Innehållsförteckning för February 2024 från Reason

I DON’T KNOW whether artificial intelligence (AI) will give us a 4-hour workweek, write all of our code and emails, and drive our cars—or whether it will destroy our economy and our grasp on reality, fire our nukes, and then turn us all into gray goo. Possibly all of the above. But I’m supremely confident about one thing: No one else knows either. November saw the public airing of some very dirty laundry at OpenAI, the artificial intelligence research organization that brought us ChatGPT, when the board abruptly announced the dismissal of CEO Sam Altman. What followed was a nerd game of thrones (assuming robots are nerdier than dragons, a debatable proposition) that consisted of a quick parade of three CEOs and ended with Altman back in charge. The shenanigans…

A FEDERAL CIRCUIT judge wants the Supreme Court to scrap a longstanding test for determining what is cruel and unusual punishment. In an October speech to the Federalist Society, Reuters reported, Judge Thomas Hardiman, appointed by President George W. Bush to the Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit, advocated a “ return to the text and original meaning of the Eighth Amendment” and an end to the “evolving standards of decency” test created by the Supreme Court in the 1950s. In 1958, the Supreme Court ruled that stripping someone’s citizenship for committing a crime violated the Eighth Amendment. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote that, to determine what constitutes cruel or unusual, the Court “must draw its meaning from the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress…

AS CALIFORNIA’S LIEUTENANT governor in 2016, Gavin Newsom supported Proposition 64, the ballot initiative that legalized recreational marijuana in his state. As governor, he acknowledges the “exciting” potential of “psychedelic medicines” to “address mental health.” Yet Newsom dealt blows to both of those causes on the same weekend in October, vetoing bills that would have decriminalized four naturally occurring psychedelics and authorized Amsterdam-style cannabis cafés. Senate Bill 58, sponsored by Sen. Scott Wiener (D–San Francisco), passed the California State Legislature in September by a 43–15 vote in the Assembly and a 21–14 vote in the Senate. The bill, which was similar to a groundbreaking ballot initiative that Colorado voters approved in 2022, would have eliminated criminal penalties for adults 21 or older who use psilocybin, psilocyn, mescaline, or dimethyltryptamine. In…

GENERAL MOTORS I.T. INNOVATION CENTER CHANDLER, ARIZONA General Motors announced in 2013 that it had picked Chandler for the site of its fourth Information Technology Innovation Center, an internal software development facility. The company would invest $21 million and create 1,000 jobs, and in return Chandler promised over $1 million in economic incentives between 2015 and 2017. In August 2023, G.M. announced that it would close the facility, laying off 940 out of 1,029 workers by the end of October. Chandler’s development director told local news that the announcement “came as a complete surprise.” LORDSTOWN MOTORS LORDSTOWN, OHIO Amid the financial crisis in 2009, General Motors (G.M.) received $60 million in tax breaks to expand its Lordstown plant. All the company had to do was keep the plant open through at…

RUSS ROBERTS MOVED from the U.S. to Jerusalem to become president of Shalem College in 2021. He hosts a popular economics podcast, EconTalk. Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe interviewed Roberts on Reason’s YouTube show Just Asking Questions about what it was like in Israel on October 7 when Hamas attacked. Q: What was October 7 like for you in Israel? A: It’s not quite what we expected when we moved here two-plus years ago. But I will say that being here is deeply meaningful, and I’m very glad I’m here. October 7 was a tough day. It was a Saturday, which means that people who keep Jewish law, as I do, do not use their phones or watch television. I first found out what was going on that day when…

CAROLINE CALLOWAY IS not exactly famous for telling the truth. Whether she’s hiring her former best friend to ghostwrite her Instagram captions or peddling a ramshackle collection of plastic flowers and salad bowls in the guise of a “creativity workshop,” the American-at-Cambridge influencer turned performance-art memoirist—propelled to national fame by a New York Magazine exposé written by said former best friend—has made an entire career, and a personal brand, out of gleeful mendacity. Back in 2021, she even sold a $75 skin care product she straightforwardly labeled Snake Oil. So when Calloway announced, several years after returning the six-figure advance for a memoir she never delivered, that she would at last be self-publishing her memoir as a trilogy, starting with Scammer—and that fans could preorder the volume for $65—one could…

In Rutherford County, Tennessee, kids as young as 7 years old were getting thrown in jail for incredibly minor offenses—stealing a football or pulling someone’s hair. Some kids were even jailed for acts that weren’t crimes at all, such as failing to stop an after-school fight. Worse still, the kids were frequently put in solitary confinement, even though that’s explicitly prohibited for children under Tennessee law. Not only were these jailings illegal, but pretty much everyone working in the Rutherford County Juvenile Court knew it—including the county’s sole juvenile court judge, Donna Scott Davenport. In The Kids of Rutherford County, a four-part podcast series from Serial Productions and The New York Times, Meribah Knight examines how so many kids could be unlawfully detained and why it took so long to…

IN NOVEMBER, SPACEX conducted the second unmanned test of Starship, with mixed success. Unlike in the first test, all 33 engines fired and the super heavy booster and Starship spacecraft successfully separated. Thirty seconds after separation, the rocket experienced “rapid unscheduled disassembly” (read: explosion) with the spacecraft following soon after. The company will file a mishap report to the Federal Aviation Administration and may have to wait months for regulatory approval to conduct a third test.…

WHILE SOME NATIONS tremble at the thought of high indebtedness, we Americans bask in the warm, comforting glow of $34 trillion in government IOUs. Why worry about a debt crisis when everyone wants to buy U.S. debt? Those of us who advocate fiscal prudence have been asked that question repeatedly in the past 15 years. We would point to the host of unfunded liabilities looming in our future. They would respond by pointing to the trend of declining interest rates over time. Low rates, they said, meant we should be able to handle interest payments on outstanding debt while growing the economy with smart investments. Indeed, thanks to low interest rates, payments on federal government debt as a share of GDP dropped from more than 3 percent in the early…

“DO I WANT to live in a society where people can be identified secretly and at a distance by the government?” asks Alvaro Bedoya. “I do not, and I think I am not alone in that.” Bedoya, a member of the Federal Trade Commission, says those words in New York Times technology reporter Kashmir Hill’s compelling new book, Your Face Belongs to Us. As Hill makes clear, we are headed toward the very world that Bedoya fears. This book traces the longer history of attempts to deploy accurate and pervasive facial recognition technology, but it chiefly focuses on the quixotic rise of Clearview AI. Hill first learned of this company’s existence in November 2019, when someone leaked a legal memo to her in which the mysterious company claimed it could…

On November 21, 2023, a BBC reporter unearthed a 20-year-old interview in which the pseudonymous street artist Banksy disclosed his first name (Robbie) for the first time. The British graffiti artist is famous around the world for his use of stencils and for his work’s anti-establishment, anti-war themes. A protester tosses not a Molotov cocktail but a bouquet of flowers; a young girl hugs a bomb instead of a teddy bear; a reproduction of Monet’s lily pads is marred by rubbish; the communist leader Che Guevara wears sunglasses with dollar signs over his eyes. Many of these images appear in “The Art of Banksy,” an unauthorized exhibit in downtown London tracing the artist’s career. Notable is a series of ad materials for The Walled Off Hotel, an actually operating lodging…

The subtitle of the cartoonistbiologist husband-and-wife pair Zach and Kelly Weinersmith’s book A City on Mars asks, Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? The answers the couple suggest are “not any time soon,” “maybe/maybe not,” and “definitely no.” It’s a buzzkill of a thesis for anyone with even the remotest sense of wonder and optimism about humanity’s potential future among the stars. If you’re a space nerd at all, parts of the book read as if someone is telling you over and over again that ice cream has calories. But busting space dreamers’ bubble is kind of the idea. The existing field of “space settlement” studies, the authors argue, is hopelessly captured by advocates for the idea. A City on Mars…

THE INTERSTATE COMMERCE Commission (ICC), which existed for about a century before being mercifully put out to pasture in 1995, is one of the best historical examples of how governmental attempts at regulating the economy can backfire. Created with the stated goal of protecting consumers from the competitive interests of Gilded Age railroad barons, the ICC was quickly captured by the very special interests it sought to control, then helped entrench a railroad cartel. At the height of its powers, the ICC tried to limit the use of trucks for hauling freight (an effort that thankfully failed) and used its influence to have a critic of the railroad monopoly committed to an asylum. Naturally, some senators see the ICC as the ideal model for a new agency aimed at regulating…

WE LIVE IN boom times for vegan alternatives, with new plant-based meat and dairy products seemingly constantly cropping up at grocery stores nationwide. While the momentum around particularly ambitious meat alternatives has cooled in the past year or so, there’s still steady growth in the market for vegan protein and dairy alternatives, and even a moderately stocked grocery store is likely to have dozens of plant-based goodies. The ability to enjoy delightfully creamy ice cream or savory meat dishes without animal cruelty is a boon for my conscience—and my appetite. Capitalism wins again! In my experimental vegan household, we’ve tried just about every exciting (and weird) vegan product you can name. Here are my favorites. GUILT-FREE TUNA It might sound weird, but the food I’ve missed the most since giving…

“I’M UNDER NO illusion that humanity will completely eradicate the racial tribal instinct or racism or bigotry itself. But I feel that colorblindness is the North Star that we should use when making decisions,” argues Coleman Hughes, a writer and podcaster who specializes in race, ethics, and public policy. Hughes’ forthcoming book, The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America, calls for returning to the original ideals of the American civil rights movement, arguing that “our departure from the colorblind ideal has ushered in a new era of fear, paranoia, and resentment.” After some staffers and audience members declared his recent TED talk “hurtful,” for example, Hughes believes TED deliberately downplayed the online version of the presentation. “TED,” Hughes concluded, “like many organizations, is caught between a faction…

THE NATIONAL RIFLE Association (NRA) “favored tighter gun laws” in the 1920s and ’30s, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote in 2018. But since the 1970s, Kristof complained, the NRA “has been hijacked by extremist leaders” whose “hardline resistance” to even the mildest gun control proposals contradicts “their members’ (much more reasonable) views.” Other NRA critics have told the same story. That widely accepted account, U.S. Air Force historian Patrick J. Charles argues in Vote Gun, is “based more on myth than on substance.” In reality, he shows, the NRA’s fight against gun control dates back to the 1920s. But in waging that battle, the organization tried to project a reasonable image by presenting itself as open to compromise. That P.R. effort, Charles says, is the main source of…

Starfield, the latest role-playing game from Bethesda Softworks, is set in a far future when humanity has moved to the stars. Two rival states dominate. The United Colonies are centralized and bureaucratic but safe and rich. The Freestar Collective is more loosely governed and prone to lawlessness, but merchants and entrepreneurs have more freedom to go about their business. Other forms of governance are always hovering at the fringes, like LIST (the League of Independent Settlers), a ragtag group of settlers who find even Freestar’s political structure too overbearing. They’ve struck out on their own, but they’ve found themselves beset by attacks from lawless rogues. As a LIST farmer explains, “The promise is freedom. True freedom. If you can fend off all the spacers and pirates the settled systems can…