Whither the U. S. Postal Service?

  

We don't usually think of mail as a technology.  But if we define a technology broadly as any system engineered for the accomplishment of a practical purpose, the U. S. Postal Service is not only a technology, but a vital one.  Like any technology that doesn't go extinct, it has to change with circumstances or die.  And those two alternatives are becoming more obvious by the day as competition from electronic media bring intense pressures on so-called "snail mail" services, not only in the U. S. but worldwide. 

 

This column is brought on by an incident which nonetheless may be symptomatic of wider problems in the system.  Ever since my father taught me how to use a checkbook, I have paid for many monthly bills by mailing checks.  Until last month, this was a reliable way to pay things like utility bills.  But in February and March of this year, four checks I mailed simply disappeared, including the payment for the electric, water, and sewer bill. 

 

These incidents have forced me to join most of the rest of the world in switching to electronic payments for those bills.  But it also made me wonder how the U. S. Postal Service is doing in general, and the answer is:  not well.

 

At its inception under the guidance of the first U. S. postmaster—some dude named Benjamin Franklin—the Post Office, as it was known then, became a powerful nation-binding force as it put even the most remote state or territory in contact with the rest of the country by both private letters and favorable rates for periodicals such as newspapers and magazines.  It was operated as a Cabinet-level department and not expected to show a profit.  That remained unchanged until thousands of postal workers struck in the largest wildcat (=unauthorized by union leadership) strike in U. S. history in 1970.  That led directly to the passing by Congress of the Postal Reorganization Act of 1970, which President Nixon signed as a way of giving the postal unions the right to collective bargaining, though it still made strikes illegal.

 

The Act did more than authorize unions, however.  It changed the name of the organization to the U. S. Postal Service and set it up as a quasi-independent corporation that was expected to be self-supporting without government subsidies.

 

In 1970, the highly-remunerative monopoly on first-class letter carrying enjoyed by the USPS was more than enough to allow it to make a profit.  But the era of electronic communications was just around the corner.  If you are old enough to remember all the things that used to be done by mail that are now done by means of the internet, that's a lot of mail that has simply disappeared, and most of it was first-class mail.  Bills, checks, legal documents, and the whole volume of commercial first-class mail that used to support the old Post Office—virtually all that has now turned into bits transmitted on fiber cables. 

 

Some analyses by Elena Patel of the research institute Brookings show that the declining volume of first-class mail has led to the USPS showing a deficit every year since 2007.  By law, it can borrow money only from the U. S. Treasury, and there is a cap on its total indebtedness, which it has already hit.  When it can't borrow any more, it has to rely on its cash reserves, and these days those are running out too.  So we face the near-term prospect of the U. S. Postal Service going bankrupt unless its governing laws are changed.

 

This would have happened even earlier if the volume of package deliveries had not increased in a way that has partly compensated for the huge loss of first-class mail, which the USPS had a monopoly on.  But in package delivery, the USPS faces stiff competition from fully private businesses such as FedEx and UPS that operate on slimmer margins than a quasi-government service like the postal system, which has built-in labor costs and obligations to serve every single post office in the U. S. 

 

I don't know if all these adverse circumstances are directly responsible for my checks getting lost, but they didn't help.

 

So what should be done?  This problem of electronic-media competition upsetting the fiscal status of mail service is worldwide, not just in the U. S., and different countries are dealing with it in various ways.  In some places, the national government simply absorbs the losses and regards the mail service as a necessary part of national infrastructure.  That's the way our old Post Office began—as a nation-binding service that was simply paid for out of government funds—but by law the current USPS can't operate that way. 

 

Some might feel that the practice of laboriously carrying little pieces of paper around and physically delivering them is an outmoded practice that should be allowed to die a natural death.  But one of the Brookings studies shows that postal services form an important part of the economy of certain areas of the country, especially where population is sparse but people can still operate businesses with nationwide clientele through the postal service.

 

I don't have any brilliant solution to these problems.  But it's clear that things can't go on the way they're going, with the laws governing the USPS assuming economic conditions that simply no longer exist.  The first-class-mail monopoly that formerly subsidized everything else the USPS did has vanished as a source of profit.  And unless the federal government recognizes that what the postal system does is important enough to pay for with taxes, we will sooner or later hit a crisis resembling what recently struck the Transportation Security Administration, which wasn't funded in the latest Congressional budget.  This caused snarled air transportation as TSA workers increasingly showed a reluctance to go to work without being paid. 

 

Maybe a lot of young people wouldn't miss the postman (post-person, these days).  But one way to find out the significance of a technology is to imagine that tomorrow you woke up and all of it has vanished into thin air.  If the USPS doesn't get its finances straightened out by Congress soon, we may find out what that thought experiment looks like in reality.  And the results won't be good.

 

Sources:  I referred to two Brookings studies by Elena Patel on postal systems at https://www.brookings.edu/articles/postal-systems-worldwide-confront-the-same-financial-pressures/ and https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-us-postal-services-fiscal-crisis/,

and the Wikipedia articles "1970 United States postal strike" and "Postal Reorganization Act."

 

US Fears AI, Uses It Anyway

  

A recent report in National Review summarized opinion polls about what U. S. residents think of artificial intelligence (AI) and how much they are using it.  Paradoxically, the more people use AI, the more they fear it.

 

A poll by NBC News showed that 46% of those queried had a negative opinion of AI versus only 26% positive.  Other polls show that citizens expect mostly or entirely negative effects on society from the widespread use of AI, and believe it will lead to serious job losses.  Over half the Americans polled by Democratic research firm Blue Rose feared that AI will lose them their job or a relative's job. 

 

At the same time, polls asking about AI use show that most people queried have used an AI tool in the past month, and a fourth say they use it every day.  So the old saying "familiarity breeds contempt" may be a guiding principle in how AI is viewed by the general public.

 

In a way, none of this matters.  If a new technology gets widely used and the companies providing it make money, who cares what people think about it?  Another technology that spread rapidly in only a few years, and also had profound effects on society, was television.  In 1950, only 9% of households had a TV, but by 1955 over half did.  And while there may have been a few voices raised in opposition to its growth, I think it's fair to say that the only groups that looked on the spread of TV with disfavor were industries threatened by it:  Hollywood, for instance.  And Hollywood has long ago made peace with the advent of television.  Your average person in the early 1950s was just waiting to see when TV sets got affordable enough to buy, and any negative consequences of TV use were not noted much in public before the 1960s.

 

One difference between the advent of TV and the advent of AI is that TV didn't threaten jobs like AI does.  And one job sector that is already seeing big effects from AI is computer science and computer programming.  The thing about public perception, regardless of whether it's accurate or not, is that it can easily become reality.  I work at a university, and I have heard in the last week that enrollment in computer-science programs is dropping across the board, after years of steady growth.  The reasons for this are not entirely clear, but one factor may well be that students fear spending four or more years getting a degree and then finding that all the entry-level positions are now being done by a few senior people writing AI prompts. 

 

On the other hand, one of the most enthusiastic proponents of AI I know is an 80-plus professor of biology who has been using ChatGPT in his research for the last year or two.  He says it helps him write papers more clearly and to organize his thoughts, and claims it's the greatest thing that's happened to him research-wise in a long time. 

 

Many of the polls mentioned were commissioned by political interests with a view toward forming policies about AI.  Currently, the Trump administration favors few if any regulations on the technology, and wants to keep states from enacting a patchwork of legislation that would encumber the field.  Historically, this approach has worked well for computer- and network-intensive industries themselves, allowing them to create vast new economies and profit mightily therefrom.  But it has also led to a number of real and lasting problems, ranging from the maleficent effects on politics of social media and the quantified and well-known harms to children and teenagers whose lives are distorted by the use of smartphones. 

 

The crystal ball of predicting how technologies will affect society is always more or less cloudy, and I will not venture to say what the future effects of AI's negative polling will be.  Even if AI were universally detested, it's not clear that Washington could get its act together enough to pass meaningful regulatory legislation, especially when Big Tech and the federal government sometimes seem to blur into each other.  On the state level, if the feds don't stop them, some states may pass laws attempting to regulate AI, but it's a little bit like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.  When the thing you are trying to regulate is so protean and shape-changing, it's hard to decide what regulations to pass, let alone to figure out if they've been violated.

 

Some of the anxiety the public feels about AI is simply due to the breathtaking speed with which it has advanced and improved.  Arthur C. Clarke's principle that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic applies here.  Real magic is scary if it happens, and I still feel a kind of queasiness when I type commands into a chat box and the program comes back with "I did this and that."  It's understandable that millions of teenagers use AI chatbots as a substitute friend, and it's also very creepy.

 

Going to extremes, a few people believe AI will engender the end of civilization as we know it.  Other hyper-tech-optimists such as Ray Kurzweil look forward to being uploaded to an eternal cloud and think it will be heaven on earth.  The truth probably lies somewhere in between.  What we can do as individuals is to keep reminding ourselves that AI systems are not human beings, and that human beings are not machines.  But both of those truths may become harder to keep in mind as time goes on. 

 

Sources:  The National Review website carried James Lynch's article "The More Americans Use AI, the More They Fear It" on Mar. 25, 2026 at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/the-more-americans-use-ai-the-more-they-fear-it/.