"In August, United and Delta Air Lines were sued by passengers in two separate but similar suits. Both airlines were accused of unfairly charging extra for some window seats without warning that there wasn't actually a window there.

United filed a motion to dismiss the case on Monday.

"The use of the word 'window' in reference to a particular seat cannot reasonably be interpreted as a promise that the seat will have an exterior window view," the airline's lawyers wrote.

"Rather, the word 'window' identifies the position of the seat—i.e., next to the wall of the main body of the aircraft," they added.

If Donald Trump loses his Supreme Court fight over tariffs, the US may be forced to return “tens of billions of dollars to companies that have paid import fees this year, plus interest,” The Atlantic reported. And the longer the verdict is delayed, the higher the refunds could go, possibly even hitting $1 trillion.

For tech companies both large and small, the stakes are particularly high. A Trump defeat would not just mean clawing back any duties paid on imports to the US that companies otherwise can use to invest in their competitiveness. But, more critically in the long term, it would also end tariff shocks that, as economics lecturer Matthew Allen emphasized in a report for The Conversation, risked harming “innovation itself” by destabilizing global partnerships and diverse supply chains in “tech-intensive, IP-led sectors like semiconductors and software.”

Currently, the Supreme Court is weighing two cases that argue that the US president does not have unilateral authority to impose tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). Defending his regime of so-called “reciprocal tariffs,” Trump argued these taxes were necessary to correct the “emergency” of enduring trade imbalances that he alleged have unfairly enriched other countries while bringing the US “to the brink of catastrophic decline.”

Not everyone thinks Trump will lose. But after oral arguments last week, prediction markets dropped Trump’s odds of winning from 50 to 25 percent, Forbes reported, due to Supreme Court justices appearing skeptical.

Dozens of economists agreed: Trump’s tariffs are “odd”

Justices may have been swayed by dozens of leading economists who weighed in. In one friend of the court brief, more than 40 economists, public policy researchers, and former government officials argued that Trump’s got it all wrong when he claims that “sustained trade deficits” have “fostered dependency on foreign rivals and gutted American manufacturing.”

Far from being “unusual and extraordinary,” they argued that trade deficits are “rather ordinary and commonplace.” And rather than being a sign of US weakness, the deficits instead indicate that the US has a “foreign investment surplus,” as other countries clearly consider the US “a superior investment.”

Look no further than the tech sector for a prominent example, they suggested, noting that “the United States has the dominant technology sector in the world and, as a result, has been running a persistent surplus in trade in services for decades.” Citing a quip from Nobel Prize winner Robert Solow—“I have a chronic deficit with my barber, who doesn’t buy a darned thing from me”—economists argued that trade deficits are never inherently problematic.

“It is odd to economists, to say the least, for the United States government to attempt to rebalance trade on a country-by-country basis,” economists wrote, as Trump seems to do with his trade deals imposing reciprocal tariffs as high as 145 percent.

SCOTUS urged to end “perfect storm of uncertainty”

Trump has been on a mission to use tariffs to force more manufacturing back into the US. He has claimed that the court undoing his trade deals would be an “economic disaster” and “would literally destroy the United States of America.” And the longer it takes for the verdict to come out, the more damage the verdict could do, his administration warned, as the US continues to collect tariffs and Trump continues to strike deals that hinge on reciprocal tariffs being in play.

However, in another friend-of-court brief, the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) and the Chamber of Commerce (CoC) argued that the outcome is worse for US businesses if the court defers to Trump.

“The current administration’s use of IEEPA to impose virtually unbounded tariffs is not only unprecedented but is causing irreparable harm” to each group’s members by “increasing their costs, undermining their ability to plan for the future, and in some cases, threatening their very existence,” their filing said.

“The tariffs are particularly damaging to American manufacturing,” they argued, complaining that “American manufacturers face higher prices for raw materials than their foreign competitors, destroying any comparative advantage the tariffs were allegedly meant to create.”

Further, businesses face decreased exports of their products, as well as retaliatory tariffs from any countries striking back at Trump—which “affect $223 billion of US exports and are expected to eliminate an additional 141,000 jobs,” CTA and CoC estimated.

Innovation “thrives on collaboration, trust and scale,” Allen, the economics lecturer, noted, joining critics warning that Trump risked hobbling not just US tech dominance by holding onto seemingly misguided protectionist beliefs but also the European Union’s and the United Kingdom’s.

Meanwhile, the CTA and CoC argued that Trump has other ways to impose tariffs that have been authorized by Congress and do not carry the same risks of destabilizing key US industries, such as the tech sector. Under Section 122, which many critics argued is the authority Trump should be using to impose the reciprocal tariffs, Trump would be limited to a 15 percent tariff for no more than 150 days, trade scholars noted in yet another brief SCOTUS reviewed.

“But the President’s claimed IEEPA authority contains no such limits” CTA and CoC noted. “At whim, he has increased, decreased, suspended, or reimposed tariffs, generating the perfect storm of uncertainty.”

US may end up owing $1 trillion in refunds

Economists urged SCOTUS to intervene and stop Trump’s attempt to seize authority to impose boundless reciprocal tariffs—arguing the economic impact “is predicted to be far greater than in two programs” SCOTUS previously struck, including the Biden administration’s $50 billion plan for student loan forgiveness.

In September, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warned justices that “the amount to be refunded could be between $750 billion and $1 trillion if the court waits until next summer before issuing a ruling that says the tariffs have to be repaid,” CNBC reported.

During oral arguments, Justice Amy Coney Barrett fretted that undoing Trump’s tariffs could be “messy,” CNBC reported.

However, some business owners—who joined the We Pay Tariffs coalition weighing in on the SCOTUS case—told CNBC that they think it could be relatively straightforward, since customs forms contain line items detailing which tariffs were paid. Businesses could be paid in lump sums or even future credits, they suggested.

Rick Muskat, CEO of family-run shoe company DeerStags, told CNBC that his company paid more than $1 million in tariffs so far, but “it should be simple for importers to apply for refunds based on this tariff itemization.” If the IRS can issue repayments for tax overpayments, US Customs should have “no problem” either, he suggested—especially since the agency automatically refunded US importers with no issue during a 2018 conflict, CNBC reported.

If there aren’t automatic refunds, though, things could get sticky. Filing paperwork required to challenge various tariffs may become “time-consuming and difficult” for some businesses, particularly those dealing with large shipments where only some products may have been taxed.

There’s also the issue that some countries’ tariffs—like China’s—changed “multiple times,” Joyce Adetutu, a partner at the law firm Vinson & Elkins, told CNBC. “It is going to take quite a bit of time untangling all of that, and it will be an administrative burden,” Adetutu said.

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[DB: This is a guest post from my Scalia Law colleague Professor Adam Mossoff, reprinting his letter to Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts resigning his position as a visiting fellow at the Foundation. As Adam says, this is a time for choosing on the political right: you either abandon conservatism and stand with Tucker Carlson and nihilism, collectivism, Nazism, and Jew hatred, or you stick up for (conserve, if you will) the American traditions of individual rights, religious and ethnic pluralism, and the rule of law.]

Dear Dr. Roberts,

It is with a heavy heart that I am resigning my Visiting Fellow position in the Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the Heritage Foundation. My resignation is effective immediately.

Please know that I did not come to this decision lightly, as it has been truly an honor to work for John Malcolm in the Meese Center for the past six years. John represents the best of Heritage, and he has inspired me. I have been tremendously proud of my legal memoranda on intellectual property law and innovation policy, and of the Intellectual Property Working Group that has been my charge. I am even more proud of my chapter on the Copyright and Patent Clause in the new edition of the Heritage Guide to the Constitution, an impressive monograph representing the fruits of a multi-year productive effort by John and his co-editor, Josh Blackmun.

Unfortunately, your October 30 video, and your subsequent interviews, videos, and commentary, have made it clear to me that Heritage is no longer the storied think tank that I was proud to join in 2019.

I waited two weeks to send my resignation notice because I did not wish to act in haste, and I wanted my decision to be the result of a considered judgment, not a reaction based on the passions of the moment. Thus, I have been following closely the follow-on commentary and discussions by you and others, both externally and internally. From these observations, I have concluded that your October 30 video, as confirmed by your subsequent comments, interviews, and meetings, was not a mere mistake; rather, it reflects a fundamental ethical lapse and failure of moral leadership that has irrevocably damaged the well-deserved reputation of Heritage as "the intellectual backbone of the conservative movement" (your words in your October 30 video).

Your October 30 video was indefensible. So were your purported explanations and backtracking in subsequent interviews and social media posts. The October 30 video was worse than a poor choice of words or a mere mistake; it was a profound moral inversion to use the language of ancient antisemitic blood libels, such as "globalist class" and "venomous coalition." It was especially loathsome to use this same language to defend Tucker Carlson.

Tucker is quickly following Candace Owens down the very dark path of Jewish conspiracy theories and defenses of Nazis. (After Candace's "explanation" a couple years ago of Kristallnacht as a burning of communist books and not an attack on Jews, this was the final straw for me and my judgment has been repeatedly confirmed by her in the ensuing years.) Similar to Candace's "just asking questions" strategy, Tucker is increasingly hosting friendly, head-nodding-in-agreement interviews with people who explicitly praise Nazis and are unrepentant in their antisemitic slurs of Jews and Israel, such as his interviews of Darryl Cooper and Agapia Stephanopoulos. Tucker's friendly, smiling interview with Nick Fuentes, an avowed Nazi, was simply the nadir of Tucker's increasing number of friendly interviews with nihilists and antisemites.

In all of these interviews, Tucker has blatantly refused to challenge any of their calumnies, propaganda, and falsehoods, despite your subsequent claim in a follow-on X statement on October 31 that we should "challenge them head on" in open debate. This bears emphasizing: Tucker has never challenged one of these evil guests on his show. For example, in a two-hour interview with Fuentes, Tucker never asked Fuentes a single question about his Nazi views or even his Nazi slur of Vice President JD Vance as a "race traitor" given Vice President Vance's marriage to Usha and their "brown" children (to quote Fuentes). This is neither debate nor critical engagement with ideas with which we profoundly disagree. This is toleration of or agreement with evil ideologies and ideas. This is made even more clear by Tucker's contrary treatment of anyone he deems to be a "zionist." Unlike his interviews of Fuentes, Cooper, Stephanopoulos, and many others, Tucker engages in skeptical interviews with pointed, hard-hitting questions of Senator Ted Cruz and others about their "zionist" or "pro-Israel" positions.

All of this makes it absolutely clear that Tucker gives credence to his millions of viewers that evil ideologies — collectivism, nihilism, and antisemitism — are consistent with conservativism and the America First movement. Tucker's friendly and laughing conversation with Fuentes signals to his millions of young viewers that it is permissible to give a pass to such evil. Even in the best light possible, Tucker makes clear we at least should tolerate such evil, because, as you said in your October 30 video, we should not be "attacking our friends on the right."

This is a massive moral inversion. This is the opposite of what the Heritage Foundation has consistently stood for over many decades in American political discourse: the ideals of the Founding Fathers in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, our inalienable natural rights, limited government, the rule of law — and the free markets and flourishing society that results from these ethical and political commitments. This is the eminent think tank I first joined.

Although you told us in the townhall last Thursday that you made a mistake in your October 30 video, you have not retracted or withdrawn the video. It remains on your X account with more than 24 million views to date. Thus, it remains unclear precisely and specifically what you regard as your moral mistake and failure in leadership. This is compounded by the mixed messages you have been giving to us and to the world about the lesson you have learned. You have continually reiterated, for example, your claims in your October 30 video that we should not "cancel" our "friends," and that Tucker "always will be a close friend of the Heritage Foundation." As far as I'm aware, you have not disavowed this claim. But you falsely conflate here the struggle sessions and cancelation campaigns that the woke left inflict on their apostates and heretics with the proper and steadfast moral condemnation of nihilism, collectivism, Nazism, and Jew hatred.

Aristotle observed in his seminal treatise on ethics that, in a choice between truth and friendship, it is to truth that we must always give our primary allegiance. Even with your mixed messages, one thing is clear: By your words and actions, Heritage is wedded to Tucker and everything he has come to represent on the periphery of the Groyper movement created by Fuentes. Instead of the truth, you have chosen a false friend of the American ideals that Heritage has represented.

In the abstract, this profound failing of truth and justice would give me serious pause and I would still ultimately resign, but it's even more pressing today to call out this moral failing and to take a stand. It is still shocking to me that the worst single-day slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, the invasion and attack of Israel on October 7, 2023, has unleashed a tsunami of violent antisemitism that has swept Europe and the U.S. In the past two years, woke Brownshirts have been screaming genocidal slogans in the streets and on university campuses (including my own university). They have been doing much worse than merely screaming slogans like "Free Palestine!" and "From the River to the Sea!"; they've acted in harassing and assaulting American Jews, firebombing and vandalizing homes and business, and murdering American Jews in DC, Colorado, and California. This has never before happened in the U.S.

This nihilism and collectivist bigotry has driven woke leftists into frenzies unseen in the West since the original Nazi Brownshirts terrorized Jews in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, and it has now reared its ugly head on the American political right. Now is the time to differentiate the right from the left, not to join the left in embracing this toxic fusion of collectivism and antisemitism. Since October 7, I have been stating on X: antisemitism is just the tip of the spear of a collectivist and nihilist ideology that seeks the destruction of Western Civilization. Your videos and statements have made it clear that we embrace as "friends" those who embrace and proselytize these evil ideas under the guise of a big tent on the right in which self-proclaimed conservatives can have friendly and cheery conversations with modern Nazis.

To employ President Ronald Reagan's iconic phrase from his justly famous 1964 speech, today is "a time of choosing." Notably, "a time of choosing" is the same adage used by historians and scholars to describe the 1930s when Germany raced headlong from social exclusion of Jews to political and legal discrimination against Jews, and then in the 1940s to the first industrial genocide in human history. The rise to prominence of the same nihilism and antisemitism on both the American political left and right has made it clear that today is again a time of choosing.

You have made clear your choice: endorsement and toleration of false friends of freedom, rights, liberty, and the American ideals of the Founding Fathers, despite their Orwellian claims to the contrary that they are advocates for America First or represent conservativism. Worse than false friends, they have proven to be advocates for the evil ideologies that seek to destroy these achievements of Western Civilization, as represented by the United States of America — what President Reagan beautifully referred to as the "shining city on a hill."

It is one thing for you to make this choice as an individual, but you have made this choice for the Heritage Foundation. I cannot stand by in silence. It is a time of choosing. I choose to resign.

Sincerely,

Adam Mossoff

The post Why I Am Resigning from the Heritage Foundation (Guest-Post by Adam Mossoff) appeared first on Reason.com.

Google is hosting a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) app that uses facial recognition to identify immigrants, and tell local cops whether to contact ICE about the person, while simultaneously removing apps designed to warn local communities about the presence of ICE officials. ICE-spotting app developers tell 404 Media the decision to host CBP’s new app, and Google’s description of ICE officials as a vulnerable group in need of protection, shows that Google has made a choice on which side to support during the Trump administration’s violent mass deportation effort.

Google removed certain apps used to report sightings of ICE officials, and “then they immediately turned around and approved an app that helps the government unconstitutionally target an actual vulnerable group. That's inexcusable,” Mark, the creator of Eyes Up, an app that aims to preserve and map evidence of ICE abuses, said. 404 Media only used the creator’s first name to protect them from retaliation. Their app is currently available on the Google Play Store, but Apple removed it from the App Store.

“Google wanted to ‘not be evil’ back in the day. Well, they're evil now,” Mark added.

The CBP app, called Mobile Identify and launched last week, is for local and state law enforcement agencies that are part of an ICE program that grants them certain immigration-related powers. The 287(g) Task Force Model (TFM) program allows those local officers to make immigration arrests during routine police enforcement, and “essentially turns police officers into ICE agents,” according to the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU). At the time of writing, ICE has TFM agreements with 596 agencies in 34 states, according to ICE’s website.

After a user scans someone’s face with Mobile Identify, the app tells users to contact ICE and provides a reference number, or to not detain the person depending on the result, a source with knowledge of the app previously told 404 Media. 404 Media also examined the app’s code and found multiple references to face scanning.

A Google spokesperson told 404 Media in an email “This app is only usable with an official government login and does not publicly broadcast specific user data or location. Play has robust policies and when we find a violation, we take action.”

Last month, Google removed an app called Red Dot. That app, in much the same vein as the more well-known ICEBlock, lets ordinary people report sightings of ICE officials on a map interface. People could then receive alerts of nearby ICE activity. “Anonymous community-driven tool for reporting and receiving ICE activity alerts,” Red Dot’s website reads.

Red Dot’s removal came after a cascading series of events starting in September. That month 29-year-old Joshua Jahn opened fire at an ICE facility in Dallas, killing two detainees and wounding another. Authorities say Jahn used his phone to search for ICE-spotting apps, including ICEBlock, before the shooting, Fox reported. A short while after, the Department of Justice contacted Apple and demanded it remove ICEBlock, which Apple did, despite such an app being First Amendment protected speech. 

Both Apple and Google then removed Red Dot, which works similarly, from their respective app stores. Google previously told 404 Media it did not receive any outreach from the Department of Justice about the issue at the time. The company said it removed apps that share the location of what it describes as a vulnerable group: a veiled reference to ICE officials.

A representative for Red Dot told 404 Media in an email they “see 100% dissonance” in Google’s position. Google removed the app claiming it harms ICE agents “while continuing to host a CBP app that uses facial recognition to identify immigrants for detention and deportation.”

“This is unequivocally morally and ethically wrong. We are deeply concerned about the number of violations that must be occurring to deploy AI facial recognition on people for the purpose of making arrests. It is a clear and unacceptable case of selective application of their policies,” they added. The representative did not provide their name.

Google’s decision to host CBP’s immigrant-hunting app while removing one designed to warn people about the presence of ICE has concerned free speech experts.

“Providing tech services to supercharge ICE operations while blocking tools that support accountability of ICE officers is entirely backwards,” Kate Ruane, director of the Center for Democracy & Technology’s Free Expression Project, told 404 Media. “ICE is currently deploying armed, masked agents to take people from daycares, street corners, parking lots, and even their own homes, often based on paper thin suspicion and frequently with unjustifiable use of force. It is the mothers, fathers, children, friends, neighbors and coworkers being targeted by ICE who are most vulnerable in this situation.”

“ICE agents don’t want to face accountability for their actions, but documenting ICE and other police activities is essential to guard against abuse of power and improper conduct. Courts have recognized for decades that tracking and reporting on law enforcement activities is an important and time honored public accountability mechanism,” she continued. 

Ruane said apps like this are an exercise of First Amendment protected rights. “As with any other app, if someone misuses it to engage in unlawful activity, they can be held accountable. Google should restore these services immediately,” she added.

Joshua Aaron, the creator of ICEBlock, told 404 Media “Big tech continues to put profit and power over people, under the guise of keeping us safe. Right now we are at a turning point in our nation’s history. It is time to choose sides; fascism or morality? Big tech has made their choice.”

Sometimes I worry that I’m giving the wrong impression around here.

I write quite a lot about many of the negative side effects of technology, including what’s going on with social media and AI. I think Posting Is The Most Powerful Force In The Universe, and not in a good way. I worry about influencers, about gambling, about what technology is doing to the social contract. I yell at venture capitalists. I talk about how smartphones and social media are causing all kinds of harmful social phenomenon and how technology profanes the sacred.

You could be forgiven for thinking this is a tech-skeptical blog, one that only exists to promote the worldview that technology is harmful and needs to be tightly controlled. This is especially true when it comes to AI - I’ve written about AI video slop, AI chatbot psychosis, and the many ways AI content is taking over social media. But the truth is that at heart, I’m a techno-optimist. I believe in the transformative power of technology, and that includes AI. So I want to explain why so much of the blog focuses on the negative, and why despite all the negative aspects of AI it’s going to have a transformative impact on society.

Part of the reason that this blog focuses on the negative so often is that it’s easy to write negative stories. Something that’s new has an unexpected side effect, people get upset, you summarize what happens, make a few pithy observations, and Hey Presto you’ve got a story. Negativity bias is everywhere in the media - local TV stations and newspapers worked for decades off the informal motto “If it bleeds, it leads”.

But beyond simple negativity bias, part of the reason I’m always talking about the downsides of AI is that social media is dominated by two particular use cases of AI: LLM chatbots and video/image generation. These two modes of AI are ubiquitous online, and can be incredibly controversial. If you’re mad about AI it’s almost certainly one of those two things. Concerns about copyrighted images? Fake AI-generated images of a politician? Slop content dominating your YouTube algorithm? Deep faked non-consensual pornography? All due to AI-generated videos and images. Meanwhile AI chatbots are the primary concern when it comes to social media bots, AI psychosis, and more. I share some of these frustrations - I’ve been stunned by how real-world humans seem to be outsourcing their common sense to chatbots:

But here’s the core of my pitch. Even if you hate AI art, AI video, and LLMs, you should still be optimistic about AI in the long run. There’s so much more to AI than just those things. AI is helping people right now, today, and it has the potential to help billions in the future in very tangible, non-digital ways.1

How is AI helping people? I’m glad you asked.

Self-Driving Cars

In America, around 40,000 people die every year from car crashes. Millions more are injured in car crashes every year. And the evidence is very strong that driverless cars are much safer than human drivers:

Waymo estimates that typical human drivers would have gotten into airbag-triggering crashes 159 times over 96 million miles in the cities where Waymo operates. Waymo, in contrast, got into only 34 airbag crashes—a 79 percent reduction.

In fact, that 79% reduction in serious crashes almost certainly downplays how much safer Waymos are compared to conventional human drivers. When the blog UnderstandingAI actually went through every NHTSA report for a Waymo accident, the vast majority of airbag crashes were other drivers running into Waymos - often while the Waymo was completely stationary. Only in a tiny minority of crashes was the self-driving software even partially at fault.

We have every reason to believe that the coming transition to self-driving cars will save tens of thousands of lives per year, as well as preventing millions of injuries. It will also revolutionize many aspects of everyday life. We’ll need less space in our cities for parking, freeing that space to be used for retail, housing, parks, etc. People will be able to read, work, sleep or play during their commutes. Police will be able to re-allocate their time to solving serious crimes rather than endlessly monitoring traffic. And this transition is already happening - you can take Waymos in multiple cities right now, today. They’re expanding and will soon start driving on freeways. Driverless long-haul trucks are coming soon as well. It’s a big deal, and something that we should all be excited about.2

AI-Boosted Manufacturing

The best way to show how AI can be used to improve manufacturing is to just show an example, like how auto manufacturer GM re-engineered their seat brackets using AI-powered ‘generative design’:

The benefit? The end result is structurally stronger while using less raw material and having fewer parts. It also looks like something from an alien spacecraft, which rocks.

This sort of AI-assisted design is already producing improved parts in our cars, rockets, planes, and in all kinds of consumer goods. And that’s just one way AI is being used - it can also help redesign plant processes, help iterate prototypes, speed up simulation and testing, and more. It’s making the things we buy better and more efficient bit by bit.

AI in Medical Imaging

A wide variety of medical imaging is currently being automated using AI techniques. AI currently either matches or outperforms medical professionals when it comes to detecting breast cancer, interpreting echocardiograph results, detecting lung nodules, finding melanomas, diagnosing tuberculosis and more. By looking at images of the brain, custom AI models are able to diagnose patients with Alzheimer’s up to seven years before they show any symptoms. Custom models also show great promise in predicting Parkinson’s disease from voice recordings.

The benefits here are potentially huge. AI can catch more diseases early, saving lives. AI also reduces the workload on radiologists - and contrary to dire predictions, most countries are experiencing a shortage of qualified radiologists, so this is a big deal. Less time spent poring over blurry images means more time for radiologists to do everything else - building plans for care, communicating with patients and other doctors, etc. There’s also evidence that AI can help doctors and patients make better diagnoses, especially tricky diagnoses.

Instant, Free Translation

In the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, our hero meets a bunch of aliens and is able to understand their language by inserting a Babel fish into his ear. The fish has special properties that allow the user to hear any language as their native language, and it was necessary as a plot device to get around the question of “Why do all aliens speak the Queen’s English?”. It obviously wasn’t realistic, but in science fiction novels it’s normal to invent crazy new forms of technology.

Just a few decades later, Babel fish are essentially real.

I worry that most people don’t fully appreciate how remarkable this is. It is absolutely insane that I can go to virtually any place in the world, whip out my phone, and instantly be able to translate any text in any language. If I need to talk with locals, I can speak into my phone in English and have the words instantly translated, written or spoken, into any language I choose. And I’m describing it the old-fashioned way. Apple now offers real-time live translation in current gen AirPods. It’s almost exactly the same thing as having a Babel fish in your ear! Imagine telling someone a hundred years ago that translation into any language would be universal, instant, and free. It’s astonishing.

Weather Forecasting

Weather forecasting is undergoing a revolution:

The new A.I. forecasts are, by leaps and bounds, easier, faster, and cheaper to produce than the non-A.I. variety, using 1,000 times less computational energy. And, in most cases, these A.I. forecasts, powered by machine learning, are more accurate, too. “Right now the machine learning model is producing better scores,” says Peter Dueben, a model developer at ECMWF in Bonn, who helped to develop the center’s Artificial Intelligence Forecasting System (AIFS). The improvement is hard to quantify, but the ECMWF says that for some weather phenomena, the AIFS is 20 percent better than its state-of-the-art physics-based models.

What sort of real world impacts is this having? AI is improving monsoon season rainfall predictions in South Asia, giving more accurate forecasts further in advance, which has large benefits for farmers. AI is also better at predicting the paths of hurricanes than conventional models:

Contra to the usual concerns about AI power usage, these AI models are also faster and cheaper to run than conventional weather models.

—-

Frankly, the examples above are just a few of the biggest examples of AI that impacts our everyday life. There are so many more stories out there:

• AI is being used to more quickly identify potholes in cities, leading to better street maintenance.

• AI is being used to identify illegal fishing activity and protect wild fish populations.

• AI has completely, utterly solved the previously intractable problem of protein folding.

• Machine-learned force fields could make it orders of magnitude faster/easier to model and design new materials.

• AI-targeted pesticide spraying tools can precisely target weeds and reduce the use of pesticides by 70%.

• AI models can predict the aftershocks of earthquakes better than conventional models.

If you want to peruse dozens more examples, you can check out the site AI Opportunities.

What you may notice here is that virtually none of the positive uses of AI listed above have anything to do with chatbots or image/video generation. Most of these uses are in professional settings. There’s genuinely so much that can be accomplished by applying AI to hard problems.

It frustrates me endlessly that so much energy, time, and brainpower is instead devoted to large language model chatbots and AI video. I don’t think LLMs are useless! I use them frequently. But I do think that we should divert at least a little bit of the energy going into chatbots and instead put that energy towards advances in the hard sciences, in predicting disasters, in diagnosing and preventing diseases.

There are signs we may be entering a new age of cross-partisan anti-AI politics. So my plea for you all is this - even if you think that ChatGPT is the devil, don’t toss out the baby with the bathwater. Let’s keep pushing to accomplish tangible things with AI, even if we worry about the social consequences of chatbots while we do it.