[Last] week at the Paris AI summit, Vice President JD Vance stood before heads of state and tech titans and said, “When conferences like this convene to discuss a cutting edge technology, oftentimes, I think, our response is to be too self-conscious, too risk-averse. But never have I encountered a breakthrough in tech that so clearly calls us to do precisely the opposite.”
Precisely the opposite of “too risk-averse” would seem to be “not risk-averse enough.” Or maybe, as both ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude said when asked for the opposite of “too risk-averse”: “too risk-seeking” or “reckless.” In any event, most people in the AI safety community would agree that such terms capture the Trump administration’s approach to AI regulation. And that includes people who generally share Trump’s and Vance’s laissez faire intuitions. AI researcher Rob Miles posted a video of Vance’s speech on X and commented, “It’s so depressing that the one time when the government takes the right approach to an emerging technology, it’s for basically the only technology where that’s actually a terrible idea.”
The news for AI safety advocates gets worse: The summit’s overall vibe wasn’t all that different from Vance’s. The host, French President Emmanuel Macron, after announcing a big AI infrastructure investment, said that France is “back in the AI race” and that “Europe and France must accelerate their investments.” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen vowed to “accelerate innovation” and “cut red tape” that now hobbles innovators. China and the US may be the world’s AI leaders, she granted, but “the AI race is far from being over.” All of this sat well with the corporate sector. As Axios reported, “A range of tech leaders, including Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch, used their speeches to push the acceleration mantra.”
Seems like only yesterday Sundar Pichai was emphasizing the need for international regulation, saying that AI, for all its benefits, holds great dangers. But, actually, that was back in 2023, when people like Open AI’s Sam Altman were also saying such things. That was the year world leaders convened in Britain’s Bletchley Park to discuss ways to collectively address AI risks, including catastrophic ones. The idea was to hold annual global summits on the international governance of AI. In theory, the Paris summit was the third of these (after the 2024 summit in Seoul). But you should always read the fine print: Whereas the official name of the first summit was “AI Safety Summit,” this year’s version was “AI Action Summit.” The headline over the Axios story was: “Don’t miss out” replaces “doom is nigh” at Paris’ AI summit.
The statement that came out of the summit did call for AI “safety” (along with “sustainable development, innovation,” and many other virtuous things). But there was no elaboration. Nothing, for example, about preventing people from using AIs to help make bioweapons—the kind of problem you’d think would call for international regulation, since pandemics don’t recognize national borders (and the kind of problem that some knowledgeable observers worry has been posed by OpenAI’s recently released Deep Research model).
MIT physicist Max Tegmark tweeted on Monday that a leaked draft of the summit statement seemed “optimized to antagonize both the US government (with focus on diversity, gender and disinformation) and the UK government (completely ignoring the scientific and political consensus around risks from smarter-than-human AI systems that was agreed at the Bletchley Park Summit).” And indeed, Britain and the US refused to sign the statement. The other 60 attending nations, including China, signed it.
Journalist Shakeel Hashim wrote about the world’s journey from Bletchley Park to Paris: “What was supposed to be a crucial forum for international cooperation has ended as a cautionary tale about how easily serious governance efforts can be derailed by national self-interest.” But, he said, the Paris Summit may have value “as a wake-up call. It has shown, definitively, that the current approach to AI governance is broken. The question now is whether we have time to fix it.”…
As we prioritize prudence, we might spare a thought for Giordano Bruno; he died on this date in 1600. A philosopher, poet, alchemist, astrologer, cosmological theorist, and esotericist (occultist), his theories anticipated modern science. The most notable of these were his theories of the infinite universe and the multiplicity of worlds, in which he rejected the traditional geocentric (or Earth-centred) astronomy and intuitively went beyond the Copernican heliocentric (sun-centred) theory, which still maintained a finite universe with a sphere of fixed stars. Although one of the most important philosophers of the Italian Renaissance, Bruno’s various passionate utterings led to intense opposition. In 1592, after a trial by the Roman Inquisition, he was kept imprisoned for eight years and interrogated periodically. When, in the end, he refused to recant, he was burned at the stake in Rome for heresy.
While there are a number of factors at work, an extraordinary piece in The Economist homes in one of the most salient: Americans love big cars, but heavy vehicles kill more people than they save…
For all the safety features available in cars today to help them avoid crashes, the laws of physics are cruel. When two vehicles collide, it is usually the heavier one that prevails. This advantage has changed little over time. Thirty years ago when a passenger car crashed with a pickup truck or sport-utility vehicle (SUV), the driver of the car was roughly four times as likely to die; today this driver dies around three times as often. Critics say this is too high a price to pay for roomier interiors and more powerful engines. Carmakers insist they are giving consumers what they want. An analysis by The Economist shows that weight remains a critical factor in car crashes in America. Reining in the heaviest vehicles would save lives…
… Over the years policymakers struggled to solve this mismatch, or “incompatibility”, problem. Often, they made things worse. When Congress set fuel-efficiency standards in the wake of the oil shocks of the 1970s, cars were swiftly downsized. Within ten years cars shed 1,000lb; trucks dropped 500lb. Although these changes saved motorists money at the pump, they also led to more traffic fatalities. A paper published in 1989 by researchers at the Brookings Institution and the Harvard School of Public Health estimated that the shift towards smaller, lighter cars in the 1970s and 1980s boosted fatalities by 14-27%. A report released in 2002 by America’s National Research Council concluded that the downsizing of America’s fleet led to thousands of unnecessary deaths.
As cars got bigger, regulators shifted their focus from the lightest vehicles to the heaviest ones. The impetus for this was the rise of SUVs. Between 1990 and 2005 the market share of such vehicles in America grew from 6% to 26%, pushing up the weight of an average new car from 3,400lb to nearly 4,100lb. As suburban soccer moms traded in their station wagons for Ford Expeditions, many felt safer. And they were right. “One of the reasons the roads are much safer is because vehicles… [are] bigger and they’re heavier than they were,” Adrian Lund of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), an industry research organisation, told conference-goers in 2011. The Competitive Enterprise Institute, a think-tank, even advocated supersizing America’s fleet to improve safety, writing in the Wall Street Journal that large vehicles are “the solution, not the problem”.
But researchers quickly learned that the extra protection provided by heavier vehicles comes at the expense of others on the road. In a paper published in 2004 Michelle White of the University of California, San Diego estimated that for every deadly crash avoided by an SUV or pickup truck, there were an additional 4.3 among other drivers, pedestrians and cyclists. Another paper in 2012 by Shanjun Li of Resources for the Future, a think-tank, estimated that when a car crashes with an SUV or pickup, rather than another car, the driver’s fatality rate increased by 31%. In 2014 Michael Anderson and Maximilian Auffhammer of the University of California, Berkeley estimated that when two cars crash, a 1,000lb increase in the weight of one vehicle raised the fatality rate in the other by 47%.
Researchers also found that the safety benefits of vehicle weight suffer from diminishing returns. This means that, once vehicles reach a certain weight, packing on more pounds provides little additional safety, while inflicting more harm on others. e pounds provides little additional safety, while inflicting more harm on others. “At some point heavy vehicles cost more lives…than they save,” wrote Brian O’Neill and Sergey Kyrychenko of the IIHS in 2004. This makes intuitive sense, says Mr Anderson of Berkeley. “Once you outweigh the other guy by a factor of two times, is adding 200 pounds more really going to make a difference for you? Probably not. But it’ll make sure that he gets completely destroyed.”…
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… Regulators are ill-equipped to fix the problem. America’s tax system subsidises heavier vehicles by setting more lenient fuel-efficiency standards for light trucks, and allowing bosses who purchase heavy-duty vehicles for business purposes to deduct part of the cost from their taxable income. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), America’s top auto-safety agency, uses a five-star rating system to score crash performance, but only takes account of the safety of the occupants of the vehicle in question, not that of other drivers. “Our rating system reflects a bias towards the occupant,” explains Laura Sandt of the Highway Safety Research Centre at the University of North Carolina, “it is not designed to rate the car in terms of its holistic safety effects.” The NHTSA declined to comment on The Economist’s findings.
There are signs that Americans may be wising up. A survey conducted last year by YouGov, a pollster, found that 41% of Americans think that SUVs and pickup trucks have become too big; 49% said such vehicles are more dangerous for other cars and 50% said they endanger cyclists and pedestrians. Researchers are raising the alarm. Since 1989 the IIHS has regularly published the driver-fatality rates of popular car models. In 2023, for the first time, the group also estimated the rate at which cars kill drivers in other vehicles. Policymakers are starting to take notice too. “I’m concerned about the increased risk of severe injury and death for all road users from heavier curb weights,” Jennifer Homendy, chair of the National Transportation Safety Board, said in a speech last year.
But the odds that carmakers curb their heaviest, most dangerous vehicles are slim. American car-buyers value safety, but mainly for themselves, not society as a whole. And although regulators are tasked with protecting consumers, they rarely do so at the expense of choice, no matter how deadly the consequences. “There may be a certain point where you say, ‘You know what, passenger vehicles shouldn’t be weighing this much,’” says Raul Arbelaez of the IIHS’s Vehicle Research Centre. “But it would, politically, be really hard to gain any momentum on that.” Finally the shift towards electric power is likely to increase their weight further, as battery-powered vehicles tend to be heavier than their internal-combustion equivalents.
“Manufacturers are playing by the book,” says Mark Chung of the National Safety Council, a non-profit. “They’re making a business decision, and it’s a rational decision. Unless they’re forced to think differently, they’re not going to. So I think this is where our federal partners really need to step up.”…
As we downsize, we might recall that on this date in 1982 Knight Rider premiered on television. The show starred David Hasselhoff as crime fighter Michael Knight who drove a customized car– a supercomputer/AI on wheels– named K.I.T.T. (Knight Industries Two Thousand). K.I.T.T. was designed by Michael Scheffe (a designer who had worked on toys for Mattel and on Bladerunner) using Pontiac’s 1982 Trans Am; in the event, he had 18 days to create his first mock up of K.I.T.T. for the network.
The original Knight Rider (1982–1986) and sequel series Team Knight Rider (1997–1998) and Knight Rider (2008–2009) spawned three television films, computer and video games, and novels, as well as KnightCon, a Knight Rider convention.
Jason Kottke on one artist’s attempt to illuminate those talents and the lives of those who practiced them…
In 1950, master photographer Irving Penn set up a simple studio in Paris and started to photograph people of all kinds of professions, each wearing their work clothes and carrying the tools of their trade.
Working in the tradition of representing the petits métiers, Penn photographed fishmongers, firefighters, butchers, bakers, divers, baseball umpires, chefs, bike messengers, and sellers of goods of all kinds.
Penn continued photographing workers in New York and London, collecting the photos into a project called Small Trades.
Like everyone else who has recorded the look of tradesmen and workers, the author of this book was motivated by the fact that individuality and occupational pride seem on the wane. To a degree everyone has proved right, and since these photographs were made, London chimney sweeps have all but disappeared and in New York horseshoers — hard to find in 1950 — now scarcely exist…
As we peruse professions, we might send muckraking birthday greetings to Upton Sinclair; he was born on this date in 1878. A writer, activist, and politician, he is probably best remembered for his classic novel, The Jungle, which exposed labor and sanitary conditions in the U.S. meatpacking industry, causing a public uproar that contributed in part to the passage a few months later of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act.
Many of his novels can be read as historical works. Writing during the Progressive Era, Sinclair describes the world of the industrialized United States from both the working man’s and the industrialist’s points of view: e.g., King Coal (1917, covering John D. Rockefeller and the 1914 Ludlow Massacre in the coal fields of Colorado), Oil! (1927, the Teapot Dome Scandal), and The Flivver King (1937, Henry Ford– his “wage reform,” his company’s Sociological Department, and his decline into antisemitism) describe the working conditions of the coal, oil, and auto industries at the time.
Sinclair ran (as a Democrat) for Governor of California in 1934, during the Great Depression, under the banner of the End Poverty in California campaign, but was defeated in the general election.
He was awarded he Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1943 for Dragon’s Teeth, which portrayed the Nazi takeover of Germany during the 1930s.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
Upton Sinclair, ruminating on his gubernatorial loss
All of us know the pains (and at least occasional pleasures) of work; but as Kayla Zhu and Sabrina Lam explain, some also know its danger…
Some jobs inherently carry significant risks due to factors such as hazardous working conditions, exposure to harmful substances, and the physical demands of the tasks.
Unfortunately, work injuries can sometimes be fatal, with the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics recording 5,486 fatal work injuries in 2022.
2022 saw a 5.7% increase from the 5,190 fatal work injuries in 2021, and meant that a worker died every 96 minutes from a work-related injury that year.
This graphic visualizes the six occupations in the U.S. with the highest rates of fatal work injuries per 100,000 full-time workers, and their number of fatal work injuries in 2022.
… While logging workers saw the highest fatal work injury rate, over 1,000 truck drivers died due to work injuries in 2022—the most fatalities out of any occupation…
As we take care, we might send carefully-conserved birthday greetings to Gifford Pinchot; he was born on this date in 1865. An American forester, he became the first chief of the Forest Service in 1905. By 1910, with President Theodore Roosevelt’s backing, he built 60 forest reserves covering 56 million acres into 150 national forests covering 172 million acres. Roosevelt’s successor, President Taft– no environmentalist– fired Pinchot, who went on to champion environmental causes (in particular, arguing against the wide-scale commercial logging of federal forests that was undertaken after he was ousted) and to serve two terms as Governor of Pennsylvania. In all, Pinchot’s efforts earned him the honorific, “the father of conservation.”
From our friends at The Pudding— specifically, from Alvin Chang— a thorough (and illuminating and bracing) look at how the conditions in which our young are raised have everything to do with how their lives unfold…
In this story, we’ll follow hundreds of teenagers for the next 24 years, when they’ll be in their late-30s. They’re among the thousands of kids who are part of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. This means researchers have followed them since their teenage years to the present day – and beyond.
… Very North America-centric in terms of the data it’s drawing on, but wherever you are in the world the themes that it speaks to will apply – drawing on data about the life experiences of young people tracked by US statisticians….
As you scroll you see visual representations of the proportion of kids in each agegroup coterie who will experience ‘significant’ life events, from crime to poverty and beyond, and how those life events will go on to impact their academic prospects and, eventually, their life prospects – none of this should be surprising, but it’s a hugely-effective way of communicating the long-term impacts of relatively small differences in early-stage life across a demographic swathe…
As we analyze adolescence, we might recall that it was on this date in 1961 that the Cleftones, a group of teens who had formed a vocal group a 3 years earlier in high school, released “Heart and Soul” (a rearrangement of the 1938 standard); it reached #18 on the pop chart and #10 on the R&B chart and was later used in the 1973 movie American Graffiti.
Then fifteen-year-old Duane Hitchings, who went on to win a Grammy award for his work on the Flashdance soundtrack in 1984, played keyboards on the track– his first professional gig. In an interview with Rock United, he recalls that the recording session was cut short when singer Pat Spann, who was dating drummer Panama Francis, was caught in a compromising position with the guitarist. “That ended the session. So the last track we recorded was the record.”
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