Dear Commons Community,

Kevin Roose, the technology columnist for The New York Times, has a piece this morning lauding the capabilities of Perplexity, a new AI-powered search engine.  He believes it has the potential to challenge Google as the go-to search engine of choice. Here is an excerpt.

“…recently, I’ve been stepping out on Google with a new, A.I.-powered search engine.

It’s called Perplexity. The year-old search engine, whose founders previously worked in A.I. research at OpenAI and Meta, has quickly become one of the most buzzed-about products in the tech world. Tech insiders rave about it on social media, and investors like Jeff Bezos — who was also an early investor in Google — have showered it with cash. The company recently announced that it had raised $74 million in a funding round led by Institutional Venture Partners, which valued the company at $520 million.

Many start-ups have tried and failed to challenge Google over the years. (One would-be competitor, Neeva, shut down last year after failing to gain traction.) But Google seems less invincible these days. Many users have complained that their Google search results have gotten clogged with spammy, low-quality websites, and some people have started looking for answers in places like Reddit and TikTok instead.

Intrigued by the hype, I recently spent several weeks using Perplexity as my default search engine on both desktop and mobile. I tested both the free version and the paid product, Perplexity Pro, which costs $20 per month and gives users access to more powerful A.I. models and certain features, such as the ability to upload their own files.

Hundreds of searches later, I can report that even though Perplexity isn’t perfect, it’s very good. And while I’m not ready to break up with Google entirely, I’m now more convinced that A.I.-powered search engines like Perplexity could loosen Google’s grip on the search market, or at least force it to play catch-up.

I’m also scared that A.I. search engines could destroy my job, and that the entire digital media industry could collapse as a result of products like them. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

At first glance, Perplexity’s desktop interface looks a lot like Google’s — a text box centered on a sparse landing page.

But as soon as you start typing, the differences become obvious. When you ask a question, Perplexity doesn’t give you back a list of links. Instead, it scours the web for you and uses A.I. to write a summary of what it finds. These answers are annotated with links to the sources the A.I. used, which also appear in a panel above the response.

I tested Perplexity on hundreds of queries, including questions about current events (“How did Nikki Haley do in the New Hampshire primary?”), shopping recommendations (“What’s the best dog food for a senior dog with joint pain?”) and household tasks (“How long does beef stew stay good in the fridge?”).

Each time, I got back an A.I.-generated response, generally a paragraph or two long, sprinkled with citations to websites like NPR, The New York Times and Reddit, along with a list of suggested follow-up questions I could ask, such as “Can you freeze beef stew to make it last longer?”

One impressive Perplexity feature is “Copilot,” which helps a user narrow down a query by asking clarifying questions. When I asked for ideas on where to host a birthday party for a 2-year-old, for example, Copilot asked whether I wanted suggestions for outdoor spaces, indoor spaces or both. When I selected “indoor,” it asked me to choose a rough budget for the party. Only then did it give me a list of possible venues.

Perplexity also allows users to search within a specific set of sources, such as academic papers, YouTube videos or Reddit posts. This came in handy when I was looking up how to change a setting on my house’s water heater. (Exciting stuff, I know.) A Google search yielded a bunch of less-than-helpful links to D.I.Y. tutorials, some of which were thinly veiled ads for plumbing companies. I tried the same query on Perplexity, and narrowed my search to YouTube videos. Perplexity found the video I needed for my exact model of water heater, extracted the relevant information from the video and turned it into step-by-step instructions.

Under the hood, Perplexity runs on OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 model along with its own A.I. model — a variant of Meta’s open-source Llama 2 model. Users who upgrade to the Pro version can choose between a handful of different models, including GPT-4 and Anthropic’s Claude. (I used GPT-4 for most of my searches, but I didn’t see much of a difference in the quality of the answers when I chose other models.)

I was not aware of Perplexity and tried it this morning.  I found it quite capable and easy to use. I suspect that Google will respond to the competition.

Tony 

Dear Commons Community,

Jonathon Cohn of The Huffington Post did an analysis yesterday comparing Joe Biden and Donald Trump as the presumed presidential candidates in the November election.  His basic message is that this election will be very different from 2020.

Below is his entire article.

Go0od commentary!

Tony

—————————————————————————

The Huffington Post

Why A Second Trump-Biden Matchup Won’t Be A Rerun Of The 2020 Election

We know more about Trump — and more still about Biden — than we did four years ago.

By Jonathan Cohn

Feb 2, 2024, 05:53 PM EST

“We’re back where we started.”

I heard CNN’s Dana Bash say that last Sunday morning, while I was half-listening to the talk shows. I knew instantly what she meant.

A rematch of Joe Biden and Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential race now seems virtually inevitable. And it doesn’t just feel familiar. It feels like the same exact race we saw last time ― the same old men, saying the same old things they always say, except now they’re even older and (in one or both cases, maybe) less mentally acute.

It seems boring, disappointing or exasperating to lots of people, and you might be one of them. I get that. But I also think it’s easy to overlook the ways in which Biden-Trump 2.0 would be dramatically different from the first time around ― and why that should matter in November, when Americans will have to decide on a president for the next four years.

The most obvious difference is the circumstances of the election: what’s happening in the nation and the world, and what challenges that means for whoever will serve in the White House.

Back in 2020, the campaign took place right as COVID-19 was first spreading, creating a once-in-a-lifetime public health crisis. This election is unfolding amid a pair of violent international crises, the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza.

The main economic challenge in 2020 was to prop up the economy as the pandemic threatened to shut it down. Today, the main challenge with the economy is to keep it running without letting it overheat.

Violent crime is now going down instead of up. Illegal border crossings are going up instead of down. And of course, in 2020, abortion was still a right throughout the U.S., albeit with restrictions. Now it exists only in some states, and is under threat in others.

But there’s another, less obvious difference between 2020 and 2024, and it might matter even more. Today, we know a great deal more about the two men who are likely to appear on the ballot.

What We’ve Learned About Trump

By 2020, Trump had said enough to suggest he might not accept the results of an election he lost fairly, and might even try to contest the outcome. But it wasn’t until Jan. 6, 2021, that he showed he would actually follow through on those impulses, up to the point of provoking an armed insurrection in order to stop Congress from certifying the electoral vote.

Since then, Trump has repeatedly threatened to continue down this path of flouting democratic principles and the rule of law, whether it would be by pardoning the Jan. 6 rioters or having the Justice Department prosecute the political foes he calls “vermin.”

Meanwhile, high-profile conservative advocates, including some former Trump administration officials, have put together “Project 2025,” a 1,000-page strategic blueprint for how Trump might govern in a second term. It includes a plan to fire as many as 50,000 federal workers, as part of an effort to fight the so-called “deep state.”

he intended to act like a dictator. “Only on day one,” Trump said. In 2020, you could maybe find an excuse to dismiss such talk. In 2024, you really can’t.

The same goes for allegations of serious transgressions in Trump’s professional and personal lives, which dogged Trump long before he ran for president. It was not until 2022 that juries found the Trump Corporation guilty of tax fraud and found Trump personally liable for sexually abusing writer E. Jean Carroll in the 1990s and then defaming her by denying it publicly.

Those are some pretty important data points for voters to consider, with more to come depending on how and when the other legal proceedings involving Trump unfold.

But it’s Biden about whom we’ve probably learned the most, because in 2020 it was impossible to know what kind of president he’d actually be. Now we do.

What We’ve Learned About Biden, Part 1

As a candidate, Biden embraced a sweeping, potentially historic agenda on domestic policy, a plan that included once-in-a-generation infrastructure efforts, a wholesale reimagining of child and elder care and transformational investments in clean energy. But Democratic candidates for president almost always talk big.

As a senator and then as vice president, Biden had focused much more on the judiciary and foreign policy. It was easy to assume he wasn’t fully committed to his campaign agenda, or that he wouldn’t actually try to pursue it.

Boy, was that assumption wrong.

Biden pushed forward with the big ideas, initially attempting to wrap them into one giant legislative package he called “Build Back Better.” He deferred heavily to Democratic leaders in Congress and was not afraid to pass legislation on party-line votes, though he simultaneously pursued bipartisan legislation where he saw an opportunity.

Not every decision worked out. There’s a strong case that narrowing the agenda even a little bit might have achieved more, or at least moved the process along more quickly.

But while Biden had to jettison some parts of the agenda and scale back others, he ended up achieving more than any reasonable analyst could have expected, affixing his signature to major initiatives that are now pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into infrastructure, semiconductor development and clean energy ― and bringing down prescription drug prices, too.

What We’ve Learned About Biden, Part 2

On foreign policy, the most revealing episodes of Biden’s presidency have arguably been the withdrawal of American forces from Afghanistan and his position on the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. They represent very different challenges, though it’s possible to see some patterns in Biden’s approach.

One constant has been his attention to and management of international alliances. With Ukraine, he has managed to lead a policy response that’s been relatively free of dissent from America’s top international allies. In Gaza, he has maintained a united diplomatic front with Saudi Arabia and other regional players that, he hopes, will be the foundation of a post-war reconstruction and peace arrangement (as reported weeks ago by HuffPost’s Akbar Shahid Ahmed).

The other constant is a firm conviction about right and wrong and what needs to be done, regardless of what Biden is hearing from critics, even in his own administration. It was obvious with the withdrawal from Afghanistan, which so many members of his military and diplomatic establishment resisted or tried to slow down. It is even more obvious now with his support for Israel, despite a growing outcry over what Israel’s response to the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas has meant for the people of Gaza.

In both cases, it seems clear Biden is following his own inner compass. In Afghanistan, that compass points him toward getting American soldiers out of what he believed was a hopeless endeavor ― a perspective likely informed by having a son who served in the military.

In the Middle East, the compass points him toward supporting an Israel he views primarily as an embattled refuge for the Jewish people. That view is a lot more common among older officials who formed their opinions in the era of Golda Meir and the Yom Kippur War, while the Holocaust was a fresher memory and Israel was repeatedly battling Arab military forces.

How you process all of this will obviously depend on your values, sympathies and priorities, and in some cases, on how you settle your own internal conflicts.

But whatever you think about Biden ― and whatever you think of Trump, for that matter ― you have a lot more information today than you did in 2020.

It may be the same old men on the ballot. That doesn’t mean it will be the same old election.

The New York Times

Dear Commons Community,

President Joe Biden  won South Carolina’s Democratic primary yesterday, notching an overwhelming 2024 victory in the state that vaulted him to the White House four years ago.

Biden on Saturday defeated the other long-shot Democrats on South Carolina’s ballot, including Minnesota Rep. Dean Phillips and author Marianne Williamson.  As reported by The Associated Press, The Huffington Post and The New York Times.

The president’s campaign had invested heavily in driving up turnout for Biden, aiming to test-drive efforts to mobilize Black voters, who are a key part of the Democratic vote in South Carolina and central to Biden’s strategy for victory in November.

Biden’s win comes in a state that he and other party leaders had recommended lead off the party’s 2024 primary calendar. In picking South Carolina, they cited the state’s far more racially diverse population compared to the traditional first-in-the-nation states of Iowa and New Hampshire, which are overwhelmingly white.

In defiance of the Democratic National Committee, New Hampshire held a leadoff primary last month anyway. But without the president’s or the national party’s backing and no delegates officially at stake, the contest was nonbinding. Biden still won New Hampshire by a sizable margin after supporters mounted a write-in campaign on his behalf.

South Carolina, where Biden has long held deep relationships with supporters and donors, also played a pivotal role in his 2020 campaign, where a big win helped revive a flagging effort in other early-voting states and propelled him to the nomination.

Biden has been aided in his South Carolina campaign by Rep. Jim Clyburn, whose 2020 endorsement served as a long-awaited signal to the state’s Black voters that Biden would be the right candidate to advocate for their interests.

Both Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, the first Black woman and Asian American to serve in the role, have consistently thanked the state’s Democrats for their support. Biden a week ago told attendees at a state party fundraiser that “you’re the reason I am president.” He also argued to an audience of hundreds of party faithful that they were “the reason Donald Trump is a loser. And you’re the reason we’re going to win and beat him again,” framing the likely general election matchup with the GOP’s current front-runner.

Biden’s reelection campaign has said it was using the state’s primary to test strategies and messages that best motivate Black voters to the polls for the November general election. Though the state is solidly Republican, South Carolina’s diverse primary voters mirror the Democratic coalition that Biden must hold together to win another term.

From South Carolina, the Democratic nominating calendar moves to Nevada, which holds its primary on Tuesday, and then to Michigan on Feb. 27.

Good victory Mr. President!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The nation’s employers delivered a stunning burst of hiring to begin 2024, adding 353,000 jobs in January in the latest sign of the economy’s continuing ability to shrug off the highest interest rates in two decades.

Friday’s government report showed that last month’s job gain — roughly twice what economists had predicted — topped the December gain of 333,000, a figure that was itself revised sharply higher. The unemployment rate stayed at 3.7%, just above a half-century low. As reported by CNN and The Associated Press.

Wages rose unexpectedly fast in January, too. Average hourly pay climbed a sharp 0.6% from December, the fastest monthly gain in nearly two years, and 4.5% from January 2023. The strong hiring and wage growth could complicate or delay the Federal Reserve’s intention to start cutting interest rates later this year.

The latest gains showcased employers’ willingness to keep hiring to meet steady consumer spending. It comes as the intensifying presidential campaign is pivoting in no small part on views of President Joe Biden’s economic stewardship. 

This week, the Fed took note of the economy’s durability, with Chair Jerome Powell saying “the economy is performing well, the labor market remains strong.” The central bank made clear that while it’s nearing a long-awaited shift toward cutting interest rates, it’s in no hurry to do so.

The details in Friday’s jobs report pointed to broad hiring gains across the economy. Professional and business services, a category that includes managers and technical workers, added 74,000 jobs. Healthcare companies added 70,000, retailers 45,000, governments at all levels 36,000 and manufacturers 23,000.

The unemployment rate has now come in below 4% for two straight years, the longest such streak since the 1960s.

“Overall, the labor market remains strong and continues to defy expectations of a softening,’’ said Rubeela Farooqi, chief U.S. economist at High Frequency Economics. “For Fed officials, these data strongly support patience on rate cuts. Policymakers will be in no rush to lower rates if job and wage growth continue to be robust over coming months.’’

Julia Pollak, chief economist at the job marketplace ZipRecruiter, noted that not everything in the January report was consistent with gangbuster job growth. She pointed out, for example, that Americans worked an average of 34.1 hours a week last month, the lowest such figure since 2010 excluding the COVID-19 recession.

“When consumer demand slackens, companies often cut workers’ hours before they cut payroll,” Pollak said. “Today’s reading could be a warning sign that demand for workers is softening and that job cuts are looming.’’

That said, she suggested that the decline in work hours might simply reflect January winter storms that kept some people away from work.

To fight inflation, the Fed raised its benchmark rate 11 times beginning in March 2022. The higher borrowing costs were widely expected to boost unemployment and likely cause a recession. Yet the economy has managed to deliver enough job growth to avoid a downturn without accelerating inflation pressures. Inflation cooled throughout 2023, making it likelier that the Fed would achieve a “soft landing” — taming inflation without derailing the economy.

January’s blowout job gain is all but sure to cause the Fed to take a cautious approach toward cutting its key interest rate, which affects many consumer and business loans. A March rate cut now seems definitely off the table.

At a news conference this week, Powell said solid hiring and economic growth by themselves wouldn’t necessarily cause the Fed to put off rate cuts. And some economists say they still expect the first rate reduction to occur in May.

“When we look at stronger growth, we don’t look at it as a problem,” Powell said. “We want to see strong growth, we want to see a strong labor market.”

A series of high-profile layoff announcements, from the likes of UPS, Google and Amazon, have raised some concerns about whether they might herald the start of a wave of job cuts. Yet measured against the nation’s vast labor force, the recent layoffs haven’t been significant enough to make a dent in the overall job market. Historically speaking, layoffs are still relatively low, hiring is still solid and the unemployment rate is still consistent with a healthy economy.

Consumers as a whole have proved more resilient than expected in the face of the Fed’s rate hikes. Having socked away savings during the pandemic, most were willing to spend it as the economy reopened. And a wave of early retirements, some of them related to COVID-19, limited the number of people available for work and contributed to a tight labor market.

The gradual improvement in public confidence has emerged in a series of recent surveys. A measure of consumer sentiment by the University of Michigan has jumped in the past two months by the most since 1991. A survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that Americans’ inflation expectations have reached their lowest point in nearly three years. And a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that 35% of U.S. adults call the national economy good, up from 30% who said so late last year.

The rate at which Americans are quitting their jobs, considered a reliable predictor of wage trends, has slowed to pre-pandemic levels. That suggests that workers have grown somewhat less confident of finding a better job elsewhere. Employers, as a result, may be less likely to feel pressure to raise wages to keep them — and to increase their prices to make up for their higher labor costs. That cycle can perpetuate inflation.

Thank you Bidenomics!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

I have just finished reading Helena Kelly’s The Life and Lies of Charles Dickens.  Kelly teaches classics and English Literature at the University of Oxford.  This book is surely for those who love Dickens.  I confess that I have a limited knowledge of Dickens’ vast body of work.  Of what I have read, Great Expectations and A Christmas Carol are my favorites.  Kelly puts forth an intriguing speculation on Dickens’ personal life including his childhood, marriage, love affairs, and accusations of plagiarism.  She also connects these speculations with the plots of his books which makes her treatment more accessible for Dickens’ scholars.  As the reviewer below states, she makes extensive use of words like:  “‘perhaps’, ‘maybe’ and ‘possibly’.  Regardless I found her narrative interesting and picks up speed the further into the book you go.  The last three chapters are riveting.

In sum,  I found The Life and Lies of Charles Dickens a good read.

Below is a review that appeared in The Guardian.

Tony

—————————————————————————————————————-

The Guardian

The Life and Lies of Charles Dickens by Helena Kelly review – great speculations

A new biography suggests everything we know about Dickens is wrong

John Mullan

Thu 16 Nov 2023 04.00 EST

Two years after Charles Dickens’s death in 1870, his closest friend, John Forster, published the first volume of his Life of Charles Dickens. Based on letters Dickens had written to him and stories he had told him, it was, in effect, an authorised biography. For Dickens buffs, it has always been both a matchless source and an untrustworthy narrative. By Helena Kelly’s account, it is more misleading than the most sceptical biographer has supposed. Far from Forster being Dickens’s hagiographer, he was his dupe. We have always known that Dickens aimed to manage his reputation; as Kelly sees it, this led him to deeper deceit than anyone has previously imagined.

So, for instance, Forster was the first to make public what Dickens said was the most crushing experience of his life: being sent, aged 12, to work in a blacking warehouse. It was an experience that he handed on to the young protagonist of David Copperfield. “It is wonderful to me how I could have been so easily cast away at such an age,” Dickens wrote, in the account Forster quoted. Yet Kelly picks at some inconsistencies about dates to suppose that it was all fiction. Dickens wanted us to believe he had been neglected and mistreated: it made for a great story of triumph over adversity.

At its heart, this book is an example of something familiar to 21st-century readers: a case history of celebrity. Those “Lies” are in its title because, for Dickens, the cost of fame was “the ability to be honest about himself”. Kelly is right that the great novelist was obsessed with “brand management”, as she calls it, that he “loved to control how others viewed him”. More questionable is her conviction that duplicity was essential to his character. She thinks his early life was “the perfect training for a liar”.

The key words in Kelly’s narrative are ‘perhaps’, ‘maybe’ and ‘possibly’

First, she latches on to the fact that his sister Harriet died not as a baby, as had been assumed, but aged nine, as researchers have only recently discovered. Silence about this truth is apparent evidence of Dickens’s deep trauma and his need to lie about it. Kelly also hypothesises that Dickens’s father John was involved in embezzlement. His boss in the Navy Pay Office, one John Slade, shot himself when auditors started investigating him. Surely Dickens Sr knew all about it? This becomes a hidden truth that haunts Dickens for the rest of his life, emerging indirectly in his novels every time the topic of dodgy dealings comes up.

The key words in Kelly’s narrative are “perhaps”, “maybe” and “possibly”, which, supported by her sense of Dickens’s deviousness, allow her to make all sorts of speculations. In middle age, Dickens met with Maria Beadnell, now a married mother of two, whom he had courted more than 20 years earlier. He wrote to her flirtatiously, but was then horrified to find her stout and matronly. Cruelly, he used her for the character of Flora Finching in Little Dorrit. But Kelly claims this was a smokescreen. “It seems perfectly possible that there was an affair.” The depiction of Flora Finching was just “a blind, a distraction”.

Her Dickens is so steeped in deceit that even the great blunders of his life can be reinterpreted as deep-laid schemes. After he publicly announced his estrangement from his wife, rumours began to swirl about his relationship with his sister-in-law Georgina Hogarth, who had taken Dickens’s side and become, in effect, his housekeeper. It has always been thought that these rumours were mortifying to both of them, but Kelly believes Dickens allowed them to circulate because they distracted attention from his relationship with Ellen Ternan, the young actor with whom he was besotted and who became his mistress.

It has long been surmised that Ternan gave birth to their baby in France, where Dickens started making trips in the early 1860s. The story of Dickens’s biggest secret has often been told, so Kelly needs to add something new. Her theory is that one of the two sons of Ternan’s cousin, Frances Cleveland, was in fact Dickens and Ternan’s child. Born after the death of his sailor father, he might have been “a little cuckoo in the Cleveland nest”. Dickens’s trips to France were him “laying a false trail”.

Kelly finally infers that Dickens wanted rumours about his relationship with Ternan to circulate in order to hide a more shameful truth. In a final flurry of speculations (“Perhaps … could it be that … possibly …”) she explains various misfortunes in Dickens’s life (and the “decidedly retroussé noses” of his younger children) with the theory that he developed syphilis in his early 30s and infected his wife. Or maybe Catherine Dickens, blameless in all previous accounts of the writer’s life, was the source of the infection. “It’s not impossible that Catherine could have contracted syphilis during an affair of her own – it isn’t as if she didn’t have an excuse for being unfaithful.” Not impossible, no. But if that is the only standard that conjectures about Dickens’s life have to meet, where does that leave the truth?

Democrats are ecstatic about the prospect of running against Donald Trump. They couldn’t dream up a worse general election candidate if they tried. Between his legal drama, his terrible poll numbers, and his confusion, Trump will hand Democrats a big victory. pic.twitter.com/mhWbeA6CxO

— Nikki Haley (@NikkiHaley) February 1, 2024

Dear Commons Community,

Nikki Haley zings Trump in a new X (Twitter) posting (see above). 

I am glad to see she has taken off the gloves when it comes to “the Donald.”

I hope she stays in the Republican primary race.

Tony

Larry Kudlow. Credit Carolyn Kaster | AP

Dear Commons Community,

Larry Kudlow, one of Trump’s leading economic advisers, now admits he was wrong about the predictions he made for the economy under President Joe Biden.

“Mea culpa,” Fox Business host Kudlow said on the air yesterday. “I was wrong about the slowdown and the recession, so was the entire forecasting fraternity.”

Fox News host Sandra Smith, however, tried to get him to back out of it.

“I don’t think you were wrong,” she said.

But Kudlow, who was director of the National Economic Council under Trump for nearly three years, stuck with it.

“The Fed, everyone was wrong,” he said, referring to widespread predictions of a recession in 2022 and 2023 that never came to fruition.

Kudlow made a similar confession about the strength of the economy last month when the gross domestic product GDP jumped faster than expected.

“He gets his due,” Kudlow said of Biden. “If I were he, I would be out slinging that hash, too. No problem.”

All the Republican and Fox News naysayers about the economy must be going crazy over Kudlow’s comments.

Tony

                          John Bolton – (Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg/Getty Images)

Dear Commons Community,

John Bolton, who served as national security adviser under Donald Trump, on Tuesday warned that authoritarian leaders around the world would welcome a second Trump term, adding that the former president is an “easy mark” for them.

Bolton said that Trump was “fortunate” to not confront major international crises, other than the COVID-19 pandemic, during his time in office, and argued that Trump would be unfit to handle the challenges facing the present administration, amid the ongoing wars in Gaza and Ukraine.

“When you’re in a crisis you need a president who is resolute, who can keep his eye on the prize and worry about our national security, not his own image,” Bolton said on CNN’s “The Source.”   See video.

Bolton, a frequent critic of Trump, added that his former boss lacks the skills to take on major decisions around national security.

“His attention span is short. He doesn’t know much about world history or world affairs,” Bolton said. “He actually doesn’t think they matter very much. He thinks his personal relationships with foreign leaders, especially the authoritarian ones, are all that matter.”

Yet, the former United Nations ambassador said, Trump’s “self-absorption” makes it nearly impossible for him to understand how his foreign counterparts see him.

“I don’t think they are really friendly with Donald Trump,” Bolton said, naming the leaders of China, Russia and North Korea as examples. “I think they think — Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un and others — they think he’s a laughing fool. And they’re fully prepared to take advantage of him.”

He added, “I think they believe he’s an easy mark.”

Meanwhile, President Joe Biden recently told his supporters in South Carolina that many international leaders, presumably U.S. allies, are anxious about the prospect of a second Trump presidency.

“I know every one of those heads of state, and I’ve known them for a while,” Biden said over the weekend. “Every meeting I go to internationally, I — as they’re walking out, this is the God’s truth … virtually every one of them pulls me aside and says: ‘You’ve got to win. We can’t let that happen again. You can’t let that happen again.’”

It might happen again!

Tony

People hold photos of their loved ones as they sit in the audience before the start of a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing with the heads of social media platforms on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, Jan. 31, 2024, to discuss child safety. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

Dear Commons Community,

The CEOs of Meta, TikTok, X and other social media companies went before the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday to testify as lawmakers and parents grow increasingly concerned about the effects of social media on young people’s lives.

The hearing began with recorded testimony from kids and parents who said they or their children were exploited on social media. Throughout the hours-long event, parents who lost children to suicide silently held up pictures of their dead kids.  As reported by The Associated Press.

“They’re responsible for many of the dangers our children face online,” U.S. Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin, who chairs the committee, said in opening remarks. “Their design choices, their failures to adequately invest in trust and safety, their constant pursuit of engagement and profit over basic safety have all put our kids and grandkids at risk.”

In a heated question and answer session with Mark Zuckerberg, Republican Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley asked the Meta CEO if he has personally compensated any of the victims and their families for what they have been through.

“I don’t think so,” Zuckerberg replied.

“There’s families of victims here,” Hawley said. “Would you like to apologize to them?”

Parents attending the hearing rose and held up pictures of their children. Zuckerberg stood as well, turning away from his microphone and the senators to address them directly.

“I’m sorry for everything you have all been through. No one should go through the things that your families have suffered,” he said, adding that Meta continues to invest and work on “industry-wide efforts” to protect children.

But time and time again, children’s advocates and parents have stressed that none of the companies are doing enough.

“Meta’s general approach is ‘trust us, we’ll do the right thing’, but how can we trust Meta? The way they talk about these issues feels like they are trying to gaslight the world, said Arturo Béjar, a former engineering director at the social media giant known for his expertise in curbing online harassment who recently testified before Congress about child safety on Meta’s platforms. “Every parent I’ve met with a kid under 13 is afraid of when their kid is old enough to be in social media.”

From left; Discord CEO Jason Citron, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew, X CEO Linda Yaccarino and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, are sworn in during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, Jan. 31, 2024, to discuss child safety. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)

Hawley continued to press Zuckerberg, asking if he’d take personal responsibility for the harms his company has caused. Zuckerberg stayed on message and repeated that Meta’s job is to “build industry-leading tools” and empower parents.

“To make money,” Hawley cut in.

South Carolina Sen. Lindsay Graham, the top Republican on the Judiciary panel, echoed Durbin’s sentiments and said he’s prepared to work with Democrats to solve the issue.

“After years of working on this issue with you and others, I’ve come to conclude the following: social media companies as they’re currently designed and operate are dangerous products,” Graham said.

He told the executives their platforms have enriched lives but that it is time to deal with “the dark side.”

Beginning with Discord’s Jason Citron, the executives touted existing safety tools on their platforms and the work they’ve done with nonprofits and law enforcement to protect minors.

Snapchat had broken ranks ahead of the hearing and began backing a federal bill that would create a legal liability for apps and social platforms who recommend harmful content to minors. Snap CEO Evan Spiegel reiterated the company’s support on Wednesday and asked the industry to back the bill.

TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew said TikTok is vigilant about enforcing its policy barring children under 13 from using the app. CEO Linda Yaccarino said X, formerly Twitter, doesn’t cater to children.

“We do not have a line of business dedicated to children,” Yaccarino said. She said the company will also support Stop CSAM Act, a federal bill that make it easier for victims of child exploitation to sue tech companies.

Yet child health advocates say social media companies have failed repeatedly to protect minors.

“When you’re faced with really important safety and privacy decisions, the revenue in the bottom line should not be the first factor that these companies are considering,” said Zamaan Qureshi, co-chair of Design It For Us, a youth-led coalition advocating for safer social media. “These companies have had opportunities to do this before they failed to do that. So independent regulation needs to step in.”

Republican and Democratic senators came together in a rare show of agreement throughout the hearing, though it’s not yet clear if this will be enough to pass legislation such as the Kids Online Safety Act, proposed in 2022 by Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee.

Meta is being sued by dozens of states that say it deliberately designs features on Instagram and Facebook that addict children to its platforms and has failed to protect them from online predators.

New internal emails between Meta executives released by Blumenthal’s office show Nick Clegg, president of global affairs, and others asking Zuckerberg to hire more people to strengthen “wellbeing across the company” as concerns grew about effects on youth mental health.

“From a policy perspective, this work has become increasingly urgent over recent months. Politicians in the U.S., U.K., E.U. and Australia are publicly and privately expressing concerns about the impact of our products on young people’s mental health,” Clegg wrote in an August 2021 email.

The emails released by Blumenthal’s office don’t appear to include a response, if there was any, from Zuckerberg. In September 2021, The Wall Street Journal released the Facebook Files, its report based on internal documents from whistleblower Frances Haugen, who later testified before the Senate.

Meta has beefed up its child safety features in recent weeks, announcing earlier this month that it will start hiding inappropriate content from teenagers’ accounts on Instagram and Facebook, including posts about suicide, self-harm and eating disorders. It also restricted minors’ ability to receive messages from anyone they don’t follow or aren’t connected to on Instagram and on Messenger and added new “nudges” to try to discourage teens from browsing Instagram videos or messages late at night. The nudges encourage kids to close the app, though it does not force them to do so.

Google’s YouTube is notably missing from the list of companies called to the Senate Wednesday even though more kids use YouTube than any other platform, according to the Pew Research Center. Pew found that 93% of U.S. teens use YouTube, with TikTok a distant second at 63%.

Critical issue and glad to see the bipartisanship here!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The European Union is applying new legal restraints around artificial intelligence this year.

The European Parliament in December reached a provisional agreement on the world’s first comprehensive legislation to regulate AI, focusing on uses instead of the technology.

The new rules range in severity depending on how risky the application is, with facial recognition and certain medical innovations requiring approval before being made available to customers.

Federal laws specific to AI don’t exist yet in the US, and it’s unknown whether that will happen. The EU’s actions, however, could still have a chilling effect on companies based in this country.  As reported by Yahoo News.

“Any software- and data-technology-rich issue crosses borders so quickly,” intellectual property expert Gareth Kristensen, a partner with the law firm Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton, said.

The EU is throwing its weight around in other parts of the tech world, too. Just this week, EU opposition to a union of two American tech companies — Amazon (AMZN) and robot vacuum maker iRobot (IRBT) — was enough for the firms to call off their $1.4 billion merger.

Not everyone in the US agrees new laws are needed to oversee AI. To date, Washington’s attempts to regulate the industry have proceeded slowly and on parallel tracks at the White House and Capitol Hill.

An executive order issued by President Biden last October directed AI developers and users to apply AI “responsibly.” Just this week, the administration announced new details there, including a new requirement for developers to disclose their safety test results to the government.

On Capitol Hill meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has overseen a series of roundtables — with figures like Elon Musk and others in attendance — to begin the process of drafting new laws around the topic.

He will be tasked with merging together a group of bipartisan bills under consideration. That includes one from Democratic Senator Gary Peters, Republican Senators Mike Braun and James Lankford to make it mandatory for US government agencies to disclose when they use AI for human interactions and to set in place an appeals process to allow individuals to object to AI-generated decisions.

In another bill introduced in June, Democratic Senators Michael Bennet and Mark Warner joined Republican Senator Todd Young in proposing an office of global competition analysis that would be tasked with helping the US maintain global leadership in AI.

Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal and Republican Senator Josh Hawley also announced their own framework on AI legislation. They proposed that the US establish an independent licensing and oversight organization, along with AI transparency requirements and legal liability for harms caused by the technology.

There’s no guarantee that any of this new US legislation will come to pass.

“The US is very free market, and difficult to get bipartisan consensus on a federal level,” Kristensen said.

‘Proactive rather than reactive’

The US, deliberately, hasn’t gone the way of the EU, said Ryan Abbott, a technology-focused intellectual property attorney and medical doctor. America’s comparatively more market-driven, “less regulation is more” philosophy, he said, could lead lawmakers to police AI using existing IP, copyright, and trademark laws.

“There’s a whole other view of this, which is that you really don’t need something comprehensive because, really, existing rules cover AI regulation,” Abbot added.

Intellectual property law governs patents, copyrights and trademarks. And tort law protects individuals from harmful products placed into the market.

Abbot, however, recommended in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee last June that lawmakers should at least consider amending intellectual property laws so that AI-generated inventions are clearly patentable. Under current US law, only human inventors are eligible to obtain a patent.

Musk — one of the original backers of OpenAI, creator of chatbot ChatGPT — has said that perhaps a new federal department is needed to stay on top of the risks. That’s what he told reporters after meetings on Capitol Hill in September.

“The reason that I’ve been saying that before, about the whole AI safety in advance of sort of anything terrible happening, is that consequences of AI going wrong are severe. So we have to be proactive rather than reactive,” Musk said last September.

White House national economic advisor Lael Brainard and acting Labor Secretary Julie Su said in a op-ed piece published in Yahoo Finance Tuesday that the Labor Department is creating a set of principles for “the responsible, worker-centric use of AI” while the administration prepares “detailed policy recommendations to protect and support workers against potential AI-related job displacement.”

A similar approach is unfolding in the United Kingdom. That nation’s government is now advocating for companies to voluntarily comply with key principles that its lawmakers set out in a white paper published last year. The UK is expected, for now, to empower its regulators to apply existing law to AI, and base potential legislation depending on future levels of compliance.

China has adopted more politically focused AI laws. Those requirements target AI-generated news distribution, deep fakes, chat bots, and datasets. To date, they are much less comprehensive than the EU’s AI Act.

Kristensen estimated that the EU’s new AI Act is likely to take effect over the next six to 24 months, as members of the 27-nation bloc sign off on the final text.

Some members, including the French government, have been rumored to be exploring whether to revise and push back on certain parts of the act.

Whatever final regulations each government adopts, Abbott said, will play a big role in how AI is developed and used from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.

Regulation here is difficult given the influence of mega international tech companies that are investing heavily in AI development.

Tony