Justin Vanessus 02

What Managers Think About Replacing Workers With AI

Mon, 13 Oct 2025 10:35:00 +0000

It's hard to look at a website, talk to anybody in business, or read a magazine for very long these days without encountering something about artificial intelligence (AI). One of the biggest concerns for the average symbolic-manipulator employee, in George Gilder's phrase, is whether AI will replace you in your job. Examples of symbolic manipulators are software developers, accountants, writers, and to some degree sales people and counselors. Hospital nurses and construction workers, on the other hand, are not symbolic manipulators, at least not most of the time.

A company called Trio realized that even if AI was available to replace a lot of these folks, somebody would have to decide to do it. And that somebody would be middle-level managers, for the most part. So last month, they performed an online survey of about 3000 U. S. managers in all 50 states to find out their attitudes toward replacing their employees with AI. And the results are illuminating.

First of all, when broken down by state, there are wide variations in how enthusiastic managers are in replacing flesh-and-blood workers with AI software. Openness to doing this varies from a high of 67% in Maine to a low of 8% in Idaho. Both being fairly rural states, the difference is hard to account for except by cultural factors. If I had to guess, I'd say finding good, reliable workers is more of a challenge in Maine, and so that may be one reason why managers in our most northeastern state would rather skip the hassle of hiring people and go straight to an AI program.

When all states were lumped together, the top reason that managers would replace workers with AI turns out to be pressure from upper management or shareholders, at 36%. Presumably this was one of a list of "choose-one" options handed to the survey respondents. The next most favored reason was for productivity gains (31%) and then cost savings (27%). This pressure from above makes me think that a sheep-like mentality which now and then manifests itself in the boardroom may be why we are hearing so much about AI replacing workers. No CEO wants to be left behind in a stampede to the next great thing, even if the thing turns out to be not so great.

What is perhaps most disturbing to engineers about the survey results is the kinds of jobs that managers see most ripe for replacement by AI. "Technical roles like coding and design" (sounds like engineering to me) were perceived as most replaceable at 33%, while the least replaceable jobs were seen to be sales (11%) and "creative work" at 15%. There are a lot of sales jobs that could pretty easily be replaced by good AI software, but evidently managers still believe in that personal touch that good salespeople can bring to the task. Whereas, engineers and programmers, who are always carried as overhead on budgets, don't have as direct a connection between sales and their salaries as salespeople do.

Independent of the question about whether a given job can actually be done better by AI than by a human, this survey looks at those who would be making the immediate decision to do so. Of course, the options presented to those surveyed were simplified ones. The fact is that rather than making a simple choice between AI and a human in a given job, what seems to be happening is that almost anybody in the symbolic-manipulation business is adopting some form of AI almost by default—some deliberately and enthusiastically, others (like myself) reluctantly and only if it can't be avoided.

These large workplace shifts tend to be hard to discern over the short term, because they happen gradually. Take the development of computer-aided design (CAD) software as an example. My late father-in-law never obtained a four-year college degree, yet in the 1950s he got a good job as a civil engineer and worked for the Texas Highway Department. If you'd visited him shortly after he went to work there, he would have been sitting at a drafting table in a huge room full of guys (all guys) sitting at drafting tables, churning out drawings that were turned into blueprints for the construction crews working on the new interstate-highway system.

Visit that same office today (the building is still there), and you'll see fewer engineers than those old drafting rooms held, and they'll be sitting at computers. The computer can't design anything by itself, and while the engineer is in some sense in charge of the process, the amount of sheer dogwork handled by the computer far exceeds the mental effort put forth by the engineer, who now does the work of ten or fifteen (or more) of the old drafting-room people. And the field of civil engineering didn't collapse: my school (Texas State University) started a new civil-engineering program a few years ago, and we have no problem placing our graduates.

The advent of AI, which has actually been going on for a decade at least and isn't as sudden as news reports make it sound, will probably be like the advent of CAD, only more so. It's easy to forget that the computers need us as much as we need the computers. Take away the largely-human-produced Internet from ChatGPT, and you'd have a lot of useless server farms on your hands.

There are clearly dangers, of course, if we get too lazy and allow AI to make decisions that should remain in human hands, or minds. And there are sectors where AI has already done serious damage, such as the harm AI-fueled social media has done to the psychological health of children and teenagers. But we're not letting the pied piper of AI march away with all our kids. Schools all across the U. S. are starting to ban smartphone use during classes, and parents are wising up to how harmful too-early use of smartphones can be to young people.

Even if all managers were dying to replace their staff with AI as fast as they could, the software simply isn't available yet. At the present time, AI has the looks of a fad, indicated by the survey's showing that pressure from upper management is the biggest reason bosses are considering it. So it's no time to panic, but keep your wits about you and be ready to deal with AI in your job, assuming you still have one.

Sources: The summarized results of the Trio survey can be seen at https://trio.dev/managers-are-ready-to-replace-employees-with-ai/. The San Marcos Daily Record of Oct. 10, 2025 carried a story on the survey on p. 8, which is how I found out about it, from an old-fashioned piece of paper. But then I went online.

Waymo 80% Safer than Human Drivers: Why Not Switch?

Mon, 06 Oct 2025 10:30:00 +0000

According to Waymo, the Google division that operates self-driving robotaxis in several U. S. cities, their vehicles are involved in 80% fewer injury-causing crashes than human-driven cars. This was a surprise to me, as it may also have been to Kelsey Piper, who writes in a substack called The Argument that if we want to reduce the number of traffic fatalities in the U. S by 80%, all we have to do is switch to Waymos.

At the current rate of nearly 40,000 U. S. traffic fatalities a year, that would be saving 31,000 lives a year. But she cites a poll conducted by The Argument which found overall that only about 28% of respondents favored allowing self-driving cars in one's town or city, and 41% favored a ban, as Boston and other cities have considered doing.

Piper speculates that a general distaste for AI-powered things may be behind what looks like irrational opposition to self-driving cars. Some Waymos have even been attacked by modern-day Luddites. As she puts it, ". . . you can't vandalize ChatGPT, so anti-AI sentiment finds its expression in harrassing Waymos."

She realizes that anything like a wholesale move to self-driving cars would cause massive disruption to our present transportation system. She also acknowledges the tendency of government to make optional things mandatory. Right now, Waymo is one private company offering a specific service in a few carefully chosen markets such as Atlanta, Austin, San Francisco, and Phoenix. With the possible exception of Atlanta, these are all locations with plenty of sunshine and relatively few days of inclement weather. And the service in Atlanta only commenced last June, so Waymos in that city have not gone through a typical Atlanta winter, which almost always includes an ice storm, as I know from living there a couple of years. Ice may present serious challenges to Waymo's algorithms.

So there are practical limitations to the areas that Waymo can operate. As one of the commenters on Piper's article mentions, Waymo has somewhat cherry-picked markets in which it can compete while maintaining its very good safety record. Even if Boston decided to allow Waymos, I expect a long development period would delay its deployment as the company figured out how to deal with snow, ice, and slush on the former cowpaths that are now Boston streets. At least the Waymo cars probably wouldn't get lost as much as I did whenever I drove to Boston when I lived in New England, which was, well, pretty much every time I went there.

But there's those 31,000 lives. As Piper points out, that's more lives than are lost every year to homicides. Wouldn't it be nice if we could eliminate all homicides? Well, numerically, changing to self-driving cars would do that.

The psychology of why we tolerate such a lot of annual deaths to traffic accidents is interesting. People don't always act toward various risks in reasonable ways. The classic example is driving to the airport to fly somewhere. Unless you live within walking distance of the airport, you're going to drive or ride. And unless you take a Waymo there, you will ride in a human-operated car. While lots of people are afraid of flying much more than they are afraid of driving, the chances of dying in a plane crash are much lower than the chances of dying in a car wreck on the way to or from the airport.

I suspect that we have gotten so used to the 40,000 or so traffic deaths every year with some variation on the notion that it always happens to someone else, and if I were in the same situation that somebody else died in, I would have been clever enough to save myself. These are pure rationalizations, but the alternative is to experience a little squirt of adrenaline every time we buckle the seat belt and pull out of the garage.

Five or ten years ago, there was a lot of hype about how every new car would be self-driving within a few years. That obviously hasn't happened, for a variety of reasons. One factor is the expense per vehicle. Waymo doesn't advertise how much each of their vehicles cost, but various estimates say it's probably on the order of $160,000 to $300,000. This puts them in the super-luxury class, and explains why they aren't deployed in areas that will not generate pretty good revenue. Even with the carefully-chosen markets that Waymo has selected, it appears that they are not making a profit yet, which means the whole thing is still an elaborate experiment oriented toward some future situation that hasn't materialized.

Still, I will admit that if I could have a self-driving car that was absolutely trustworthy, a Level-5 one according to the SAE autonomous-vehicle rating system, one you could read or sleep in while the machine takes care of all driving tasks, and not pay a whole lot more for it than I'm paying now, I would at least consider it. But in my relatively small town, which would not provide enough revenue for Waymo under its present operating circumstances, that's not going to happen.

Now and then on my trips to Austin, I see a Waymo eerily coasting along with nobody inside, and once I saw two in a row. I will admit to having a flash of mischief when I saw one the first time, and wondering what would happen if you pulled in front of it and slammed on the brakes suddenly. Probably nothing bad. Fortunately, I was a passenger in the car I was in, not the driver, and so the experiment was never performed.

Unless something radical happens in the areas of AI, sensors, or legislation regarding the right to drive your own vehicle, it looks like Waymo and similar autonomous vehicle companies may not spread their wares much farther than they've already done. And that's too bad for the 40,000 or so people who die on roadways each year. Some ideas look good in theory, but when you start examining everything that would have to change to put them into practice, it just falls apart. And converting our fleet of vehicles to nearly 100% self-driving looks like another one of those nice ideas that has had an unfortunate encounter with reality.

Sources: A note in the online magazine The Dispatch referred me to Kelsey Piper's article "Please let the robots have this one," at https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/please-let-the-robots-have-this-one. I also referred to a Reddit item on the estimated cost of Waymo vehicles at https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/1g8vv7o/where_did_the_whole_talk_about_the_cost_of_waymo/, and the Wikipedia article "Waymo."

Life For Teenagers Without Social Media

Mon, 29 Sep 2025 11:19:00 +0000

About a year ago, the Associated Press ran an article profiling two teenagers who were bucking the social-media frenzy by consciously limiting their phone use. Since that time, teenagers without social media have only become more newsworthy. As of June of this year, fourteen states have enacted some form of statewide ban on the use of cellphones in classrooms, and the trend is for more states to get on the bandwagon.

What is it like for a teenager to do without most of the social media that their peers use? Reporter Jocelyn Gecker profiled two teenage girls: Gabriela Durham, who hopes to pursue a dancing career once she graduates from her Brooklyn high school, and Kate Bulkeley, who is a fifteen-year-old high schooler who is co-president of her Bible study club and has participated in a Model UN conference. She ran into a problem when the other conference participants wanted to exchange only Instagram addresses rather than phone numbers. And sometimes she relies on friends with Snapchat to tell her about important student government messages. But overall, she is glad her social-media use is as low as it is.

Kate's parents knew that their daughter's school had a cellphone ban, but it wasn't enforced. They were concerned about the bad publicity surrounding teens' use of social media, so when she became a freshman in high school they told her she couldn't use it. Fine with it at first, she found as a sophomore that she needed Instagram to coordinate after-school activities.

But the 15-year-old says she still only uses social media about two hours a week. This is far below the average weekly use by teens, which runs over 35 hours a week for half of today's teens, according to one study cited in the report. Kate simply sees most uses of social media as a waste of time, and prefers to use her time studying and encountering friends in the flesh, so to speak.

Gabriela Durham received a cellphone as soon as she was old enough to use public transportation in New York. This was much later than her peers, who have often been using their cellphones since early in elementary school. Her mother, Elena Romero, enforces a strict ban on social media until her daughters are 18. They have fallen off the wagon only once, secretly using TikTok for a few weeks until Romero found out about it.

As a dance major at the Brooklyn High School of the Arts, Gabriela dances outside of school every day. Dancing and dance practice, plus commuting on the subway, take up time that she might otherwise use for social media. But she is scandalized by peers who say they log up to 60 hours or more of social-media use weekly, saying it's "insane."

Both girls admit there are inconveniences to not being on social media in high school. So much of what goes on socially happens online, and so they miss out on jokes, memes, rumors, and a lot of other things that people in the pre-cellphone days were familiar with from high school. But back then you didn't need advanced technology to be in the know.

These young women serve as test cases to prove that reasonably happy and fulfilling lives can be led by teenagers who nevertheless make minimal use of social media.

I think it's important to note, however, that both sets of parents began their restrictions by delaying the time when their children received a cellphone for the first time. As an educator, I long ago learned the lesson that it is much easier to start out with strict rules and then ease them gradually, than it is to begin with laxness and tighten up later.

Parents who have not laid any cellphone restrictions on their children and suddenly get convicted that they have to do something, may find it very difficult to remove privileges with social media that their children have grown accustomed to already. Education, whether in college or the nursery, is a long-term enterprise. So it behooves parents to give serious thought to how they will deal with cellphones long before their children start asking for one.

I am acquainted with a family of five who seem to have negotiated the cellphone issue pretty well so far. Their oldest child is fourteen. After she was homeschooled up to the age of twelve, her parents put her in a local Christian school for a year. But she came home complaining that "those other kids spend all their spare time on their phones!" and eventually moved her to a home-school cooperative, where cellphones are not in evidence. This shows that good habits can be ingrained in children to the extent that they embody virtuous attitudes themselves, even when placed in tempting situations.

This is what all parents want for their kids, I hope. All children are different, and in the same family one child is biddable and does everything she is told, while the other one raised in the same environment rebels against all strictures and cheats every chance he gets.

But the current trend of recognizing on an institutional scale that constant access to social media by teenagers does on balance more harm than good, is vastly encouraging to those parents out there who saw the dangers years ago and have been taking positive action ever since.

While there are still situations in which using aspects of social media are logistically necessary, the hope is that the same philosophy of delaying social-media use becomes generally acceptable in K-12 educational institutions, whether forced to change by state legislators, or guided from within by enlightened educators at all levels.

The damage has already been done to millions of children and teens, however. And my point about suddenly withdrawing social media from those who have made it an integral part of their lives is still valid. The results are likely to be comparable to Prohibition, which became effective in 1920 and only made alcohol-consumption problems worse.

But if the educational system is adapted to minimize social-media dependence at all levels, there is real hope that the current increases in teen depression and suicide can be reversed.

Sources: The article "Life as a teen without social media isn't easy. These families are navigating adolescence offline" by Jocelyn Gecker was dated June 5, 2024 and appeared at https://apnews.com/article/influenced-social-media-teens-mental-health-e32f82d46ea74b807c9099d61aec25d5. I also referred to data about state-adopted school cellphone bans at https://www.newsweek.com/map-shows-us-states-school-phone-bans-2090411.

Are $100K H-1B Visas a Good Idea?

Mon, 22 Sep 2025 10:38:00 +0000

President Trump seems to think so. The H-1B visa was intended to be used by foreigners wishing to work in the United States in "an occupation that requires theoretical and practical application of a body of highly specialized knowledge" and typically requires a bachelors' degree or higher. When President Bush signed the Immigration Act of 1990 creating the H-1B as we know it today, it established a quota of persons to be admitted and required that companies hiring such people fill out a Labor Condition Application, which showed that it was unusually hard to find such qualified individuals in the existing U. S. labor pool.

On the face of it, the H-1B visa sounds like a good idea. If we are going to allow immigration at all (a question that is more debatable now than it has been in the past), it would make sense to choose those immigrants who are more capable of contributing to the economy in employment sectors where there are presently shortages.

But there are always unintended consequences for any law, and lately there have been accusations that the H-1B system has been abused by companies simply wanting to hire cheaper foreign workers for jobs that they could fill with better-paid U. S. workers.

Evaluating the truth of that accusation is something I'm not personally prepared to do. But the current H-1B visas are allocated largely by lottery, plus a nominal fee of a few hundred dollars, and a recent article in the Los Angeles Times indicates that companies have been gaming the lottery system by putting in multiple applications for the same person or position. Authorities claim they have changed the rules to reduce such abuse. But clearly there is room for improvement in the way the H-1B visa is administered.

President Trump's solution to these problems is to raise the annual fee for an H-1B visa holder to at least $100,000, with a variety of more expensive visas for which the main qualification is that you're already rich and can pay a million dollars or more. Some statistics cited by the LA Times indicate that many H-1B visa holders may be earning as little as $60,000 a year, which is both an indication that the prevailing wages in the high-tech industry are not being paid as they should be for these visa holders, and that slapping a $100K surcharge on such visas will simply make most of them disappear, along with the current visa holders.

There are two main groups of stakeholders in this situation. One group consists of high-tech U. S. firms wanting to hire the best workers at the lowest wages they can get by with. Another group (or set of groups) are foreign workers who are qualified to do high-tech jobs, and would like to do them in the U. S. Over 70% of H-1B visa holders are from India, it turns out, but there are other countries involved as well.

Adam Smith's invisible hand would let these workers in at whatever wage they would accept, which would be way below the prevailing U. S. wage scale. While Smith's rule about trade barriers (namely, the fewer the better) was intended for goods, not people, extending it to free immigration is in the spirit if not the letter of his ideas. In the free-for-all of illegal immigration we have seen over the last few years before Trump came into office, high-tech companies have not benefited as much as they might have, because even with troops of lawyers at their disposal they would find it difficult to blatantly violate immigration law on a large scale, in contrast to the thousands of construction and other more menial jobs that most illegal immigrants find to do, at least at first.

On the other extreme, you have people such as President Trump and my late friend Steve Unger, who was a classic "leftie" of the old school. Two more different personalities can scarcely be imagined, but on this issue I think they would agree: keep out them durn foreigners so that U. S. workers can make higher wages.

If you take this principle to an extreme, we would halt all immigration of whatever kind, even for temporary student visas, which are a kind of back-door way that many well-qualified foreigners get here in the first place. From personal experience, I can tell you that would be an unmitigated disaster for U. S. higher education, which depends on non-U. S. citizens for a large fraction of its students and ultimately professors, who have to start out as students.

Would wages for high-tech jobs and graduate students go up? Perhaps some, but that assumes other things are equal, and after a while they wouldn't be. It's easy to forget that the world's most important resource is people, not rare-earth minerals or oil or even water and air. We are a nation of immigrants, and historically we have turned that into a unique strength by means of converting all kinds of immigrants to something called the American Way.

But if the American Way turns into something that people from other countries either can't afford, or can't buy into for some other reason, be it political, ethnic, or what have you, then the future of this country is dim. We have had practically open borders with toleration of scofflaws for far too long, and it makes sense to reform the system so that the rule of law becomes more respected. But it should be a rule of law, not a rule of men, or of one man. And laws, or rules, that change with the whims of one energetic guy in the White House are hard to have respect for.

In sum, the hundred-thousand-dollar H-1B visa looks a lot like the tariff situation or the random roundups by masked ICE enforcers. It's flashy, attracts a lot of attention and support from President Trump's base, but makes little logical sense in the greater scheme of things if you look at it from a practical view. Not only the H-1B visa system, but the whole immigration process needs a major overhaul. But in a republic, the ideas for the overhaul should originate with the public who is concerned, as well as stakeholders such as high-tech companies. That's not being done, and until it is done, we can expect further chaos and distress among highly qualified people who are here to contribute to our economy and just want to better their lives.

Sources: The Los Angeles Times carried the article "India expresses concern about Trump's move to hike fees for H-1B visas" at https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2025-09-20/india-expresses-concern-about-trump-plan-to-hike-fees-on-h-1b-visas-that-bring-tech-workers-to-us on Sept. 20, 2025. I also referred to the Wikipedia article on the H-1B visa

Data Centers On the Grid: Ballast or Essential Cargo?

Mon, 15 Sep 2025 10:35:00 +0000

Back in the days of sailing ships, the captain had a choice when a storm became so severe that it threatened to sink the ship. He could throw the cargo overboard, lightening the ship enough to save it and its crew for another day. But doing that would ruin any chance of profiting from the voyage.

It was a hard decision then, and an equally hard decision is facing operators of U. S. power grids as they try to cope with increasing demand for reliable power from data centers, many of which are being built to power the next generation of artificial-intelligence (AI) technologies.

An Associated Press report by Marc Levy reveals that one option many grid operators are considering is to write into their agreements with new data centers an option to cut off power to them in emergencies.

Texas, which is served by a power grid which is largely independent of the rest of the country's networks, recently passed a law that prescribes situations in which the grid operator can disconnect big electricity users such as semiconductor-fab plants and data centers. This is not an entirely new practice. For some years, large utility customers have taken the option of being disconnected in emergencies such as extremely hot or cold days that put a peak strain on the grid. Typically they receive a discount for normal power usage when they allow the grid operator to have that option.

But according to Levy, the practice is being considered in other parts of the country as well. A large grid operator called PJM Interconnection serves 65 million customers in the mid-Atlantic region. They have proposed a rule similar to the one adopted in Texas for their data-center customers. But an organization called the Digital Power Network, which includes data-center operators and bitcoin miners, another big energy user class, complained that if PJM adopts this policy, it may scare off future investment in data centers and cause them to flee to other parts of the U. S.

Another concern is rising electricity prices, which some attribute to the increased demand by data centers. These prices are being borne by the average consumer, who in effect is subsidizing the gargantuan power needs of data centers, which typically pay less than residential consumers per kilowatt anyway.

In a way, this issue is just an extreme example of a problem that power-grid operators have faced since there were power grids: how to handle peak loads. Historically, electricity has to be generated at the same time it's consumed, although there is some progress recently in battery storage of electricity, though not enough to make much of a large-scale difference yet. This immediacy requires a power grid to have enough generating capacity to supply the peak load—the most electricity they will ever have to supply on the hottest (or coldest) day under worst-case situations.

The problem with peak loads from an economic view is that many of those generating facilities sit idle most of the time, not producing a return on their investment. So it's always been a tradeoff between taking a chance that your grid will manage the peak load and scrimping on capacity, versus spending enough to make sure you have margin even with the worst peak load imaginable, but having a lot of useless generators and network stuff on your hands most of the time.

When the electric utility business was highly regulated and companies had a guaranteed rate of return, they could build excess capacity without being punished by the market. But since the deregulatory era of the 1970s, and especially in hyper-free-market environments such as Texas, the grids no longer have this luxury. This is one reason why load-shedding (the practice of cutting off certain big customers in emergencies) looks so attractive now: instead of building excess capacity, the grid operator can simply throw some switches and pull through an emergency while ticking off only a few big customers, rather than cutting it off to everybody, including the old ladies who might freeze or die of heat exhaustion without power.

Understandably, the data-center operators are upset. They don't want to spend the money on backup generators that they would rather the grid operators spend. But the semiconductor manufacturers have learned how to do this already, and build costs for giant emergency-generation facilities into their budgets from the start.

Some data-center operators are starting to build their own backup generators so that they can agree to go off-grid in emergencies without interrupting their operations. After all, it's a lot easier to restart a data center after a shutdown than a semiconductor plant, which could suffer extreme damage after a disorganized shutdown that could put it out of action for months and cost many millions of dollars.

Compared to plants that make real stuff, data centers can easily offload work to other centers in different parts of the country, or even outside the U. S. So if there is a regional power emergency, and a global operation such as Google has to shut down one data center, they have plenty more to take up the slack.

It looks to me like the data centers don't have much of a rhetorical leg to stand on when they argue that they shouldn't be subjected to load-shedding agreements like many other large power users tolerate already. We are probably seeing the usual huffing and puffing that accompanies an industry-wide shift to a policy that makes sense for consumers, power-grid operators, and even the data centers themselves, if they agree to take more responsibility for their own power in emergencies.

If electricity gets expensive enough, data-center operators will have an incentive to figure out how to do what they do more efficiently. There's plenty of low-power technology out there developed for the Internet of Things and personal electronics. We all want cheap electricity, but if it's too cheap it leads to inefficiencies that are wasteful on a large scale. Parts of California in the 1970s had water bills that were practically indistinguishable from zero. When I moved out there to school in 1972 from water-conscious Texas, I was amazed to see shopkeepers cleaning their sidewalks every morning, not with a broom, or a leafblower, but with a spray hose, washing down the whole sidewalk.

I don't think they do that anymore, and I don't think we should guarantee all data centers that they'll never lose power in an emergency either.

Sources: Marc Levy's article "US electric grids under pressure from power-hungry data centers" appeared on the Associated Press website on Sept. 13 at https://apnews.com/article/big-tech-data-centers-electricity-energy-power-texas-pennsylvania-46b42f141d0301d4c59314cc90e3eab5.

The Fading Glory of Subsidiarity

Mon, 08 Sep 2025 10:56:00 +0000

I'll get to subsidiarity in a minute. First, here is why I'm writing about it this morning.

For many years, I have subscribed to the Austin American-Statesman, first in its hard-copy paper form, and then when that got insupportably expensive, in its digital form only. Already by then, it was owned by a large media conglomerate called the Cox Media Group, but the operations and editorial control of the paper remained in Austin. An outfit called GateHouse Media bought it from Cox in 2018, but relatively little changed when the owners of GateHouse bought the company that ran USA Today, Gannett Media, and moved the Statesman under the Gannett umbrella. That caused some changes, but they were tolerable. Back in February 2025, however, Gannett sold the Statesman to Hearst Communications, another media conglomerate.

This may or may not have anything to do with what happened to me this week, but I suspect it does.

I've been accustomed to propping my iPad on the breakfast table and reading the "e-edition" of the Statesman along with having my cereal and orange juice. The software worked reasonably well most of the time, and until Wednesday of this week (Sept. 3) everything went smoothly.

Suddenly on Wednesday, I was asked for a password, and the system rejected it. After futilely trying to reset the password and getting no response from the paper's system, I called a help number and got connected to a man who said there was a software problem, and I should uninstall the Statesman app on my iPad and reinstall it.

I tried that Thursday, but it didn't help. Then I tried pretending I was a new subscriber (although I had found a place online which said my subscription was paid up until December of 2025), and tried to subscribe. That didn't even work.

Finally, I called the help line again. I spoke to one person, who silently connected me to another person, who sounded like she was working in a boiler room with fifteen other people crowded into a space the size of a VW bus.

She tried to identify me by name and phone number, and all those records had been lost. (This was also the case when I called the day before). Finally, she could locate me by street address, but it said I wasn't a subscriber. I asked if she could look up my subscription record to tell when it expired. She said because of the transfer to Hearst they didn't have that information, and would I like to subscribe now?

Seeing no other option, I said yes. I'd already spent about half an hour on the phone, and I figured this was the only way to get my paper back. It took about twenty minutes for her to take my information and put it in the system, and I could hear her asking for help in the background. Then it took another twenty minutes for me to log on and get my new subscription going, and we never could change the password they started me with.

The entire megilla cost me an hour of time I was not planning to spend, and $360 for a year's subscription to the e-edition only, which was the price point that made me cancel the hard-copy edition a few years ago. We've had some inflation since then, but not that much.

If there is anybody under 40 reading this, you are probably wondering why this old guy is insisting on paying that much money for stuff that I could get for free. Well, while I disagree with the editorial positions of the Statesman staff on most matters, it is still an edited entity that does a fairly good job of telling me what's been going on. And for another thing, you can't find that many comics all in one place on the internet for free, or if you can I don't know where to go.

Now for subsidiarity. It is a term from Catholic social teaching which describes the principle that "issues should be dealt with at the most immediate or local level that is consistent with their resolution." That's according to Wikipedia, and while that source is slanted on some matters, they are right on with this definition.

Going straight to my problem with the Statesman, most of the paper is written and edited thirty-five miles away up in Austin. The issue of my e-edition was a local issue, not going any farther in principle than Austin and San Marcos. The principle of subsidiarity says that the problem with my subscription, and the list of when I've subscribed, and my credit balance which has apparently vanished into the bit void, and my passwords, and whatever other stuff is relevant to the problem including the authority to do something about it, should all be right there in Austin, and not stuck in some anonymous server farm in Seattle and controlled from a boiler-room operation in God knows where, and owned by a corporation based in Manhattan which clearly doesn't give a flip about how it treats its new customers.

Simply because technology did not yet permit otherwise, newspaper operations prior to about 1970 had to be local, in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity. If my father had a problem with his subscription to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, he'd get on the phone and call their office downtown. A human being less than 20 miles away would answer the phone, and flip through physical pages of paper until he or she found the hand-written subscription records, and the issue would be resolved, or not. People made mistakes with paper records too, but they were more easily resolved. I have no idea what's gone wrong with my subscription to the Statesman, but again, only God knows exactly what the problem is, where all the loose ends are, and whether and how it can be resolved, because it's now so complex and involves incompatible computer systems and who knows what else.

I don't have an answer to this problem, except to point out that if we try moving toward systems that are more in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity, a lot of these kinds of problems might take care of themselves.

Sources: I referred to the Wikipedia articles on subsidiarity and the Austin American-Statesman

Will AI Doom A Good Chunk of Hollywood?

Mon, 01 Sep 2025 11:03:00 +0000

This week's New Yorker carries an article by Joshua Rothman about what artificial intelligence (AI) is poised to do to the arts, broadly speaking. I'd like to focus on one particularly creepy novelty that AI has recently empowered: the ability of three guys (one in the U. S., one in Canada, and one in Poland) to produce fully realized short movies without actors, sets, cameras, lights, or any of the production equipment familiar to the motion-picture industry. The collaborators, who call themselves AI OR DIE, use only prompts to their AI software to do what they do.

I spent a few minutes sampling some of their wares. Their introductory video appears to show what a camera sees while it progresses through a mobile-home park, into one home, where the door opens, another door opens, and finally a piece of toast appears, floating in the air. Another one-minute clip shows a big guy pretending to be a karate-type expert knocking down smaller harmless people. If all the characters in that clip were creations of AI without any rotoscoping or other involvement of real humans or their voices, we are very far down a road that I wasn't aware we were even traveling on.

Software from a firm called Runway is not only used by AI OR DIE, but by commercial film production companies in mainstream films as well. But so far, nobody has produced an entire successful feature film using only AI. But it's only a matter of time, it seems to me.

Rothman quotes the AI OR DIE collaborators as saying how thrilled they are when they can have an idea for a scene one day, and then start making it happen the next day. No years in production hell, fundraising, hiring people, and all the other pre-production hassles that conventional filmmaking entails—just straight from idea to product. So far, most of what they've done are what Rothman calls "darkly surrealistic comedies." If the samples I saw were representative, it reminds me of an afternoon I spent at Hampshire College in the 1990s, I think it was, in Massachusetts, where a screening of student animations was held.

Early in the development of any new medium, you will come across works that were made simply to exploit the medium, without much thought given to what ought to be said through it. The short animations we saw that afternoon were like that. The students were thrilled to be able to express themselves in this semi-autonomous way. Chuck Jones, the famous Warner Brothers animated-film director, once said that animators are the only artist who "create life." Most of the time they let their thrills outweigh their judgment. A good many of the films we saw back in Massachusetts that afternoon were in the category of the classic "Bambi Meets Godzilla." This film, which I am not too surprised to learn was No. 38 in a book of fifty classic animated films, at least meets the Aristotelian criteria of unities of action, time, and place. There is one principal action, it happens over less than a 24-hour period, and it happens in only one location. We see the fawn Bambi, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, browsing peacefully among flowers to idyllic background music. Suddenly a giant foot—Godzilla's, in fact—drops into the frame and squashes Bambi flat. End of story. Most of the other films were like that: a silly, stupid, or even mildly obscene idea, realized through the painful and tedious process of sole-author animation.

Just as our ability to manipulate human life technologically has led us to face fundamental questions about what it means to be human, the ability to only a few people to digitally synthesize works of art that formerly required the intense collaboration and technology-aided actions of hundreds of people will lead us to ask, "What is art?" And here I'm going to fall back on some classical sources.

Plato posed that the transcendentals of truth, goodness, and beauty are things that lie at the roots of the universe. According to theologian and philosopher Peter Kreeft, art is the cultivation of beauty. Filmmaking is a type of storytelling, one in which the way the story is told plays as much of a role as the story itself. And it's obvious that AI can now replace many more expensive older ways of doing moviemaking without compromising what are called production values. The authentic quality of the AI OR DIE clips I saw would fool anybody not thoroughly familiar with the technology into thinking those were real people and real mobile homes.

But AI is in the same category as film, cameras, lights, microphones, technicians, and all the other paraphernalia we traditionally associate with film. These are all means to an end. And the end is what Kreeft said: the cultivation of beauty.

I think the biggest change that the use of AI in film and animation is going to make will be economic. Just as the advent of phototypesetting obsoleted entire technology sectors (platemaking, Linotyping, etc.), the advent of AI in film is going to obsolete a lot of technical jobs associated with real actors standing in front of real scenery and being photographed with real cameras.

Will we still have movie stars? Well, is Bugs Bunny a movie star? You can't get his autograph, but nobody would deny he's famous. And he's just as alive as he ever was.

Before we push the panic button and write off most jobs in Hollywood, bear in mind that live theater survived the advents of radio, film, and television. It was no longer something you could find in small towns every week, but it survived in some form. I think film production with real actors in front of cameras will survive in some form too. But the economic pressures to use AI for more chunks of major-studio-produced films will be so immense that some companies won't be able to resist. And if the creatives come up with a way to make a film that cultivates beauty, and also uses mostly AI-generated images and sounds, well, that's the way art works. Artists use whatever medium comes to hand to cultivate beauty. But it's beauty that must be cultivated, not profits or gee-whiz dirty jokes. And unfortunately, the dirty jokes and the profits often win out.

Sources: Jonathan Rothman's "After the Algorithm" appeared on pp. 31-39 of the Sept. 1-8, ,2025 issue of The New Yorker. I also referred to Wikipedia articles on "Bambi Meets Godzilla," and the software company Runway. Peter Kreeft's ideas of art as the cultivation of beauty can be found in his Doors In the Walls of the World (Ignatius Press, 2018).

RAND Says AI Apocalypse Unlikely

Mon, 25 Aug 2025 10:44:00 +0000

In 2024, several hundred artificial-intelligence (AI) researchers signed a statement calling for serious actions to avert the possibility that AI could break bad and kill the human race. In an interview last February, Elon Musk mused that there is "only" a 20% chance of annihilation from AI. With so many prominent people speculating that AI may spell the end of humanity, Michael J. D. Vermeer of the RAND Corporation began a project to explore just how AI could wipe out all humans. It's not as easy as you think.

RAND is one of the original think tanks, founded in 1948 to develop U. S. military policies, and has since studied a wide range of issues in quantitative ways. As Vermeer writes in the September Scientific American, he and his fellow researchers considered three main approaches to the extinction problem: (1) nuclear weapons, (2) pandemics, and (3) deliberately-induced global warming.

It turns out that nuclear weapons, although capable of killing billions if set off in densely-populated areas, would not do the job. There would be little remnants of people scattered in remote places, and they would probably be enough to reconstitute human life indefinitely.

The most likely scenario that would work is a combination of pathogens that together would kill nearly every human who caught them. The problem here ("problem" from AI's point of view) is that once people figured out what was going on, they would invoke quarantines, much as New Zealand did during COVID, and entire island nations or other isolated regions could survive until the pandemic burned itself out.

Artificially-induced global warming was the hardest way to do it. There are compounds such as sulfur hexafluoride which have about 25,000 times the global-warming capability of carbon dioxide. And if you made a few million tons of that and spread it around, it could raise the global average temperature so much that "there would be no environmental niche left for humanity." But factories pumping megatons of bad stuff into the atmosphere would be hard to hide from people, who naturally would want to know what's going on.

So while an AI apocalypse is theoretically possible, all the scenarios they considered had common flaws. In order for any of them to happen, the AI system would first have to make up its mind, so to speak, to persist in the goal of wiping out humanity until the job was actually done. Then it would have to wrest control of the relevant technology (nuclear or biological weapons, chemical plants) and conduct extensive projects with them to execute the goal. It would also have to obtain the cooperation of humans, or at least their unwitting participation. And finally, as civilization collapsed, the AI system would have to carry on without human help, as the few remaining humans would be useless for AI's purposes and simply targets for extinction.

While this is an admirable and objectively scientific study, I think it overlooks a few things.

First, it draws an arbitrary line between the AI system (which in practice would be a conglomeration of systems) and human beings. Both now and in the foreseeable future, humans will be an essential part of AI because it needs us. Let's imagine the opposite scenario: how would humans wipe out all AI from the planet? If every IT person in the world just didn't show up for work tomorrow, what would happen? A lot of bad things, certainly, because computers (not just AI, but increasingly systems involving AI) are intimately woven into modern economies. Nevertheless, I think issues (caused by stupid non-IT humans, probably) would start showing up, and in a short time we would have a global computer crash the likes of which have never been seen. True, millions of people would die along with the AI systems. But I'm not aware of any truly autonomous AI system of any complexity and importance that has no humans dealing with it in any way, as apparently was the case in the 1970 sci-fi film "Colossus: The Forbin Project."

So if an AI-powered system showed signs of getting out of hand—taking over control of nuclear weapons, doing back-room pathogen experiments on its own, etc.—we could kill it by just walking away from it, at least the way things are now.

More likely than any of the hypothetical disasters imagined by the RAND folks is a possibility they didn't seem to consider. What if AI just gradually supplants humans until the last human dies? This is essentially the stated goal of many transhumanists, who foresee the uploading of human consciousness into computer hardware as their equivalent of eternal life. They don't realize that their idea is equivalent to thinking that making an animated effigy of myself will guarantee my survival after death, much as the ancient Egyptians prepared their pharaohs for the afterlife.

But pernicious ideas like this can gain traction, and we are already seeing an unexpected downturn in fertility worldwide as civilizations benefit from technology-powered prosperity. If AI, and its auxiliary technological forms, ever puts an end to humanity, I think the gradual, slow replacement of humans by AI-powered systems is more likely than any sudden, concentrated catastrophe, like the ones the RAND people considered. And the creepy thing about this one is that it's happening already, right now, every day.

Romano Guardini was a theologian and philosopher who in 1956 wrote The End of the Modern World, in which he foresaw in broad terms what was going to happen to modernity as the last vestiges of Christian influence were replaced by a focus on the achievement of power for power's sake alone. Here are a few quotes from near the end of the book: "The family is losing its significance as an integrating, order-preserving factor . . . . The modern state . . . is losing its organic structure, becoming more and more a complex of all-controlling functions. In it the human being steps back, the apparatus forward." As Guardini saw it, the only power rightly controlled is exercised under God. And once God is abolished and man sets up technology as an idol, looking to it for salvation, the spiritual death of humanity is assured, and physical death may not be far behind.

I'm glad we don't have to worry about an AI apocalypse that would make a good, fast, dramatic movie, as the RAND people assure us won't happen. But there are other dangers from AI, and the slow insidious attack is the one to guard against most vigilantly.

Sources: Michael J. D. Vermeer's "Could AI Really Kill Off Humans?" appeared on pp. 73-74 of the September 2025 issue of Scientific American, and is also available online at https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/could-ai-really-kill-off-humans/. I also referred to the Wikipedia article on sulfur hexafluoride. The Romano Guardini quotes are from pp. 161-162 of his The End of the Modern World, in an edition published by ISI Press in 1998.

Is the Internet Emulsifying Society?

Mon, 18 Aug 2025 10:41:00 +0000

About a year ago I had cataract surgery, which these days means replacing the natural lens in the eye with an artificial one. Curious about what happens to the old lens, I looked up the details of the process. It turns out that one of the most common procedures uses an ultrasonic probe to emulsify the old lens, turning a highly structured and durable object that served me well for 70 years into a liquefied mess that was easily removed.

If you're wondering what this has to do with the internet and society, be patient.

A recent report in The Dispatch by Yascha Mounk describes the results of an analysis by Financial Times journalist John Burn-Murdoch of data from a large Understanding America survey of more than 14,000 respondents. Psychologists have standardized certain personality traits as being fairly easy to assess in surveys and also predictive of how well people do in society. Among these traits are conscientiousness, extraversion, and neuroticism. People who are conscientious make good citizens and employees: they are "organized, responsible, and hardworking." Extraversion makes for better social skills and community involvement, while neuroticism indicates a trend toward anxiety and depression.

Burn-Murdoch divided up the results by age categories, with the youngest being 16 to 39, and compared the rates of these traits to what prevailed in the full population in 2014, less than ten years ago. The results are shocking.

Everybody (16-39, 40-59, and 60+) has declined in extraversion from the 50th to the 40th percentile, although by only ten percentile points out of 100. (If a number is unchanged from 2014, the results would be 50th percentile today). But in neuroticism, those under 40, who were already in the 60th percentile in 2014, have now zoomed up to the 70th. Lots of young neurotics out there. And they have distinguished themselves even more in the categories of agreeableness (declining from 45 to 35) and most of all, in conscientiousness. From a relatively good 47th percentile or so in 2014, the younger set have plummeted to an abysmal 28th percentile of conscientiousness in less than a decade.

When the results of conscientiousness are broken down into their constituent parts, it gets even worse. Starting about 2016, the 16-39 group shows jumps in positive responses to "is easily distracted" and "can be careless."

If the survey was restricted to teenagers, you would expect such results, although not necessarily this big. But we're talking about people in their prime earning years too, twenty- to forty-year-olds.

Mounk ascribes most of these disastrous changes to influences traceable to the Internet, and specifically, social media. He contrasts the ballyhoo and wild optimism that greeted various Internet-based developments such as online dating and worldwide free phone and Zoom calls with the reality of cyberbullying, trolling, cancel culture, and the mob psychology on steroids that the Internet provides fertile soil for.

Now for the emulsion part. An emulsion takes something that tends to keep its integrity—such as a blob of oil in water or the natural lens of an eye—and breaks it up into individual pieces that are surrounded by a foreign agent. In the case of mayonnaise, the oil used is separated into tiny drops surrounded by water. Oil doesn't naturally mix with water, but when an emulsifier is used (the lecithin in egg yolk, in this case), it reduces surface tension and breaks up the oil into tiny droplets.

That's fine in the case of mayonnaise. But in the case of a society, surrounding each individual with a foreign film of Internet-mediated software that passes through firms interested not primarily in the good of society, but in making a profit, all kinds of pernicious effects can happen.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with making money, so this is not a diatribe against big tech as such. But in the case of cigarettes, when a popular habit that made the tobacco companies rich was shown to have hidden dangers, it took a lot of political will and persistence to change things so that at least the dangers were known to anyone who picks up a pack of cigarettes.

Mounk thinks it may be too late to do much about the social and psychological harms caused by the Internet, but we are still at the early stage of adoption when it comes to generative artificial intelligence (AI). I tend not to make such a sharp distinction between the way the Internet is currently used and what difference the widespread deployment of free software such as chatGPT will make. For decades, the tech companies have been using what amounts to AI systems to addict people to their social media services and to profit from political polarization. So as AI becomes more commonplace it will be a change only in degree, not necessarily in kind.

AI or no, we have had plenty of time already to see the pernicious results among young people of interacting with other humans mainly through the mediation of mobile phones. It's not good. Just as man does not live by bread alone, people aren't intended to interact by smartphone alone. If they do, they get less conscientious, more neurotic, more isolated and lonely, and more easily distracted and error-prone. They also find it increasingly difficult to follow any line of reasoning of more than one step.

Several states have recently passed laws restricting the use of smartphones in K-12 education. This is a controversial but ultimately beneficial step in the right direction, although it will take a while to see how seriously individual school districts take it and whether it makes much of a difference in how young people think and act. For those of you who believe in the devil, I'm pretty sure he is delighted to see that society is breaking up into isolated individuals who can communicate only through the foreign agent of the Internet, rather than being fully present—physically, emotionally, and spiritually—to the Other.

Perhaps warnings like these will help us realize how bad things have become, and what we need to do to stop them from getting any worse. In the meantime, enjoy your mayonnaise.

Sources: John Burn-Murdoch's article "How We Got the Internet All Wrong" appeared in The Dispatch on Aug. 12, 2025 at https://thedispatch.com/article/social-media-children-dating-neurotic/. I also referred to the survey on which it was based at https://uasdata.usc.edu/index.php.

"Winter's Tale" and the Spirit of Engineering

Mon, 11 Aug 2025 11:02:00 +0000

Once in a great while I will review a non-fiction book in this space that I think is worth paying attention to if one is interested in engineering ethics. Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin is a novel, published in 1983, and even now I can't say exactly why I think it should be more widely known among engineers and those interested in engineering. But it should be.

Every profession has a spirit: a bundle of intuitive and largely emotional feelings that go along with the objective knowledge and actions that constitute the profession. Among many other things, Winter's Tale captures the spirit of engineering better than any other fiction work I know. And for that reason alone, it deserves praise.

The book is hard to describe. There are some incontestable facts about it, so I'll start with those. It is set mainly in New York City, with excursions to an imaginary upstate region called Lake of the Coheeries, and side trips to San Francisco. It is not a realistic novel, in the sense that some characters in it live longer than normal lifespans, and various other meta-realistic things happen. There are more characters in it than you'd find in a typical nineteenth-century Russian novel. There is no single plot, but instead a complex tapestry that dashes back and forth in time like a squirrel crossing a street.

But all these matters are secondary. The novel's chief virtue is the creation of an atmosphere of hope and, not optimism, exactly—some truly terrible things happen to people in it—but a temperate yet powerful energy and drive shared by nearly all the characters, except for a few completely evil ones. And even the evil ones are interesting.

The fertility of Helprin's imagination is astounding, as he creates technical terms, flora and fauna, and other things that are, strictly speaking, imaginary yet somehow make sense within the story. One of the many recurring elements in the book is the appearance of a "cloud wall" which seems to be a kind of matrix of creation and time travel. Here is how Virginia, one of the principal characters, describes it to her son Martin:

". . . It swirls around the city in uneven cusps, sometimes dropping down like a tornado to spirit people away or deposit them there, sometimes opening white roads from the city, and sometimes resting out at sea while connections are made with other places. It is a benevolent storm, a place of refuge, the neutral flow in which we float. We wonder if there is anything beyond it, and we think that perhaps there is."

"Why?" Martin asked from within the covers.

"Because," said Virginia, "in those rare times when all things coalesce to serve beauty, symmetry, and justice, it becomes the color of gold—warm and smiling, as if God were reminded of the perfection and complexity of what He had long ago set to spinning, and long ago forgotten."

The whole novel is like that.

Although there is no preaching, no doctrine expounded, and very few explicitly religious characters such as ordained ministers, a thread of holiness, or at least awareness of life beyond this one, runs throughout the book. This is probably why I learned about it from a recommendation by the Catholic philosopher Peter Kreeft, who mentioned it in Doors in the Walls of the World.

The reason engineers might benefit from reading it is that machines and other engineered structures—steam engines, cranes, bridges, locomotives—and those who design, build, and tend them, are portrayed in a way that is both appealing and transcendent. At this moment I feel a frustration stemming from my inability to express what is so attractive about this book.

You may learn something from the fact that the reviews of it I could find fell into two camps. One camp loved it and wished it would go on forever. The other camp, of which I turned out to be a member, said that after a while they found the book annoying, and almost didn't finish it. I think one reason for the latter reaction is that structurally, it is all trees and very little forest.

The very fertility of Helprin's imagination leads him to introduce novel and fascinating creations, incidents, and characters every page or two, and the result is a loss of coherence in the overall story and sequence of events. A chart of every character and incident with lines drawn among them would look like the wiring diagram of a Boeing 747.

But every time I said to myself that I was going to stop reading it, I picked it up again, and finally chose one free day to finish the thing, all the time hoping that it would get to the point. There is no crashing finale in which everything is tied up neatly with a bow. There is, however, a climax of sorts, and toward the end events occur which have parallels in the New Testament. Farther than that I shouldn't go, for fear of spoiling the ending for anyone who wants to read it.

The only other novel I can think of that bears even a faint resemblance to Winter's Tale is G. K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday. It is also a fantasy in the sense that unrealistic things happen, and it features characters who are what Kreeft calls archetypes, embodied representations of ideas. Not everyone likes or can even make sense of Chesterton's novel, and the same will undoubtedly be true of Winter's Tale.

For a fantasy, Helprin's book is rather earthy in spots, and for that reason I wouldn't recommend it for children. But the earthiness is not gratuitous, and rounds out the realism of his character portrayals. Many of the main actors behave courageously and even nobly, and would be good subjects for the exemplary mode of engineering ethics, in which one describes how engineering went right in a particular case with ethical implications.

If you pick up the book, you will know in the first few pages whether you can stand to read the rest. If you persist till the end, you will have experienced a world unlike our own in some ways, but very like what it could be if we heeded, in Lincoln's phrase, the better angels of our nature.

Sources: Winter's Tale was published in 1983 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Peter Kreeft's Doors in the Walls of the World was published in 2018 by Ignatius Press.

Should We Worry About Teens Befriending AI Companions?

Mon, 04 Aug 2025 10:56:00 +0000

A recent survey-based study by Common Sense Media shows that a substantial minority of teenagers surveyed use AI "companions" for social interaction and relationships. In a survey of over a thousand young people aged 13 to 17 last April and May, the researchers found that 33% used applications such as ChatGPT, Character, or Replika for things like conversation, role-playing, emotional support, or just as a friend. Another 43% of those surveyed used AI as a "tool or program," and about a third reported no use of AI at all.

Perhaps more troubling than the percentages were some comments made by teens who were interviewed in an Associated Press report on the survey. An 18-year-old named Ganesh Nair said, "When you're talking to AI, you are always right. You're always interesting. You are always emotionally justified."

The researchers also found that teens were more sophisticated than you might think about the reliability of AI and the wisdom of using it as a substitute for "meat" friends. Half of those surveyed said they do not trust advice given to them by AI, although the younger teens tended to be more trusting. And two-thirds said that their interactions with AI were less satisfying than those with real-life friends, but one-third said they were either about the same or better. And four out of five teens spend more time with real friends than with AI.

The picture that emerges from the survey itself, as opposed to somewhat hyped news reports, is one of curiosity, cautious use, and skepticism. However, there may be a small number of teens who either turn to AI as a more trusted interlocutor than live friends, or develop unhealthy dependencies of various kinds with AI chatbots.

At present, we are witnessing an uncontrolled experiment in how young people deal with AI companions. The firms backing these systems with their multibillion-dollar server farms and sophisticated software are motivated to engage young people especially, as habits developed before age 20 or so tend to stay with us for a lifetime. It's hard to picture a teenager messaging ChatGPT to "grow old along with me," but it may be happening somewhere.

I once knew a woman in New England who kept a life-size cloth doll in her house, made to resemble a former husband. Most people would regard this as a little peculiar. But what difference is there between that sort of thing and spending time in online chats with a piece of software that simulates a caring and sympathetic friend? The interaction with AI is more private, at least until somebody hacks the system. But why does the notion of teenagers who spend time chatting with Character as though it were a real person bother us?

By saying "us," I implicitly separate myself from teens who do this sort of thing. But there are teens who realize the dangers of AI overuse or misuse, and older teens especially expressed concerns to the AP reporter that too much socializing with chatbots could be bad.

The same teen quoted above got "spooked" about AI companions when he learned that a friend of his used his companion to compose a Dear Jill message to his girlfriend of two years when he decided to break up. I suppose that is not much different than a nineteenth-century swain paging through a tome entitled "Letters for All Occasions," although I doubt that even the Victorians were that thorough in providing examples for the troubled ex-suitor.

Lurking in the background of all this is a very old theological principle: idolatry. An idol is anything less than God that we treat as God, in the sense of resorting to it for help instead of God. For those who don't believe in God, idolatry would seem to be an empty concept. But even atheists can see the effects of idolatry in extreme cases, even if they don't acknowledge the God who should be worshipped instead of the idol.

For a teen in a radically dysfunctional household, turning to an AI companion might be a good alternative, but a kind, loving human being would always be better. Kind, loving human beings aren't always available, though, and so perhaps an AI companion would suffice in a pinch like a "donut" spare tire until you can get the flat fixed. But you shouldn't drive on a temporary tire indefinitely, and teens who make AI companions a regular and significant part of their social lives are probably headed for problems.

What kind of problems? Dependency, for one thing. The AI firms are not promoting their companions out of the kindness of their collective hearts, and the more people rely on their products the more money they make. The researchers who executed the survey are concerned that teens who use AI companions that never argue, never disagree with them, and validate everything they say, will be ill-prepared for the real world where other humans have their own priorities, interests, and desires.

In an ideal world, every teen would have a loving mother and father they would trust with their deepest concerns, and perhaps friends as well who would give them good advice. Not many of us grew up in that ideal world, however, and so perhaps teens in really awful situations may find some genuine solace in turning to AI companions rather than humans.

The big news of this survey is the fact that use of AI companions among teens is so widespread, though still in the minority. The next thing to do is to focus on those small numbers of teens for which AI companions are not simply something fun to play with, but form a deep and significant part of their emotional lives. These are the teens we should be the most concerned about, and finding out why they get so wrapped up with AI companions and what needs the companions satisfy will take us a long way toward understanding this new potential threat to the well-being of teenagers, who are the future of our society.

Sources: The AP article "Teens say they are turning to AI for friendship" appears on the AP website at https://apnews.com/article/ai-companion-generative-teens-mental-health-9ce59a2b250f3bd0187a717ffa2ad21f, and the Common Sense Media survey on which it was based is at https://www.commonsensemedia.org/sites/default/files/research/report/talk-trust-and-trade-offs_2025_web.pdf.

The Tea App Data Breach: Not Everybody's Cup Of . . .

Mon, 28 Jul 2025 11:10:00 +0000

A phone app called Tea became the No. 1 app downloaded from the U. S. Apple App Store last week. Then Friday, news came that the app had been hacked, exposing thousands of images and other identifying information online. The users of Tea are women who want to exchange information about men they are considering as dates, or have dated and want to evaluate for other women. So any kind of data breach is disturbing, although it could have been worse.

Tea, an app introduced in 2023, is exclusively for women, and requires some form of identification to use. Once a user is logged in, she can either post information about a certain man, or research his background as reported by other users, similar to the popular Yelp app that uses crowdsourcing to rate businesses.

Understandably, some men take a dim view of Tea, and claim it violates their privacy or could even provide grounds for defamation lawsuits. An attorney named Aaron Minc has been getting "hundreds" of calls from men whose descriptions on Tea are less than complimentary. In an interview, Minc said Tea users could be sued for spreading false information. But as the Wikipedia site describing Tea points out, the truth is an absolute defense against such a charge. Nevertheless, being sued for any reason is not a picnic, and so with data breaches and lawsuits in the air, women may now think twice before signing up for Tea and posting the story of their latest disastrous date, which may have been arranged via social media anyway.

You might think most couples meet electronically these days, but a recent survey shows that even among those aged 18-29, only 23% of those who are either married or "in a relationship" met online. So meeting the old-fashioned eyeball-to-eyeball way is still how most couples get together. The woman meeting a new guy in person could still use Tea to check out the man's credentials, but that raises larger issues of how reliable the report of another woman would be, especially if the report is anonymous.

Lawsuits over relationships are nothing new, of course. One of the running plot threads that Charles Dickens milked for a lot of laughs in his first published novel, The Pickwick Papers, was how Mr. Pickwick's landlady Mrs. Bardell misunderstood a stray comment he made as a proposal of marriage, and filed a suit against him for breach of promise. Though the legal details differ, this kind of action pitted the woman against the man, who then had to prove that his intentions were honorable or lose the suit.

I will admit that the idea of anonymous women posting ratings on me is somewhat disquieting, but as a teacher at a university, I'm subject to somewhat the same treatment by "Rate the Prof" websites, which take anonymous reports by students of various professors and post them online. I never look at such sites, and if anything scurrilous has been posted about me, I've remained blissfully unaware of it.

The way Tea works raises the question of whether anonymity online should be as widespread as it is. That issue has been in the news lately as several states have passed laws requiring robust systems to verify ages for users of pornographic websites, for example. That is another example where anonymity leads to problems,and positive identification with regard to age can at least mitigate harms to children who are too young to be exposed to porn.

Unfortunately, anonymity is almost a default setting online, while tying one's identity to every online communication would be not only technically burdensome, but downright dangerous. How would we do anonymous hotlines and tip lines? There would have to be exceptions for such cases. And VPN and other technologies exist that currently encumber even the most vigorous attempts to identify people online, such as in criminal investigations.

The Tea app is facing not only its data-breach problem, which always is disturbing to users, but also the moral question of whether anonymous comments by women about men they have dated are fair to the men. Such a question can be answered on a case-by-case basis, but in general, if women had to sign their real names to every comment they posted on Tea instead of remaining anonymous, the comments might not be as frank as they are now.

The same principle applies to student evaluations conducted not by a commercial app, but by my university. Students are guaranteed anonymity for the obvious reason that if they make a negative comment, and the professor finds out who said it, the student might have to take another one of the professor's classes, in which the professor might be tempted to wreak vengeance upon the unhappy but honest student. So I accept the idea of anonymity in that situation, because I might otherwise be tempted to abuse my authority over students that way.

If Tea were really confined only to women users, there wouldn't seem to be any danger of that sort of thing happening. But a woman could turn traitor, so to speak: seeing a bad review of her current boyfriend on Tea, she could show it to him, and if the review was tied to the identity of the woman who gave him the bad review, he might consider some kind of revenge. That would be bad news as well, so anonymity makes sense for Tea too.

Still, when people know their names are associated with things they say, they tend to be more moderate in their expressions than if they hide behind a pseudonym and can flame to their hearts' content without any fear of retribution. Some systems allow the option of either signing your name or remaining anonymous, and possibly that is the best approach.

Tea presents itself as a way to find "green flags," that is, women going online and saying what a good guy this was and you ought to date him. If he's so good, why not keep him for yourself? Realistically, I expect most of the comments are negative, which is why the site has been criticized to the extent it has been. Assuming the operators of Tea address their data breach, they can take comfort in the old saying attributed (perhaps apocryphally) to P. T. Barnum: "There's no such thing as bad publicity." More women know about Tea now, and so more men may get reviewed. I only hope they get the reviews they deserve.

Sources: The Associated Press article "The Tea app was intended to help women date safely. Then it got hacked," appeared on July 26, 2025 at https://apnews.com/article/tea-app-data-breach-leak-4chan-c95d5bb2cabe9d1b8ec0ca8903503b29. I also referred to an article at https://www.hims.com/news/dating-in-person-vs-online for the statistic about percentage of couples meeting online, and to the Wikipedia article on Tea (app).

Can Teslas Drive Themselves? Judge and Jury To Decide

Mon, 21 Jul 2025 10:58:00 +0000

On a night in April of 2019, Naibel Benavidez and her boyfriend Dillon Argulo had parked the Tahoe SUV they were in near the T-intersection of Card Sound Road and County Road 905 in the upper Florida Keys. George McGee was heading toward the intersection "driving" a Model S Tesla. I put "driving" in quotes, because he had set the vehicle on the misleadingly-named "full self-driving" mode. It was going about 70 MPH when McGee dropped his cellphone and bent down to look for it.

According to dashcam evidence, the Tesla ran a stop sign, ignoring the blinking red light above the intersection, crashed through reflective warning signs, and slammed into the SUV, spinning it so violently that it struck Naibel and threw her 75 feet into the bushes, where her lifeless body was found by first responders shortly thereafter. Dillon survived, but received a brain injury from which he is still recovering.

Understandably, the families of the victims have sued Tesla, and in an unusual move, Tesla is refusing to settle and is letting the case go to trial.

The firm's position is that McGee was solely at fault for not following instructions on how to operate his car safely. The driver should be prepared to take over manual control at all times, according to Tesla, and McGee clearly did not do that.

The judge in the federal case, Beth Bloom, has thrown out charges of defective manufacturing and negligent misrepresentation, but says she is hospitable toward arguments that Tesla "acted in reckless disregard of human life for the sake of developing their product and maximizing profit."

Regardless of the legal details, the outlines of what happened are fairly clear. Tesla claims that McGee was pressing the accelerator, "speeding and overriding the car's system at the time of the crash." While I am not familiar with exactly how one overrides the autopilot in a Tesla, if it is like the cruise control on many cars, the driver's manual interventions take priority over whatever the autopilot is doing. If you press the brake, the car's going to stop, and if you press the accelerator, it's going to speed up, regardless of what the computer thinks should be happening.

The Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) has promulgated its six levels of vehicle automation, from Level 0 (plain old human-driven cars without even cruise control) up to Level 5 (complete automation in which the driver can be asleep or absent and the car will still operate safely). The 2019 Tesla involved in the Florida crash was most likely a Level 3 vehicle, which can operate itself in some conditions and locations, but requires the driver to be prepared to take over at any time.

McGee appears to have done at least two things wrong. First, he was using the "full self-driving" mode on a rural road at night, while it is more suitable for limited-access freeways with clear lane markings. Second, for whatever reason, when he dropped his phone he hit the accelerator at the wrong time. This could conceivably have happened even if he had been driving a Level 0 car. But I think it is much less likely, and here's why.

Tesla drivers obviously accumulate experience with their "self-driving" vehicles, and just as drivers of non-self-driving cars learn how hard you have to brake and how far you have to turn the steering wheel to go where you want, Tesla drivers learn what they can get by with when the car is in self-driving mode. It appears that McGee had set the car in that mode, and while I don't know what was going through his mind, it is likely that he'd been able to do things such as look at his cellphone in the past while the car was driving itself, and nothing bad had happened. That may be what he was doing just before he dropped the phone.

At 70 MPH, a car is traveling over 100 feet per second. In a five-second pause to look for a phone, the car would have traveled as much as a tenth of a mile. If McGee had been consciously driving a non-autonomous car the whole time, he probably would have seen the blinking red light ahead and mentally prepared to slow down. But the way things happened, his eyes might have been on the phone the whole time, even after it dropped, and when he (perhaps accidentally) pressed the accelerator, the rest of the situation plays out naturally, but unfortunately for Naibel and Dillon.

So while Tesla may be technically correct that McGee's actions were the direct cause of the crash, there is plenty of room to argue that the way Tesla presents their autonomous-driving system encourages drivers to over-rely on it. Tesla says they have upgraded the system since 2019, and while that may be true, the issue at trial is whether they had cut corners and encouraged ways of driving in 2019 that could reasonably have led to this type of accident.

In an article unrelated to automotive issues but focused on the question of AI in general, I recently read that the self-driving idea has "plateued." A decade or so ago, the news was full of forecasts that we would all be able to read our phones, play checkers with our commuting partners, or catch an extra forty winks on the way to work as the robot drove us through all kinds of traffic and roads. That vision obviously has not come to pass, and while there are a few fully autonomous driverless vehicles plying the streets of Austin right now—I've seen them—they are "geofenced" to traverse only certain areas, and equipped with many more sensors and other devices than a consumer could afford to purchase for a private vehicle.

So we may find that unless you live in certain densely populated regions of large cities, the dream of riding in a robot-driven car will remain just that: a dream. But when Tesla drivers presume that the dream has become reality and withdraw their attention from their surroundings, the dream can quickly become a nightmare.

Sources: I referred to an Associated Press article on the trial beginning in Miami at https://apnews.com/article/musk-tesla-evidence-florida-benavides-autopilot-3ffab7fb53e93feb4ecfd3023f2ea21f. I also referred to news reports on the accident and trial at https://www.nbcmiami.com/news/local/trial-against-tesla-begins-in-deadly-2019-crash-in-key-largo-involving-autopilot-feature/3657076/ and

https://www.nbcmiami.com/news/local/man-wants-answers-after-deadly-crash/124944/.

Are AI Chatbots Really Just Pattern Engines?

Mon, 14 Jul 2025 11:29:00 +0000

That's all they are, according to Nathan Beacom, who wrote recently in the online journal The Dispatch an article with the title "There Is No Such Thing as Artificial Intelligence."

His point is an important one, as the phrase "artificial intelligence" and its abbreviation "AI" have enjoyed a boom in usage since 2000, according to Google's Ngrams analysis of words appearing in published books. The system plots frequency of occurrence, as a percentage, versus time. The term "AI" peaked around 1965 and again around 1987, which correspond to the first and second comings of AI, both of which fizzled out as the digital technology of the time and the algorithms used were inadequate to realize most of the hopes of developers.

But starting around 2014, usage of "AI" soared until in 2022 (the last year surveyed by the Ngram machine), it stands at a level higher than the highest peak ever enjoyed by a common but very different phrase, "IRS." So perhaps people now think the only inevitable things are death and AI, not death and taxes.

Kidding aside, Beacom says that the language we use about the technology generally referred to as AI has a profound influence on how we view it. And his point is that a basic philosophical fallacy is embedded in the term "artificial intelligence." Namely, what AI does is not intelligent in any meaningful sense of the term. And fooling ourselves into thinking it is, as millions are doing every day, can lead to big problems.

He begins his article with a few extreme cases. A woman left her husband because he developed weird conspiracy theories after he became obsessed with a chatbot, and another woman beat up on her husband after he told her the chatbot she was involved with was not "real."

The problem arises when we fall into the easy trap of behaving as though Siri, Alexa, Claude, and their AI friends are real people, as real as the checkout person at the grocery store or the voice who answers on the other end of the line when we call Mom. Admittedly, quite a few of the chatbots out there would pass the Turing test, which compares the responses to typed commands and queries between a human being and a computer.

But to believe that an AI chatbot can think and possesses human intelligence is a mistake. According to Beacom, it's as much a mistake to believe that as it was for the probably apocryphal New Guinea tribesman who, when first hearing a voice come out of a radio, opened it up to see the little man inside. The tribesman was disappointed, and it didn't do the radio any good either.

We can't open up AI systems to see the works, as they consist of giant server farms in remote areas that are intentionally hidden from view, like the Wizard of Oz who hid behind a curtain as he tried to astound his guests with fire and smoke. Instead, companies promote chatbots as companions for elderly people or entertainment for the lonely young. And if you decide to establish a personal relationship with a chatbot, you are always in control. The algorithms are designed to please the human, not the other way around, and such a relationship will have little if any of the unpredictability and friction that always happens when one human being interacts with another human being.

That is because human intelligence is a clean different kind of a thing than what AI does. Beacom makes the point that all the machines can do is a fancy kind of autocomplete function. Large-language models use their huge databases of what has been said on the Internet to predict what kind of thing is most likely to come after whatever the human interlocutor says or asks. And so the only way it can sound human is by basing its responses on the replies of millions of other humans.

But an AI system no more understands what it is saying, or thinks about your question, than a handheld calculator thinks about what the value of pi is. Both a simple electronic calculator and the largest system of server farms and Internet connections are fundamentally the same kind of thing. A newborn baby and its elemental responses to its environment, as simple as they are, represents a difference in kind, not degree, from any type of machine. A baby has intelligence, as rudimentary as it is. But a machine, no matter how complex and no matter what algorithms are running on it, is just a machine, as predictable (in principle, but no longer in practice in many cases) as a mechanical adding machine's motions.

Nobody in his right mind is going to treat a calculator like it was his best friend. But the temptation is there to attribute minds and understanding to AI systems, and the systems' developers often encourage that attitude, because it leads to further engagement and, ultimately, profits.

There is nothing inherently wrong with profits, but Beacom says we need to begin to disengage ourselves from the delusion that AI systems have personalities or minds or understanding. And the way he wants us to start is to quit referring to them as AI.

His preferred terminology is "pattern engine," as nearly everything AI does can be subsumed under the general category of pattern repetition and modification.

Beacom probably realizes his proposal is unlikely to catch on. Terms are important, but even more important are the attitudes we bring toward things we deal with. Beacom touches on the real spiritual problem involved in all this when he says that those who recognize the true nature of what we now call AI will "be able to see the clay feet of the new idol."

Whenever a friend of mine holds his phone flat, brings it to his mouth, and asks something like "What is the capital of North Dakota?" I call it "consulting the oracle." I mean it jokingly, and I don't think my friend is seriously worshipping his phone, but some people treat AI, or whatever we want to call it, as something worthy of the kind of devotion that only humans deserve. That is truly idolatry. And as the Bible and history prove, idolatry almost always ends badly.

Sources: Nathan Beacom's article "There Is No Such Thing as Artificial Intelligence" appeared in The Dispatch at https://thedispatch.com/article/artificial-intelligence-morality-honesty-pattern-engines/.

Has AI Made College Essays Pointless?

Mon, 07 Jul 2025 10:49:00 +0000

That's the question that Bard College professor of literature Hua Hsu asks in the current issue of The New Yorker. Anyone who went to college remembers having to write essay papers on humanities subjects such as art history, literature, or philosophy. Even before computers, the value of these essays was questionable. Ideally, the task of writing an essay to be graded by an expert in the field was to give students practice in analyzing a body of knowledge, taking a point of view, and expressing it with clarity and even style. The fact that few students achieved these ideals was beside the point, because, as Hsu says in his essay, "I have always had a vague sense that my students are learning something, even when it is hard to quantify."

The whole process of assigning and grading essay papers has recently been short-circuited by the widespread availability of large-language-model artificial intelligence (AI) systems such as ChatGPT. Curious to see whether students at large schools used AI any differently than the ones at his exclusive small liberal-arts college, Hsu spent some time with a couple of undergraduates at New York University, which has a total graduate-plus-undergraduate enrollment of over 60,000. They said things such as "Any type of writing in life, I use A. I." At the end of the semester, one of them spent less than an hour using AI to write two final papers for humanities classes, and estimated doing it the hard way might have taken eight hours or more. The grades he received on the papers were A-minus and B-plus.

If these students are representative of most undergraduates who are under time pressure to get the most done with the least amount of damage to their GPA in the subjects they are actually interested in, one can understand why they turn to resources such as ChatGPT to deal with courses that require a lot of writing. Professors have taken various tacks to deal with the issue, which has mostly flummoxed university administrations. Following an initial panic after ChatGPT was made publicly available in 2022, many universities have changed course and now run faculty-education courses that teach professors how to use ChatGPT more effectively in their research and teaching. A philosophy professor, Barry Lam, who teaches at the University of California Riverside, deals with it by telling his class on the first day, "If you're gonna just turn in a paper that's ChatGPT-generated, then I will grade all your work by ChatGPT and we can all go to the beach." Presumably his class isn't spending all their time at the beach yet, but Lam is pretty sure that a lot of his students use AI in writing their papers anyway.

What are the ethical challenges in this situation? It's not plagiarism pure and simple. As one professor pointed out, there are no original texts that are being plagiarized, or if there are, the plagiarizing is being done by the AI system that scraped the whole Internet for the information it comes up with. The closest non-technological analogy is the "paper mills" that students can pay to write a custom paper for them. This is universally regarded as cheating, because students are passing off another person's work (the paper mill's employee) as their own.

When Hsu asked his interviewees about the ethics of using AI heavily in writing graded essays, they characterized it as a victimless crime and an expedient to give them more time for other important tasks. If I had been there, I might have pointed out something that I tell my own students at the beginning of class when I tell them not to cheat on homework.

A STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) class is different than a humanities class, but just as vulnerable to the inroads of AI, as a huge amount of routine coding is now reportedly done with clever prompts to AI tools rather than writing the code directly. What I tell them is that if they evade doing the homework either by using AI to do it all or paying a homework service, they are cheating themselves. The point of doing the homework isn't to get a good grade; it is to give your mind practice in solving problems that (a) you will face without the help of anything or anybody when I give a paper exam in class, and (b) you may face in real life. Yes, in real life you will be able to use AI assistance. But how do you know it's not hallucinating? Hsu cites experts who say that the hallucination problem—AI saying things that aren't true—has not gone away, and may actually be getting worse, for reasons that are poorly understood. At some level, important work, whether it's humanities research papers to be published or bridges to be built, must pass through the evaluative minds of human beings before it goes straight to the public.

That begs the question of what work qualifies as important. It's obvious from reading the newspapers I read (a local paper printed on actual dead trees, and an electronic version of the Austin American-Statesman) that "important" doesn't seem to cover a lot of what passes for news in these documents. Just this morning, I read an article about parking fees, and the headline and "see page X" at the end both referred to an article on women's health, not the parking-fees article. And whenever I read the Austin paper on my tablet, whatever system they use to convert the actual typeset words into more readable type when you select the article oftenmakesthewordscomeoutlikethis. I have written the managing editor about this egregious problem, but to no avail.

The most serious problem I see in the way AI has taken over college essay writing is not the ethics of the situation per se, although that is bad enough. It is the general lowering of standards on the part of both originators and consumers of information. In Culture and Anarchy (1869) (which I have not read, by the way), British essayist Matthew Arnold argued that a vital aspect of education was to read "the best that has been thought or said" as a way of combating the degradation of culture that industrialization was bringing on. But if nobody except machines thinks or says those gems of culture after a certain point, we all might as well go to the beach. I actually went to the beach a few weeks ago, and it was fun, but I wouldn't want to live there.

Sources: Hua Hsu's "The End of the Essay" appeared on pp. 21-27 of the July 7 & 14, 2025 issue of The New Yorker. I referred to the website https://newlearningonline.com/new-learning/chapter-7/committed-knowledge-the-modern-past/matthew-arnold-on-learning-the-best-which-has-been-thought-and-said for the Arnold quote.

Supreme Court Validates Texas Anti-Porn Law

Mon, 30 Jun 2025 11:10:00 +0000

On Friday, June 27, the U. S. Supreme Court issued its decision in the case of Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton. The Free Speech Coalition is an organization representing the interests of the online pornography industry, and Kenneth Paxton is the controversial attorney general of Texas,whose duty it is to enforce a 2023 law which "requires pornography websites to verify the age of users before they can access explicit material," according to a report by National Review. The Court upheld the Texas law, finding that the law was a constitutional exercise of a state's responsibility to prevent children from "accessing sexually explicit content."

This ruling has implications beyond Texas, as 22 other states have adopted similar laws, and the decision of the court means that those states are probably safe from federal lawsuits as well.

This is a matter of interest to engineering ethicists because, whether we like it or not, pornography has played a large role in electronic media at least since the development of consumer video-cassette recorders in the 1970s. As each new medium has appeared, the pornographers have been among its earliest adopters. Around 1980, as I was considering a career change in the electronic communications industry, one of the jobs I was offered was as engineer for a satellite cable-TV company. One of the factors that made me turn it down was that a good bit of their programming back then was of the Playboy Channel ilk. I ended up working for a supplier of cable TV equipment, which wasn't much better, perhaps, but that job lasted only a couple of years before I went back to school and remained in academia thereafter.

The idea behind the Texas law is that children exposed to pornography suffer objective harm. The American College of Pediatricians has a statement on their website attesting to the problems caused by pornography to children: depression, anxiety, violent behavior, and "a distorted view of relationships between men and women." And it's not a rare problem. The ubiquity of mobile phones means that even children who do not have their own phone are exposed to porn by their peers, and so even parents who do not allow their children to have a mobile phone are currently pretty defenseless against the onslaught of online pornography.

Requiring porn websites to verify a user's age is a small but necessary step in reducing the exposure of young people to the social pathology of pornography. In an article in the online journal The Dispatch, Charles Fain Lehman proposes that we dust off obscenity laws to prosecute pornographers regardless of the age of their clientele. The prevalence of porn in the emotional lives of young people has ironically led to a dearth of sexual activity in Gen Z, who have lived with its presence all their lives. In a review of several books that ask why people in their late teens and 20s today are having less sex than previous generations, New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino cites the statistic that nearly half of adults in this age category regard porn as harmful, but only 37% of older millennials do. And fifteen percent of young Americans have encountered porn by the age of 10.

There are plenty of science-based reasons to keep children and young teenagers from viewing pornography. For those who believe in God, I would like to add a few more. In the gospel of Matthew, Jesus tells his disciples that they must "become like children" to enter the kingdom of Heaven. Then he warns that "whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin [the Greek word means "to stumble"], it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened round his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea." (Matt. 18:6). People who propagate pornography that ten-year-olds can watch on their phones seem to fill the bill for those who cause children to stumble.

The innocence of children can be overrated, as anyone who has dealt with a furious two-year-old can attest. But it is really a kind of mental virginity that children have: the absence of cruel and exploitative sexual images in their minds helps keep them away from certain kinds of sin, even before they could understand what was involved. Until a few decades ago, most well-regulated societies protected children from the viewing, reading, or hearing of pornography, and those who wished to access it had to go to considerable efforts to seek out a bookstore or porn theater.

But that is no longer the case, and as Carter Sherman, the author of a book quoted in the New Yorker says, the internet is a "mass social experiment with no antecedent and whose results we are just now beginning to see." Among those results are a debauching of the ways men and women interact sexually, to the extent that one recent college-campus survey showed that nearly two-thirds of women said they'd been choked during sex.

This is not the appropriate location to explore the ideals of how human sexuality should be expressed. But suffice it to say that the competitive and addictive nature of online pornography invariably degrades its users toward a model of sexual attitudes that are selfish, exploitative, and unlikely to lead to positive outcomes.

The victory of Texas's age-verification law at the Supreme Court is a step in the right direction toward the regulation of the porn industry, and gives hope to those who would like to see further legal challenges to its very existence. Perhaps we are at the early stages of a trend comparable to what happened with the tobacco industry, which denied the objective health hazards of smoking until the evidence became overwhelming. It's not too early for pornographers to start looking for millstones as a better alternative to their current occupation.

Sources: The article "Supreme Court Upholds Texas Age-Verification Law" appeared at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/supreme-court-upholds-texas-age-verification-porn-law/, and the article "It's Time to Prosecute Pornhub" appeared at https://thedispatch.com/article/pornhub-supreme-court-violence-obscenity-rape/. I also referred to the Wikipedia article "Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton" and the New Yorker article "Sex Bomb" by Jia Tolentino on pp. 58-61 of the June 30, 2025 issue.

Should Chatbots Replace Government-Worker Phone Banks?

Mon, 23 Jun 2025 11:03:00 +0000

The recent slashes in federal-government staffing and funding have drawn the attention of the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR), and two of the Institute's members warn of impending disaster if the Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE) carries through its stated intention to replace hordes of government workers with AI chatbots. In the July/August issue of Scientific American, DAIR founder Timnit Gebru, joined by staffer Asmelash Teka Hadgu, decry the current method of applying general-purpose large-language-model AI to the specific task of speech recognition, which would be necessary if one wants to replace the human-staffed phone banks that are at the other end of the telephone numbers for Social Security and the IRS with machines.

The DAIR people give vivid examples of the kinds of things that can go wrong. They focused on Whisper, which is a speech-recognition feature of OpenAI, and the results of studies by four universities of how well Whisper converted audio files of a person talking into transcribed text.

The process of machine transcription has come a long way since the very early days of computers in the 1970s, when I heard Bell Labs' former head of research John R. Pierce say that he doubted speech recognition would ever be computerized. But anyone who phones a large organization today is likely to deal with some form of automated speech recognition, as well as anyone who has a Siri or other voice-controlled device in the home. Just last week I was on vacation, and the TV in the room had to be controlled with voice commands. Simple operations like asking for music or a TV channel are fairly well performed by these systems, but that's not what the DAIR people are worried about.

With more complex language, Whisper was shown not only to misunderstand things, but to make up stuff as well that was not in the original audio file at all. For example, the phrase "two other girls and one lady" in the audio file became after Whisper transcribed it, "two other girls and one lady, um, which were Black."

This is an example of what is charitably called "hallucinating" by AI proponents. If a human being did something like this, we'd just call it lying, but to lie requires a will and an intellect that chooses a lie rather than the truth. Not many AI experts want to attribute will and intellect to AI systems, so they default to calling untruths hallucinations.

This problem arises, the authors claim, when companies try to develop AI systems that can do everything and train them on huge unedited swaths of the Internet, rather than tailoring the design and training to a specific task, which of course costs more in terms of human input and guidance. They paint a picture of a dystopian future in which somebody who calls Social Security can't ever talk to a human being, but just gets shunted around among chatbots which misinterpret, misinform, and simply lie about what the speaker said.

Both government-staffed interfaces with the public and speech-recognition systems vary greatly in quality. Most people have encountered at least one or two government workers who are memorable for their surliness and aggressively unhelpful demeanor. But there are also many such people who go out of their way to pay personal attention to the needs of their clients, and these are the kinds of employees we would miss if they got replaced by chatbots.

Elon Musk's brief tenure as head of DOGE is profiled in the June 23 issue of The New Yorker magazine, and the picture that emerges is that of a techie dude roaming around in organizations he and his tech bros didn't understand, causing havoc and basically throwing monkey wrenches into finely-adjusted clock mechanisms. The only thing that is likely to happen in such cases is that the clock will stop working. Improvements are not in the picture, not even cost savings in many cases. As an IRS staffer pointed out, many IRS employees end up bringing in many times their salary's worth of added tax revenue by catching tax evaders. Firing those people may look like an immediate short-term economy, but in the long term it will cost billions.

Now that Musk has left DOGE, the threat of massive-scale replacement of federal customer-service people by chatbots is less than it was. But we would be remiss in ignoring DAIR's warning that AI systems can be misused or abused by large organizations in a mistaken attempt to save money.

In the private sector, there are limits to what harm can be done. If a business depends on answering phone calls accurately and helpfully, and they install a chatbot that offends every caller, pretty soon that business will not have any more business and will go out of business. But in the U. S. there's only one Social Security Administration and one Internal Revenue Service, and competition isn't part of that picture.

The Trump administration does seem to want to do some revolutionary things to the way government operates. But at some level, they are also aware that if they do anything that adversely affects millions of citizens, they will be blamed for it.

So I'm not too concerned that all the local Social Security offices scattered around the country will be shuttered, and one's only alternative will be to call a chatbot which hallucinates by concluding the caller is dead and cuts off his Social Security check. Along with almost every other politician in the country, Trump recognizes Social Security is a third rail that he touches at his peril.

But that still leaves plenty of room for future abuse of AI by trying to make it do things that people really still do better, and maybe even more economically than computers. While the immediate threat may have passed from the scene with Musk's departure from DOGE, the tendency is still there. Let's hope that sensible mid-level managers will prevail against the lightning strikes of DOGE and its ilk, and the needed work of government will go on.

Sources: The article "A Chatbot Dystopian Nightmare" by Asmelash Teka Hadgu and Timnit Gebru appeared in the July/August 2025 Scientific American on pp. 89-90. I also referred to the article "Move Fast and Break Things" by Benjamin Wallace-Wells on pp. 24-35 of the June 23, 2025 issue of The New Yorker.

Why Did Air India Flight 171 Crash?

Mon, 16 Jun 2025 10:40:00 +0000

That is the question that investigators will be asking in the coming days, weeks and months to come. On Thursday June 12, a Boeing 787 Dreamliner took off from Ahmedabad in northwest India, bound for London. On board were 242 passengers and crew. It was a hot, clear day. Videos taken from the ground show that after rolling down the runway, the plane "rotated" into the air (orienting flight surfaces to make the plane take off), and assumed a nose-up attitude. But after rising for about fifteen seconds, it began to sink back toward the ground and plowed into a building housing students of a medical college. All but one person on the plane were killed, and at least 38 people on the ground died as well.

This is the first fatal crash of a 787 since it was introduced in 2011. The data recorder was recovered over the weekend, so experts have abundant information to comb through in determining what went wrong. The formal investigation will take many weeks, but understandably, friends and relatives of the victims of the crash would like answers earlier than that.

Air India, the plane's operator, became a private entity only in 2022 after spending 69 years under the control of the Indian government. An AP news report mentions that fatal crashes killing hundreds of people involved Air India equipment in 1978 and 2010. The quality of training is always a question in accidents of this kind, and that issue will be addressed along with many others.

An article in the Seattle Times describes the opinions of numerous aviation experts as to what might have led to a plane crashing shortly after takeoff in this way. While they all emphasized that everything they say is speculative at this point, they had some specific suggestions as well.

One noted that the appearance of dust in a video of the takeoff just before the plane becomes airborne might indicate that the pilot used up the entire runway in taking off. This is not the usual procedure at major airports, and might have indicated issues with available engine power.

Several experts mentioned that the flaps may not have been in the correct position for takeoff. Flaps are parts of the wing that can be extended downward during takeoff and landing to provide extra lift, and are routinely extended for the first few minutes of any flight. The problem with this theory, as one expert mentioned, is that modern aircraft have alarms to alert a negligent pilot that the flaps haven't been extended, and unless there was a problem with hydraulic pressure that overwhelmed other alarms, the pilots would have noticed the issue immediately.

Another possibility involves an attempt to take off too soon, before the plane had enough airspeed to leave the ground safely. Rotation, as the actions to make the plane leave the ground are called, cannot come too early, or else the plane is likely to either stall or lose altitude after an initial rise. Stalling is an aerodynamic effect that happens when an airfoil has an excessive angle of attack to the incoming air, which no longer flows in a controlled way over the upper surface but separates from it. The result is that lift decreases dramatically. An airplane entering a sudden stall can appear to pitch upward and then simply drop out of the air. While such a stall was not obvious in the videos of the flight obtained so far, something obviously caused a lack of sufficient lift that led to the crash.

Other more remote possibilities include engine problems that would limit the amount of thrust available below that needed for a safe takeoff. It is possible that some systemic control issue may have limited available thrust, but there was no obvious mechanical failure of the engines before the crash, so this possibility is not a leading one.

In sum, initial signs are that some type of pilot error may have at least contributed to the crash: too-early rotation, misapplication of flaps, or other more subtle mistakes. A wide-body aircraft cannot be stopped on a dime, and once it has begun a rollout to takeoff there are not a lot of options left to the pilot should a sudden emergency occur. A decision to abort takeoff beyond a certain point will result in overrunning the runway. And depending on how much extra space there is at the end of the runway, an overrun can easily lead to a crash, as recently happened when Jeju Air Flight 2216 in Thailand overshot the runway and crashed into the concrete foundation of some antennas in December 2024.

The alternative of taking off and trying to stay in the air may not be successful either, unless sufficient thrust can be applied to gain sufficient altitude. Although no expert mentioned the following possibility and there may be good reasons for that, perhaps there was an issue with brakes not being fully released on the landing-gear wheels. This would slow down the plane considerably, and the unusual nature of the problem might not give the pilots time enough to figure out what was happening.

Modern jetliners are exceedingly complicated machines, and the more parts there are in a system, the more combinations of things can happen to cause difficulties. The fact that there have so far been no calls to ground the entire fleet of 787 Dreamliners indicates that the consensus of experts is that a fundamental issue with the plane itself is probably not at fault.

Once the flight-recorder data has been studied, we will know a great deal more about things such as flap and engine settings, precise timing of control actions, and other matters that are now a subject of speculation. It is entirely possible that the accident happened due to a combination of minor mechanical problems and poor training or execution by the flight crew. Many major tragedies in technology occur because a number of problems, each of which could be overcome by itself, combine to cause a system failure.

Our sympathies are with those who lost loved ones in the air or on the ground. And I hope that whatever lessons we learn from this catastrophe will improve training and design efforts to make these the last fatalities involving a 787 in a long time.

Sources: I referred to AP articles at https://apnews.com/article/air-india-survivor-crash-boeing-e88b0ba404100049ee730d5714de4c67 and https://apnews.com/article/india-plane-crash-what-to-know-4e99be1a0ed106d2f57b92f4cc398a6c, a Seattle Times article at https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/what-will-investigators-be-looking-for-in-air-india-crash-data/, and the Wikipedia articles on Air India and Air India Flight 171.

Science Vs. Luck: DNA Sequencing of Embryos

Mon, 09 Jun 2025 11:36:00 +0000

"Science Vs. Luck" was the title of a sketch by Mark Twain about a lawyer who got his clients off from a charge of gambling by recruiting professional gamblers, who convinced the jury that the game was more science than luck—by playing it with the jury and cleaning them out! Of course, there was more going on than met the eye, as professional gamblers back then had some tricks up their sleeves that the innocents on the jury wouldn't have caught. So while the verdict of science looked legitimate to the innocents, there was more going on than they suspected, and the spirit of the law against gambling was violated even though the letter seemed to be obeyed.

That sketch came to mind when I read an article by Abigail Anthony, who wrote on the National Review website about a service offered by the New York City firm Nucleus Genomics: whole-genome sequencing of in-vitro-fertilized embryos. For only $5,999, Nucleus will take the genetic data provided by the IVF company of your choice and give you information on over 900 different possible conditions and characteristics the prospective baby might have, ranging from Alzheimer's to the likelihood that the child will be left-handed.

There are other companies offering services similar to this, so I'm not calling out Nucleus in particular. What is peculiarly horrifying about this sales pitch is the implication that having a baby is no different in principle than buying a car. If you go in a car dealership and order a new car, you get to choose the model, the color, a range of optional features, and if you don't like that brand you can go to a different dealer and get even more choices.

The difference between choosing a car and choosing a baby is this: the cars you don't pick will be sold to somebody else. The babies you don't pick will die.

We are far down the road foreseen by C. S. Lewis in his prescient 1943 essay "The Abolition of Man." Lewis realized that what was conventionally called man's conquest of nature was really the exertion of power by some men over other men. And the selection of IVF embryos by means of sophisticated genomic tests such as the ones offered by Nucleus are a fine example of such power. In the midst of World War II when the fate of Western civilization seemed to hang in the balance, Lewis wrote, " . . . if any one age attains, by eugenics and scientific education, the power to make its descendants what it pleases, all men who live after it are the patients of that power."

Eugenics was a highly popular and respectable subject from the late 19th century up to right after World War II, when its association with the horrors of the Holocaust committed by the Nazi regime gave it a much-deserved bad name. The methods used by eugenicists back then were crude ones: sterilization of the "unfit," where the people deciding who was unfit always had more power than the unfit ones; encouraging the better classes to have children and the undesirable classes (such as negroes and other minorities) to have fewer ones; providing birth control and abortion services especially to those undesirable classes (a policy which is honored by Planned Parenthood to this day); and in the case of Hitler's Germany, the wholesale extermination of whoever was deemed by his regime to be undesirable: Jews, Romani, homosexuals, and so on.

But just as abortion hides behind a clean, hygienic medical facade to mask the fact that it is the intentional killing of a baby, the videos on Nucleus's website conceal the fact that in order to get that ideal baby with a minimum of whatever the parents consider to be undesirable traits, an untold number of fertilized eggs—all exactly the same kind of human being that you were when you were that age—have to be "sacrificed" on the altar of perfection.

If technology hands us a power that seems attractive, that enables us to avoid pain or suffering even on the part of another, does that mean we should always avail ourselves of it? The answer depends on what actions are involved in using that power.

If the Nucleus test enabled the prospective parents to avert potential harms and diseases in the embryo analyzed without killing it, there would not be any problem. But we don't know how to do that yet, and by the very nature of reproduction we may never be able to. The choice being offered is made by producing multiple embryos, and disposing of the ones that don't come up to snuff.

Now, at $6,000 a pop, it's not likely that anyone with less spare change than Elon Musk is going to keep trying until they get exactly what they want. But the clear implication of advertising such genomic testing as a choice is that, you don't have to take what Nature (or God) gives you. If you don't like it, you can put it away and try something else.

And that's really the issue: whether we acknowledge our finiteness before God and take the throw of the genetic dice that comes with having a child, the way it's been done since the beginning; or cheat by taking extra turns and drawing cards until we get what we want.

The range of human capacity is so large and varied that even the 900 traits analyzed by Nucleus do not even scratch the surface of what a given baby may become. This lesson is brought home in a story attributed to an author named J. John. In a lecture on medical ethics, the professor confronts his students with a case study. "The father of the family had syphilis and the mother tuberculosis. They already had four children. The first child is blind, the second died, the third is deaf and dumb, and the fourth has tuberculosis. Now the mother is pregnant with her fifth child. She is willing to have an abortion, so should she?"

After the medical students vote overwhelmingly in favor of the abortion, the professor says, "Congratulations, you have just murdered the famous composer Ludwig von Beethoven!"

Sources: Abigail Anthony's article "Mail-order Eugenics" appeared on the National Review website on June 5, 2025 at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/mail-order-eugenics/. My source for the Beethoven anecdote is https://bothlivesmatter.org/blog/both-lives-mattered.

AI-Induced False Memories in Criminal Justice: Fiction or Reality?

Mon, 02 Jun 2025 11:16:00 +0000

A filmmaker in Germany named Hashem Al-Ghaili has come up with an idea to solve our prison problems: overcrowding, high recidivism rates, and all the rest. Instead of locking up your rapist, robber, or arsonist for five to twenty years, you offer him a choice: conventional prison and all that entails, or a "treatment" taking only a few minutes, after which he could return to society a free . . . I was going to say, "man," but once you find out what the treatment is, you may understand why I hesitated.

Al-Ghaili works with an artificial-intelligence firm called Cognify, and his treatment would do the following. After a detailed scan of the criminal's brain, false memories would be inserted into his brain, the nature of which would be chosen to make sure the criminal doesn't commit that crime again. Was he a rapist? Insert memories of what the victim felt like and experienced. Was he a thief? Give him a whole history of realizing the loss he caused to others, repentance on his part, and rejection of his criminal ways. And by the bye, the same brain scans could be used to create a useful database of criminal minds to figure out how to prevent these people from committing crimes in the first place.

Al-Ghaili admits that his idea is pretty far beyond current technological capabilities, but at the rate AI and brain research is progressing, he thinks now is the time to consider what we should do with these technologies once they're available.

Lest you think these notions are just a pipe dream, a sober study from the MIT Media Lab experimented with implanting false memories simply by sending some of a study group of 200 people to have a conversation with a chatbot about a crime video they all watched. The members of the study did not know that the chatbots were designed to mislead them with questions that would confuse their memories of what they saw. The researchers also tried the same trick with a simple set of survey questions, and left a fourth division of the group alone as a control.

What the MIT researchers found was that the generative type of chatbot induced its subjects to have more than three times the false memories of the control group, who were not exposed to any memory-clouding techniques, and more than those who took the survey experienced. What this study tells us is that using chatbots to interrogate suspects or witnesses in a criminal setting could easily be misused to distort the already less-than-100%-reliable recollections that we base legal decisions on.

Once again, we are looking down a road where we see some novel technologies in the future beckoning us to use them, and we face a decision: should we go there or not? Or if we do go there, what rules should we follow?

Let's take the Cognify prison alternative first. As ethicist Charles Camosy pointed out in a broadcast discussion of the idea, messing with a person's memories by direct physical intervention and bypassing their conscious mind altogether is a gross violation of the integrity of the human person. Our memories form an essential part of our being, as the sad case of Alzheimer's sufferers attests. To implant a whole set of false memories into a person's brain, and therefore mind as well, is as violent an intrusion as cutting off a leg and replacing it with a cybernetic prosthesis. Even if the person consents to such an action, the act itself is intrinsically wrong and should not be done.

We laugh at such things when we see them in comedies such as Men in Black, when Tommy Lee Jones whips out a little flash device that makes everyone in sight forget what they've seen for the last half hour or so. But each person has a right to experience the whole of life as it happens, and wiping out even a few minutes is wrong, let alone replacing them with a cobbled-together script designed to remake a person morally.

Yes, it would save money compared to years of imprisonment, but if you really want to save money, just chop off the head of every offender, even for minor infractions. That idea is too physically violent for today's cultural sensibilities, but in a culture inured to the death of many thousands of unborn children every year, we can apparently get used to almost any variety of violence as long as it is implemented in a non-messy and clinical-looking way.

C. S. Lewis saw this type of thing coming as long ago as 1949, when he criticized the trend of substituting therapeutic treatment of criminals as suffering from a disease, for retributive fixed-term punishment as the delivery of a just penalty to one who deserved it. He wrote "My contention is that this doctrine [of therapy rather than punishment], merciful though it appears, really means that each one of us, from the moment he breaks the law, is deprived of the rights of a human being."

No matter what either C. S. Lewis or I say, there are some people who will see nothing wrong with this idea, because they have a defective model of what a human being is. One can show entirely from philosophical, not religious, presuppositions that the human intellect is immaterial. Any system of thought which neglects that essential fact is capable of serious and violent errors, such as the Cognify notion of criminal memory-replacement would be.

As for allowing AI to implant false memories simply by persuasion, as the MIT Media Lab study appeared to do, we are already well down that road. What do you think is going on any time a person "randomly" trolls the Internet looking at whatever the fantastically sophisticated algorithms show him or her? AI-powered persuasion, of course. And the crisis in teenage mental health and many other social-media ills can be largely attributed to such persuasion.

I'm glad that Hashem Al-Ghaili's prison of the future is likely to stay in the pipe-dream category at least for the next few years. But now is the time to realize what a pernicious thing it would be, and to agree as a culture that we need to move away from treating criminals as laboratory animals and restore to them the dignity that every human being deserves.

Sources: Charles Camosy was interviewed on the Catholic network Relevant Radio on a recent edition of the Drew Mariani Show, where I heard about Cognify's "prison of the future" proposal. The quote from C. S. Lewis comes from his essay "The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment," which appears in his God in the Dock (Eerdmans, 1970). I also referred to an article on Cognify at https://www.dazeddigital.com/life-culture/article/62983/1/inside-the-prison-of-the-future-where-ai-rewires-your-brain-hashem-al-ghaili and the MIT Media Lab abstract at https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/ai-false-memories/overview/.

NSF and Women in STEM: Removing Barriers or Chartering Jets?

Mon, 26 May 2025 11:20:00 +0000

Anyone even remotely connected with the academic world knows that the Trump administration has recently been playing Attila the Hun to the Italy of the government-funded research establishment, slashing billions in already-granted money, firing staff, and generally raising Hades. A recent article by Andrew Follett in National Review highlights the shakeup at what many academics consider to be the crown jewel of such funding, the U. S. National Science Foundation (NSF). Follett points out that the long-established woke-diversity-equity-inclusion slant at the agency may be repressed for the moment, but making permanent changes will require Congressional action.

Follett may well be right regarding the correct political strategy, but what I would like to focus on is one particular goal which the NSF holds dear to its bureaucratic heart: expanding participation in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) for women.

It is not quite the case, as Follett says it is, that NSF is abandoning this goal completely. Rather, according to some updated guidelines on the NSF website, investigators may pursue it, but only "as part of broad engagement activities" that are open to all Americans, regardless of sex, race, or other "protected characteristics." Even if Congress gets involved, I suspect NSF will keep doing what it wants to do while staying within the letter of the law, because I've seen up close how they do it in the case of a specific grant aimed at increasing the participation of women in engineering.

I state categorically that women should not be barred from pursuing degrees or jobs in engineering, either de jure or de facto. As recently as 1970, women were not admitted to many all-male engineering-intensive schools, and many engineering programs at coed universities refused to take women. Accordingly, the U. S. Dept. of Labor reports that only 3% of engineers were women that year. Second-wave feminism, equal-employment laws, and other societal changes knocked down virtually all the legal and cultural barriers that kept women from being engineers by around 1990, and the percentage of engineers in the U. S. who were women rose to around 16%, where it has hovered to this day.

But since 1990, NSF has expended probably a total of billions of dollars trying to raise that percentage above 16%, with the presumed goal being "equity": that is, a percentage of women in engineering equal to their percentage in the general population. We can say several things about these efforts.

The most obvious thing is, they have failed. If NSF had poured billions of dollars into a pure-science project—just to take one at random, say, the nature of ball lightning—and gotten precisely zip results by now, one would hope that common sense would prevail and they would turn their attention to other matters. But that is not how these things work. This is not to say that all the money was wasted. In a grant I was familiar with at my own university, special scholarships and academic support networks were set up in a way that mainly attracted women, although when I asked the principal investigator whether a male student could apply, she said technically yes, although they weren't getting any to speak of. And scholarships are good for students, other things being equal.

But in terms of NSF's original goals of funding science research that otherwise would not get done, paying for scholarships that are legally for everybody but (wink-wink) are really focused on women is a classic example of politics corrupting science.

I use the word "corrupting" deliberately, in the sense that betrayal of an agency's stated purpose for political reasons—any political reasons, right, left, or slantwise—is a step down a long road that led to distinctions such as "Aryan science" in Germany before World War II.

As a wise junior-high civics teacher once told me, politics is just the conduct of public affairs, and of course it's not possible to keep any human institution, let alone a governmental one, completely free of political considerations.

But as in so many other ethical situations, the intent is the key. If Congress manipulates an agency's budget to favor certain regions, there's not much the agency's director can do about it other than jawbone. But that is vastly different from setting up entire divisions directed not at the discovery of new knowledge, but at the changing of certain demographic statistics such as the percentage of women in engineering.

It is entirely possible, but in the nature of things it cannot be proved, that about as many women as want to go into engineering today presently do so. As we said, most legal barriers that kept women out of engineering were gone by 1990, and since then the two professions that are even more prestigious than engineering—law and medicine—have become thoroughly feminized. And the stereotypical engineering image has changed radically from the 1940s, when a clipart drawing of an engineer would depict a rugged guy wearing work boots and toting a transit tripod on one shoulder and a big hammer in his hand. Nowadays, your typical engineer does exactly what I'm doing now—sits at a computer, something that women and men can do equally well.

I agree with Follett that the NSF, along with other federal agencies, will require extensive Congressional action and supervision in order for it to reorient its intentions and priorities. Old habits die hard, and old bureaucrats die harder. But some such sea change may be necessary if we are to avoid a wholesale turn away from government support of science research, which from the 1940s up to at least the 1990s enjoyed the benign support of most citizens. In a democracy, if most people no longer want a thing done by the government, it shouldn't be done, generally speaking. And if the science establishment has betrayed its origins and allowed itself to be corrupted by political winds that inevitably go out of fashion, the day of reckoning we are currently seeing the dawn of may go on longer than we think.

I'm glad there are women in engineering. I miss them when I don't have any in my undergraduate class, which happened last semester. But I think it's time NSF quit trying to move political needles and go back to funding science.

Sources: Andrew Follett's article "How Republicans Can Actually Defund Woke Science" appeared on the National Review website at https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/05/how-republicans-can-actually-defund-woke-science/. I also referred to the Dept. of Labor site at https://www.dol.gov/agencies/wb/data/occupations-stem for women-in-engineering statistics, and the NSF website https://www.nsf.gov/updates-on-priorities for their updated priorities.

Parents and Children: Breaking Down the Technoference Barrier

Mon, 19 May 2025 10:49:00 +0000

No, I never read the word "technoference" before today, either. But according to some sociologists, technoference is what happens when a parent pays more attention to a mobile phone than to their children. And the results are not good.

An article by Clare Morell on the news website The Dispatch points out that even if children don't have mobile phones or screens themselves, their lives are significantly affected when their parents do. A study that compared rates of parental mobile phone use with how well their children do when starting school found that kids whose parents used their phones a lot had deficits in language and interpersonal skills.

Another problem comes when children try to learn new life skills. It turns out that parental "scaffolding"—basic support and encouragement—is vital for children to control their emotions when dealing with new situations. If Mommy is off in cyberspace when Junior is trying to color within the lines for the first time, she can't provide the reassurance and guidance which, however trivial-seeming for the parent, can make an earthshattering difference for the child.

I'm pretty sure I remember the first time I rode a bike without training wheels. And it was when my father held the bike for me to get on, and then gave it enough of a shove that it would stay upright no matter what I did. Suddenly I could make it go on my own. This was about three decades before the advent of mobile phones, and while my upbringing was not without problems, mobile-phone technoference wasn't one of them.

Full disclosure: I have never been a parent, so I can't speak about childraising from personal experience. But there is one childraising principle I have observed in action over many years, which the article terms "over-imitating." I prefer to state it as follows: "Whatever Daddy (or Mommy) does is OK." This is a deep and profound, even subconscious, tendency in children to accept, embrace, and imitate whatever they see their parents doing. It plays out in everything from such minor habits as habitual finger-tapping to major malfeasances such as adultery. And I'm sure it applies to mobile-phone use as well.

One interesting study found that even babies are affected by a parent using a mobile phone within the child's field of view, even if the baby doesn't need anything in particular at the time. If you observe the expressions of people while they are looking at their phones, it's a kind of passive, zoned-out look that showed up a lot when a sociologist decided to install a camera on a TV and take pictures of people as they watched television. The researchers call this a "still face." It turns out that showing a still face to an infant isn't good, because it gives the infant no positive feedback or assurance that the mother or father is paying attention to the child. This passive look often inspires the infant to cry or otherwise try to attract attention. If Mommy stays glued to her phone, Junior escalates provocations until he gets some kind of reaction, which by this time will probably be a negative one.

Yet another study showed a correlation between a four-times-greater incidence of depression in teenagers and high rates of mobile phone use among parents.

Now, as we should constantly remind ourselves when reading about research like this, correlation isn't necessarily causation. The crisis in reproducibility of scientific studies means that statistical methods are often misapplied in an illogical way. That is a topic for another blog. But even if we disregard all the statistics and simply ask, "Can a parent's mobile-phone use get in the way of their attempts to be a good parent?" I think the answer is obvious. Of course it can, but what can we do about it?

Morell has a number of recommendations, some of which are easier to do than others. She suggests having a "phone box" to put phones in at the end of the day, so parents and children are both freed up to interact without distractions. How one would define the day's end is up to the individual, but it sounds like a good idea. I have a phone you can actually turn off, and I set it in my study and leave it there overnight.

She suggests putting away your phone whenever you are with your children. For some people, especially single moms, that is a big ask. But at least consciously setting aside a no-phone interval each day might be a good idea. The only time these days I am around parents with a lot of children is when I go to church, and except for the stray ringtone during the sermon, you might otherwise think that my church is a phone-free zone. That's an unusual situation, though, and I have no idea what these parents do with regard to mobile phones when they are home with their kids. A good many of them homeschool, however, and you can bet the phone is put away during those times.

Morell says she uses something called a Wisephone. A visit to that firm's website shows that their product has "no social media, no explicit content, no web browser" but can do basic stuff like maps, calling for rides, playing music, dealing with money, and checking the weather. That's two or three more things than I use my phone for, so I'm ahead of her already in that regard.

I'm also in sync with her recommendations to go analog (or at least not use your phone for everything): get a separate alarm clock (check), use a paper calendar (check), use a real camera instead of your phone camera (check), and use a notepad and pen (check). I claim no particular virtue for doing these things: I just never quit doing them when I got a mobile phone. Others may have more of a problem transitioning.

So even if kids don't have mobile phones themselves, their parents' phones can cause problems. Parenting is a huge responsibility, and my metaphorical hat is off to anyone who attempts it. Just be aware that your smartphone may get in the way of being the best parent you want to be.

Sources: Clare Morell's article "Parents, Put Down the Phones" is on the (paywall-protected, unfortunately) website The Dispatch, which some may be able to access at https://thedispatch.com/article/parenting-phones-screen-time-kids-development-imitation/. I also referred to the Wisephone website at https://wisephone.com/.

Did Renewables Contribute to Spain's Blackout?

Mon, 12 May 2025 10:50:00 +0000

That's the question that still has not been definitively answered as of today (May 11), almost two weeks after the April 28 power outage that plunged much of Spain and Portugal into darkness for almost 24 hours. Why could renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power have contributed to the blackout? The answer isn't simple, but as more and more countries derive more of their energy from renewables, it's a question that deserves examination.

What we do know about the blackout is this. The Iberian Peninsula is a little like Texas in that its power grid is nearly autonomous, with only small interties to the rest of the European continent. A little after noon, some "oscillations" appeared in the grid and were "detected and mitigated." Operating a large power grid is a delicate balancing act in which the fluctuating demand must be met by appropriate generating capacity at all times. And across the entire grid, all the generating plants must produce power in synchronism at a rate of 50 Hz (in Europe—60 Hz in the U. S.).

A prime indicator of the health of the grid is how close the grid's frequency is to its nominal frequency. The grid is like a symphony orchestra in which all the instruments are tuned to the same pitch. The entire system is designed for optimum efficiency at 50 Hz, and as little as only 1 Hz deviation above or below that can lead to serious problems and ultimately damage or destroy millions of dollars' worth of transformers and other gear. So grid operators have both automatic and manually backed-up systems to keep the grid frequency near its nominal value, and to vary the amount of power being generated as demand varies.

For reasons that are not yet clear, at 12:33 PM three generators tripped off the grid. This meant that the system lost 2.2 GW of capacity instantly. In response, the grid frequency began to fall from 50 Hz, and when it reached 48 Hz, automatic protection circuitry began to disconnect more generators from the grid, leading to a cascade that shut the entire system down in a matter of seconds.

Once a thing like this happens, it takes hours to communicate among the now-isolated generating plants and organize an effort to re-synchronize and reconnect parts of the grid in a way that will not lead to further problems. In the meantime, most communications and transportation systems in Spain and Portugal were severely crippled, thousands of people had to be evacuated from electric trains, and seven people died as a result of the blackout.

At the time of the grid failure, over half of the grid's power was being produced by solar, wind, or hydroelectric plants. Assuming most of this was wind or solar, the grid was therefore missing something that power grids used to have an abundance of: "spinning reserve." And spinning reserve is an important way that grids can stabilize themselves.

Simply put, spinning reserve is the energy stored in the mechanical momentum of the turbines and generators used to produce power at nuclear, fossil-fueled, and hydropower plants. A generator-turbine shaft, armature, and blades weighing many tons cannot be stopped on a dime, and the fact that it's spinning, typically at thousands of revolutions per minute, means that there's a lot of energy stored in it.

When a sudden increase or decrease in load occurs on such a generator, the spinning reserve means that its speed (which directly determines its frequency) does not change instantly. If the load increases (as it would if generators elsewhere suddenly tripped off the line), the spinning reserve automatically keeps the frequency from dropping instantly. This factor can be used in designing stability into the grid, and historically spinning reserve has been an asset in making grids stable.

When renewable sources began to be connected to power grids, the approach taken by designers was that the renewables would always be a small fraction of the total power generated. So when they designed the devices to interface solar or wind power to the grid (called "inverters") they simply designed them to follow whatever frequency the grid was producing at the time. Electronics has no mechanical momentum, so renewable sources can adjust their frequency instantaneously. As long as they represent a small fraction of the total power generated, like a few monkeys riding on the back of an elephant, the fact that renewables do not contribute spinning reserve was not important. The monkeys go where the elephant goes, and they're just along for the ride.

But reports say that at the time of the blackout, the fraction of power being made by renewables was on the order of 58%. So the monkeys outweighed the elephant in this case. Engineers have studied and modeled these situations, and presumably know what they're doing, but there is an undercurrent of suspicion that under some circumstances, having too large a fraction of renewables on a power grid that is isolated, like the Iberian Peninsula's is, can lead to trouble. The question is, was last month's blackout an example of the kind of trouble renewables can cause? We will have to wait on the results of the investigation to find out.

There is a way to make renewable power sources act like they have spinning reserve, but it's not cheap. That energy has to come from somewhere, and either the renewable source has to hold its maximum capacity in reserve (which is wasteful), or you have to add capacity in the form of batteries. But with suitable inverter design, a wind or solar source with batteries can be made to act like it has a certain amount of spinning reserve.

If we find that the blackout was in fact worsened by inverter-based renewables, something like the battery-spinning-reserve idea may need to be implemented as a safety precaution. There are other good reasons to put battery storage on grids with a lot of renewable energy. A windless night produces no wind or solar power, and it's handy in such cases to have energy stored up somewhere that you can use in such situations.

Batteries are improving steadily and may come in very handy to avert the next blackout. If it turns out that renewables contributed to the problem, we have a solution, but it's not going to be cheap.

Sources: I referred to an article in Wired at https://www.wired.com/story/what-caused-the-european-power-outage-spain-blackout/, an article on batteries supplying spinning reserve at https://www.renewableenergyworld.com/energy-storage/battery/spinning-reserve-displacement-using-batteries-for-a-more-efficient-and-cleaner-way-to-back-up-power/, and the Wikipedia article "2025 Iberian Peninsula blackout."

She Did Not Turn Left

Mon, 05 May 2025 11:43:00 +0000

Those are the last words of a New York Times story on the helicopter-airline crash that killed 67 people last Jan. 29 in Washington, DC. While there is no official word yet from the National Transportation Safety Board on the cause of the crash, the in-depth Times report has material from interviews with numerous experts, and pieces together the final minutes leading up to the crash. As with so many avertable tragedies, this one combined multiple factors, each one of which might have not been fatal by itself. But the combination proved deadly, and as is often the case in modern aviation accidents, human error played a large role.

The basics of what happened are well known. American Airlines Flight 5342 from Wichita, Kansas to Washington's National Airport was on its final approach to land when an Army UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter flying a training mission collided with it short of the runway. All 64 people on the commercial flight died in the crash, as did the helicopter pilot, Capt. Rebecca M. Lobach; the instructor, Chief Warrant Officer 2 Andrew Loyd Eaves, and the third member of the crew, Staff Sgt. Ryan Austin O'Hara.

When I blogged on this crash shortly after it happened, we knew that the helicopter was flying higher than FAA regulations allowed. At the location of the crash, it was supposed to be lower than 200 feet, but the crash occurred at an altitude of about 300 feet. Also, the helicopter was equipped with an improved navigational aid called ADS-B, which updates air traffic controllers every second on the aircraft's location, but the device was not turned on at the time.

The Times article adds important information about the interaction among the air traffic controller, Capt. Lobach, and Warrant Officer Eaves. The main purpose of the flight was to practice evacuating important members of the Federal government in time of emergency. As a part of that practice, it was customary not to operate easily-detected navigational equipment such as the ADS-B. The helicopter had a standard radar transponder on board which was operational, but it provides updated location information only about every five to twelve seconds, according to the report.

Such a time gap between updates could have been critical. For one thing, the runway that Flight 5342 landed on that night was seldom used, and it's possible that Capt. Lobach had never been in a situation where she had to avoid a plane landing on that runway. For another thing, it seems that critical information the controller tried to tell the helicopter crew may have been "stepped on" when the crew pressed their push-to-talk button to transmit words to the controller.

A third factor is that a few minutes before the crash, after being alerted that there was a commercial flight nearby, the helicopter pilots requested "visual separation" from the controller. This meant basically, "We want to be responsible for avoiding a crash by looking around us and getting out of the way of anything we see in our path."

This relieves the controller from essentially micro-managing the flight's actions, but puts a heavy burden on the pilot to know exactly what is going on and what to do to avoid a collision. At night, with night-vision goggles on, it is quite possible that Capt. Lobach and Warrant Officer Eaves had difficulty seeing the approaching Flight 5342, or at least gaining enough information about its path to avoid the collision.

At about 40 seconds before the crash, when the two aircraft were about a mile apart, the controller asked the helicopter pilots if they had the CRJ passenger jet in sight. He received no response, and then transmitted an order to them to pass behind the jet. Analysis of the recordings indicates that the helicopter crew might have been transmitting at the time and didn't hear this order. The last exchange between Warrant Officer Eaves and the controller came a few seconds later, and affirmed that the helicopter crew had "the aircraft" in sight and wanted to be okayed for visual separation, which was again approved.

Then, the instructor Eaves told the pilot Lobach to turn left, which would have brought the helicopter farther away from the jet's flight path and might have averted the accident. But she kept flying straight, and the collision happened a few seconds later.

No one knows what was going on in the minds of Capt. Lobach and Warrant Officer Eaves in those last few seconds. But some aspects of this tragedy remind me of the crash of Korean Air flight 801 in Guam in 1997. Analysis of the voice recorders in that crash revealed that the captain of the flight evidently became confused about the plane's location. But when the junior-ranked copilot tried to correct him, his suggestions were ignored.

In a training flight, the protocol should be that the student, even if she is a five-star general, for the moment is under the authority of the instructor, even if he is just a warrant officer. It's possible that cultural factors prevented Warrant Officer Eaves from being as forceful as he should have been in telling Capt. Lobach to turn left. And we do not know how deferential Capt. Lobach was feeling at the time, and whether she was alert and cognizant of her surroundings, frozen with fear, or somewhere in between.

But it is already clear that communications broke down in significant ways in the last few critical seconds before the crash. The technology exists to enable pilots to both hear and talk to the controller at the same time. I say that, not knowing the details of what would have to change about the old-fashioned AM VHF cockpit radio system still in use, but I suspect there would be some grumbling on the part of those affected and then they would go along with the change.

Beyond technology, there is the vital issue of prompt and relevant communication among those who can do something to avoid a crash. That didn't happen in this case, and I hope the lessons learned here are applied in every situation where they could help avoid the next accident.

Sources: The New York Times carried the story entitled "Missteps, Equipment Problems and a Common but Risky Practice Led to a Fatal Crash" by Kate Kelly and Mark Walker appeared in the Apr. 27, 2025 edition. I also referred to Wikipedia articles on the 2025 Potomac River mid-air collision and Korean Air Flight 801.

Waymo Comes to Austin

Mon, 28 Apr 2025 11:00:00 +0000

In March, the robotaxi company Waymo announced that it was teaming for the first time with the ride-hailing service Uber to provide rides in Austin, Texas. Waymo traces its roots to a secret project started by Google in 2009, with some key staffers having participated in the 2004 Stanford Self-Driving Car Project. It is now a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., the parent company of Google. Uber, along with Lyft, provides app-based ride-hailing services outside the usual taxi structure. Waymo's driverless taxis operated commercially first in San Francisco, and now provide service in U. S. cities such as Phoenix, Los Angeles, Miami, and now Austin.

Last week, I rode with a friend, who was driving, from north Austin to the University of Texas main campus just north of downtown. Our route went along Burnet Road, which is in many ways the prototypical Austin street: four lanes, a center median in some blocks, all kinds of one-story retail businesses along the way with multiple parking-lot entrances in each block, and fairly heavy traffic.

We pulled up at a red traffic signal, and a few feet ahead of us in the lane to our right were two Waymo driverless cars, one in front of the other. There were no passengers and of course, no driver. They are easy to spot from a distance, even if you can't see whether anyone is in the driver's seat. A thing like a black police gumball on top of the roof spins constantly, as do smaller gizmos on each side of the car, and it bristles with wide-angle camera lenses and less identifiable technology, as well as logos letting you know what it is. The Wikipedia article on Waymo says the vehicles are equipped with 360-degree lidar (light-based radar) with a nearly 1000-foot (300-meter) range, radio-type radars, and an extremely sophisticated AI processing system. Also, some stray comments on a Reddit page indicates there are human "remote monitors" who are responsible for several cars each. So yes, they look completely autonomous, but somewhere in the background there's a human ready to intervene if something unusual happens.

I didn't know all of that as I gazed at a technology that has been on the streets in some form for at least a decade. But I have never actually seen a driverless car that close, let alone two of them.

The car in front was facing the intersection when the red light changed to green, and sure enough, it knew to start going, just like somebody was driving it. This is not a true-confession column, but I have to admit something here. Seeing those driverless cars acting so normal gave me the perverse urge to try to mess them up somehow, to wave a hand in front of one of the cars or something just to see how clever it was. It was only a brief stray thought, but its strangeness struck me. I am normally a live-and-let-live type of person, not given to vandalizing-type ideas. But there is a radical difference between reading about things and seeing them for yourself.

Philosophers make a distinction between two types of knowing. Knowing by description is what you would learn about riding a bicycle, say, by reading a book on how to ride a bicycle. You might understand the physics of bicycles, you could answer detailed questions on bicycle dynamics, but if you had never actually sat on a bicycle or tried to ride one, your knowing about bicycles is only the first kind of knowledge: knowledge by description.

On the other hand, knowing by acquaintance requires a personal physical encounter with the thing known. Up to last Wednesday, I had known a lot about autonomous vehicles. I have blogged about them probably dozens of times. But all my knowledge was by description, not acquaintance.

Seeing those two Waymo cars in the flesh, so to speak, was qualitatively different than any amount of reading or watching YouTube videos. I was right there, not twenty feet away from them, and if something happened to go wacky with one of them, I could be personally in danger.

Not that Waymo has had too much trouble along those lines. Wary of how one spate of bad publicity can ruin an entire project, Waymo has been very cautious in choosing its operating locations and in keeping a nearly spotless safety record so far. According to Wikipedia, the only fatal accident involving a Waymo driverless car happened when an unoccupied Waymo vehicle was involved in a multiple-car pileup set off by a Tesla driver who was going 98 MPH before the crash. Waymo can hardly be blamed for that.

Austin is a good choice for Waymo's initial teaming with Uber, as it is full of technophiles who will take a driverless Uber ride just for the thrill of it. The annual international futurefest called SXSW (originally South by Southwest) was held in Austin in March, and I'm sure many of the out-of-town participants were tickled to get Uber rides in Waymos, which was probably one of the main reasons they were rolled out that month.

There are still some people like me who will have generally negative feelings towards robotaxis. For one thing, you're not going to have the huge variety of interpersonal experiences that riding in a human-driven cab provides.

Just for example, a couple of weeks ago I flew to Lawrence, Kansas, and the closest airport was in Kansas City, a 50-mile-or-so drive away. The place I was visiting hired a limo service to pick me up at the airport, and for the hour or so drive to Lawrence I had a fascinating conversation with a native of Veracruz, Mexico, who was as full of local and international tourist-type info as he was curious about various exotic places I'd been.

Waymo isn't going to do that. All you're greeted with is an empty car with a few control buttons, and no conversation. At least not yet, but maybe they'll add a Cab-Chat app for people who miss the old days of human drivers.

Sources: The Associated Press carried an article describing Waymo's teaming with Uber in Austin at https://apnews.com/article/uber-waymo-robotaxis-austin-texas-988aba46988e649be8cf59979587a8e5. I found a reference to human monitors of Waymo cars at https://www.reddit.com/r/waymo/comments/1f3ur68/current_waymo_revenue_per_car/?rdt=36096. I also referred to the Wikipedia article on Waymo and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/knowledge-acquaindescrip/.

Here's Why Your Girlfriend Will Eventually Get Bored During Sex

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 21:26:52 +0000

Don't shoot the messenger here

7 Ways to Make Your Girlfriend Feel Less Self-Conscious In Bed

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 21:00:08 +0000

If you give her what she needs, trust us— she'll return the favor

Calvin Klein's Latest Sweater ... Is Different. We Can't Put Our Nipples on It

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 20:47:57 +0000

It's not exactly office appropriate

Could Tattoos Actually Give You Cancer? Honestly, Science Doesn't Know

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 20:35:51 +0000

Research suggests that there might be a correlation between tattoo ink and cancer— but don't freak out just yet

Can Watching Too Much Porn Give You Erectile Dysfunction?

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 20:29:45 +0000

We spoke to two experts about the scary possibility

Daily Deal: Cook the Juiciest Steak of Your Life With This Sous Vide

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 20:13:28 +0000

Way cheaper than tuition at Le Cordon Bleu

Actor Frank Vincent Passes Away Due to Open Heart Surgery Complications

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 20:00:04 +0000

The critically-acclaimed mob drama star was 80 years old

Light Up Your Arms, Chest, and Abs With This TRX Exercise

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 19:23:38 +0000

The pushup to pike is ideal for multitaskers

No, Wonder Woman Is Not Based on a Threesome

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 19:08:57 +0000

A new movie suggests that the superhero was inspired by a steamy three-way— but the truth is a lot more complicated than that

This Victoria's Secret Model's Muay Thai Workout Will Leave You Drenched

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 18:41:24 +0000

You'll work your abs in ways you never have before

There's Actually a Way to Reverse Diabetes—Here's How You Can Do It

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 17:46:58 +0000

The condition doesn't have to be permanent for everyone, research suggests

Danica Patrick's 33-Minute Living Room Workout Looks Exhausting as Hell

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 17:34:08 +0000

The NASCAR star shows off her fitness in a living room workout she posted on Instagram

'I Tried Eating An Avocado Every Day For A Week—Here's What Happened'

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 17:25:33 +0000

It was harder than it sounds

Meet the Man Who Tattooed His Penis and 90 Percent of His Body to Help Fight His Chronic Pain

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 16:59:36 +0000

"Tattboy" has spent over $80,000 on his ink

The Cadillac CT6 Plug-In Hybrid is Green Luxury

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 16:48:55 +0000

What you should know about Cadillac's new hybrid

Could a Sex Robot Actually Kill You?

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 16:33:47 +0000

A viral news story claims hackers could train fembots to kill us in our sleep— but don't believe the hype

The 16 Coolest Leather Backpacks for Fall

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 16:16:03 +0000

Perfect for a daily commute or a weekend adventure—and everything in between

5 Celebrity Chefs Reveal the Key to Perfectly Fluffy Scrambled Eggs

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 16:05:23 +0000

Just don't over-whisk them

Here's Why WWE's "Big Show" May Finally Have to Call It Quits

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 15:39:29 +0000

Due to a lingering injury, the seven-time champion isn't sure what the future holds

What Every Germaphobe Should Know

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 15:34:10 +0000

Your quest to avoid pathogens might take you down the wrong path

Selena Gomez Reveals She Underwent a Secret Kidney Transplant Due to Lupus

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 14:55:46 +0000

The singer's battle with the autoimmune disease continues to impact her life

Watch This Giant Cyst Pop Like It Was Shot Out of a Cannon

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 14:50:44 +0000

You can thank Michael Lewis, M.D., for this clip

More Men Are Seeking Help for Eating Disorders Than Ever Before

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 14:09:04 +0000

The number of guys seeking treatment has risen 70 percent between 2010 and 2016

Conor McGregor Says a "Wealth Belly" Is the New Six-Pack—Here's Why We Aren't Buying It

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 13:15:01 +0000

Don't expect the MMA champ to start fighting as a heavyweight anytime soon, either

Male Birth Control Might Be Right Around the Corner, And It Sounds Pretty Damn Cool

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 12:52:58 +0000

Researchers have been talking about male contraception for years, but it actually might be on the horizon