Pun Salad

Christian Schneider proposes a warning label to be slapped on AI innovation: "Caution: May Cause Billionaires." (archive.today link)

Multiply this single well-documented example by the ones we don't know about yet.

At the WSJ, James Freeman notes another voice raised against "digital doomsayers": Bezos, Billionaires and the Age of AI Abundance. He quotes extensively from Bezos's recent CNBC interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin, and here's a small excerpt:

It seems that, beyond the transitory headlines, the real story these days is whether America will continue to be innovative, or let fear, uncertainty, and doubt prevail.

Also of note:

• Good advice. I've mentioned the feeble protests made at New York University against their commencement speaker, Jon Haidt. He's put the text of his address up at After Babel: Treasure Your Attention. I like the opening:

  NYU began holding commencement ceremonies here in Yankee Stadium in 2009. Since then, graduates have heard from prime ministers, presidents, Supreme Court justices, movie stars, civil-rights crusaders, and Taylor Swift. So I know what you’re all thinking: Finally, they brought in a social psychologist!

  Perhaps that’s why over the past few weeks, as I’ve thought about what I might say to all of you, I’ve felt grateful. I’ve felt excited. But most of all, I’ve felt a strong sense of responsibility. Because I am part of NYU. I love this university, and I love the students that I have the privilege to teach. That’s why I feel a strong responsibility to do my small part to make this the great and memorable day that all of you, and your families, deserve.

  I think it's pretty good! Check it out.

• I suspect I know at least one reason. At the Daily Economy, Matt Zwolinski purports to explain Why Libertarianism Keeps Splintering.

  Is libertarianism cracking up? Pick almost any contested political issue of the moment, and you’ll find prominent self-identified libertarians on opposite sides of it. On immigration, the Cato Institute’s Ilya Somin has spent the last several years arguing that libertarian principles require something close to open borders. Lew Rockwell, founder of the Mises Institute, has spent the same years arguing that they require the opposite. On Israel and Gaza, Walter Block has been an unabashed defender of Israel’s military operations on libertarian grounds; Dave Smith, working from what he takes to be the same principles, has been an equally vocal critic.

  On the larger question of whether libertarianism should renew its old fusionist alliance with cultural conservatism, Reason‘s Stephanie Slade has made a careful and sympathetic case for fusionism — including in a forthcoming book of that name; her colleague Elizabeth Nolan Brown has been a consistent voice for the more “libertine,” socially liberal version of the tradition. None of these disputes is between a “real” libertarian and an impostor. Each is between recognized, self-identified libertarians who reach opposite conclusions about what libertarian principles require. Are these still the same movement?

  Matt was one of the contributors to the "Bleeding Heart Libertarians" website a few years back. He makes a pretty solid point about what kind of a beast "libertarianism" is (or should be):

  … [L]ess as conclusions deduced from a single axiom, more as provisional positions arrived at through careful thinking about particular issues, with libertarian principles as one important input among others. On some questions that thinking will yield confident conclusions. On many it will yield humility. That, I’ve come to believe, is the stance that actually follows from taking libertarian principles seriously, once you see that they were never powerful enough to do the work that ideological certainty requires of them.

  Not for the first time, I'll mention that all the political parties, including the Libertarian Party, seem dedicated to not following this advice.

• And also relying on DoorDash-delivered takeout. At Reason, Ari Shtein describes another outrage: America's Highway Fund Is Running Out of Money. Congress Wants To Spend New Funds on Not Fixing Highways.

  As the national debt rises ever higher, Congress is gearing up to pass an enormous infrastructure spending bill.

  Earlier this week, the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee released the BUILD America 250 Act. The sprawling 1000-page bill combines some hits—including provisions to streamline environmental reviews of infrastructure projects—with some obvious misses.

  Lawmakers claim that the bill would strengthen the Highway Trust Fund, which pays for both road maintenance and mass transit investments, by levying a new registration fee on electric vehicles (E.V.) and plug-in hybrids. But Marc Scribner, senior transportation policy analyst at Reason Foundation (the nonprofit that publishes this site), tells Reason that it "won't come close to eliminating the revenue-outlay gap," since the bill fails to rein in the "irresponsible spending" that has doomed the fund to insolvency by 2028. Scribner's assessment seems to be shared by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which finds that although the E.V. fee could raise around $30 billion in the next decade, "the Highway Trust Fund will remain severely out of balance."

  My own CongressCritter, Chris Pappas, is a proud member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. Which means he probably bears an above-average responsibility for this lousy outcome.

• RIP, RCP8.5. Roger Pielke Jr. notes the MSM's misguided coverage of the demise of climate-change doomsday scenarios, and thinks the "experts" are trying out a Jedi mind trick: These are Not the Droids You are Looking For.

  Two weeks ago I wrote about the most significant development in climate science in decades: the international committee responsible for producing the scenarios adopted by the IPCC formally retired RCP8.5, SSP5-8.5, and SSP3-7.0 — labeling them “implausible.” Last week I documented the near-total silence that greeted the announcement from the English-language mainstream press.

  Then President Trump posted about RCP8.5 on social media, calling it “WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!” (just about the only accurate part of his post!).

  Within 48 hours, the New York Times, Washington Post, Bloomberg, AP, and Carbon Brief and others published on the scenarios. The main motivation for the coverage centered on Trump, not the new scenarios.

  Today, as a follow up to my post noting that there was almost no English language coverage of RCP8.5 RIP, I take a closer look at this first wave of mainstream English language media reports.

  In a nutshell: The overwhelming framing of the “climate beat” is that there is really nothing to see here, and to the extent that there is, what we are witnessing reflects the incredible success of climate policy. Right wing media has focused more on the politics, emphasizing the scenario evolution as a “win” for President Trump.

  Roger does an admirable job of documenting the lazy and irresponsible job the MSM performed in covering this story accurately and fairly.