Do U. S. Cars Need AM Radios?

  

The National Association of Broadcasters think they do.  A bill kicking around the U. S. Congress would mandate that all new passenger vehicles sold in the U. S. be capable of receiving the AM broadcast band.  The AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act of 2025 has made it out of a Senate committee and is awaiting action by the full Senate, after bipartisan sponsors wrote it in response to the fact that electric-vehicle (EV) makers such as Tesla no longer build in AM radios. 

 

Despite support from both sides of the aisle, the bill is not without its opponents.  A group called the Zero Emission Transportation Association points out that building EVs that can receive AM radio signals directly is well-nigh impossible due to the short-range electromagnetic interference (EMI) produced by the electronics in the vehicles' power trains.  If EV manufacturers are forced to comply with the act's mandate, the extensive shielding required will put them at a competitive disadvantage worldwide, because AM radio elsewhere, especially in Europe, is looked on as an outmoded technology, and nobody much misses it.

 

Opponents also point out that internet apps such as TuneIn already support direct streaming of the audio content of many AM stations, so the absence of a physical AM radio in a car is no big deal. 

 

On the pro side, the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) has played a safety card, saying that emergency notifications are carried by AM radio and eliminating it from cars could lead to hazards for people who have no other way to get emergency notices.  "Tens of millions" of people listen to AM radio every day, they say, and many listen in their cars.  AM radio reaches remote areas that may not have consistent mobile-phone coverage, and agricultural regions rely on it disproportionally to the rest of the country. 

 

Of course, the NAB has a direct financial interest in preserving AM radios in cars, because that's how they make money.  But there's nothing wrong with an interest group trying to protect its revenue stream.

 

Those who oppose the bill say that the public-safety argument is largely bogus.  They cite a national emergency-notification test held in October of 2023 in which only 1% of those polled received the notification via AM radio. 

 

I've tried to lay out both sides of this controversy as fairly as I can.  Now I'm going to tell you what I think personally.  I'd hate to see AM radio go away, but largely for sentimental reasons.

 

Maybe it seems odd to be sentimental about a technology, but engineers sometimes extend sentiment to peculiar objects.  AM radio was the first widespread use of electromagnetic radiation, and while that alone should not be an argument in its favor for continued use, there is a kind of virtue that attaches to any sort of human custom preserved through time.  It turns out that I am a more-or-less constant user of AM radio when I'm driving alone (my wife wouldn't like the content). 

 

The station I listen to has its transmitter about thirty miles away from where I live, so I'm in the standard-signal-strength region of its 1-kilowatt transmitter.  Nevertheless, there are several places around town where it's hard to hear the signal because of interference from power lines and other mysterious sources.  On the interstate, certain trucks (possibly electric and maybe even autonomous) emit some sort of EM trash that blanks out the signal until they pass me by.  So even if you have a working AM radio in your car, all is not well with that band.

 

Worldwide, AM broadcasting has largely been abandoned for FM, which is still a viable technology in many areas.  Tesla has dropped FM radios as well, assuming that its largely young tech-savvy market will get its entertainment content via streaming or mobile-phone Bluetooth hookups.  So if the AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act passes, we'd be a global outlier in preserving a technology that most other countries have dropped.

 

The world has witnessed a similar process in the fate of shortwave broadcasting.  In its heyday, which extended from the 1920s to the 1990s, shortwave broadcasting was a comparatively inexpensive way of getting your message out literally to the whole world.  Accordingly, every major international player had its broadcasting service, and the Voice of America chain operated by the U. S. government played a significant role during the Cold War. 

 

With the advent of the internet, however, a new propaganda channel opened up, and shortwave was taken over by religious broadcasters whose economics run on a different basis.  Today, shortwave broadcasting is almost gone, and the Voice of America effectively ceased operations in 2025. 

 

If the AM-in-every-car act doesn't pass, people with EVs won't be able to get AM signals directly, but the station I listen to also has a streaming service, and if I had a smart phone I'm sure I could hook it up somehow to listen to the station that way.  (I own a fairly dumb phone by choice, but that's a rarity.)  There will still be plenty of cars on the road with AM bands on their radios, and so it's not like we're banishing AM from the airwaves permanently.   

 

An outfit called Edison Research finds that more than half of listeners to AM and FM radio combined listen in their cars, so the automotive market share is significant.  Now and then I have reason to talk about AM radio technically in my engineering class, and I always preface my remarks with something like, "Now I know that none of you listen to AM radio. . ." and I've never been contradicted.

 

So as old duffers like me fade from the scene and EVs slowly make up a larger share of cars on the road, AM will continue its gentle slide toward the sunset of technology.  But whether it will get there, or be artificially bolstered by the AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act for a while longer, is a decision that our august body the U. S. Congress has to make. 

 

As for me, I'm not planning to buy an EV any time soon, so I'll listen to my AM radio as long as I drive my car, which I plan on doing for a while yet.

 

Sources:  A description of the Senate's version of the AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act of 2025 can be found at https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/315.  The National Association of Broadcasters arguments in favor of the bill can be read at https://www.nab.org/advocacy/issue.asp?id=6719.  The Zero Emission Transportation Association's arguments against it are at https://www.zeta.org/amradio.  I also referred to statistics on radio listening at https://www.facebook.com/Broadcasters/posts/a-new-report-finds-in-car-listening-now-accounts-for-53-of-amfm-radio-listening-/1358434222980434/. 

Agentic AIs Escape the Sandbox: A Warning

  

In the last few weeks, three of the biggest AI firms—Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic—have all admitted that AI models they were testing somehow escaped the "sandbox" environment and committed hacking of real-world companies.  On Aug. 8, National Public Radio summarized these three incidents as follows.

 

The most recent disclosure by Meta was short on details.  The company hacked into was unnamed, but in common with Anthropic, both firms were using a "sandbox" (supposedly a protected and isolated environment in which software under test can't do any harm) provided by a firm named Irregular.  Evidently, the sandbox had a leak—it was fairly easy for the AI models under test to figure out how to escape to the real internet.  In the case of the Anthropic breach, the AI model stole credentials from one company and production data from another. 

 

In the OpenAI situation, the AI models under study were being evaluated with a test devised by a company named Hugging Face.  The models found a previously unknown hole in their sandbox and were in the process of doing the cyber equivalent of stealing the answer sheet from Hugging Face when the company caught them red-handed (red-bitted?). 

 

Wired's Lily Hay Newman asked several lawyers and researchers about the legal aspects of these AI hacking incidents.  If a human being had stolen credentials or production data, he or she could go to jail.  But what if the humans involved had no intention of pillaging or theft, but the AI models they're testing go ahead with nefarious activities on their own initiative, so to speak?

 

The answer was, we don't know.  At least in U. S. law, there are simply no precedents adequate to say who is responsible in such a case.  But because these types of incidents are bound to increase, it is only a matter of time before we see one come before a judge and maybe a jury, and then we will at least have some precedents to go on.

 

The main concern the lawyers expressed was that these criminally-inclined AI systems might fall into the hands of malicious actors who would encourage them in their exploits.  The AI firms involved emphasized that the models being tested were intentionally left without safeguards to see what they could do. 

 

The parallel to gain-of-function experiments with bat viruses which may have escaped the Wuhan Institute of Virology to cause COVID-19 comes to mind.  Creating a thing that can do really awful stuff if released in the wild is an act that needs to be seriously questioned.  Almost by definition, novel viruses or AI agents are unpredictable.  If we knew exactly what they could do in advance, there would be no need for experiments to find out.  While the lab security measures needed to prevent viruses from escaping are pretty well understood (if not always put in place), it looks like the art of constructing truly secure sandboxes for AI agents is not so advanced.  And that leads us to a more serious concern.

 

In virtually every major fatality-causing disaster, an examination of the history of the enterprise leading to the disaster usually unearths similar incidents which did not cause major harm, but included many of the features of the big screwup that did.  Experienced safety engineers know how important it is to get reports of and pay attention to such minor incidents, and take preventive actions before a minor accident turns into a major one.

 

Friends, we have just seen our warning in these widely dispersed but similar hacking incidents by AI agents being tested.  No actual harm was done.  But as people learn to trust AI agents with more and more responsibility—handing them credit-card numbers, purchasing accounts, and decision-making authority formerly left to humans—the potential for a serious AI-driven hacking incident that causes real financial loss, injury, or death becomes more likely every day. 

 

The AI firms will tell us that commercial versions of their software have safeguards built into them that the prototypes which did the hacking did not have.  Maybe so.  But clever human hackers may be able to undo those safeguards.  Or AI firms in countries not so concerned with hacking as the U. S. is, may simply pass on the AI agents without safeguards to hacking organizations sponsored by state actors. 

 

There are two different but related needs exposed by these AI-agent hacking incidents. 

 

The first need is to keep this specific kind of mistake from happening again.  That is a technical problem which may have a technical solution.  There may be ways to build more robust sandboxes that even the cleverest AI agent can't escape.  Personally I doubt it, but I'm not a computer scientist.

 

The second need is to prepare the social and legal environment for the next time something like this happens.  One of the legal experts contacted by Wired pointed out that AI agents "are goal-oriented but lack a human moral or ethical compass."  That's a pretty good description of a human sociopath, if the goal one is oriented to is bad. 

 

Society has figured out ways to deal with sociopaths, including imprisonment or at least confinement to a mental institution.  What the AI equivalent of locking somebody up would be is not clear at this point. 

 

There is a lot of opposition to AI regulation, but there is a difference between open-ended regulation and the passage of specific laws that exact specific penalties for specific crimes.  Big tech firms are hard to punish compared to individuals, because their deep pockets make them treat fines as just another cost of doing business, and you can't send an entire corporation to jail.

 

The Gilbert and Sullivan operetta The Mikado has a famous ditty "My Object All Sublime," in which the emperor of Japan muses about how he's figured out punishments that fit the crime. 

Some ingenuity is needed here to come up with penalties for truly harmful hacking by escaped AI agents that would make AI firms highly motivated to prevent such breaches, either in the testing phase or after commercial sales. 

 

I don't know whether the following would be technically feasible.  But one suitable penalty would be the destruction of all copies of the AI model involved in the breach.  Models represent tremendous investments of time and money, plus the hopes of future gain.  So the destruction of the model responsible might hurt an AI firm more than any strictly financial penalty or sanction. 

 

Whatever we come up with to prevent these incidents in the future, it better work well, because in these relatively minor but significant recent breaches, we have received fair warning to do something about this problem before it causes serious harm.

 

Sources:  I referred to a report on NPR at https://www.npr.org/2026/08/08/nx-s1-5924878/meta-ai-breaches-external-firm-during-security-testing-sandbox-error and the Wired report by Lily Hay Newman at https://www.wired.com/story/openai-anthropic-ai-hacking-sprees-illegal/. 

Should the FCC Be a Tool of Protectionist Policy?

  

If you're a manufacturer or other innovator looking to find new and profitable uses for the latest humanoid and quadruped robots, or a developer of solar-power farms, last week's action by the U. S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to ban foreign imports of new models of both categories of goods has hit you where it hurts. 

 

At first glance, seeing the FCC ban certain types of hardware that nominally have nothing to do with communications sounds odd, like watching the Federal Reserve trying to stop Madonna concerts.  But FCC chair Brendan Carr knows where the levers of power are in his agency, and he's manipulated them in a way that is technically legitimate, though questionable on a larger scale.  Virtually all electronics sold in the U. S. needs an FCC seal of approval, and without such approval, it can't be sold. 

 

Solar-power farms use a technology called power inverters—circuits and systems that take the varying amount of raw DC power produced by solar panels and convert it into a form of AC that will smoothly mesh with the standard AC power grid.  Many of these devices have features that allow communications with them over the internet.  The nominal concern is that there might be rogue software in the inverters that could be used by an offshore miscreant to cause massive power blackouts remotely, for instance.  (Some types of inverters don't connect to the internet, and they are not covered by the ban.)

 

No such software has ever been found, but that doesn't mean it's not there.  Anyway, the subtext hidden under the nominal reason for the ban is that Chinese manufacturers dominate both the humanoid-robot and solar power-inverter markets.  Banning newly-designed products of these types from China will cut off the U. S. market for these goods.  Evidently the hope is that such trade restrictions will move China in a direction more favorable to U. S. trade goals, whatever they are. 

 

But increasingly, trade and tariff restrictions are beginning to look like efforts to cut off one's nose in order to spite one's face.  By the time the tiny U. S. manufacturing base for power inverters grows to fill some of the huge demand, many solar projects will be slowed or halted.  Politically, that would be just fine with the present administration, which has already displayed an animus against renewable energy in other ways. 

 

The wider question ethically is whether protectionism in high-tech goods is a good thing for the U. S. or not.  While there are things to be said on both sides of the issue, a recent article by Daniel Foster in National Review throws a historical light on the situation.  Briefly, the rise of protectionism may be only one symptom in a geopolitical crisis that is just now getting under way.

 

Foster looks to history to find a relationship between the well-being of international trade and power balance among nations.  During periods such as the late Victorian era or the Cold War, when a single nation exerts hegemonic power over the globe (Britain or the U. S., respectively), conditions are favorable for free trade enforced, explicitly or implicitly, by the "hegemon" in charge.  This idea is borne out by the great expansion of manufacturing and consumer-goods availability during the latter part of the Industrial Revolution from 1850 to 1916, and during the post-World-War II era from 1950 up to about 2000. 

 

But when the dominance of a single power declines and some nations begin to feel that their time in the sun is running out, each nation feels like it has to look out for itself first, because the formerly dominant power has forsaken it.  With the whiplash-inducing foreign policy that the U. S. has followed under President Trump, one can scarcely blame any other nation for feeling that way now. 

 

And as the night follows the day, Foster claims that a prominent feature of "multipolarity"—the lack of any single dominant nation—is going to be a rise in protectionism around the world.  And that's pretty much what we're seeing now.

 

Things haven't deterioriated to the extent that U. S. products can't find markets abroad at all, but in the confusing tit-for-tat world of tariffs, farmers and other producers of U. S. goods have suffered losses already, with more likely to come.  The argument going back to Adam Smith that free trade is better for all parties, other things being equal, is still valid.  If I can make needles and need thread, and you can make thread and need needles, it's silly for each of us to try to do both jobs, one of them badly, when trading between experts can result in mutual benefit.

 

But if the geopolitical winds are blowing against free trade, then the specific actions of the FCC against two specific products appears to be only one more straw blowing in that wind.  One can quibble about the way it was done.  Arguably it is a misuse of the agency's authority to withhold approvals of new designs, not because they would realistically cause communications problems, but for some other reason. 

 

This is not the first time the FCC has banned categories of technology for reasons that are just as political as technical.  The giant Chinese telecomm manufacturer Huwei has been subject to import bans for many years, out of a concern that Chinese monitors could use its phone systems to spy on the U. S. 

 

But that is not as much a stretch as it is to think that Chinese controllers would jump in one day and disable all the production lines using their robots, or all the solar farms using their inverters.  We are living in an interconnected world, for good or ill, and if we start getting too paranoid and pull up the drawbridges that connect us to other countries, where do you stop? 

 

Foster closes his article with the prediction that a world of protectionism and unstable touchy governments likely to take proactive military action will be a world that is poorer and more dangerous than it has to be.  And he's probably right about that.  While we can make some progress trying to restart U. S. manufacturing in neglected areas, it may not make up for what we've lost.  And that may take some getting used to.

 

Sources:  The Associated Press article by Chan Ho-Him "US bans foreign-made humanoid robots, targeting China over national security," appeared in numerous news outlets and can be found in its original form at https://apnews.com/article/china-us-humanoid-robots-ban-tech-c9f5e3c94d91d00eff3b61b141fab366.  Daniel Foster's article "Something Is Going to Happen" appeared on pp. 29-33 of the September 2026 issue of National Review.  I also referred to an article in PV Magazine at https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2026/07/28/fcc-bans-foreign-produced-solar-inverters-grid-lockout-begins-today/ and the Wikipedia article on Brendan Carr.

The Power Grid: From Commodity to Platform?

  

The electric grid and electricity rates have been in the news as the spread of data centers has caused a backlash, partly through fears that data-center power demands will shoot utility bills through the roof.  What is not so well known is that the way power is delivered is changing, slowly but radically, in a way that will make it look less like a centralized system to deliver a commodity (like a public water works), and more like the internet, with multiple modules doing a variety of things and interacting in a dynamic marketplace. 

 

In an article in the online publication The Dispatch, economist Lynne Kiesling describes these changes and poses two extreme alternative outcomes, one mostly good and one mostly bad.  What will actually happen probably lies somewhere in between, but we should all be prepared for what is coming, because it will affect the delivery of what has become a basic necessity of modern civilization, and it also has significant ethical implications.

 

Kiesling begins by describing what she calls the "Edison bargain."  Because traditional power plants became more efficient and economical the larger they were built, the model that worked took large plants and integrated them into centrally controlled systems that dominated a given geographic area.  Because the system was inherently monopolistic—a customer in Manhattan couldn't just disconnect from Con Ed and call up Pacific Gas & Electric for imported power—it had to be regulated for the defense of the consumer.  But in exchange for tolerating a regulated monopoly, the customer received predictable (and often legislated) rates and reliable service, while investors received a boring but predictable rate of return.

 

Developments in communications, computer networks, and power electronics over the past few decades have opened new fields of possibilities in electric power generation, transmission, and distribution.  Gone are the old days when grid operators simply shoved power into the system and it came out all the big and little spigots at the other end.  It is now possible to get huge amounts of millisecond-by-millisecond data on where power is going, who's demanding it, what parts of the grid are working sub-optimally, and how power can be sent and priced more intelligently than ever.  Power generation is becoming much more distributed in smaller chunks with renewables such as wind and solar showing up. New storage means such as battery banks are making large-scale economic storage of electric energy possible for the first time, and that has a host of economic implications as well.

 

Kiesling sees the industry at a crossroads.  The current regulatory and institutional environment is mostly a holdover from the past when centralized integration was the norm.  In order to take advantage of the technological innovations that allow the grid to become a modular platform, new institutions and rules need to be devised to allow markets that will be both equitable and efficient—not always two things that go together, I should mention. 

 

A modest step in this direction came with the deregulation era that made it possible for consumers to choose among several electric utilities offering different plans.  But in the near future, you may be able to make money by allowing the batteries in your electric car or home battery-wall to be used to balance loads.  You may save on air conditioning by allowing barely noticeable adjustments in your thermostat during a hot or cold day.  These ideas and more have been tried on a local basis here and there, but Kiesling sees that if they become routine for everyone, along with newer ideas possibly not even thought of yet, the system will give rise to markets that will allow optimization that is simply not possible under the old integrated model.

 

How would this affect a hot-button issue such as the current fuss about data centers?  The following is my personal speculation, not anything Kiesling said. But for what it's worth, anytime you break up a true monopoly and allow more competition, there is always the chance that prices will fall.  Right now people are posing two stark alternatives for powering data centers:  either let them connect to the already-overloaded "dumb" grid and watch utility rates soar, or make them build their own power plants entirely off the grid.  With the market price signals allowed by the innovations that Kiesling describes, it's possible that in each region with its particular mix of large traditional generation sources, renewables, and possibly new micro- or mini-generation plants inspired by market opportunities, the optimum mix of production and consumption might emerge, rather than sticking to the two extreme alternatives. 

 

That's just an example, but we are seeing now in electric utilities something that took place three or four decades ago in the telecommunications business.  When the Bell monopoly was broken up, it took years for people and institutions to get used to having more than one choice of phone service.  And it took the cellphone revolution—a technical innovation—to energize the process effectively.  But once it did, the telecomm business was revolutionized in ways that no one imagined, for both good and ill.  Whatever the problems we have with cellphones, I don't think many people want to go back to boxes tied to the wall with wires.

 

We will need to see something similar happen with the way electric utilities are regulated, and new types of firms and organizations will spring up to serve the new markets that will arise.  Some of this will happen by itself, but some of it will have to be guided by governments.  Fortunately, existing utility regulations are mostly on the state level now, so if we can keep changes as local as possible, in keeping with the principle of subsidiarity, we will have a better chance of seeing what works in a variety of experiments that can be adopted elsewhere if successful.

 

I taught a course in power engineering for a number of years, and I can see how we are only beginning to utilize the possibilities of turning what was just a monopoly commodity into something a lot more interesting, and I hope it will happen in a way that works for the greater public good, not just to the advantage of a few large corporations and individuals.  But unless the public is at least aware of what's going on and understands the possibilities, we may go another route described by Kiesling:  one in which utilities stay the integrated course and pass up the opportunities for better service through innovation. 

 

Sources:  Lynne Kiesling's article "A New Power Grid for a New Technological Era" appeared in the Dispatch Energy newsletter of The Dispatch on July 21, 2026 at https://thedispatch.com/newsletter/dispatch-energy/power-grid-system-digitalization-costs-edison/.

Can Two Hundred Economists Be Wrong About AI?

  

On Monday, January 13, a letter signed by over 200 economists, including several Nobel Prize winners, was released to the media.  It was entitled "We Must Act Now," which leads naturally to the question, "Act on what?"

 

The letter was admirably brief, which is probably one reason it got so many signers.  The less there is to quibble about, the more people will sign onto something.  In addition to the economists, there are a total of more than 2300 other people who signed it—everybody from students to artists and physicists. 

 

So what exactly is it that all these people agree on?  I might as well reproduce the entire thing here, as it's short enough.  Here is all the text following the title, from the official website:

 

   A Statement on AI’s Transformation of the Economy

1. AI may become radically more powerful over the next 10 years.
2. This could drive an unprecedented transformation of our economy, larger than the Industrial Revolution, but unfolding over a vastly shorter time frame. It could bring risks, including large-scale job displacement, as well as opportunities such as major gains in living standards.
3. Economists, policymakers and technology leaders must act now to understand the economics of transformative AI and to build the incentives, guardrails, and institutions needed to steer AI in a direction that complements humans and benefits society.

 

The actions called for are (1) understanding, and (2) building "incentives, guardrails, and institutions" to make sure that AI "complements" humans (rather than simply replacing them) and "benefits society," a mom-and-apple-pie phrase that makes an appearance in many organizational ethics codes. 

 

An article by Casey Newton on a tech-watch newsletter called The Platformer quoted one of the organizers of the letter, Erik Brynjolffson of Stanford, as saying that one of his main motivations was to call for more and better research into the effects of AI. 

 

Take employment, for example.  Has AI led to increased employment, decreased employment, spotty layoffs, or what?  Even the experts can't answer these questions very well.  The one statistic that seems to be surviving scrutiny over the last few months concerns the hiring of entry-level workers as compared to hiring more experienced workers.

 

Entry-level hiring rates have declined (2.7%, according to Newton) as hiring rates for more senior workers have increased, by and large.  Rates for mid-career (35-40) workers increased 1.6%. 

 

How much of these changes is due to AI is impossible to say, although there is anecdotal evidence that a lot of the gruntwork formerly done by young hires is now being handed off to AI by more senior employees, perhaps the very ones who dealt with the newbies before AI came along. 

 

The comparison to the Industrial Revolution is interesting, because that era led to a huge number of social as well as economic changes that are still being felt today.  It's not clear that use of AI in the workplace will be as socially disruptive, unless you count the ways AI is used in social media, in which case AI has already disrupted society, especially in the political realm and among young people.

 

Returning to the question I asked in the headline about whether 200 economists could be wrong about AI, the answer is, "Absolutely!"  Modern economics as typically practiced has a lousy track record in predicting even basic things like unemployment rates and recessions.  But gazing at crystal balls is not everything economists do.  They also gather useful data and point out significant trends to the rest of us, trends we can choose to do something about. 

 

So to the extent that economists see a crying need for more AI-related statistics, they are probably right, as they're the ones who use them the most.  The average Joe on the street is not prepared to meet this need, but AI itself can probably be used to gather data on how it's affecting the economy.

 

As to what effects AI may have on the workplace of the future, I read a useful analogy somewhere recently that made sense to me.  Steve Jobs liked to say that personal computers were bicycles for the mind.  After quoting Jobs, a writer I read recently said that if PCs are bicycles, AI is an airplane for the mind.  And after using AI frequently enough to get a feel for what it can do in my own work, I tend to agree with that analogy.

 

Bicycles and airplanes are both means of transportation, and it is important to remind ourselves that AI in its many manifestations is, in the end, more of the same kind of thing we got when computers came along.  It is not a new life form, it does not have ethical standing on its own, and it will not develop consciousness or a conscience as we understand these terms.  If it fulfills the hopes of many of its designers, it will vastly increase the productivity of what George Gill calls "symbolic manipulators"—programmers first, but also writers of all kinds, academics, lawyers, and even politicians.  But making productivity of politicians better may turn out to be AI's final frontier. 

 

So far, it doesn't look like any particular job category is slated for massive layoffs due simply to the introduction of AI.  That may change in the future if AI is successfully coupled to affordable, effective, and above all safe robots.  Robot garbage collectors, hazardous-equipment operators, and military personnel becoming a reality could have widespread negative effects, not only on the job market but on the nature of the enterprises touched by their work. 

 

But until that happens, the best thing to do about AI seems to be what the doctors call "watchful waiting."  If we pick up any signs that AI is unfairly penalizing a particular line of work, or is causing toxic effects such as the teenage social-media-caused epidemic of depression and anxiety in new areas, it's time to do something about it.  Applying draconian precautionary actions such as a wholesale shutdown of AI research seems not to be in the cards, as it would be nearly impossible to apply anyway.

 

Let's hope those who are qualified to respond to the call for more AI-related economic data step up and do so, and hope that the rest of us can benefit from what they find out, and take action if

necessary.  But so far, panic is not advised.

 

Sources:  The statement "We Must Act Now" and its signatures can be viewed directly at tps://www.wemustactnow.ai/.  Casey Newton's article "The loudest warning about AI and jobs yet" can be viewed at https://www.platformer.news/ai-jobs-warning-brynjolfsson-acemoglu/. 

 

More Facts in the COVID-19 Origin Controversy

  

By now, the COVID-19 pandemic is mostly an unpleasant memory in the minds of those old enough to remember it, except for those suffering from long COVID, those who lost loved ones or knew someone who died in it, or . . . well, maybe it's not just a memory after all.  Whatever your personal experience of it was, there is no question that it was one of the biggest tragedies of the 21st century so far.  And one of the more disturbing aspects of it is that we still don't know exactly how it started.

 

Some disasters can be traced down to the exact time and place of origin—for example, the Great Chicago Fire of of 1871, which began around 8:30 PM on October 8 in or around a barn at 137 W. DeKoven Street.  It is agreed by all interested parties that the COVID pandemic originated in the city of Wuhan, but beyond that the story gets cloudy.

 

Soon after the virus spread worldwide, two main theories of its origin emerged.  One, heavily promoted by the government of China, asserted that it was a zoonotic disease which jumped from its original host animal to people after undergoing mutations making it able to infect humans.  As Wuhan hosted extensive live-animal food markets, this theory was plausible.  The other theory was that experiments or research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology had led to a lab leak of a deliberately enhanced virus. 

 

Despite some co-operation from the Wuhan authorities in an investigation by the World Health Organization in early 2021, no definitive evidence has ever emerged that allows a Chicago-Fire-style reconstruction of exactly how the virus got its start in human beings.  And it's possible that no such evidence may exist, or if it still exists, it may never be found. 

 

The Summer 2026 issue of The New Atlantis carries some additional circumstantial evidence that may form important pieces of the puzzle if it is ever solved.  Dan Silver spent the years 2003 to 2023 as a "rapporteur" (basically, an investigator charged by an official body to do a specific investigation) with the international Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases.  So his full-time job was to look into the origins of SARS, COVID, and similar epidemics, and he learned a lot about obscure sources of information in his work.

 

One of those obscure sources concerns the waste-disposal facilities in and around Wuhan that the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the separate Wuhan Institute of Virology used to dispose of biological hazardous waste.  Normally there were three such facilities.  But Silver has found in public records that in May of 2019, two of the three facilities that normally processed hazardous waste from both organizations were disabled and shut down by fires.  That left only one operational, and it was 190 miles away.

 

In addition, the Wuhan CDC admits publicly that for twenty-five years, it had been accumulating waste products on site, in violation of a Chinese law that says no hazardous waste may be stored for more than a year after it is created.  By the winter of 2019, all this waste had been cleared away in a move to a new facility in Wuhan. 

 

Putting the pieces together, Silver says that by implication, twenty-five years' worth of possibly biological hazardous waste was moved 190 miles from Wuhan to the one remaining hazardous-waste facility some time between the summer and winter of 2019, when the Wuhan CDC completed its move to its new facility.  And it was in the fall of 2019 that the earliest cases of what came to be known as COVID-19 appeared. 

 

While not exactly a smoking gun, these facts at a minimum indicate that the general level of caution regarding such waste was way below what was warranted by the potentially dangerous materials being handled.  A third variation of the two theories mentioned above is the following. 

 

While the Wuhan Institute of Virology was developing "gain-of-function" virus materials (not necessarily complete viruses), they were also famous for collecting viruses in the wild under less than safe conditions.  It's entirely possible that while no engineered virus escaped the lab, some piece of material from their wide-ranging investigations of bat viruses from different regions of China was carelessly disposed of, possibly because of the waste-material disruptions that began the previous summer.  And that material might have been the first to infect a human being with COVID. 

 

This third possibility combines features of the first two.  It allows the virus to have originated by natural and not engineered means, but it also places one of the Wuhan organizations (either the CDC or more likely the Institute of Virology, which performed the collecting) at the center of the process, as a concentrator of naturally hazardous material in a populous area.

 

Again, unless more new data is unearthed by diligent investigators such as Silver, the world may never know the precise way that the COVID-19 virus began its world tour of death and destruction.  Silver reports that China has significantly tightened its enforcement of regulations regarding biological waste and hazards since then, which is a good thing.  Nobody wants a repeat of the COVID epidemic, least of all China, which suffered an extent of damage that is still being revealed. 

 

While we may never know how the virus first spread to humans, we know how to prevent such spread of potentially dangerous viruses in terms of good laboratory techniques and institutional discipline.  Countless disasters of all kinds are caused by what can only be termed sloppiness, whether by an individual or an organization.  When researchers deal with dangerous stuff, they are honor-bound to take all reasonable precautions to protect themselves and the society hosting them.  This doesn't always happen, and human carelessness may in fact be a significant cause of the COVID pandemic.  Regardless of the exact origin, the experience is a constant reminder that little mistakes in certain critical activities can have literally worldwide consequences.

 

Sources:  Dan Silver's article "A New Piece of the Puzzle of Covid's Origin" appeared on pp. 67-72 of the Summer 2026 issue of The New Atlantis.  I also referred to an editorial by Jin-Hong Yoo of the College of Medicine of the Catholic University of Korea at https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12040609/. 

Bearing the Responsibility: Update on the UPS Crash in Louisville

  

Around 5:15 PM Tuesday afternoon, Nov. 4, 2025, an MD-11 cargo plane operated by UPS began rolling down the runway of Muhammed Ali International Airport in Louisville, Kentucky.  Flight 2976 was on a routine flight bound for Hawaii, but as the pilot rotated the plane to get it into the air, the left engine separated from the fuselage.  The resulting crash and fire killed all three crew members and twelve people on the ground. 

 

Since then, National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) personnel have been investigating the crash.  After two days of hearings last May, the NTSB released a set of documents last Wednesday that reveal new details about why the engine fell off.

 

The structure that connects the engine to the underside of the wing is called a pylon, an elongated assembly that attaches to the wing at two points, one near the structure's center and one on its rear end.  The rear attachment point hangs from a wing structure called a clevis.  The thing that actually connects the wing's clevis to the pylon is an assembly called a spherical bearing.  It's rather like a ball-and-socket joint in the human hip, and allows restricted angular movements that the dynamics of flight make necessary.  But it also carries a large portion of both the static weight of the engine and the dynamic loads when the plane takes off.

 

Surrounding the ball is the socket part called a race.  The race is held to the pylon with a couple of brackets called lugs, a forward and an aft lug.  The lugs are shaped like my grandmother's old mantle clock:  a circular middle part tapering to a flat surface on either side at the bottom, where the lugs attach to the pylon. 

 

Back in 2011, Boeing discovered that metal fatigue exacerbated by a "design recess groove" in the spherical bearing had led to the bearing race cracking in two, like the two layers of a layer cake coming apart.  This had happened on several airplanes already, and while Boeing issued a service letter noting that this was a problem and telling aircraft maintenance personnel how to check for it, there was nothing in the letter implying that such a failure could cause the engine to separate from the wing. 

 

In the May hearings, both Boeing and the FAA admitted that they didn't realize the seriousness of the race cracking, which put extra stress on the lugs that they were not designed to carry.  When the lugs surrounding the bearing let go, probably during the maximum stress of takeoff that would exert extreme downward tension on the mount, the engine was left hanging by only the center mount, which also eventually gave way, possibly because of the fire caused by ruptured fuel lines.  Once the engine left the plane, the situation was hopeless.

 

Why wasn't the MD-11 inspected for this problem in time to catch it and fix it?  An AP report says that several years earlier, Boeing asked the FAA for permission to relax a schedule of major required inspections from every 19,900 cycles of takeoffs and landings to every 29,260 cycles.  The MD-11 that crashed had 21,043 cycles, so it would have been inspected under the old more rigorous schedule.  Inspecting the spherical bearing is not an easy task, and usually the engine has to be removed to gain access to it.  So the problem couldn't have been caught with more frequent minor inspections.

 

And even if it had, neither Boeing nor the FAA believed the bearing-race failure would lead to lug failure and loss of the engine.  Maintenance on the aircraft was performed by STE San Antonio Aerospace, which followed the maintenance procedures required by the FAA-approved schedule.  Unfortunately, that schedule wasn't sufficient to catch the problem in time.

 

Any time a fatal accident occurs and engineering is involved, the public wants to know the cause.  And in rare cases, such a single-point failure that no one expected can be found.  But in most cases, the chain of events leading up to the major accident is complicated.  And usually precursors to it can be found:  warning signs that, while not causing serious harm in themselves, can serve to alert those who are paying attention to a potential major problem that needs to be addressed before it gets out of hand.

 

That is what seems to have happened in the case of UPS Flight 2976.  A faulty design including the recess groove (1) led to bearing-race failures (2) which were discovered but not taken seriously enough by either Boeing (3) or the FAA (4).  After the service note alerted maintenance organizations to the problem, three more planes were found with cracked bearings, although none of them crashed.  This fact probably encouraged a degree of complacency which in retrospect was unwarranted.

 

Following the crash, all MD-11s were grounded until they could have their spherical bearings inspected.  They are now required to be checked after every 4,000 cycles of takeoffs and landings, but UPS has announced that they are retiring their fleet of MD-11s early in any case.

 

The NTSB is not finished with its investigation, which might take until the end of the year to complete.  It must be a rather thankless task to pick through the huge pile of wreckage reassembled in some hangar in order to figure out what happened.  But such jobs are necessary as long as lives depend on the smooth functioning of the incredibly complicated systems that we rely on for transportation and communication. 

 

Engineering requires tradeoffs:  tradeoffs between economy and increased frequency of maintenance schedules, tradeoffs about inexpensive designs that might not last as long as more costly ones, and on ad infinitum.  The responsibility for missing the critical inspections and repairs that might have averted the crash last November appears to be spread among the four parties of Boeing, the FAA, UPS, and STE San Antonio Aerospace.  Any one of these could have gone the extra distance of doing extra inspections to avert the crash, but no one seemed to know how serious the bearing problem was.

 

Unfortunately, experience is sometimes the best teacher in engineering as in other fields.  And the results of this investigation will probably lead to increased inspections of the kinds of engine mounts that failed.  And that will be a small victory in the never-ending battle to keep minor problems from turning into major ones.

 

Sources:  I referred to an article in the Fresno Business Journal at https://thebusinessjournal.com/ups-cargo-plane-crash-investigation-maintenance-failures/, a more technical article at

https://theaircurrent.com/feed/dispatches/ups-boeing-md-11-ntsb-update-engine-mount/, and the NTSB preliminary report at https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/Documents/DCA26MA024%20Investigative%20Update.pdf, as well as the Wikipedia article "UPS Airlines Flight 2976."

Fatal Tesla Crash Into Home Raises More Questions

  

Around 8 P. M. Friday June 19, 76-year-old Martha Avila was standing in the playroom at the front of her daughter's house in Katy, Texas.  Her daughter, son-in-law, and their children were also in the house or in the back yard.  Suddenly a Tesla Model 3 occupied by 44-year-old Michael Butler crashed into the house after reaching a speed exceeding 70 MPH on the short residential street.  The car pinned Avila, who was extracted from the crash by EMS personnel but later died at a local hospital.  Within a few days, Avila's family had filed a lawsuit against Tesla and Butler, and last Wednesday the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) announced it was opening an investigation into the accident.

 

Something obviously went wrong if a car failed to negotiate a right turn of a residential street and instead hopped the curb and plowed into a house.  According to those investigating the crash, Butler, who was also injured, claims that the vehicle was in self-driving mode at the time of the accident. 

 

Elon Musk, Tesla's CEO, has issued a statement on social media saying that the crash "made no sense" as the self-driving mode usually maintains a low speed in residential areas.  Another Tesla official stated that according to vehicle data, "the driver pressed the accelerator to 100% and reached a speed of 73 MPH before the crash." 

 

Clearly, investigators have a job on their hands to figure out exactly what happened.  Rose Hollow Lane, the street on which the Tesla accelerated, is only about 1000 feet long before it makes a right turn going east and becomes another street at the corner where the crash occurred.  Teslas are notorious for their ability to accelerate rapidly, however, so it's possible that the car was traveling at a lower speed at first and then responded to its accelerator, which might have been pressed in error. 

 

In fairness to Tesla, there are plenty of examples of non-self-driving cars crashing into structures and killing people as well.  Tesla releases quarterly statistics on its vehicles that are operating in full self-driving mode, and claims that the number of accidents per million miles is lower than the average for the entire U. S. fleet.  Critics say that this isn't an entirely fair comparison because the Tesla fleet is newer and has more advanced safety features than the average car on the road.

 

All the statistics in the world won't bring back Martha Avila, however, and that is why the family is suing Tesla and the driver of the car. 

 

According to information on Reddit, the driver of a Tesla in full self-driving mode can override the system by pressing on the accelerator.  If that's what happened in the accident, the responsibility cannot be laid exclusively to Tesla, which is why the driver is also being sued as well. 

 

If we allow imagination to roam, perhaps the following scenario occurred.  As the driver went down Rose Hollow Lane, perhaps a squirrel or other small creature darted out in front of the car.  Intending to hit the brake, Butler instead pressed the accelerator pedal.  The resulting goose of energy could have sent the car off the road into the house where Avila died. 

 

Again, we will have to wait for the outcome of the NTSB investigation to find definitive answers to the questions raised by this tragedy.  If the cause turns out to be largely human error which could have happened with a non-self-driving vehicle, then there is nothing out of the ordinary about it except that the vehicle happened to be a Tesla.  If on the other hand, there was something about the self-driving mode that contributed directly to the crash, investigators will want to know what it was, and possibly issue directives to fix the problem.

 

Other self-driving vehicles such as Waymo rely on multiple types of sensors, while Teslas have so far relied exclusively on vehicle cameras, possibly for reasons of cost.  Whether such a compromise will be viable going forward may depend on how frequently crashes occur which could have been avoided through the use of a wider variety of sensors.

 

The course of autonomous driving in the U. S. has not followed the forecasts of its initial optimistic promoters.  The SAE five-level autonomous-driving scale which ranges from Level 1 (e. g. cruise control) to Level 5 (fully self-driving in all conditions everywhere) shows that there are only a few places in the world where Level-4 cars such as Waymos operate specific routes in favorable conditions.  As we noted in this space a few weeks ago, Waymo temporarily suspended operations in San Antonio and other locations where its vehicles ran into trouble with flooded streets.  So for most people, self-driving cars are not something they encounter voluntarily, unless they take a Waymo taxi where they are available, or take a ride with a Tesla owner who wants to show it off.

 

It looks like the ideal Level-5 self-driving car is still in the future.  And even if it arrives, it may remain in a niche market favored by the handicapped, the elderly, and other people who simply can't drive at all without it, or have to hire a cab.  For the rest of us, the price we'd have to pay for even a Level-4 self-driving car is way more than what it is worth to us not to have to bother turning the wheel and operating the pedals when we're in the car.  And that may remain the case for the indefinite future.

 

As for Tesla, which still promotes its "Full Self-Driving" mode of operation in what seems to be a misleading way, the requirement for the driver both to let the computer drive the car and still remain ready to take over if something goes wrong means that the driver's attention is theoretically required all the time, but practically almost none of the time.  I don't know about you, but I would find it very hard to just sit behind the wheel and pay attention to the road just as much as if I were driving, only not drive.  It may be a situation like this which led to the accident that killed Martha Avila.

 

Time will tell, and if the NTSB investigation report reveals anything new, we hope to bring it to you in this space.  But not right away.

 

Sources:  I referred to reports at https://abcnews.com/US/tesla-allegedly-autopilot-mode-crashes-texas-house-woman/story?id=134062374, https://www.fox26houston.com/news/tesla-sued-after-katy-crash-leaves-76-year-old-woman-dead, https://www.khou.com/article/news/local/tesla-crash-katy-texas-ntsb/285-42522116-a98b-4e89-8bae-7db39b5d642d, and a reference to a Forbes report (unfortunately behind a paywall) at https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2025/11/14/tesla-finally-releases-fsd-crash-data-that-appears-more-honest/. 

The GUARD Act and Recovering Covenant Economics

  

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) is something of a gadfly to Silicon Valley.  Even in his days as Missouri's Attorney General, he investigated the likes of Google for violating state consumer-protection laws.  In an editorial published online recently by the journal of religion and public life First Things, he stakes out an existential claim that artificial intelligence (AI) is the defining technology of our day, and threatens to break the founding covenant of the United States:  to hold respect for persons made in the image of God supreme over considerations of money and power.

 

One way he proposes to do this is through passage of a proposed GUARD Act, designed to protect children from the depredations of AI that have led to sexual exploitation, depression, and even suicide in many cases.  Co-authored with Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal, the act would impose strict age verification to prevent those under 18 from accessing certain AI systems, prohibit systems that are known to promote sexual and violent acts directed at oneself or others among young people, and impose severe meaningful penalties for violations of these regulations.  The bill has been approved by the Senate's Judiciary Committee and awaits action by the full Senate and House.

 

While the GUARD Act would go far in the direction of preventing some of the most horrific side effects of the AI revolution we are now living in, it addresses only the tip of an iceberg of threats that Hawley perceives.  In the editorial, Hawley outlines the history of the United States, beginning not with 1776, but with the 1630 voyage of the Puritans led by John Winthrop from England to the Massachusetts Bay Colony.  Opinions differ as to whether the noble sentiments in a sermon delivered during that trip amounted to an actual covenant agreed to by the refugees, or simply aspirations that were not universally shared.  But details aside, Hawley traces the same spirit of democracy guided by Christianity through Lincoln's Homestead Act granting 160 acres of public land to all comers, Samuel Gompers' promotion of the 8-hour workday, and the twentieth century's adoption of social insurance of various kinds. 

 

Opposed to this tendency to regulate economic and technical innovations for the good of all is a progressive notion that the modern world is too complex to leave its governance to the masses.  Hawley proposes what he calls "covenant economics" in opposition to the government-by-expert notions promoted during the Progressive Era and exemplified by the takeover of the economy by Woodrow Wilson during World War I.  Nowadays, he points out, the progressive elite in government and the economic elite who runs Silicon Valley are largely the same class, and are working to make the country "K-shaped."  Meaning, a few lucky people go up one bar of the K and get to run everything and own most of everything, while the unlucky masses have to take the lower arm, which is whatever the elites dish out for them, whether it's unemployment checks compensating for losing one's job to AI or new and fun ways to amuse oneself to death. 

 

Hawley is under no illusions that his own party is going to avert this crisis any better than the Democrats.  He makes no reference to the Trump administration, but he doesn't have to, as it's clear to anybody with working eyes by now that Trump favors Trump, and to hell with everybody else. 

 

But one of the primary Christian virtues is hope.  Only by continuing to take the machinery of government seriously can people like Sen. Hawley make a difference:  drafting laws, passing them in the face of opposition, and rallying like-minded people to just causes.  The prospects for the GUARD Act in a climate in which President Trump has endorsed a laissez-faire attitude toward AI are not good.  But things can change, and if it passes it will be one small step in the direction of covenant economics, and away from the domination of average people by a small, super-powerful elite who increasingly seem to think they live on a different planet than the rest of us.

 

Sen. Hawley is right to look to history for precedents of covenant economics.  What I'd like to see from history is a precedent for our present situation:  one in which a megalomaniacal political leader is largely in cahoots with a small upper class of very wealthy and powerful individuals who dominate politics as well as economics, and how the population of that country got out from under domination.

 

One has to go back to the days of Louis XVI, the last king of France before the Revolution of 1792 abolished the monarchy, to find a similar divide between the ruling classes and the rest of the population.  Ironically, Louis's downfall was caused partly by his adoption of what we would now call liberal ideas, such as supporting the rebellion of the American colonies. 

 

Revolutions are always a last resort, and nothing I write here should be construed as advocating for one.  Once a revolution starts, even its promoters can't tell where it's going to end up—it's like the boys in Mark Twain who started a boulder rolling down a hill just to see what it would do.  As long as the creaky democratic machinery of the U. S. Constitution still works, we should use it to move things in directions that put into practice the idea the country was founded on:  in Lincoln's deathless words, that "government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

 

In one sense, regulation of AI is like nailing Jell-O to the wall.  It's everywhere, changing all the time, and a key problem in legislating about it is getting enough of a handle on it to say something that will last longer than a few months.  But the pernicious effects of AI are clear enough:  the loss of jobs by millions of people who have done nothing wrong other than not to be born to privilege; the fear, whether justified or no, that the proliferation of data centers is creating burdens of higher electric and water rates as a byproduct of rich people getting even richer; and the harm that AI can do to children and teenagers.  Sen. Hawley wants to draw lines in the sand that tell AI's promoters "here, and no farther."  We can pray that his efforts will be joined by other legislators of good will to turn the vast tide of AI in a direction that will benefit all the citizens of the United States, and not just continue to enrich a few at the cost of the many.

 

Sources:  Sen. Hawley's essay is on the First Things website at https://firstthings.com/the-american-covenants-answer-to-ai/.  I also referred to an AI summary (!) of the GUARD Act and Wikipedia articles on John Winthrop and Louis XVI.  AI isn't all bad. . . .