Illustration by The New York Times; Photographs by Brendan Smialowski and Brandon Bell, via Getty Images

Dear Commons Community,

Donald Trump and Kamala Harris have agreed to a debate on ABC on September 10th. Vice President Harris and former President Trump have both confirmed they will attend the ABC debate,” the network said in a statement.

Speaking at a news conference at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, Trump said that he was “looking forward” to debating the vice president.

Trump said “minor details” were still being worked out, including audience and locations.

Harris previously agreed to the ABC debate on September 10th – which was originally accepted by Trump and former President Joe Biden before the latter dropped out of the race. Earlier this week, Trump had said that he would not debate Harris if she did not agree to attend the proposed Fox News debate on September 4th.

An ABC source was confident that the network’s debate would be the first one between Trump and the vice president, as the Harris campaign has indicated she will not agree to the Fox News debate.

Full details on location and rules are still being discussed but ABC says that David Muir and Linsey Davis will be the moderators.

Tony

A satellite image shows the International Space Station docked with the Boeing Starliner spacecraft.Credit…Maxar Technologies, via Reuters

Dear Commons Community,

For weeks, NASA has downplayed problems experienced by Starliner, a Boeing spacecraft that took two astronauts to the International Space Station in June.

But yesterday, NASA officials admitted that the issues might be more serious than first thought and that the astronauts might not return on the Boeing vehicle, after all.

The agency is exploring a backup option for the astronauts, Suni Wiliams and Butch Wilmore, to instead hitch a ride back to Earth on a spacecraft built by Boeing’s competitor SpaceX.

The astronauts’ stay in orbit, which was to be as short as eight days, could be extended into next year.

“We could take either path,” Ken Bowersox, NASA’s associate administrator for the space operations mission directorate, said during a news conference on Wednesday. “And reasonable people could pick either path.”

The announcement adds more headaches and embarrassment for Boeing, an aerospace giant that has billions of dollars of aerospace contracts with the federal government and builds commercial jets that fly all around the world.

In addition to the woes faced by the company’s civil aviation division after part of a 737 jet’s fuselage blew off during flight in January, Boeing announced on Aug. 1 that it was writing off $125 million of unplanned costs spent on the Starliner program, adding to $1.5 billion of earlier write-offs.

NASA and Boeing officials had maintained that the crew members who launched with Starliner on its first crewed test flight were not stranded in space. Ms. Williams and Mr. Wilmore have spent two months aboard the orbital outpost while engineers continue to analyze data about the faulty performance of several of the Starliner’s thrusters when it approached for docking, as well as several helium leaks.

NASA typically sends a contingent of four astronauts to the space station every six months to replace an earlier crew of astronauts who then return to Earth.

Under the contingency plan, the next SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule would travel to the space station with only two astronauts instead of four. Ms. Williams and Mr. Wilmore would then join as full-fledged members of the space station crew for a half-year stay and return on the Crew Dragon around next February.

“In the last few weeks, we have decided to make sure we have that capability there, as our community, I would say, got more and more uncomfortable,” said Steve Stich, the manager of the commercial crew program at NASA.

Mr. Stich said that no decision had been made but that one would have to be made by the middle of this month.

That Crew Dragon launch has been pushed back to no earlier than Sept. 24 to allow more time for NASA officials to contemplate what to do with Starliner. The launch had been scheduled for Aug. 18.

On Wednesday, a Boeing spokesman said in a statement: “We still believe in Starliner’s capability and its flight rationale. If NASA decides to change the mission, we will take the actions necessary to configure Starliner for an uncrewed return.”

During earlier news conferences, Mr. Stich and Mark Nappi, who runs the Starliner program at Boeing, portrayed the delays as prudent engineering measures.

Mr. Stich also downplayed the possibility that the astronauts would not return on Starliner. On July 10, in response to a question about whether NASA was looking at using Crew Dragon as a backup, Mr. Stich said, “Certainly we’ve dusted off a few of those things to look at relative to Starliner, just to be prepared.”

But he added that Starliner remained the “prime option.”

In the background, NASA had already started working on the backup plan. “We started in early July, doing some early planning with SpaceX for some of these contingencies,” Mr. Stich said on Wednesday. “Then as we got closer and a little bit more data, we started to put a few more things in place.”

This does not sound very good!

Tony

Kamil  Krzaczynski/AFP via Getty Images, Jim Vondruska/Getty Images.

Dear Commons Community,

In the hours after Vice President Kamala Harris announced Governor Tim Walz as her running mate, allies of former President Donald Trump rushed to denigrate the Minnesota Democrat, seizing on criticism of his handling of the riots in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in May 2020.

“He allowed rioters to burn down the streets of Minneapolis,” JD Vance, the Republican candidate for vice president, said Tuesday.

But at the time, Trump expressed support for Walz’s handling of the protests, according to a recording of a phone call obtained by ABC News — telling a group of governors that Walz “dominated,” and praising his leadership as an example for other states to follow. Here is a partial text of what Trump said in the phone call.

The audio undercuts GOP recent comments of Walz’s handling of the protests.

Trump and company will have to find some other criticism.

Tony

Cori Bush and Wesley Bell.  Courtesy of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Dear Commons Community,

Representative Cori Bush (D-Mo.) lost her Democratic primary yesterday, shrinking the ranks of the House’s left-wing “Squad” and delivering another major victory to the pro-Israel and business-friendly groups that backed her challenger.

Wesley Bell, the St. Louis County prosecutor, defeated Bush. Since Missouri’s 1st Congressional District, which includes all of St. Louis and many of its northern and western suburbs, is overwhelmingly Democratic, Bell is all but assured of a seat in Congress come November.

Bell’s victory over Bush marks the second “Squad” member in recent months to fall to a challenger heavily funded by pro-Israel groups. Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.), who, like Bush, ousted an incumbent in 2020, lost his race to Westchester County Executive George Latimer this past June.

As reported by The Huffington Post.

“This race is about the future of our democracy and the soul of our Democratic Party, frankly,” Usamah Andrabi, a spokesperson for Justice Democrats, told HuffPost on Monday. “This is a question about whether we want to let a handful of Republican mega-donors dictate the outcome of Democratic primaries, or do we want to move forward to elect more nurses and everyday people to represent the community’s best interests.”

Bush, an ordained pastor and registered nurse, indeed faced a massive fundraising deficit. As Andrabi noted, Bell had the support of some local Republican donors — and many national megadonors from both parties, through the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

Super PACs supporting Bell outspent those supporting Bush by a more than 3-to-1 margin. Spending by pro-Bell groups included about $8.6 million from AIPAC’s United Democracy Project, $1.5 million from LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman’s Mainstream Democrats PAC, $1.4 million from the crypto-industry-backed FairShake PAC, and nearly $500,000 from the Democratic Majority for Israel PAC.

Bush made national waves with her July 2021 sit-in on the U.S. Capitol steps to draw attention to the expiration of the federal government’s COVID-19-era eviction moratorium. Her action got results; President Joe Biden responded by extending the policy, though the Supreme Court stopped it a few weeks later.

Later that year, in a bid to shore up support for abortion rights, Bush spoke on national television — and in a House hearing — about her experience getting an abortion after being raped at age 17.

Bush’s allies — and she retains the support of many local elected officials — see her as an authentic tribune of the Black Lives Matter movement, which was born in Ferguson, Missouri, following the police killing of Michael Brown in 2014.

Unlike many other Democrats in Washington, Bush continues to embrace calls to “defund the police.”

Bell, who also got his political start during the Ferguson protests and unseated a more conservative incumbent prosecutor in 2018, has, by contrast, disappointed many of his former fellow activists. They fault him for declining to prosecute Darren Wilson, the police officer who killed Brown, and for not more rapidly reducing the county’s jail and prison populations, even as he points to the creation of a conviction review unit and the expansion of drug diversion programs.

“Everyone keeps saying they both come from the movement,” said St. Louis Alderman Rasheen Aldridge, a Ferguson alum and Bush supporter. “I would say there’s somebody like Cori Bush, who was a front-liner, who was actually in the movement, and there’s somebody like Bell who was using the movement as a stepping stone for another seat.”

But Bush also had weaknesses that gave her ideological adversaries an opening.

DMFI PAC’s polling found Bush leading Bell by 16 percentage points in January, but still only getting 45% of the vote. By late July, the group had Bell leading Bush by six percentage points ― a close approximation of the final outcome.

“There was clear evidence in the polling, she was very vulnerable,” said Mark Mellman, president of DMFI, and a veteran campaign pollster.

Bush’s vulnerabilities included her vote against President Joe Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure law. While she and the other five progressives who voted against it say they meant to pressure Biden to pass broader social and climate legislation, attack ads papered over those nuances to paint Bush as a party turncoat.

Perhaps trying to offset the impact of this vote, Bush erected signs claiming she had “delivered over $2 billion” to the district. But with an assist from DMFI, local TV station KDSK reported in June that Bush’s team had counted virtually all federal grant and American Rescue Plan Act money that had come into the district during her time in Congress, the vast majority of which she had little direct role in allocating. Bush’s staff later took down at least one of the signs.

In addition, Bush faces a Department of Justice investigation for improperly spending more than $750,000 in campaign funds on private security services from a firm run by a man who was her romantic partner and is now her husband.

Federal campaign finance law allows candidates to hire family members as vendors as long as they are providing an authentic service at a market rate. Bush, who says she needs private security due to the death threats she receives, insists that the business agreement is above board. The House Ethics Committee also recommended no charges against her in October.

But in leaked audio of a January meeting with some of her aides in which Bush pleaded for them to remain with her, she acknowledged the arrangement might look “messed up” to some people.

Ironically, former Rep. William “Lacy” Clay, who Bush unseated in 2020, elicited scrutiny for a similar practice, albeit without the justification of personal safety. His campaign had shelled out so much money to his sister’s law firm for legal expenses, Bush was able to outspend him on television in the final two weeks of the race.

Finally, Bush has been among the most outspoken critics of Israel in Congress, particularly after Israel invaded Gaza in response to Hamas’ terror attack on Oct. 7. She was not only an early advocate for a ceasefire, but has also accused Israel of genocide ― a charge that remains highly disputed. And in an interview with The New York Times out on Monday, Bush expressed ambivalence about describing Hamas as a terrorist group, though her campaign later walked it back.

“Would they qualify to me as a terrorist organization? Yes,” Bush told the Times. “But do I know that? Absolutely not.”

Bush’s stances cost her the support of Susan Talve, a progressive St. Louis rabbi who leads the only synagogue in Bush’s district. But they also unsettled some other allies who see her national profile as a distraction from the needs of the high-poverty, majority Black district.

Darryl Gray, a local pastor and social justice advocate who ran Bush’s failed Senate campaign in 2016 and has voted for her ever since, is a prominent former ally now backing Bell.

“As an advocate on national issues, she gets an A+. She has been vocal and present and 10 toes in around issues that all of us ought to be concerned about ― from Palestine to housing,” Gray said Monday. “What St. Louis needs right now in their congressperson is not so much a vocal advocate, but a facilitator, a leader locally that can bring other elected officials and community partners to a table to address and hopefully solve local issues.”

Jeff Smith, a former state senator and executive director of the Missouri Workforce Housing Association, is another St. Louis resident who voted for Bush in 2020 and is now voting for Bell.

“She’s leaned into some of her more controversial positions instead of modulating her rhetoric,” Smith said. “A lot of people feel like she’s not been a representative for everyone, but has rather been narrowly focused on the people who constituted her base in her initial primary.”

“Public safety’s the biggest challenge that the region faces,” he added. “People have different positions for how to address it, but I would say the trajectory of the ‘defund the police’ message is similar to what it is in other places: It peaked in June 2020.”

Good luck to Rev. Bell!

Tony

JD Vance and Tim Walz. Photo by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty.

Dear Commons Community,

USA TODAY has an article this morning comparing the vice presidential candidates, Republican JD Vance and Democrat Tim Walz.

Walz entered the national ring yesterday while Vance was formally nominated at the Republican National Convention in July.

Vance has faced some criticism in recent weeks. He recently came under fire for comments about Americans without biological children – a demographic that includes Harris – referring to them as “childless cat ladies” with “no direct stake” in America, in a 2021 interview with Fox News.

Vance’s controversy, coupled with rising excitement over Harris’ jump to the top of the ticket, has given Democrats a boost less than 100 days to Election Day.

But how long will that boost last? Harris tapping Walz sets the stage for a contentious match-up between the experienced Midwestern governor and fresh-faced senator with a few years in Washington.

So how does Walz stack up to Vance? Here is a comparison courtesy of USA TODAY.

On a slew of issues, Walz and Vance are generally aligned with their running mates – and distinct from one another.

Vance has been an outspoken opponent of abortion − an issue expected to play a key role in 2024 − but backed Trump’s public position of leaving decisions around restrictions to individual states. However, the senator has said previously he would “like abortion to be illegal nationally.”

Walz is more in lockstep with Harris, as an equally vocal supporter of reproductive rights on the campaign trail. And the same dynamic plays out between Trump and Vance – and Harris and Walz – on issues ranging from climate change to immigration and more.

Across the board, though, Vance in recent years has doubled down on Trump’s stances. His position as a MAGA-megaphone made Vance a more unusual choice, said Joel Goldstein, a vice-presidential scholar at Saint Louis University.

“It wasn’t a pick that seemed to reach out to a different sector of the Republican Party, or to unify the party or the country,” Goldstein told USA TODAY. “It seemed that Senator Vance was, of all the candidates, the one who had gone to the greatest lengths to associate himself with former President Trump.”

Harris picking Walz also doesn’t necessarily represent bringing together differing Democrats.

He has been an ardent supporter of President Joe Biden and was a surrogate for his reelection campaign. After the president’s disastrous debate performance in June, Walz often took to the airwaves to defend Biden and boast about the administration’s accomplishments, even in the face of Democratic doubts.

But what else do Walz and Vance bring to the table? Originally added to the GOP ticket to attract swing state voters and face a former senator from California − before Biden bowed out of the 2024 race − Vance may have a different fight against Walz, a two-term governor with years in politics under his belt.

Now, Vance isn’t the only Midwesterner in the game. In naming Walz as her running mate, Harris selected a pro-union Democrat who can speak to the concerns of blue-collar workers in Midwestern states, and beyond.

Walz, 60, has also been governor of Minnesota – a decades-long Democratic stronghold – since 2018, coming off 12 years of representing the state in the U.S. House of Representatives. Walz also served in the Army National Guard and worked as a high school teacher and football coach.

Trump’s pick, meanwhile, lacks the experience of a typical vice president, Goldstein said.

Vance, a 40 year old who previously served in the Marines, made his introduction to politics two years ago after rising to fame with his best-selling memoir “Hillbilly Elegy.” In his 2022 Senate campaign, he faced a competitive Republican primary and was ultimately boosted by a coveted Trump endorsement.

But in a presidential election, experience isn’t everything, Goldstein cautioned. After all, concerns about Biden and Trump’s ages have taken center stage for months.

“The fact that you have X years of experience doesn’t mean that you’re ready,” he said, “and the fact that you have very little doesn’t mean that you’re not ready for the national stage.”

But Vance’s greenness may already be taking its toll.

Just under 30% of voters said they have a favorable opinion of the Buckeye State lawmaker, a historic low for a potential vice president, in a CNN/SSRS poll published July 24.

“In Vance’s case, you don’t really have any sort of other indication that he’s ready,” Goldstein said. “So then when he gets out on the national stage, and is confronted with damaging clips from his past, and isn’t very effective in handling them, it sort of reinforces questions about his inexperience.”

Walz’s experience hasn’t guaranteed name recognition though, a challenge he’ll have to take on ahead of November. Seventy-one percent of Americans said they’ve never heard of Walz or were unsure how to rate him in a NPR/PBS/Marist national survey released this week.

Regardless of their resumes and approaches, in the coming months, Vance and Walz will face a similar challenge. They’ll have to make their pitch to voters about why they’re the right man for the job.

The country got a taste of Vance’s willingness to vehemently defend his running mate and go after their opposition during his speech at the RNC accepting his VP nomination. Vance told the nation that Americans “need” Trump at this moment in history and bashed Biden and Harris’ leadership.

Walz will have the same opportunity as he takes up the running mate mantle ahead of the Democratic convention later this month.

But political observers have already seen a slice of how he’ll go on offense. When he was simply a vice presidential candidate, Walz coined a new Democratic talking point, bashing Vance and Trump on TV and social media with a now-viral insult against his GOP opponents, labeling them “weird.”

“These are weird people on the other side,” Walz told MSNBC. “They wanna take books away, they wanna be in your exam room, that’s what it comes down to and don’t, you know, get sugar-coating this, these are weird ideas. Listen to them speak, listen to how they talk about things.”

Good analysis!

Tony

Photos: Jim Watson and Chris Kleponis/AFP via Getty Images

Dear Commons Community,

Vice President Kamala Harris has decided on Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate in her bid for the White House.  A former teacher,  AFT President Randi Weingarten described him:

“…as a great governor, who will be a great vice president. He is an inspired choice. We supported him when he ran for Congress and governor, and for good reason: He has provided record funding for public education, protected reproductive rights, and expanded collective bargaining, affordable child care and paid family and medical leave. And he did it with the slimmest of majorities.

Maybe Walz is so successful because he’s a teacher. He was a longtime social studies teacher in Mankato, Minn., and a member of Education Minnesota, the AFT and the National Education Association. Think about how incredible it would be to have someone with such deep understanding of our schools serving as vice president.”

The Associated Press described him as follows:

Walz comes from rural America

It would be hard to find a more vivid representative of the American heartland than Walz. Born in West Point, Nebraska, a community of about 3,500 people northwest of Omaha, Walz joined the Army National Guard and became a teacher in Nebraska.

He and his wife moved to Mankato in southern Minnesota in the 1990s. That’s where he taught social studies and coached football at Mankato West High School, including for the 1999 team that won the first of the school’s four state championships. He still points to his union membership there.

Walz served 24 years in the Army National Guard before retiring from a field artillery battalion in 2005 as a command sergeant major, one of the military’s highest enlisted ranks.

He has a proven ability to connect with conservative voters

In his first race for Congress, Walz upset a Republican incumbent. That was in 2006, when he won in a largely rural, southern Minnesota congressional district against six-term Rep. Gil Gutknecht. Walz capitalized on voter anger with then-President George W. Bush and the Iraq war.

During six terms in the U.S. House, Walz championed veterans’ issues.

He’s also shown a down-to-earth side, partly through social media video posts with his daughter, Hope. One last fall showed them trying a Minnesota State Fair ride, “The Slingshot,” after they bantered about fair food and her being a vegetarian.

He could help the ticket in key Midwestern states

While Walz isn’t from one of the crucial “blue wall” states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, where both sides believe they need to win, he’s right next door. He also could ensure that Minnesota stays in the hands of Democrats.

That’s important because former President Donald Trump has portrayed Minnesota as being in play this year, even though the state hasn’t elected a Republican to statewide office since 2006. A GOP presidential candidate hasn’t carried the state since President Richard Nixon’s landslide in 1972, but Trump has already campaigned there.

When Democratic Gov. Mark Dayton decided not to seek a third term in 2018, Walz campaigned and won the office on a “One Minnesota” theme.

Walz also speaks comfortably about issues that matter to voters in the Rust Belt. He’s been a champion of Democratic causes, including union organizing, workers’ rights and a $15-an-hour minimum wage.

He has experience with divided government

In his first term as governor, Walz faced a Legislature split between a Democratic-led House and a Republican-controlled Senate that resisted his proposals to use higher taxes to boost money for schools, health care and roads. But he and lawmakers brokered compromises that made the state’s divided government still seem productive.

Bipartisan cooperation became tougher during his second year as he used the governor’s emergency power during the COVID-19 pandemic to shutter businesses and close schools. Republicans pushed back and forced out some agency heads. Republicans also remain critical of Walz over what they see as his slow response to sometimes violent unrest that followed the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020.

Things got easier for Walz in his second term, after he defeated Republican Scott Jensen, a physician known nationally as a vaccine skeptic. Democrats gained control of both legislative chambers, clearing the way for a more liberal course in state government, aided by a huge budget surplus.

Walz and lawmakers eliminated nearly all of the state abortion restrictions enacted in the past by Republicans, protected gender-affirming care for transgender youth and legalized the recreational use of marijuana.

Rejecting Republican pleas that the state budget surplus be used to cut taxes, Democrats funded free school meals for children, free tuition at public colleges for students in families earning under $80,000 a year, a paid family and medical leave program and health insurance coverage regardless of a person’s immigration status.

He has an ear for sound-bite politics

Walz called Republican nominee Donald Trump and running mate JD Vance “just weird” in an MSNBC interview last month and the Democratic Governors Association — which Walz chairs — amplified the point in a post on X. Walz later reiterated the characterization on CNN, citing Trump’s repeated mentions of the fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter from the film “Silence of the Lambs” in stump speeches.

The word quickly morphed into a theme for Harris and other Democrats, and has a chance to be a watchword of the 2024 election.

We wish him and Harris the best!

Tony

Jenna Ellis.  Courtesy of John Bazemore/Pool/AFP via Getty Images.

Dear Commons Community,

Trump’s former campaign attorney Jenna Ellis, who worked closely with Rudy Giuliani, will cooperate with Arizona prosecutors in exchange for charges being dropped against her in a fake electors case, the state attorney general’s office announced yesterday.

Ellis had previously pleaded not guilty to fraud, forgery and conspiracy charges in the Arizona case. Seventeen other people charged in the case have pleaded not guilty to the felony charges — including Giuliani, Trump presidential chief of staff Mark Meadows and 11 Republicans who submitted a document to Congress falsely declaring Trump had won Arizona.  As reported by The Associated Press.

“Her insights are invaluable and will greatly aid the State in proving its case in court,” Attorney General Kris Mayes said in a statement. “As I stated when the initial charges were announced, I will not allow American democracy to be undermined — it is far too important. Today’s announcement is a win for the rule of law.”

Last year, Ellis was charged in Georgia after she appeared with Giuliani at a December 2020 hearing hosted by state Republican lawmakers at the Georgia Capitol during which false allegations of election fraud were made. She had pleaded guilty in October to one felony count of aiding and abetting false statements and writings.

While not a fake elector in Arizona, prosecutors say Ellis made false claims of widespread election fraud in the state and six others, encouraged the Arizona Legislature to change the outcome of the election and encouraged then-Vice President Mike Pence to accept Arizona’s fake elector votes.

The indictment said Ellis, Giuliani and other associates were at a meeting at the Arizona Legislature on Dec. 1, 2020, with then-House Speaker Rusty Bowers and other Republicans when Giuliani and his team asked the speaker to hold a committee hearing on the election.

When Bowers asked for proof of election fraud, Giuliani said he had proof but Ellis had advised that it was left back at a hotel room, the indictment said. No proof was provided to Bowers.

Ellis also is barred from practicing law in Colorado for three years after her guilty plea in Georgia.

Prosecutors in Michigan, Nevada, Georgia and Wisconsin have also filed criminal charges related to the fake electors scheme.

Arizona authorities unveiled the felony charges in late April. Overall, charges were brought against 11 Republicans who submitted a document to Congress falsely declaring Trump had won Arizona, five lawyers connected to the former president and two former Trump aides. President Joe Biden won Arizona by 10,457 votes.

Trump himself was not charged in the Arizona case but was referred to as an unindicted co-conspirator in the indictment.

The 11 people who claimed to be Arizona’s Republican electors met in Phoenix on Dec. 14, 2020, to sign a certificate saying they were “duly elected and qualified” electors and asserting that Trump carried the state. A one-minute video of the signing ceremony was posted on social media by the Arizona Republican Party at the time. The document was later sent to Congress and the National Archives, where it was ignored.

Another Trump crony fesses up to his lies!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Futurist Ray Kuzweil has a new book entitled, The Singularity is Nearer:  When We Merge with AI.  Kurzweil is well-known for his work in artificial intelligence, having been a principal researcher at Google for decades. The simplest definition of singularity is when AI reaches human-level intelligence. He has written a number of best-selling books including The Singularity is Near (2005) and How to Create a Mind (2012). The present book is a follow-up to his 2005 book and forecasts a more rapid development of AI applications due mainly to the explosion of generative AI software such as ChatGPT. He also documents how AI investment totaling $189 billion in 2022 and the incredible advances in digital technology capability in the past twenty years as the main drivers.  Kurzweil predicts that the integration of biotechnology, artificial intelligence and nanotechnology as the impetus for the arrival of the singularity. If you are interested in where AI is heading, The Singularity is Nearer…will be helpful.  Kurzweil provides a fairly positive view of the future of AI but does discuss its perils in his final chapter.

Below is a review that appeared in The New York Times.

Tony

————————————————————————

The New York Times

Review of Books

THE SINGULARITY IS NEARER: When We Merge With A.I., by Ray Kurzweil

By Nathaniel Rich

June 26, 2024

A central conviction held by artificial intelligence boosters, but largely ignored in public discussions of the technology, is that the ultimate fulfillment of the A.I. revolution will require the deployment of microscopic robots into our veins.

In the short term, A.I. may help us print clothing on demand, help prevent cancer and liberate half of the work force. But to achieve its greatest aims — immortality, superhuman intelligence, the elimination of all our social ills — we must infuse our blood with millions of self-replicating diamondoid robots.

Why don’t we hear more about the blood robots? Their arrival is only a few years away — at least according to Ray Kurzweil, a godfather of A.I., our foremost technological prophet and a “principal researcher and A.I. visionary” at Google.

“The Singularity Is Nearer” follows Kurzweil’s 2005 “The Singularity Is Near,” and several other heraldic works of tech futurism that have become sacred texts to the current generation of A.I. utopians. In his latest, Kurzweil boasts of his greatest hits: his prediction, in the late 1980s, that a global information network would be universally accessible by the late 1990s, and that mobile devices linked to this network would appear by the turn of the century; his 2018 prediction that, within two years, a neural net would be able to analyze radiology images as well as human doctors, a feat accomplished by Stanford researchers two weeks later; and his 1999 prediction that an A.I. capable of convincingly impersonating a human being would appear by 2029 — which now may seem conservative.

In “The Singularity Is Nearer,” Kurzweil promises that, by 2029, A.I. will be “better than all humans” in “every skill possessed by any human.” During the 2030s, solar power, enhanced by A.I.-driven advances in 3-D printing, will come to dominate the global energy supply, most consumer goods will be free, and the “dramatic reduction of physical scarcity” will “finally allow us to easily provide for the needs of everyone.” Sounds rad!

Enter the blood robots. Have no doubt: “The long-term goal is nanorobots.” One day next decade, Kurzweil believes, you and I will feed nanobots through our capillaries. The little busybodies will swim to our brains, where they will connect our neocortex to the cloud, allowing us to expand our intelligence “millions-fold.” This is “the Singularity.”

Nanobots will connect us directly to virtual worlds, so that we will be able to scale Mount Everest, attend an opera or take “a sensory-rich virtual beach vacation for the whole family” in our minds. Why bother with damp bathing suits and sunscreen when you can enjoy abundant “natural beauty” from your own bed — or cryo-capsule?

By 2040, nanobots will cure most disease and arrest the aging process. (Kurzweil believes that the first person to live 1,000 years has been born.) By the early 2040s, you will be able to upload your entire brain to the cloud — or into the skull of a “Blade Runner”-style replicant. You might elect to clone yourself, or recreate a dead person.

Nanotechnology will enable us to modify our bodies at will, allowing us to “run much faster and longer, swim and breathe under the ocean like fish, and even give ourselves working wings.”

Might things not go according to plan? Kurzweil tends to bracket dour speculations with conditional assurances too broad to satisfy any non-optimized brain. “If we can meet the scientific, ethical, social and political challenges posed by these advances,” he writes, “we will transform life on earth profoundly for the better.”

That “if” contains libraries of unwritten ethics volumes, revolutionary manifestoes, Supreme Court opinions. Helpfully, Kurzweil offers a distillation of his general view of risk: “As this technology becomes more prevalent, society will adapt.” Pushed to its most unbridled excesses, optimism becomes fatalism.

Kurzweil’s predictions may be of use to investors and science fiction novelists (at least until they are replaced by A.I. in five years), but the greatest value of “The Singularity Is Nearer” is to articulate, with bracing candor, the technocrat’s view of humanity.

People are, in a word, weak. Our bodies, like last year’s MacBook, are “outdated” and prone to failure. Our brains are prisons. As Kurzweil puts it, sub-optimally: “We are far from optimal, especially with regard to thinking.”

This miserly view of human nature extends to our culture. Kurzweil thinks A.I.-generated art will be “vastly richer” because it will be able to put “a character’s raw, disorganized, nonverbal” thoughts “directly into our brains,” not realizing that artistic skill moves in the opposite direction: toward specificity, clarity, idiosyncrasy.

To Kurzweil, visual art is wall decoration (Leonardos aren’t “any better at sprucing up a living room than high-quality reproductions”) and novels are successful to the extent that they’re “heart-rending.” Kurzweil believes that poetry lovers are equivocating when they refuse to quantify merit: If only enough readers could be persuaded to “give 0-100 assessments of how beautiful a poem seemed to them,” the truth would out.

What’s missing in all this is any conception of the subjectivity of art — the spark of recognition shared by poet and reader across time and space. If everyone liked the same art, we wouldn’t need art.

At 76, Kurzweil has one thing in common with the authors of those poems and novels he hasn’t read: a panicky fear of death. He laments being sentenced to a body “biologically programmed to eventually destroy the information pattern that is Ray Kurzweil,” and plans to create a replicant of himself ASAP. To survive until the day when A.I. defeats aging and disease, he recently told Joe Rogan, he swallows 80 supplements a day.

The purest expression of his ambition, however, can be found in a conversation he has with a chatbot trained in the writings of his father, the Viennese composer Frederic Kurzweil, who died in 1970. The author has often spoken of his desire to reincarnate Frederic; he calls this chatbot “the first step in bringing my father back.”

Here, finally, is the apotheosis of Kurzweil’s A.I. dream: not super-intelligence or optimized blood, but the chance to sit down with his father, and discuss music.

Ever Forward

Dear Commons Community,

I was watching TV coverage of the Olympics on Saturday afternoon when at 5:00 pm, NBC decided to interrupt its airing to bring a 30-minute special entitled “In The Company of Heroes.”  The special was well-done and presented without commercial interruption.  It featured a dozen or so American veterans of the June 6, 1944 invasion of Normandy that was the turning point of World War II in Europe. All of the veterans were in their late nineties or early one-hundreds and it was a tear-jerk to see them return to Omaha Beach and other critical  landing places. They reflected on their comrades who perished that day and the hell of struggling in the water and on the beaches.  The special also featured young French school children who treated the veterans as their heroes.  It ended with taps being played at The Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial.

I had the privilege of visiting Normandy in 2019 (75^th Anniversary).  It is a place that every American should visit at least once in their lifetime.

Bravo to NBC!

Tony

The Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial

David Axelrod

Dear Commons Community,

Barack Obama campaign strategist David Axelrod warned that much of the enthusiasm among Democrats about Vice President Harris’s campaign is just “irrational exuberance,” as the race remains neck and neck.

Harris’s campaign has come out to a quick start, breaking fundraising records and significantly cutting into former President Trump’s previous lead in polls since she replaced President Biden at the top of the ticket.  As reported by The Hill.

“She has a lot of momentum, but if you do look at the polling, this is still a really tight race,” he said. “This is going to be a hard fight for either side. It’s based on the numbers we’re seeing right now.”

“Look, I mean, there’s a lot of irrational exuberance … on the Democratic side of the aisle right now, because there was despair for some period of time about what November was gonna look like,” he continued. “Now people feel like there’s a chance.”

Despite that optimism, Axelrod said, the balance remains in Trump’s favor.

“It’s absolutely Trump’s race to lose right now. He is ahead,” he said. “And he is ahead in most of the battleground states. They’re close, they can be won by either candidate.”

Axelrod was among the top Democrats urging Biden to leave the 2024 campaign but hasn’t joined the fervor for Harris alongside other party members. He warned last week that Trump remains a “pretty substantial favorite” over the vice president.

The vice president became the official Democratic nominee in a virtual roll-call vote last week and is set to announce her own vice presidential pick before a Tuesday campaign event.

Polling remains tight in the race, with Trump holding a slim 1.1 point lead over Harris in The Hill/Decision Desk HQ average of national polls. In battleground states, polling shows both candidates within the margin of error. The most recent The Hill/Decision Desk HQ prediction model gives Trump a 56 percent chance of winning the White House.

Axelrod knows what he is talking about!

Tony