Credit…Illustration by Rebecca Chew/The New York Times

Dear Commons Community,

In an  editorial yesterday, The New York Times declared that the Democratic Party is in a state of denial about why it lost the presidency, as well as the Senate and the House in 2024, and said its proposed solutions for getting back on track are delusional as well. 

“As comforting as these explanations may feel to Democrats, they are a form of denial that will make it harder for the Democratic Party to win future elections,” the Board said in the editorial.

The title of the editorial flatly declared, “The Democrats Are in Denial About 2024.” 

The Times editorial comes as the Democratic Party’s approval rating has been at one of its lowest points in modern history. According to national polls from CNN and NBC News published earlier this month, just 29% and 27% of respondents, respectively, say they view the party favorably. These represent the lowest approval numbers for the party surveyed by those outlets since the early ’90s.

The NYT editorial board hammered “many party leaders” who have “decided that they do not need to make significant changes to their policies or their message” following their “comprehensive defeat.” 

Furthermore, the party has turned to a “convenient explanation for their plight,” namely that forces beyond its control, like “postpandemic inflation” hurt its chances, as well as the fact that they just need to message better. “If Democrats could only communicate better, particularly on social media and podcasts, the party would be fine,” the board stated, summarizing part of their denial.

The editorial also mentioned how new Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin insists that the party has the “right message” and just needs a way to “connect it back with the voters.” It also provided the example of former Democratic Vice Presidential candidate Gov. Tim Walz, D-Minn., recently telling voters that “90 million” people stayed home last election and the party has to get their support. 

Denial indeed!

Below is the entire editorial.

Tony

———————————————————————

The New York Times

The Democrats Are in Denial About 2024

March 29, 2025

By The Editorial Board

The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.

Last year’s election was close, despite President Trump’s hyperbolic claims about his margin of victory. Still, the Democratic Party clearly lost — and not only the presidential race. It also lost control of the Senate and failed to recapture the House of Representatives. Of the 11 governor’s races held last year, Democrats won three. In state legislature races, they won fewer than 45 percent of the seats.

In the aftermath of this comprehensive defeat, many party leaders have decided that they do not need to make significant changes to their policies or their message. They have instead settled on a convenient explanation for their plight.

That explanation starts with the notion that Democrats were merely the unlucky victims of postpandemic inflation and that their party is more popular than it seems: If Democrats could only communicate better, particularly on social media and podcasts, the party would be fine. “We’ve got the right message,” Ken Martin, the new chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said while campaigning for the job. “What we need to do is connect it back with the voters.”

A key part of this argument involves voter turnout. Party leaders claim that most Americans still prefer Democrats but that voter apathy allowed Mr. Trump to win. According to this logic, Democrats do not need to worry about winning back Trump voters and should instead try to animate the country’s natural liberal majority. “I don’t think we’re going to win over those 77 million that voted for Donald Trump,” Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, the party’s 2024 vice-presidential nominee, said this month. “I’m concerned with the 90 million who stayed home.” It was an unfortunate echo of Hillary Clinton saying that millions of Trump voters were “deplorables” and “irredeemable.”

As comforting as these explanations may feel to Democrats, they are a form of denial that will make it harder for the Democratic Party to win future elections.

Even many conservatives and Republicans should be concerned about the Democratic denial. The country needs two healthy political parties. It especially needs a healthy Democratic Party, given Mr. Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party and his draconian behavior. Restraining him — and any successors who continue his policies — depends on Democrats’ taking an honest look at their problems.

The part of the Democratic story that contains the most truth is inflation. Prices surged during Covid’s supply-chain disruptions, and incumbent parties around the world have suffered. Whether on the political right or left, ruling parties lost power in the United States, Brazil, Britain, Germany and Italy.

But some incumbent parties managed to win re-election, including in Denmark, France, India, Japan, Mexico and Spain. A healthier Democratic Party could have joined them last year. The Democrats, after all, were running against a Republican whose favorability rating rarely exceeded 45 percent. Most voters did not like Mr. Trump. They did prefer him to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

Polls make clear that inflation was not the only reason. Voters also trusted Republicans more than Democrats on immigration, crime, government spending, global trade and foreign policy. Among the few exceptions were abortion and health care. As the headline of a recent Times news article summarized, “Support for Trump’s Policies Exceeds Support for Trump.” Only 27 percent of Americans now have a favorable view of the Democratic Party. It is the party’s lowest approval rating in decades.

Support for Democrats hits a low

The part of that Democratic story that contains the least truth is voter turnout. Nonvoters appear to have favored Mr. Trump by an even wider margin than voters, as Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, has reported. David Shor, the bracingly honest Democratic data scientist, put it well: “We’re now at a point where the more people vote, the better Republicans do.”

The good news for Democrats is that winning over nonvoters and Trump voters is not in conflict. People who do not vote have many of the same concerns as voters who flipped to Mr. Trump. Nonvoters are disproportionately working class, young, Asian, Black, Latino or foreign-born, and each of these groups shifted away from Democrats. When Democrats call for ignoring the country’s 77 million Trump voters, they are writing off a diverse group of Americans, many of whom voted Democratic before.

We recognize that the Democratic Party is in a difficult position. It must compete with a Republican Party that shows an alarming hostility to American democracy. And we urge Democrats to continue speaking out against Mr. Trump’s authoritarian behavior — his bullying of military leaders, judges, law firms, universities and the media; his disdain for Congress; his attempts to chill speech through deportation; his tolerance for incompetent cabinet secretaries who endanger American troops. Whatever polls say about the political wisdom of such criticism, Democratic silence on these issues would only encourage timidity from other parts of society.

It is the rest of the Democratic strategy that requires more rigorous and less wishful reflection. To regain voters’ trust, Democrats should take at least three steps.

First, they should admit that their party mishandled Mr. Biden’s age. Leading Democrats insisted that he had mental acuity for a second term when most Americans believed otherwise. Party leaders even attempted to shout down anybody who raised concerns, before reversing course and pushing Mr. Biden out of the race. Already, many voters believe that Democrats refuse to admit uncomfortable truths on some subjects, including crime, illegal immigration, inflation and Covid lockdowns. Mr. Biden’s age became a glaring example. Acknowledging as much may be backward looking, but it would send an important signal.

Second, Democrats should recognize that the party moved too far left on social issues after Barack Obama left office in 2017. The old video clips of Ms. Harris that the Trump campaign gleefully replayed last year — on decriminalizing the border and government-funded gender-transition surgery for prisoners — highlighted the problem. Yes, she tried to abandon these stances before the election, but she never spoke forthrightly to voters and acknowledged she had changed her position.

Even today, the party remains too focused on personal identity and on Americans’ differences — by race, gender, sexuality and religion — rather than our shared values. On these issues, progressives sometimes adopt a scolding, censorious posture. It is worth emphasizing that this posture has alienated growing numbers of Asian, Black and Latino voters. Democrats who won last year in places where Mr. Trump also won, such as Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona and Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, adopted a more moderate tone. They were hawkish about border security and law enforcement, criticizing their own party. They did not make the common Democratic mistake of trying to talk about only economic policy and refusing to engage with Americans’ concerns on difficult social issues.

Third, the party has to offer new ideas. When Democrats emerged from the wilderness in the past, they often did so with fresh ideas. They updated the proud Democratic tradition of improving life for all Americans. Bill Clinton remade the party in the early 1990s and spoke of “putting people first.” In 2008, Mr. Obama, Mrs. Clinton and John Edwards offered exciting plans to improve health care, reduce inequality and slow climate change. These candidates provided intellectual leadership.

Ms. Harris failed to do so in last year’s campaign, and few Democrats are doing so today. Where is the Democrat with bold plans to cut living costs? Or fight the ills of social media? Or help aimless boys who are struggling in school? Where is the governor who does more than talk about an abundance agenda and actually cuts regulations to help America build? New ideas should come from both the party’s progressives and its centrists. The most successful American politicians, like Mr. Obama and Ronald Reagan, deftly mix boldness and moderation. One benefit of being out of power is that it offers time to develop ideas and see which resonate. It is not a time to say, “We’ve got the right message.”

Even without reforming themselves, Democrats may fare well in elections over the next two years. Opposition parties usually thrive in midterms. The longer-term picture is less sanguine. The next Republican leader may be more disciplined than Mr. Trump. And both the Senate and the Electoral College look challenging for Democrats. Of the seven states whose population has grown the most since 2020, the Democratic Party won none in last year’s presidential election.

Defeat has a long history of inspiring honest reflection in politics. In this time of frustration and anxiety for Democrats, they should give it a try.

Dear Commons Community,

There’s passionate debate about how to solve America’s ongoing housing crisis, much of which revolves around mortgage rates, zoning issues, immigration and construction. However, billionaire entrepreneur and investor Mark Cuban believes the biggest issue of all is being overlooked by the public.

“Home insurance in areas hit by repetitive disasters is going to be the number one housing affordability issue over the next 4 years. And possibly going into the midterms. More so than interest rates,” he said in a post on Bluesky. “Florida, in particular, is going to have huge problems.”

Home insurance rates have surged, driven primarily by two key factors: inflation and climate change.

The cost of labor and building materials for homes has risen rapidly since the pandemic. Although the price of lumber has recovered, the National Association of Home Builders says things like drywall, concrete and steel mill products are still selling at elevated prices.

For those with a replacement cost insurance policy, it can cost the insurer more to cover the cost of replacing your home without taking depreciation into account. The risk this presents will be reflected in your premium.

While homes are more expensive to replace, they’re also more prone to damage because of climate change.

Severe floods, wildfires and hurricanes have become more frequent, which must be factored into the underwriting of property insurance. According to the Insurance Information Institute, “cumulative replacement costs related to homeowners insurance soared 55% between 2020 and 2022.”

In fact, major insurers like Farmers and Progressive have either left states like Florida or limited their exposure to these disaster-prone regions. Mark Friedlander of the Insurance Information Institute said, “We have estimated up to 15% of Florida homeowners may not have property insurance, based on input from insurance agents across the state.”

Homeowners and potential homebuyers should be aware of how risky it is to go without coverage and prepare for the cost of adequate protection.

Lowering the cost of home insurance may seem difficult with these facts at hand, but it is still possible to shop around for a better deal on your home insurance.

I just experienced what Cuban expresses above and I don’t live in a disaster-prone area of New York (thank God). My insurance was set to increase twenty-five percent for the coming year.  I called my broker and she said exactly what Cuban is saying about insurance.  She indicated that the company handling my insurance wants to get out of the home insurance business even though it has been my insurer for almost thirty years. Through her good work, she found another insurer who issued me a policy that was actually less than my previous policy.  

Thank you, Linda!

Tony

A protester holds a sign against Tesla CEO Elon Musk while rallying outside a Tesla store in San Francisco  yesterday. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)

Dear Commons Community,

Protesters against billionaire Elon Musk’s purge of the U.S. government under President Donald Trump demonstrated outside Tesla dealerships throughout the U.S. and in Europe yesterday in an attempt to dent the fortune of the world’s richest man.

The protesters were trying to escalate a movement targeting Tesla dealerships and vehicles in opposition to Musk’s role as the head of the newly created Department of of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, where he has gained access to sensitive data and shuttered entire agencies as he attempts to slash government spending. The biggest portion of Musk’s estimated $340 billion fortune consists of his stock in the electric vehicle company, which he continues to run while also working alongside Trump.  As reported by The Associated Press.

After earlier demonstrations that were somewhat sporadic, yesterday marked the first attempt to surround all 277 of the automaker’s showrooms and service centers in the U.S. in hopes of deepening a recent decline in the company’s sales.

By early afternoon crowds ranging from a few dozen to hundreds of protesters had flocked to Tesla locations in New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Maryland, Minnesota and the automaker’s home state of Texas. Pictures posted on social media showed protesters brandishing signs such as “ Honk if you hate Elon ” and “ Fight the billionaire broligarchy.”

As the day progressed, the protests cascaded around the country outside Tesla locations in major cities such as Washington, Chicago, Indianapolis, Cincinnati and Seattle, as well as towns in Virginia, Pennsylvania and Colorado. Smaller groups of counterprotesters also showed up at some sites.

“Hey, hey, ho, ho, Elon Musk has got to go!” several dozen people chanted outside a showroom in Dublin, California, about 35 miles (60 miles) east of San Francisco, while a smaller cluster of Trump supporters waved American flags across the street.

A much larger crowd circled another showroom in nearby Berkeley, chanting slogans to the beat of drums.

“We’re living in a fascist state,” said Dennis Fagaly, a retired high school teacher from neighboring Oakland, “and we need to stop this or we’ll lose our whole country and everything that is good about the United States.”

Anti-Musk sentiment extends beyond the U.S.

The Tesla Takedown movement also hoped to rally protesters at more than 230 locations in other parts of the world. Although the turnouts in Europe were not as large, the anti-Musk sentiment was similar.

About two dozen people held signs lambasting the billionaire outside a dealership in London as passing cars and trucks tooted horns in support.

One sign displayed depicted Musk next to an image of Adolf Hitler making the Nazi salute — a gesture that Musk has been accused of reprising shortly after Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration. A person in a Tyrannosaurus rex costume held another sign with a picture of Musk’s straight-arm gesture that said, “You thought the Nazis were extinct. Don’t buy a Swasticar.”

“We just want to get loud, make noise, make people aware of the problems that we’re facing,” said Cam Whitten, an American who showed up at the London protest.

Tesla Takedown was organized by a group of supporters that included disillusioned owners of the automaker’s vehicles, celebrities such as actor John Cusack, and at least one Democratic Party lawmaker, Rep. Jasmine Crockett from Dallas.

“I’m going to keep screaming in the halls of Congress. I just need you all to make sure you all keep screaming in the streets,” Crockett said during an organizing call this month.

Another Democratic lawmaker, Rep. Pramila Jaypal, showed up at a protest in Seattle, which she represents in Congress.

Musk backlash has included some vandalism

Some people have gone beyond protest, setting Tesla vehicles on fire or committing other acts of vandalism that U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi has decried as domestic terrorism. In a March 20 company meeting, Musk indicated that he was dumbfounded by the attacks and said the vandals should “stop acting psycho.”

Crockett and other Tesla Takedown supporters have been stressing the importance of yesterday’s protests remaining peaceful.

But police were investigating a fire that destroyed seven Teslas in northwestern Germany in the early morning. It was not immediately clear if the blaze, which was extinguished by firefighters, was related to the protests.

In Watertown, Massachusetts, local police reported that the side mirror of a black pickup struck two people at a protest outside a Tesla service center, according to the Boston Herald. The suspect was promptly identified by police at the scene, who said there were no serious injuries.

Musk maintains that the company’s future remains bright

A growing number of consumers who bought Tesla vehicles before Musk took over DOGE have been looking to sell or trade them in, while others have slapped on bumper stickers seeking to distance themselves from him.

But Musk did not appear concerned about an extended slump in new sales in the March meeting, during which he reassured the workers that the company’s Model Y would remain “the best-selling car on Earth again this year.” He also predicted that Tesla will have sold more than 10 million cars worldwide by next year, up from about 7 million currently.

“There are times when there are rocky moments, where there is stormy weather, but what I am here to tell you is that the future is incredibly bright and exciting,” Musk said.

After Trump was elected last November, investors initially saw Musk’s alliance with the president as a positive development for Tesla and its long-running efforts to launch a network of self-driving cars.

That optimism helped lift Tesla’s stock by 70% between the election and Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration, creating an additional $560 billion in shareholder wealth. But virtually all those gains have evaporated amid investor worries about the backlash, lagging sales in the U.S., Europe and China, and Musk spending time overseeing DOGE.

“This continues to be a moment of truth for Musk to navigate this brand tornado crisis moment and get onto the other side of this dark chapter for Tesla,” Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives said in a recent research note.

Musk, Trump and Tesla are surely on the dark side.

Tony

A protester holds a placard as she takes part in the Tesla Takedown Global Day of Action near a Tesla dealership in London. (AP Photo/Thomas Krych)

A burnt-out Tesla sits in front of a Tesla dealership yesterday in Ottersberg, Germany. (J’rn H’neke/dpa via AP)

Dear Commons Community,

More and more people are becoming infected in the ongoing measles outbreak in West Texas, New Mexico and other states, as more than 300 people have tested positive for the illness. The disease has killed one unvaccinated child in Texas and is suspected in the death of an unvaccinated adult in New Mexico.  As reported by The Huffington Post.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently said in a Fox News interview that the government is “delivering vitamin A” to West Texas to battle the outbreak, and “they’re getting very, very good results from budesonide, which is a steroid … and clarithromycin [an antibiotic], and also cod liver oil, which has high concentrations of vitamin A and vitamin D.”

He also promoted the use of vitamin A for measles treatment in a recent Fox News opinion piece.

While his statements refer to the treatment of measles in a medical setting, medical experts told HuffPost that they worry Kennedy’s focus on vitamin A and cod liver oil could encourage parents of unvaccinated children, or unvaccinated people themselves, to try supplementation as prevention or treatment at home — which is exactly what’s now happening in West Texas.

At a Texas children’s hospital, unvaccinated kids with severe cases of measles are also being treated for vitamin A toxicity, which suggests that the children were given the vitamin before hospitalization. There’s also increased demand for cod liver oil at local stores, according to Texas Public Radio. 

Medical professionals are concerned that this vitamin A misinformation could continue to spread and result in people not understanding what’s actually best for measles treatment and prevention.

Here’s what medical experts want everyone to know:

Vitamin A is not an at-home treatment or prevention tool for measles, but RFK Jr.’s vitamin A thoughts do come from somewhere.

“Like much of what RFK says, there’s always a kernel of truth, which he sort of manipulates to legitimize the things he’s saying, which I know is a strong statement, but at this point I think it’s very important to say strong statements about it because if we are not clear in our responses, they easily get manipulated,” said Dr. Anita Patel, a pediatric critical care doctor in Washington, D.C.

This is evident in Kennedy’s claims about vitamin A, according to Patel.

“The kernel of truth is that he’s right. Vitamin A at very high doses — high doses that you would never administer by yourself at home — but high-dose vitamin A administered in the hospital has shown to reduce both mortality and duration and severity of [measles] illness,” Patel said.

“The lack of truth in the statement he made is that giving vitamin A in the form of cod liver oil as like a panacea for all the people in Texas … is unequivocally wrong,” Patel added.

Cod liver oil as a measles treatment has not been studied, said Joel Bervell, a recent medical graduate and medical myth-buster on social media.

“It’s not the same as vitamin A supplementation,” Bervell explained. “I think the reason why he was talking about cod oil in the first place was it has high levels of vitamin A, but the amount of vitamin A that’s in cod oil can vary widely, and relying on that instead of vaccines can be risky.”

Supplementation for children just generally can also be an issue.

“As a blanket statement, I would never give my kids cod liver oil because we know the supplement industry is not very well regulated,” Patel explained. “I don’t like giving my kids any supplements, because the truth is, you have no idea what’s in them.”

More, taking too much of any vitamin, including vitamin A, can lead to complications and toxicity, Bervell said. “It can cause … liver damage to fatigue to hair loss and headaches.” According to Texas Public Radio, the hospitalized children who are now being treated for vitamin A toxicity have abnormal liver function.

Vitamin A also can interact with other medications, which can lead to more problems, Patel said.

Bottom line: Vitamin A isn’t going to prevent someone from getting the measles, and it’s also not proven to help with symptoms for patients who aren’t hospitalized, according to Patel. Ingesting high amounts of vitamin A or cod liver oil can lead to real health issues.

“I hope RFK knows that what he says is what parents are going to do,” Bervell said. “If they’re believing that either vitamin A or cod oil is a replacement for vaccines, that’s going to do their children, and the rest of communities in these areas, more harm than good.”

We have a maniac running the Department of Health and Human Services!

Tony

Katrina A. Armstrong

Dear Commons Community,

Columbia University announced yesterday that its interim president, Katrina A. Armstrong, was stepping down. The news arrives a week after the university caved to a list of demands from the Trump administration, which refused to restore $400 million in federal funding unless drastic concessions were made.

Armstrong had replaced former university President Minouche Shafik, who resigned last August after a firestorm of criticism of Shafik’s handling of student protests against the ongoing war in Gaza.

According to a statement from Columbia, Board of Trustees Co-Chair Claire Shipman has been appointed Acting President, effective immediately.  As reported by Rolling Stone and MSNBC.

“Dr. Armstrong accepted the role of interim president at a time of great uncertainty for the University and worked tirelessly to promote the interests of our community,” said David J. Greenwald, Chair of the Board of Trustees. “Katrina has always given her heart and soul to Columbia. We appreciate her service and look forward to her continued contributions to the University.”

Armstrong will return to lead the school’s Irving Medical Center, per the statement.

Earlier this month, the Trump administration sent a letter to the university with nine demands to meet as a precondition to negotiations surrounding its federal funding. With $400 million in key funding on the line, one of the nation’s most prestigious and oldest universities conceded and agreed to ban students from wearing masks on campus for the purpose of concealing identity during protests, with exceptions for religious and health reasons. Columbia also agreed to increase its campus security by hiring 36 new security officers, who unlike in the past, will have the authority to arrest students, and to install a new senior vice provost to monitor the department of Middle East, South Asian and African Studies.

Columbia also stated its commitment to “greater institutional neutrality” and said it is “working with a faculty committee to establish an institution-wide policy implementing this stance.”

It sounds like venerable Columbia is in disarray!

Tony

Microsoft’s Majorana 1 processor, a quantum computing device it claims contains eight  “topological” qubits. PHOTO: JOHN BRECHER/MICROSOFT

Dear Commons Community,

Physicists are casting doubt on claims by Microsoft of its “topological” qubit (photo above), a robust quantum analog of the 0-or-1 bit used in conventional computers.  As reported by Science.

On 18 March in an Anaheim, California, conference hall, Microsoft physicist Chetan Nayak faced a formidable challenge: convincing a standing-room audience of other scientists that his company had shaken the landscape of quantum computing. Nayak tried to make the case that his team had created the world’s first “topological” qubit, a robust quantum analog of the 0-or-1 bit used in conventional computers. Doing so would require not only conjuring the Majorana quasiparticle—a long-sought mode of electron behavior— but also controlling multiple Majoranas to encode quantum information.

Many audience members, however, weren’t sold. “I don’t think the data are convincing,” says Jelena Klinovaja, a physicist at the University of Basel who attended Nayak’s talk at the American Physical Society’s (APS’s) Global Physics Summit.

The claims received a similarly frosty reception at a talk the day before at the same meeting, when University of St. Andrews physicist Henry Legg—the author of two preprints challenging Microsoft’s work— declared that “any company claiming to have a topological qubit in 2025 is essentially selling a fairy tale.”

For his part, Nayak remains confident that his team has tamed the Majoranas. “We’ve only revealed a tiny fraction of what we’ve done,” he tells Science. “It’s going to look more and more convincing that this is going to be the basis of a technology.”

The furor began last month, when Microsoft proclaimed via a press release and a paper in Nature that it had achieved a breakthrough: a chip hosting eight Majorana-based topological qubits, which it says could yield utility-scale quantum computers in a matter of years. Quantum computing stocks soon rose, and Senator Ted Cruz (R–TX) touted the news on the Senate floor. In a social media post, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella suggested the chip “could be quantum’s transistor moment.”

Microsoft’s paper, however, didn’t detail the chip or provide proof of Majoranas, focusing instead on a method for measuring certain quantum properties of a future device. Outraged by what they deemed to be hype, many physicists responded by posting fiery comments, barbed memes, and livestreamed takedowns online.

“I’ve never seen anything like this in my time in physics,” says Jason Alicea, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology. “The burden is on [Microsoft] to really show that what they have is the real deal.”

For decades, scientists have dreamed of better simulating nature and solving certain problems much faster by building computers that operate not on conventional bits— which can be set to either 0 or 1—but rather on qubits, which can be set to combinations of 0 and 1 simultaneously. But today’s quantum computers remain stifled by their qubits’ fragility to environmental noise.

Microsoft is trying to build qubit protection directly into its hardware by making qubits out of Majoranas, which are essentially delocalized electrons. Because the electrons don’t exist in any one location, their information can be protected “topologically” from any local disturbances under the right conditions.

Microsoft’s chip features ultrathin, superconducting indium-arsenide wires that force the electrons inside to form loose pairs. Each wire can also accommodate an extra unpaired electron, which effectively splits in half to occupy a Majorana at each end of the wire. A given wire’s two “parity” states—which would represent a 0 or 1 in a future computer—correspond to whether the wire contains an even or odd number of electrons. By measuring the chip in specific ways, Nayak’s team plans to shift and probe the wires’ parity states, thereby encoding and reading out quantum information.

To better define their search for the elusive Majoranas—whose discovery has been claimed and then debunked multiple times—Microsoft researchers devised a protocol in 2021 that tests whether a device can host the quasiparticles. The protocol consists of a computer simulation of their device they trained to identify Majorana-forming states. They then fed real measurements of the device into the same protocol to assess its state.

In 2023, Nayak’s team claimed to have built a device that passed the protocol; the new paper, published in Nature on 19 February, establishes a procedure for reading out the parity of the device’s nanowires. Microsoft claimed these results, along with new data hinted at in a press release, constituted “the world’s first quantum processor powered by topological qubits.”

Of the researchers who consider Microsoft’s claims overblown, Legg has been among the most forceful critics. A week after the company’s February announcement, he posted his first public challenge: a preprint that sharply criticized the reliability of Microsoft’s protocol for identifying Majoranas. “They have some explaining to do,” he says.

By digging into the protocol’s available code, Legg noticed that simply changing the measured ranges of a device’s different parameters, such as its magnetic field, appears to affect whether the device passes the protocol. Within each Microsoft experiment, Legg tells Science, the code used to evaluate real data also seems to be less restrictive than the code used for simulated data. And in another preprint posted on 11 March, Legg argues that raw data in Microsoft’s latest paper appear too disordered for the company’s device to have been harboring Majoranas.

In a 15 March LinkedIn post, Microsoft researcher Roman Lutchyn defended his team’s work, claiming the protocol’s sensitivity was expected and that the two versions of code yielded statistically similar outputs. During the Q&A session of Legg’s APS talk, Lutchyn issued his own challenge to Legg: “If you have a better idea, put forward a protocol, and then let’s all follow it.”

In his packed APS talk, Nayak unveiled a device that combines two nanowires into an H-shaped array that’s meant to demonstrate a functioning qubit. He then showed data describing the nanowires’ ability to exist in two distinct states that are complex combinations of 0 and 1, essential for the device to operate as a qubit.

Some in the audience were impressed by the engineering advances behind the doublenanowire device—but the new measurements were also met with skepticism. The data suggested a single nanowire would hold the 0 or 1 state for up to 10 milliseconds. However, the measurements Nayak presented for more complex states were far less clear. Statistical analysis suggested the complex states persisted for a few microseconds at a time. To some physicists in attendance, though, the data looked more like noise.

” would have loved for this to come out screaming at me that there’s only two [distinct] states,” says Cornell University physicist Eun-Ah Kim, who moderated the session. “But that’s not what I think I see.”

Despite many physicists’ qualms over Microsoft’s current evidence for a topological qubit, some, including University of Oxford physicist Steve Simon, remain hopeful: Recently, Simon bet Legg a Belgian beer that Nature won’t retract Microsoft’s paper in the next 2 years.

But for others such as Anton Akhmerov, a physicist at the Delft University of Technology, the overriding feeling is one of frustration—with both Microsoft’s sensational announcement and the backlash to it. “The problem is that both sides are making confident claims … and I don’t think either viewpoint is justified,” Akhmerov says. “It’d be nice if people would chill out a bit.”

This furor will not die down any time soon.  The ball is in Microsoft’s court.

Tony

Tong Tong (pictured, center) is an artificial general intelligence (AGI) agent at the Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence (BIGAI) embodied in a virtual world that emulates the complexity of the real physical social world. Here, she interacts with her mother and generates tasks based on her value function. PHOTO: ZHEN CHEN AND XIAOMENG GAO.

 Dear Commons Community,

Science has a featured article this morning entitled, “AI gets a mind of its own” that reports on the latest developments at DeepSeek and the Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence.  It reports on the work of Song-Chun Zhu, recognized as one of the major figures in creating new AI models.  The photo above pictures Tong Tong,  an artificial general intelligence (AGI) agent, created by Zhu and his colleagues.

The entire Science article is below.  An important step forward in general AI development.

Tony

———————————————————-

Science

AI gets a mind of its own

Artificial general intelligence research is moving into a new era

Sometimes, less is more. In January, DeepSeek released the latest version of its chatbot, upending the artificial intelligence (AI) world. A training AI built for under $6 million, DeepSeek seems to rival the technical capabilities of other large language model (LLM) AIs, including ChatGPT, with only a fraction of the processing power. The breakthrough was a welcome development for Song-Chun Zhu, dean of the Institute for Artificial Intelligence at Peking University in Beijing, who has been challenging the current LLM-dominated AI paradigm in his efforts to create artificial general intelligence (AGI).

Zhu, a trailblazer in the AI field, graduated from Harvard University in 1996 and has published more than 400 papers covering computer vision, cognitive science, robot autonomy, and commonsense reasoning, among other topics. Now, he is the founder and director of the non-profit Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence (BIGAI).

“We as a society may have misunderstood the term ‘AI’,” says Zhu. “Just like how we call a multifunctional cellphone ‘smart’, the popular AI models we use today are not truly intelligent.” That’s because today’s AI, he explains, is driven by big data built upon massive computing power. Zhu pioneered data-driven statistical approaches and created the world’s first large-scale annotated image dataset at the Lotus Hill Institute in 2005. However, he realized that big data sets and specific machine learning models alone are not enough to make true intelligence. “One of the major Chinese philosophical schools, the Yangmingism or the ‘Teachings of the Heart’, argues ‘the reality we see comes from how our minds perceive’,” Zhu says. To make AI more like humans, Zhu says, it needs to have a framework that emulates the top-down mechanisms in the brain.

According to Zhu, the future of AGI should be a kind of autonomous AI that doesn’t require vast datasets. In 2020, Zhu returned to China to establish and lead BIGAI. Its mission: To pursue a unified theory of artificial intelligence in order to create general intelligent agents for lifting humanity.

Defining AGI agents in CUV-space:

Zhu and his team’s focus at BIGAI is on creating value-driven human-like cognition that goes beyond data-driven imitation. “The difference between AGI and current LLM-based AI is just like the difference between a crow and a parrot,” he said. While parrots can mimic many words, he says, crows can achieve their goals autonomously in the real world. In an article published in 2017, Zhu discusses how statistical models, which modern LLMs are based upon, function like “stochastic parrots.” While leading two Multidisciplinary University Research Initiatives at UCLA, Zhu pursued research to make machines more crow-like, exploring the brain mechanisms that make it possible for crows—and humans—to understand the physical and social world and act accordingly.

Human intelligence evolves over time, as the body changes and experiences accrue. AGI also matures over time. To help define, evaluate, and improve AGI development, Zhu proposed to define AGI in the mathematical space of the “CUV framework” In this framework, C is the AGI’s “cognitive architecture” to think, or its simulation of the decision-making processes in the brain. U is a set of “potential functions” that represent an AGI’s ability to understand and interact with its environment. V is a set of hierarchical internal “value functions” that supply the AGI’s motivation. With this formulation, Zhu and colleagues can define AGI agents as points in this CUV space and characterize their learning and self-reflection processes.

The Tong test

In Chinese, the word “general” is translated as Tong (), a character that is also the logo of BIGAI. Artistically arranged, the character also holds the English letters “AGI.” Tong Tong is the name Zhu gave to world’s first AGI agent born at BIGAI, a digital Chinese girl that looks to be about 3 to 4 years old. Tong Tong is a step forward in AGI research, and researchers really want to know, “What is she thinking?” and “How is she learning and making decisions?” Researchers have long relied on tests to assess AI models. The Turing test was developed to determine whether a machine could mimic human intelligence through dialogue. ChatGPT and other AI built on big data can pass the Turing test, but Zhu wanted a test that could assess broad human intelligence. Thus, the Tong Test was born, which relies on the CUV framework.

What sets Tong Tong apart from ChatGPT is that she doesn’t exist in a vacuum, but is rather embodied in a virtual world that emulates the complexity of the real physical social world. The Tong test examines an AGI’s understanding of this world— its abilities—as well as the AGI’s internal motivations for behaviors—its values. For example, how an AGI responds to a crying baby sitting on a floor can say a lot about its commonsense reasoning, inference of social interactions, and self-awareness. “Those natural abilities such as emotions and languages are true embodiment of human intelligence,” Zhu says. “Tong Tong may be an AGI agent, but she is just like a real human child, able to understand and behave according to her own environment even if it changes. The goal of the Tong test is to build a systematic evaluation system to promote standardized, quantitative, and objective benchmarks and evaluation for AGI.” And Tong Tong is just the beginning; researchers at BIGAI are developing diverse AGI agents that may someday enter the physical world through robotics and other mediums to serve society in meaningful ways.

AGI safety

As Tong Tong and the Tong test continue to grow and mature, AGI safety is front of mind for Zhu. Because AGI behavior is human-like, and not all humans are benevolent, there are risks that AGI will take actions that are not in humanity’s best interests. On the other hand, AGI’s cognitive architecture may be able to incorporate a mutual theory of mind—in other words, the golden rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

During a panel discussion at SafeAI 2023, Zhu and Stuart Russell from the University of California Berkeley, two leading figures in AGI, had an in-depth discussion on the risks and ethics of AGI.

When Russell raised a question about how humans could keep AGI agents in check, Zhu replied, “To prevent potential threats from future AGI agents to humanity, we can gradually loosen the capability and value space of agents. It’s similar to how we approach robots: initially, we confine them in a ‘cage’ and slowly increase their permission. Now, we already have autonomous vehicles operating on specific roads.” Zhu added that once AGI agents are proven safe and controllable, they can have more freedom, with the safeguard of understanding and transparency. “If we can explicitly represent the cognitive architecture of AGI agents, understanding how they work, we will be better equipped to control them.”

For Zhu, now is the beginning of a new era for AI to evolve into AGI. Zhu’s doctoral advisor at Harvard, mathematician and Fields medalist David Mumford, is also an advocate of creating AIs with the top-down neural architecture of the human brain. He gave Zhu a trophy to recognize his perseverance at AGI innovation. “The future of AGI will be a combination of science and philosophy,” Zhu says. “Chinese teachings of the heart are crucial to guiding AGI to obtain true beneficial human behavior.”

Dear Commons Community,

Over the next decade, advances in artificial intelligence will mean that humans will no longer be needed “for most things” in the world, says Bill Gates.

That’s what the Microsoft co-founder and billionaire philanthropist told Jimmy Fallon during an interview on NBC’s “The Tonight Show.”  At the moment, expertise remains “rare,” Gates explained, pointing to human specialists we still rely on in many fields, including “a great doctor” or “a great teacher.”  As reported by CNBC.

But “with AI, over the next decade, that will become free, commonplace — great medical advice, great tutoring,” Gates said.

In other words, the world is entering a new era of what Gates called “free intelligence” in an interview last month with Harvard University professor and happiness expert Arthur Brooks. The result will be rapid advances in AI-powered technologies that are accessible and touch nearly every aspect of our lives, Gates has said, from improved medicines and diagnoses to widely available AI tutors and virtual assistants.

“It’s very profound and even a little bit scary — because it’s happening very quickly, and there is no upper bound,” Gates told Brooks.

The debate over how, exactly, most humans will fit into this AI-powered future is ongoing. Some experts say AI will help humans work more efficiently — rather than replacing them altogether — and spur economic growth that leads to more jobs being created.

Others, like Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman, counter that continued technological advancements over the next several years will change what most jobs look like across nearly every industry, and have a “hugely destabilizing” impact on the workforce.

“These tools will only temporarily augment human intelligence,” Suleyman wrote in his book “The Coming Wave,” which was published in 2023. “They will make us smarter and more efficient for a time, and will unlock enormous amounts of economic growth, but they are fundamentally labor replacing.”

AI is both concerning and a ‘fantastic opportunity’

Gates is optimistic about the overall benefits AI can provide to humanity, like “breakthrough treatments for deadly diseases, innovative solutions for climate change, and high-quality education for everyone,” he wrote last year.

Talking to Fallon, Gates reaffirmed his belief that certain types of jobs will likely never be replaced by AI, noting that people probably don’t want to see machines playing baseball, for example.

“There will be some things we reserve for ourselves. But in terms of making things and moving things and growing food, over time those will be basically solved problems,” Gates said.

AI’s development does come with “understandable and valid” concerns, Gates wrote in a 2023 blog post. Today’s top-of-the-line AI programs are rife with errors and prone to enabling the spread of falsehoods online, for example.

But if he had to start a new business from scratch, he’d launch an “AI-centric” startup, Gates told CNBC Make It in September 2024.

“Today, somebody could raise billions of dollars for a new AI company [that’s just] a few sketch ideas,” he said, adding: “I’m encouraging young people at Microsoft, OpenAI, wherever I find them: ‘Hey, here’s the frontier.’ Because you’re taking a fresher look at this than I am, and that’s your fantastic opportunity.”

Gates saw the AI revolution coming nearly a decade ago: When asked which industry he’d focus on if he had to start over from scratch, he quickly chose AI.

“The work in artificial intelligence today is at a really profound level,” Gates said at a 2017 event at Columbia University alongside Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett. He pointed to the “profound milestone” of Google’s DeepMind AI lab creating a computer program that could defeat humans at the board game Go.

At the time, the technology was years away from ChatGPT-style generative text, powered by large language models. Yet by 2023, even Gates was surprised by the speed of AI’s development. He’d challenged OpenAI to create a model that could get a top score on a high school AP Biology exam, expecting the task to take two or three years, he wrote in his blog post.

“They finished it in just a few months,” wrote Gates. He called the achievement “the most important advance in technology since the graphical user interface [in 1980].”

I share  the same concerns as Gates. I started speaking and writing about the potential of AI on education about ten years ago.  (See: Artificial Intelligence and the Academy’s Loss of Purpose | Online Learning.) While I agree with some of what Gates says, I think his timing is off.  AI will come to dominate much of what we do but it will take much longer than ten years for this to happen.  There will be a long conversion period from where we are now to the possible world that Gates is describing.

Tony

Former Rep. Adam Kinzinger during an interview with Jake Tapper on CNN.

Dear Commons Community,

Former Congressman Adam Kinzinger challenged Donald Trump to bring charges against him for his role on the January 6th committee. The committee investigated Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.  

On Sunday night, Trump made a strange claim. He suggested that some of the pardons issued by President Joe Biden, including those given to members of the January 6th committee, were invalid because they were signed with an autopen, which is a machine that signs documents automatically.  As reported on CNN and the Daily Boulder.

Trump said, “But I would say that they’re null and void because I’m sure Biden didn’t have any idea that it was taking place.” He then posted on Truth Social, calling the pardons “VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT.”

The White House quickly pushed back on Trump’s claim. The next day, Kinzinger, one of the two Republicans on the January 6th committee, responded during an interview on CNN’s The Lead. Host Jake Tapper asked Kinzinger about Trump’s post, which declared his preemptive pardon invalid.

Kinzinger responded, saying, “First off, I’m trying to figure out what he’s trying to distract from because that’s what all this is – always a distraction to try to get people’s attention. Or maybe he hasn’t felt like he’s gotten enough attention.”

He continued, “But look, Jake. It’s like, bring it on. Like, honestly. So, we had an election. I fought against Donald Trump. I wanted Kamala Harris to win. January 6th was a big thing, but America made a different choice. Fine. I’m ready to move on.”

Kinzinger added, “I’m like, look, we made it very clear what happened on January 6th. America made a decision. And there is one person that’s obsessed about the sixth because he still has been basically deemed guilty in the court of public opinion, and that’s Donald Trump. And he can’t handle it. He obsesses about it.”

He ended with a bold statement: “So, my reaction to him is like, you know what? Then bring it on ! Like, stop talking about it! Stop being all verbose. Stop pretending like you’re tough. Bring the charges then if you really want to do it because we will crush you in court.”

Kinzinger understands well that Trump is a cowardly bully who talks the talk but doesn’t walk the walk!

Tony