communist Party’s top-most decision making body.

Other officials on the ground include US Ambassador to China David Perdue, his counterpart Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng, and China’s executive vice minister of foreign affairs, Ma Zhaoxu, according to the White House.

The US president will also be met by 300 Chinese youth in matching blue and white uniforms who marched along the tarmac holding Chinese flags, along with a military honor guard and a military band.

Contrast that with President Obama’s reception nine years ago, as reported at The Guardian:

China’s leaders have been accused of delivering a calculated diplomatic snub to Barack Obama after the US president was not provided with a staircase to leave his plane during his chaotic arrival in Hangzhou before the start of the G20.

Chinese authorities have rolled out the red carpet for leaders including India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, the South Korean president, Park Geun-hye, Brazil’s president, Michel Temer, and the British prime minister, Theresa May, who touched down on Sunday morning.

But the leader of the world’s largest economy, who is on his final tour of Asia, was forced to disembark from Air Force One through a little-used exit in the plane’s belly after no rolling staircase was provided when he landed in the eastern Chinese city on Saturday afternoon.

When Obama did find his way on to a red carpet on the tarmac below there were heated altercations between US and Chinese officials, with one Chinese official caught on video shouting: “This is our country! This is our airport!”

President Xi and his advisors know exactly what they are doing and whom they are dealing with. The Chinese president is performing simultaneously for a domestic, an American, and a global audience. Had Xi treated Trump the way Obama was treated in Hangzhou, many observers would have interpreted it as a deliberate signal that Washington was expected to approach Beijing as a supplicant rather than a peer. The risk for Xi in that is that Trump might have arrived at the same conclusion.

What is clear at this point is that both President Xi and President Trump want something. The open questions are what do they want and who wants it more?

I found a number of aspects of this Politico poll interesting. Let’s ruminate about some of them.

The first question was about whether people thought there was “too much money in politics”. 80% of Harris voters thought so; 77% of Trump voters agreed. I would say that qualifies as a consensus.

While I agree that there’s too much money in politics, I suspect my interpretation of that is different from most. Let’s consider spending in presidential elections since 2008:

And it’s not just presidential elections. Here’s a comparison of the campaign spending in the Democratic primary for U. S. Senate:

Not only was the spending high but note, too, that there’s very little relationship between the amount of money spent and winning an election.

I’m open to explanations for why that be. Here’s my speculation. Campaign spending is shaped by people whose incentives reward spending not efficiency and that is more true for Democrats than Republicans.

I also wonder what correctives people would support? Limits? Disclosure? Public financing? Overturning Citizens United v. FEC?

Here’s another topic on which quite a few people agreed: 61% thought that billionaires wielded too much power in politics (75% of Harris voters agreed). I agree with that, too, but, again, I suspect my interpretation is somewhat different from that of most people. I doubt that billionaires are wielding power by buying candidates or their elections (other than their own elections, of course). I think it’s more subtle (and less defensible) than that. I think that politicians and their consultants are trying to curry favor with the ultra-rich to get them to donate to their campaigns, provide jobs for them, etc.

Here’s a final area of agreement I found somewhat surprising: a majority of Americans (53%) see “special interest” money as corrupting politics rather than as an exercise of freedom of speech. I was unable to identify what was meant by “special interests” or the breakdown of opinion between Harris voters and Trump voters.

The SCOTUS decision in Louisiana v. Callais continues to trouble me and to explain why we need to dig into the history a bit. When the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965, Louisiana’s population was, as it is now, roughly one-third black. The state had eight Congressional districts. All were held by Democrats—remember, that was the era of the “Solid South”. None of Louisiana’s Congressional representatives was black.

Today the situation is quite different. Louisiana has six Congressional districts. Four of those districts are held by Republicans, two by Democrats. All of the Republican Congressmen are white while both Democrats are black. Today’s two black Democratic seats are primarily made possible by the wild racial gerrymandering, a picture of which I’ve already shown.

In 1965 the absence of black representatives was the result of racial exclusion; today, the alignment of race and party means that representation is largely a byproduct of partisan geography.

The following table illustrates the challenge:
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If a non-gerrymandered map were drawn that did not cross parish boundaries, the greatest likelihood would be that Louisiana would be left with no Democratic seats. If Caddo parish in the north were bundled with other adjacent parishes with a large percentage of black voters, it’s possible that one seat with a black majority could be eked out.

The questions this raises are at the heart of the controversy over redistricting in Louisiana.

• Does not being able to elect a candidate of your choice impair your right to vote?
• Does not being able to elect a candidate of the race of your choice impair your right to vote?
• Does not being able to elect a candidate of the political party of your choice impair your right to vote?
• Does not being able to elect a candidate of the political party and race of your choice impair your right to vote?
• If you answered “Yes” to any of the above, why is that different in Louisiana than it is, say, in Illinois?

Personally, my preference would be for all Congressional districts throughout the United States to be determined algorithmically to be compact and not cross jurisdiction boundaries to the greatest degree possible AND for there to be at least three times and possibly four times as many Congressional districts as there are at present. Either of those would require an act of Congress (which I think is unlikely) or a Constitutional amendment (which is even less likely).

However, I do think we need to recognize just how different things are than they were 60 years ago. Not only are black voters not suppressed as they were then but the makeup and nature of the political parties are drastically different. But that’s a topic for a different post.

After my cataract surgery it’s hard for me to read. Using my left (operated on) eye only it’s too fuzzy with or without my glasses. Using my right eye only with my glasses I can read without difficulty but keeping my left eye closed while I read is a strain on its own.

Since my ordinary daily schedule includes an enormous amount of reading, that restricts my daily activities pretty strictly. In a typical day I would read several hundred emails (mostly uninteresting) and scores of editorials, columns, articles, and blog posts. If I don’t maintain that pace, my Inboxes (multiple email addresses) get cluttered quite quickly. I’m barely able to maintain a quarter of that now.