Wilderness As 'Tactical Infrastructure'?

In June, when Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee moved to force a sell-off of up to 3.2 million acres of public land, he insisted he was solely interested in combatting America’s housing crunch and that the bill only targeted “unused, garden-variety” federal parcels — not national parks, wilderness areas and other “crown jewel” lands.

Few bought what Lee was trying to sell.

Now, just a few months after being forced to pull the plug on his land-sale scheme amid sweeping bipartisan backlash, Lee is leaning into new issues to further his well-documented anti-public lands agenda: border security and disability access.

On Oct. 2, Lee introduced legislation aimed at opening millions of federal acres along both U.S. borders, including national parks and wilderness areas, to road construction, timber harvest, surveillance systems and any other “tactical infrastructure” deemed necessary to protect those lands from what he describes as “environmental destruction” resulting from “the Biden Administration’s open-border policies.”

“Biden’s open-border chaos is destroying America’s crown jewels,” Lee said in a statement announcing his bill, dubbed the Border Lands Conservation Act. “This bill gives land managers and border agents the tools to restore order and protect these places for the people they were meant to serve.”

While Lee pitches the legislation as an immigration enforcement bill, it would encompass federal lands far from the U.S.-Mexico border — including a huge swath along the U.S.-Canada border. The legislation defines “covered federal land” as any federal land “located in a unit, or in a portion of a unit, or within 1 or more parcels of land that shares an exterior boundary with the southern border or northern border.”

In other words, if a “unit” — a national park, forest, monument or any other designated area — touches a border, the entire unit is covered, regardless of how far it extends from a border. That would encompass all of Joshua Tree National Park in California, Big Bend National Park in Texas, Glacier National Park in Montana, North Cascades National Park in Washington and Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, to name a few. One of the more extreme examples Public Domain identified is Flathead National Forest, located in northwestern Montana, which spans 2.4 million acres, extends approximately 120 miles from the U.S.-Canada border, and includes 1 million acres of wilderness.

“The big picture is Mike Lee will use any pretext to undermine public lands and conservation,” Neal Clark, wildlands director at the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, told Public Domain. “It was housing six months ago, now it’s border security.”

The legislation would amend the 1964 Wilderness Act, which protects more than 110 million acres of designated wilderness areas from development, to allow for DHS to conduct patrols using motorized vehicles, including cars, airplanes and boats, and “deploy tactical infrastructure,” which the bill defines as “infrastructure for the detection of illegal southern border and northern border crossing, including observation points, remote video surveillance systems, motion sensors, vehicle barriers, fences, roads, bridges, drainage and detection devices.”

It would also give the Department of Homeland Security unfettered authority to conduct immigration, terrorism and drug enforcement activities across all federal land within 100 miles of either border, barring land management agencies from restricting DHS’s work. And it would create a “Border Fuels Management Initiative” to combat the risk of wildfires on federal border lands, one of several environmental impacts that Lee and other sponsors of the bill say have been exacerbated by illegal immigration.

The bill comes despite a steep decline in the number of unauthorized migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border amid the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. Border Patrol is on track to finish the year with fewer than 250,000 apprehensions at the southern border. That figure is down from 1.5 million last year and may become the lowest number of southern border arrests recorded since 1970. (...)

Along with his attempt to weaken environmental protections across federal borderlands, Lee introduced a trio of bills on Oct. 6 that would open national parks and other federal lands to increased off-road vehicle use. The goal, he says, is to “ensure that Americans with disabilities can access and enjoy the nation’s public lands.”

“The mountains, canyons, and forests managed by the federal government are part of our shared heritage, and access to them should not depend on whether someone can hike ten miles or climb a ridge,” Lee said in a statement about his “Outdoor Americans with Disabilities Act.”

Lee’s press release touts support from several off-road vehicle associations and enthusiasts. But Syren Nagakyrie, the founder and director of Disabled Hikers, a nonprofit that supports disabled people in the outdoors, called the legislation a “shameful” attempt to “use the disability community in his ongoing attempts to dismantle public lands, build and prioritize roads, and sell lands to the highest bidder.”

“People with disabilities are not political pawns to be used while catering to special interests,” Nagakyrie said in a statement.

by Chris D’Angelo, High Country News | Read more:
Image: Jerry Glaser/U.S. Customs and Border Protection

[ed. What a piece of work. Guys like Lee and Hegseth love throwing the military jargon around. Makes 'em feel more manly.Especially if you're a nepo baby or low level guardsman who's never been closer to a battlefield than watching Netflix. See also: One small glimmer of hope re: Senate Stewardship Caucus (Re:Public).]

Matsuyama Miyabi, Addams Family in Kimono

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Every Wrinkle is a Policy Failure

A lot of people blame their frown lines on their job, the tanning salon, or aging. I blame the government.

There’s a treatment for wrinkles—Botox and similar toxins that freeze your face in place.. It can be pricey. The average price of a Botox treatment is above $400, depending on how many doses or units you get injected. But Botox isn’t patented so why is it still so expensive?

 

Some of the cost comes from buying the chemical itself. Allergan which owns Botox doesn’t have a patent on it- but it does have a trademark for the brand name. And Botox isn’t just the botulism toxin that paralyzes your face- there are a few additive chemicals mixed in and Allergan’s manufacturing process is a trade secret.

But wholesale Botox is still kind of cheap- you can get it for $3.50 a unit but the price the consumer pays is around $20 in urban areas.

If you’ve ever gotten Botox or its equivalent, you know you are not getting highly tailored and personalized injections here- you can get a same-day appointment, walk in, get injected, and walk out.

This should not require a medical degree.

Unfortunately, in some states only physicians or nurses supervised by physicians are allowed to. The obvious solution is to just let more people inject Botox- I can’t imagine a state just fully deregulating injection rights, but allowing pharmacists (who already handle a huge share of vaccinations), pharmacy techs under pharmacist direction, or registered nurses could make getting Botox way cheaper and make the number of facilities where you could Botox way larger.

The cost savings to the consumer might actually be larger than what you would think given the difference in labor costs. There are already cheaper alternatives to Botox that work just as well like Dysport or Xeomin (which is pure toxin without the additives) . But in the U.S. where we’re already paying so much for labor, the cost difference of the injectable can be overlooked. But in other countries, Botox alternatives are outcompeting Botox.

Liberalizing injection laws would make Americans look younger and spend less per treatment.

Are You Using Tretinoin?

Botox regulations aren’t the only way the government tries to make us look our age.

I think most of my readers here are straight men but if I could give you some non-policy advice, it would be that you should consider using tretinoin. It’s a cream you can use for acne but unlike a lot of woo-based anti-aging products it actually works to reverse the effects of sun on skin aging. [ed. Retin- A, Avita, Renova, others]

Unfortunately, you need a prescription to use it even though it’s incredibly safe as long as you aren’t pregnant- and if it irritates your skin just stop using it. So every time I see an urgent care doctor for whatever reason at the end of the appointment, I always ask “could I have a prescription for this?” It has never failed.

Tretinoin is still pretty cheap but the necessity of the prescription drives up the price in terms of time and inconvenience. Federal rules require it to be prescription-only but states have a lot of discretion to make “prescription required” a fairly nominal requirement. For example, states could allow pharmacists to prescribe the cream so instead of scheduling a telehealth or doctor’s appointment, you just show up at the pharmacy and ask for it. States can also make laws friendly to telehealth.

While I think every state should do this as well as make it easy to inject Botox, Nevada or Florida seem like the perfect first-movers. Both attract a ton of tourists, both have a lot of sun (photoaging!), and both just have the Botox-friendly vibes. You could also throw in easy-to-prescribe finasteride rules to help out balding men.

by Cold Button Issues |  Read more:

Image: uncredited via

[ed. Botox and GLP-1's (Ozempic, Wegovy etc,). Everyone wants to look their best.]

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Why Doesn’t Anyone Trust the Media?

Anatomy of a credibility crisis

The challenges facing the establishment media are more severe today than ever before. Trust in the press is at a record low, with only a quarter of Americans aged eighteen to twenty-nine expressing confidence in media organizations. Jobs in journalism, meanwhile, are declining faster than jobs in coal mining: since 2005, the United States has lost more than one third of its newspapers and nearly three quarters of its newspaper journalism positions. Furthermore, recent years have exposed significant professional failures—from the flawed coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic to inadequate reporting on President Biden’s cognitive health. All the while, audiences sift into ever-narrower silos: Substacks, podcasts, livestreams.

Perhaps most telling is the changing relationship between media and political power. There is a palpable sense of surrender in the air. In December, ABC News agreed to pay President Trump $16 million to settle a defamation suit he had filed against the network. CBS’s parent company, Paramount Global, later settled its own Trump lawsuit, also for $16 million, three weeks before securing Federal Communications Commission approval for its merger with Skydance Media. Trump has since filed a host of additional suits against media organizations, including the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, and threatened the broadcast licenses of major networks.

All of this raises pressing questions: In an era of declining trust, industry collapse, and technological disruption, does the media, as we’ve historically understood it, have a future? What essential functions does professional journalism serve that cannot be replaced by other forms of information gathering and dissemination? And why, finally, do Americans view the media with such skepticism?

Harper’s Magazine invited four leading media observers to grapple with these questions and to consider how we got here in the first place, seeking neither to defend nor condemn wholesale, but to examine honestly what—if anything—we lose if traditional media continues on its current trajectory.

The following Harper’s Forum is based on a conversation that took place at the NoMo SoHo hotel, in New York City, on July 23, 2025. Harper’s Magazine editor Christopher Carroll served as moderator.

Participants:

JELANI COBB: Jelani Cobb is the dean of the Columbia Journalism School and a staff writer at The New Yorker. He is the author, most recently, of Three or More Is a Riot: Notes on How We Got Here.

TAYLOR LORENZ: Taylor Lorenz is an independent journalist and the founder of User Mag, a Substack publication. She is the author of Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet.

JACK SHAFER: Jack Shafer is a media critic who has written for Politico, Reuters, and Slate.
He previously edited Washington City Paper and SF Weekly.

MAX TANI: Max Tani is a reporter at Semafor covering media, politics, and technology.
He previously covered the White House for Politico.

1. Conspiracy, Culpability, Covid, and Collapse

Christopher Carroll: Why don’t we begin with the biggest question. A Gallup poll from last year showed that the media was the least trusted civic or political institution in the United States—among other things, Americans trust Congress more than they trust the media. What accounts for this? Why don’t we trust the media?

by Christopher Carroll, Jelani Cobb, Taylor Lorenz, Jack Schafer and Max Tani, Harper's |  Read more:

Image: Collages by Mark Harris

Vlastimil Beneš (Czech, 1919-1981), Vršovice Gardens in Winter, 1960

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Please Do Not Ban Autonomous Vehicles In Your City

I was listening with horror to a Boston City Council meeting today where many council members made it clear that they’re interested in effectively banning autonomous vehicles (AVs) in the city.

A speaker said that Waymo (the AV company requesting clearance to run in Boston) was only interested in not paying human drivers (Waymo is a new company that has never had human drivers in the first place) and then referred to the ‘notion that somehow our cities are unsafe because people are driving cars’ as if this were a crazy idea. A council person strongly implied that new valuable technology always causes us to value people less. One speaker associated Waymo with the Trump administration. There were a lot of implications that AVs couldn’t possibly be as good as human drivers, despite lots of evidence to the contrary. Some speeches were included lots of criticisms that applied equally well to what Uber did to taxis, but now deployed to defend Uber.

Most of the arguments I heard were pretty wildly off-base. Many of the speakers didn’t factor in the basic safety benefit of AVs to the riders or pedestrians at all, and many of the arguments fell apart when poked at. Here are all my arguments for why a city should legalize AVs, with some concerns at the end:

• AVs are ridiculously safe compared to human drivers

• There is no real difference for a city between an AV fleet and a very cheap rental car service

• Protecting ride share driver jobs is a bad basis for policy

• Should we build fewer bike lanes to save Uber jobs?

• Ride share jobs are bad for the drivers

• Losing these jobs is still a loss

• Eyes on the street

• AVs can open up opportunities for disabled riders

• Waymos are fully electric

• Would you ban AVs if they were already widespread to create Uber driver jobs?

• Freedom

• Real problems with AVs

• Cybersecurity

• Could make traffic worse

• Environmental impact

AVs are ridiculously safe compared to human drivers

The most obvious reason to allow AVs in your city is that every time a rider takes one over driving a car themselves or getting in a ride share, their odds of being in a crash that causes serious injury or worse drop by about 90%. I’d strongly recommend this deep dive on every single crash Waymo has had so far:

[Very few of Waymo’s most serious crashes were Waymo’s fault (Understanding AI).]

This is based on public police records rather than Waymo’s self-reported crashes. It doesn’t seem like there have been any serious crashes Waymo’s been involved in where the AV itself was at fault. This is wild, because Waymo’s driven over 100 million miles. These statistics were brought up out of context in the hearing to imply that Waymo is dangerous. By any. normal metric it’s much more safe than human drivers.

40,000 people die in car accidents in America each year. This is as many deaths as 9/11 every single month. We should be treating this as more of an emergency than we do. Our first thought in making any policy related to cars should be “How can we do everything we can to stop so many people from being killed?” Everything else is secondary to that. Dropping the rate of serious crashes by even 50% would save 20,000 people a year. Here’s 20,000 dots:

The more people choose to ride AVs over human-driven cars, the fewer total crashes will happen.

One common argument is that Waymos are very safe compared to everyday drivers, but not professional drivers. I can’t find super reliable data, but ride share accidents seem to occur at about a rate of 40 per 100 million miles traveled. Waymo in comparison was involved in 34 crashes where airbags deployed in its 100 million miles, and 45 crashes altogether. Crucially, it seems like the AV was only at fault for one of these, when a wheel fell off. There’s no similar data for how many Uber and Lyft crashes were the driver’s fault, but they’re competing with what seems like effectively 0 per 100 million miles.

by Andy Masley, The Weird Turn Pro |  Read more:

Image: Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images

What To Know About Data Centers

As the use of AI increases, data centers are popping up across the country. The Onion shares everything you need to know about the controversial facilities.

Q: What do data centers need to run?

A: Water, electricity, air conditioning, and other resources typically wasted on schools and hospitals.

Q: Do data centers use a lot of water?

A: What are you, a fish? Don’t worry about it.

Q: How are data centers regulated?

A: Next month, Congress will hear about data centers for the very first time.

Q: Do I need to worry about one coming to my town?

A: Only if your town is built on land.

Q: How long does it take to build a new data center?

A: Approximately one closed-door city council vote.

Q: What’s Wi-Fi?

A: Not right now, big guy.

Q: What will most data centers house in the future?

A: Raccoons.

Image: uncredited

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What It's Like to Work at the White House

Introduction

I recorded several exit interviews after I departed the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy last month. These turned out well, I think, but the truth about me is that I have not truly reflected on an experience until I have written about it. Today’s essay constitutes my long-overdue reflections on my time working for the White House.

This essay is based upon extensive conversations I had with former and current White House staff during my time in government, as well as on similar essays I have read by others over the years. And of course, it draws from my own experience as Senior Policy Advisor for AI and Emerging Technology in the White House. With that said, this essay is not about gossip: I will not be describing any newsy anecdotes or anything of that sort. And when I do describe internal interactions I had, all names will remain anonymous.

Understanding “The White House”

“The White House” is a lossy abstraction. The name of the bureaucracy that encompasses “The White House” is the Executive Office of the President (EOP). The EOP is composed of many “components”: the National Security Council (NSC), the National Economic Council (NEC), the Office of Management and Budget OMB), and, where I worked, the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). The Department of Government Efficiency, too, is a White House component, having previously been the Obama-era US Digital Service (the technical name of DOGE is the US DOGE Service). Wikipedia says that about 1,800 people work in the EOP, though I suspect this number is meaningfully lower under the Trump Administration.

Almost none of these personnel work in the building made of white sandstone known as “The White House.” Fewer still work in the White House’s West Wing. Instead they work in the White House Complex, most importantly the New and Old Executive Office Buildings, the latter of which is called today the Eisenhower Executive Office Building (EEOB). The vast majority of people who work for “The White House” work in these latter two office buildings. I worked in the EEOB, located across from the White House on a small, private street called West Executive Avenue.

Despite the geographic confusion, “The White House” usually refers as a metonym to the entirety of the EOP. And when people outside the EOP talk to an EOP staffer about some policy issue, they will say to their friends and colleagues that they spoke with “The White House” about the matter—even if all they really did was exchange text messages with a twenty-something EOP staffer whose security clearance does not even permit him to walk around the West Wing unescorted. Mostly I think this is because it’s convenient, and also because it sounds cool to say you “spoke with The White House.”

This social reality also means that everything you say and do as a White House staffer was said and done by “The White House.” This ends up being a tremendously difficult fact of life for the people whose desk resides within the metonym. You are no longer, exactly, a person. You are transformed into a symbol, a walking embodiment of power. This affects how people treat you, and sadly, I think, it affects how you treat others.

Working at the White House Complex is like orbiting within a solar system. The closer you get to the sun in the center—the President himself—the temperature rises, and the intensity of the gravity increases. The EEOB is a nice middle ground—not an icy, distant planet, but also not, you know, Venus. Still, everyone in the EOP constantly surveils for the occasional coronal mass ejection from the Sun—that is, when something you work on reaches POTUS-level attention. The pace and character of your workday can change at a moment’s notice—from “wow-this-is-a-lot” to “unbelievably,-no-seriously-you-cannot-fathom-the-pressure” levels of intense.

The First Day (...)

The Work of the White House Staffer

So what do you do all day, exactly? It’s a great question. Outside of offices like the NSC and OMB, most White House components do not have much or any hard power. They have no written-in-statute capabilities, other than “providing advice.” They have no shalls at their disposal, only shoulds. So your power rests entirely in soft varieties: mandates, real or perceived, from senior officials, ideally POTUS; proximity, real or perceived, to the President himself.

The other path to soft power is simply by being useful, by solving other people’s problems for them, or by being the person who simply must be a part of that meeting because of your expertise and insight. (...)

Running an interagency process is not that hard—at least, it is not hard to summarize. You want to avoid excessive “policymaking by committee” while also ensuring that agencies have the opportunity to bring legitimate nuance and detail to the table—characteristics that only they, with their subject-matter expertise, can furnish.

To do this you need to identify all the agencies relevant to your policy process (itself nontrivial!); find productive counterparties in those agencies and cultivate them as allies; develop a rich model not just of your counterparty’s incentives and goals but also those of his entire team and agency; and build a model also of the tensions between each counterparty/agency’s incentives and goals and those of all the other counterparties and agencies. 

Then, you need to engage in behind-the-scenes diplomacy to “pre-bake” all the major things you care about achieving. Your goal should be for the interagency meeting itself to be a coronation of the already-agreed-upon major policy objectives, and a nuanced discussion of the details of implementation. You’ll need to do this focused work for each interagency process you run while also dealing with all the reactive elements of White House staffing (the Indonesia speech and the nebulous government-to-government negotiations and the lobbying and what not).

Some agencies are easy to work with. Others are almost entirely incorrigible. The most difficult ones are those that centralize communications with the White House, such that the EOP staffer can only get information filtered through the top-level offices of the agency. “Solving” each agency is a unique problem unto itself. (...)

Through the highs and the lows you come to realize what it is to be a mid-senior level White House staffer. You are a lone man, attached to the hull of a gargantuan ship, so large you cannot even see the ends. Your goal is to make it to the engine room, or the bridge, or to whatever else in the ship you feel it is your job to fix or improve. First you have to make it through the hull, and in your hands you have a butter knife.

The job is not just hard. In the final analysis, it is effectively impossible to do completely. But you can make inches of progress, and inches are not nothing. Despite the glamor and the flashes of glory, the work is mostly toil, if you are doing it right (not everyone does). There is a reason, after all, it is called public service.

Nonetheless, it is easy to become dispirited, to become overwhelmed by the enormity of your task and the problems you are trying to solve. In Washington, doing this too much is referred to as “admiring the problem.” That many in our nation’s capital treat understanding problems with such derision perhaps sheds light on why Americans are so often dissatisfied with their solutions.

by Dean Ball, Hyperdimensional |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. Not all fun and games. Sometimes there's the unexpected threat too:]

Hans Hartung, T-50 Peinture 8, 1950
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Scenario Scrutiny for AI Policy

AI 2027 was a descriptive forecast. Our next big project will be prescriptive: a scenario showing roughly how we think the US government should act during AI takeoff, accompanied by a “policy playbook” arguing for these recommendations.

One reason we’re producing a scenario alongside our playbook at all—as opposed to presenting our policies only as abstract arguments—is to stress-test them. We think many policy proposals for navigating AGI fall apart under scenario scrutiny—that is, if you try to write down a plausible scenario in which that proposal makes the world better, you will find that it runs into difficulties. The corollary is that scenario scrutiny can improve proposals by revealing their weak points.

To illustrate this process and the types of weak points it can expose, we’re about to give several examples of AI policy proposals and ways they could collapse under scenario scrutiny. These examples are necessarily oversimplified, since we don’t have the space in this blog post to articulate more sophisticated versions, much less subject them to serious scrutiny. But hopefully these simple examples illustrate the idea and motivate readers to subject their own proposals to more concrete examination.

With that in mind, here are some policy weaknesses that scenario scrutiny can unearth:

1. Applause lights. The simplest way that a scenario can improve an abstract proposal is by revealing that it is primarily a content-free appeal to unobjectionable values. Suppose that someone calls for the democratic, multinational development of AGI. This sounds good, but what does it look like in practice? The person who says this might not have much of an idea beyond “democracy good.” Having them try to write down a scenario might reveal this fact and allow them to then fill in the details of their actual proposal.

2. Bad analogies. Some AI policy proposals rely on bad analogies. For example, technological automation has historically led to increased prosperity, with displaced workers settling into new types of jobs created by that automation. Applying this argument to AGI straightforwardly leads to “the government should just do what it has done in previous technological transitions, like re-skilling programs.” However, if you look past the labels and write down a concrete scenario in which general, human-level AI automates all knowledge work… what happens next? Perhaps displaced white-collar workers migrate to blue-collar work or to jobs where it matters that it is specifically done by a human. Are there enough such jobs to absorb these workers? How long does it take the automated researchers to solve robotics and automate the blue-collar work too? What are the incentives of the labs that are renting out AI labor? We think reasoning in this way will reveal ways in which AGI is not like previous technologies, such as that it can also do the jobs that humans are supposed to migrate to, making “re-skilling” a bad proposal.

3. Uninterrogated consequences. Abstract arguments can appeal to incompletely explored concepts or goals. For example, a key part of many AI strategies is “beat China in an AGI race.” However, as Gwern asks,

“Then what? […] You get AGI and you show it off publicly, Xi Jinping blows his stack as he realizes how badly he screwed up strategically and declares a national emergency and the CCP starts racing towards its own AGI in a year, and… then what? What do you do in this 1 year period, while you still enjoy AGI supremacy? You have millions of AGIs which can do… ‘stuff’. What is this stuff?

“Are you going to start massive weaponized hacking to subvert CCP AI programs as much as possible short of nuclear war? Lobby the UN to ban rival AGIs and approve US carrier group air strikes on the Chinese mainland? License it to the CCP to buy them off? Just… do nothing and enjoy 10%+ GDP growth for one year before the rival CCP AGIs all start getting deployed? Do you have any idea at all? If you don’t, what is the point of ‘winning the race’?”

A concrete scenario demands concrete answers to these questions, by requiring you to ask “what happens next?” By default, “win the race” does not.

4. Optimistic assumptions and unfollowed incentives. There are many ways for a policy proposal to secretly rest upon optimistic assumptions, but one particularly important way is that, for no apparent reason, a relevant actor doesn’t follow their incentives. For example, upon proposing an international agreement on AI safety, you might forget that the countries—which would be racing to AGI by default—are probably looking for ways to break out of it! A useful frame here is to ask: “Is the world in equilibrium?” That is, has every actor already taken all actions that best serve their interests, given the actions taken by others and the constraints they face? Asking this question can help shine a spotlight on untaken opportunities and ways that actors could subvert policy goals by following their incentives.

Relatedly, a scenario is readily open to “red-teaming” through “what if?” questions, which can reveal optimistic assumptions and their potential impacts if broken. Such questions could be: What if alignment is significantly harder than I expect? What if the CEO secretly wants to be a dictator? What if timelines are longer and China has time to indigenize the compute supply chain?

5. Inconsistencies. Scenario scrutiny can also reveal inconsistencies, either between different parts of your scenario or between your policies and your predictions. For example, when writing our upcoming scenario, we wanted the U.S. and China to agree to a development pause before either reached the superhuman coder milestone. At this point, we realized a problem: a robust agreement would be much more difficult without verification technology, and much of this technology did not exist yet! We then went back and included an “Operation Warp Speed for Verification” earlier in the story. Concretely writing out our plan changed our current policy priorities and made our scenario more internally consistent.

6. Missing what’s important. Finally, a scenario can show you that your proposed policy doesn’t address the important bits of the problem. Take AI liability for example. Imagine the year is 2027, and things are unfolding as AI 2027 depicts. America’s OpenBrain is internally deploying its Agent-4 system to speed up its AI research by 50x, while simultaneously being unsure if Agent-4 is aligned. Meanwhile, Chinese competitor DeepCent is right on OpenBrain’s heels, with internal models that are only two months behind the frontier. What happens next? If OpenBrain pushes forward with Agent-4, it risks losing control to misaligned AI. If OpenBrain instead shuts down Agent-4, it cripples its capabilities research, thereby ceding the lead to DeepCent and the CCP. Where is liability in this picture? Maybe it prevented some risky public deployments earlier on. But, in this scenario, what happens next isn’t “Thankfully, Congress passed a law in 2026 subjecting frontier AI developers to strict liability, and so…

For this last example, you might argue that the scenario under which this policy was scrutinized is not plausible. Maybe your primary threat model is malicious use, in which those who would enforce liability still exist for long enough to make OpenBrain internalize its externalities. Maybe it’s something else. That’s fine! An important part of scenario scrutiny as a practice is that it allows for concrete discussion about which future trajectories are more plausible, in addition to which concrete policies would be best in those futures. However, we worry that many people have a scenario involving race dynamics and misalignment in mind and still suggest things like AI liability.

To this, one might argue that liability isn’t trying to solve race dynamics or misalignment; instead, it solves one chunk of the problem, providing value on the margin as part of a broader policy package. This is also fine! Scenario scrutiny is most useful for “grand plan” proposals. But we still think that marginal policies could benefit from scenario scrutiny.

The general principle is that writing a scenario by asking “what happens next, and is the world in equilibrium?” forces you to be concrete, which can surface various problems that arise from being vague and abstract. If you find you can’t write a scenario in which your proposed policies solve the hard problems, that’s a big red flag.

However, if you can write out a plausible scenario in which your policy is good, this isn’t enough for the policy to be good overall. But it’s a bar that we think proposals should meet.

As an analogy: just because a firm bidding for a construction contract submitted a blueprint of their proposed building, along with a breakdown of the estimated costs and calculations of structural integrity, doesn’t mean you should award them the contract! But it’s reasonable to make this part of the submission requirements, precisely because it allows you to more easily separate the wheat from the chaff and identify unrealistic plans. Given that plans for the future of AI are—to put it mildly—more important than plans for individual buildings, we think that scenario scrutiny is a reasonable standard to meet.

While we think that scenario scrutiny is underrated in policy, there are a few costs to consider:

by Joshua Turner and Daniel Kokotajlo, AI Futures Project |  Read more:

Image: via

Eduardo Chillida
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Model Cities: Monumental Labs Stonework

Monumental Labs, a group working on “AI-enabled robotic stone carving factories”. The question of why modern architecture is so dull and unornamented compared to its classical counterpart is complicated, but three commonly-proposed reasons are:

1. Ornament costs too much

2. The modernist era destroyed the classical architecture education pipeline; only a few people and companies retain tacit knowledge of old techniques, and they mostly occupy themselves with historical renovation.

3. Building codes are inflexible and designed around the more-common modern styles.

Getting robots to mass-produce ornament solves problems 1 and 2, and doing it in a model city with a ground-level commitment to ornament solves problem 3. 

Sramek writes:

Our renderings do not tell the full story. Getting architecture right in a way that is also scalable and affordable is hard. And until now, we’ve been focused on the things “lower down in the stack” that need to be designed first – land use plans, urban design, transportation, open space, infrastructure, etc. But I started this company nearly a decade ago precisely because I felt that so much of our world had become ugly, and I wanted to live, and have my kids grow up, in a place that appreciates craft and beauty.

via: Model Cities Monday - 10/27/25 (ASX)

[ed. Sounds good to me.]

Amazon Plans to Replace More Than Half a Million Jobs With Robots

[ed. Amazon announces 14000 job cuts - 10/28/2025]

Over the past two decades, no company has done more to shape the American workplace than Amazon. In its ascent to become the nation’s second-largest employer, it has hired hundreds of thousands of warehouse workers, built an army of contract drivers and pioneered using technology to hire, monitor and manage employees.

Now, interviews and a cache of internal strategy documents viewed by The New York Times reveal that Amazon executives believe the company is on the cusp of its next big workplace shift: replacing more than half a million jobs with robots.

Amazon’s U.S. work force has more than tripled since 2018 to almost 1.2 million. But Amazon’s automation team expects the company can avoid hiring more than 160,000 people in the United States it would otherwise need by 2027. That would save about 30 cents on each item that Amazon picks, packs and delivers to customers.

Executives told Amazon’s board last year that they hoped robotic automation would allow the company to continue to avoid adding to its U.S. work force in the coming years, even though they expect to sell twice as many products by 2033. That would translate to more than 600,000 people whom Amazon didn’t need to hire.

At facilities designed for superfast deliveries, Amazon is trying to create warehouses that employ few humans at all. And documents show that Amazon’s robotics team has an ultimate goal to automate 75 percent of its operations.

Amazon is so convinced this automated future is around the corner that it has started developing plans to mitigate the fallout in communities that may lose jobs. Documents show the company has considered building an image as a “good corporate citizen” through greater participation in community events such as parades and Toys for Tots.

The documents contemplate avoiding using terms like “automation” and “A.I.” when discussing robotics, and instead use terms like “advanced technology” or replace the word “robot” with “cobot,” which implies collaboration with humans. (...)

Amazon’s plans could have profound impact on blue-collar jobs throughout the country and serve as a model for other companies like Walmart, the nation’s largest private employer, and UPS. The company transformed the U.S. work force as it created a booming demand for warehousing and delivery jobs. But now, as it leads the way for automation, those roles could become more technical, higher paid and more scarce.

“Nobody else has the same incentive as Amazon to find the way to automate,” said Daron Acemoglu, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studies automation and won the Nobel Prize in economic science last year. “Once they work out how to do this profitably, it will spread to others, too.”

If the plans pan out, “one of the biggest employers in the United States will become a net job destroyer, not a net job creator,” Mr. Acemoglu said.

The Times viewed internal Amazon documents from the past year. They included working papers that show how different parts of the company are navigating its ambitious automation effort, as well as formalized plans for the department of more than 3,000 corporate and engineering employees who largely develop the company’s robotic and automation operations. (...)

A Template for the Future

For years, Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and longtime chief executive, pushed his staff to think big and envision what it would take to fully automate its operations, according to two former senior leaders involved in the work. Amazon’s first big push into robotic automation started in 2012, when it paid $775 million to buy the robotics maker Kiva. The acquisition transformed Amazon’s operations. Workers no longer walked miles crisscrossing a warehouse. Instead, robots shaped like large hockey pucks moved towers of products to employees.

The company has since developed an orchestrated system of robotic programs that plug into each together like Legos. And it has focused on transforming the large, workhorse warehouses that pick and pack the products customers buy with a click.

Amazon opened its most advanced warehouse, a facility in Shreveport, La., last year as a template for future robotic fulfillment centers. Once an item there is in a package, a human barely touches it again. The company uses a thousand robots in Shreveport, allowing it to employ a quarter fewer workers last year than it would have without automation, documents show. Next year, as more robots are introduced, it expects to employ about half as many workers there as it would without automation.

“With this major milestone now in sight, we are confident in our ability to flatten Amazon’s hiring curve over the next 10 years,” the robotics team wrote in its strategy plan for 2025.

Amazon plans to copy the Shreveport design in about 40 facilities by the end of 2027, starting with a massive warehouse that just opened in Virginia Beach. And it has begun overhauling old facilities, including one in Stone Mountain near Atlanta.

That facility currently has roughly 4,000 workers. But once the robotic systems are installed, it is projected to process 10 percent more items but need as many as 1,200 fewer employees, according to an internal analysis. Amazon said the final head count was subject to change. (...)

Amazon has said it has a million robots at work around the globe, and it believes the humans who take care of them will be the jobs of the future. Both hourly workers and managers will need to know more about engineering and robotics as Amazon’s facilities operate more like advanced factories.

by Karen Weise, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Emily Kask
[ed. Everyone knew this was coming, now it's here. I expect issues like universal basic income, healthcare for all, even various forms of democratic socialism (which I support) getting more attention soon. See also: What Amazon’s 14,000 job cuts say about a new era of corporate downsizing (WaPo via Seattle Times); and, The AI job cuts are here - or are they? (BBC).]

College Football: Big Money, Big Troubles

College football programs could spend $200 million in buyouts. Spare us the money moaning.

If you watched college football on Saturday, you saw yet another set of misleading political ads urging you to call your local congressman and tell them to SAVE COLLEGE SPORTS! The latest ones give the impression that women’s and Olympic sports are in trouble because having to pay athletes a salary is going to bankrupt their schools.

On Sunday, Penn State announced it has fired 12th-year coach James Franklin, for whom they now owe a roughly $45 million buyout.

These schools aren’t broke. They’re just wildly irresponsible spenders.

And if they find a private equity firm to come rushing to their rescue, as the Big Ten is actively seeking, they’ll just find a way to light that money on fire, too.

We’re only halfway through the 2025 regular season, and it’s clear we’re headed to a full-on coaching carousel bloodletting. Stanford (Troy Taylor), UCLA (DeShaun Foster), Virginia Tech (Brent Pry), Oklahoma State (Mike Gundy), Arkansas (Sam Pittman), Oregon State (Trent Bray) and now Penn State have already sent their guys packing, and the likes of Florida (Billy Napier), Wisconsin (Luke Fickell) and several more will likely come.

By year’s end, the combined cost of those buyouts could well exceed $200 million. Let that sink in for a second. Supposed institutions of “higher learning” have managed to negotiate themselves into paying $200 million to people who will no longer be working for them.

Just how much is $200 million? Well, for one thing, it’s enough to pay for the scholarships of roughly 5,000 women’s and Olympic sports athletes.

You may be asking yourself: How do schools keep entering into these ridiculous, one-sided coaching contracts that cost more than the House settlement salary cap ($20.5 million) to extricate themselves from?

Well, consider the dynamics at play in those negotiations.

On one side of the table, we have an athletics director who spends 95 percent of their time on things like fundraising, marketing, facilities, answering fan emails about the long lines of concession stands, and so on. Once every four or five years, if that, they have to hire or renew a highly paid football coach, often in the span of 24 to 48 hours.

And on the other side, we have Jimmy Sexton. Or Trace Armstrong. Or another super-agent whose sole job is to negotiate lucrative coaching contracts. It’s a bigger mismatch than Penn State-UCLA … uh, Penn State-Northwestern … uh … you know what I mean.

Franklin’s extremely one-sided contract is a perfect example. (...)

Coaching salaries have been going up and up for decades, of course, but that 2021-22 cycle reached new heights in absurdity. In addition to Franklin’s windfall, USC gave Oklahoma’s Riley a 10-year, $110 million contract, and LSU gave Brian Kelly a 10-year, $95 million deal; and the most insane of all, Michigan State’s 10-year, $75 million deal for the since-fired Mel Tucker.

As of today, none of the four schools has gotten the return they were seeking. (...)

Now, according to USA Today’s coaching salary database published last week, none of the 30 highest-paid coaches in the country have a buyout of less than $20 million.

In the past, we might have just rolled our eyes, proclaimed, “You idiots!” and moved on. But the current college sports climate all but demands that there needs to be more accountability of the people making these deals.

by Stewart Mandel, The Athletic | Read more:
Image: Alex Slitz/Getty

[ed. I don't follow college football much, but from what I do pick up it seems like the transfer portal, NIL, legitimized sports gambling, conference reorganizations, big media money, and who knows what else have really had an overall negative effect on the sport, resulting in an ugly mercenary ethic that's now common. See also: College football is absolutely unhinged right now. It’s exactly why we love it; and, Bill Belichick pledged an NFL approach at North Carolina. Program insiders call it dysfunctional (The Athletic). 

Then there's this: College football’s ‘shirtless dudes’ trend is all the rage. And could be curing male loneliness? Can't see the connection but imagine women sure as hell won't be sitting anywhere near these guys. Don't think that's going to help with the loneliness problem.]  

The Uncool: A Memoir

Who Is Cameron Crowe Kidding With the Title of His Memoir?

One of the greatest tricks cool people play on the rest of us is convincing us in their memoirs that they were and are profoundly uncool. Cameron Crowe comes right out with the pandering on his book’s cover: “The Uncool: A Memoir.”

The title refers to a scene in “Almost Famous” (2000), the tender film he wrote and directed. The headstrong rock critic Lester Bangs (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is consoling the Crowe-like hero, a floppy-haired teenage rock journalist, over the telephone at a low moment. Bangs says, “The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you’re uncool.” It’s a good line. Call me anytime, Bangs adds: “I’m always home. I’m uncool.”

Never mind whether Lester Bangs was plausibly uncool. How about Crowe? Here’s a man who spent his adolescence in the 1970s careening around the United States for Rolling Stone magazine, a boy wonder in the intimate and extended company of David Bowie, Led Zeppelin, Gram Parsons, the Allman Brothers, Fleetwood Mac, Emmylou Harris, Kris Kristofferson, the Eagles, Todd Rundgren and Yes, about whom he was writing profiles and cover stories.

Occasionally, he’d fly home to see his mother, check out high school for a day or two, then blearily type up his road memories and interview notes. Sounds uncool to me.

The second act of Crowe’s career began when, in his early 20s, he went undercover for a year, posing as a high school student in San Diego, and wrote the experience up in a book called “Fast Times at Ridgemont High.” Crowe and the director Amy Heckerling turned it into a wide-awake 1982 movie that provided rocket fuel for Sean Penn, who played the perpetually stoned surfer Jeff Spicoli.

Crowe, who burned out young as a journalist, pivoted to film. He wrote and directed “Say Anything” (1989), with John Cusack, Ione Skye and a famous boombox; “Singles” (1992), a romantic early look at the Seattle grunge scene; and “Jerry Maguire” (1996), with Tom Cruise and Renée Zellweger, before winning an Oscar for his “Almost Famous” screenplay. All this while married to Nancy Wilson, the guitarist in Heart. No sane person would trade their allotment of experience for this man’s. Omnidirectionally uncool.

When you read Crowe’s memoir, though, you begin to see things from his unhip point of view. He had no interest in drink and drugs while on the road, though Gregg Allman tried to hook him up with a speedball. He seems to have mostly abstained from sex, too, though there’s something about his adoration in the presence of his rock heroes that makes it seem he’s losing his virginity every few pages.

His editors at Rolling Stone thought he was uncool, increasingly as time went on, because the acolyte in him overrode the journalist. He Forrest Gumped along. Bands liked having Crowe around because he was adorable and a bit servile; he’d often leave out the bits they wanted left out. (...)

Crowe thought rock writers were snobs. He moved in with Glenn Frey and Don Henley of the Eagles while profiling them, for example, and he was in the room when they wrote “One of These Nights” and “Lyin’ Eyes.” It bugged him to see them put down:

A collection of rock writers at a party would challenge each other on their musical taste, each one going further and further into the world of the obscure until they’d collectively decided that “Self Portrait” was Bob Dylan’s greatest album and the Eagles barely deserved a record contract.

He especially liked Frey, because his message to the world seemed to be: “Lead with your optimism.” This was Crowe’s mother’s ethos, as well, and it chimed with his own. It’s a worldview that has worked for him in his best movies, though he’s also made gooey flops. The world needs its Paul McCartneys as much as it needs its Lou Reeds. It makes sense that Reed only sneered when he met Crowe. (...)

The crucial thing to know about this book is that it overlaps almost exactly with the story Crowe tells in “Almost Famous.” If you remember the phrases “It’s all happening” and “Don’t take drugs,” or the young woman — a “Band-Aid” in the movie’s argot — who is offered for a case of Heineken, or the rock star who briefly kills an important story, or Crowe’s flight-attendant sister, or the group sex scene that seems like a series of flickering veils, or the L.A. hotel known as the Riot House, or Lester Bangs acting out in a glassed-in first-floor radio studio, it’s all here and more.

The book reads like a novelization of the movie, so much so that it makes you consider the nature of memory. I’m not suggesting Crowe is making things up in this memoir. I’m merely suggesting that the stories he wrote for the movie may have been so reverberant that they began to subtly bleed into his own.

The secret to the movie, one that most people miss, Crowe says, is the empty chair at the family’s dining-room table. It belonged to Crowe’s older sister, Cathy, who was troubled from birth and died by suicide at 19. This detail reminds you how relatively sanitized this book otherwise is. There is little that’s grainy or truly revelatory about his own life and loves. The book ends before his directing career has begun, thus leaving room for a sequel. Everything is a bit gauzy, soft-core.

God help me, I read this book quickly and enjoyed it anyway: The backstage details alone keep this kite afloat. It got to me in the same way “Almost Famous” always gets to me, despite the way that movie sets off my entire bank of incoming sentimentality detectors. If you can watch the “Tiny Dancer” scene without blinking back a tear, you’re a stronger person than me. 

by Dwight Garner, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Neal Preston

Georgia Cox, Goldfinch and Teasels

via:

Jackson Pollock - Untitled (Green Silver), 1949
via:

Karla Davis

[ed. A real talent. See also: Mississippi Thing (and more).]

New Statement Calls For Not Building Superintelligence For Now

Building superintelligence poses large existential risks. Also known as: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. Where ‘it’ is superintelligence, and ‘dies’ is that probably everyone on the planet literally dies.

We should not build superintelligence until such time as that changes, and the risk of everyone dying as a result, as well as the risk of losing control over the future as a result, is very low. Not zero, but far lower than it is now or will be soon.

Thus, the Statement on Superintelligence from FLI, which I have signed.

Context: Innovative AI tools may bring unprecedented health and prosperity. However, alongside tools, many leading AI companies have the stated goal of building superintelligence in the coming decade that can significantly outperform all humans on essentially all cognitive tasks. This has raised concerns, ranging from human economic obsolescence and disempowerment, losses of freedom, civil liberties, dignity, and control, to national security risks and even potential human extinction. The succinct statement below aims to create common knowledge of the growing number of experts and public figures who oppose a rush to superintelligence.

Statement:

We call for a prohibition on the development of superintelligence, not lifted before there is

1. broad scientific consensus that it will be done safely and controllably, and

2. strong public buy-in.

Their polling says there is 64% agreement on this, versus 5% supporting the status quo.

A Brief History Of Prior Statements

In March of 2023 FLI issued an actual pause letter, calling for an immediate pause for at least 6 months in the training of systems more powerful than GPT-4, which was signed among others by Elon Musk.

This letter was absolutely, 100% a call for a widespread regime of prior restraint on development of further frontier models, and to importantly ‘slow down’ and to ‘pause’ development in the name of safety.

At the time, I said it was a deeply flawed letter and I declined to sign it, but my quick reaction was to be happy that the letter existed. This was a mistake. I was wrong.

The pause letter not only weakened the impact of the superior CAIS letter, it has now for years been used as a club with which to browbeat or mock anyone who would suggest that future sufficiently advanced AI systems might endanger us, or that we might want to do something about that. To claim that any such person must have wanted such a pause at that time, or would want to pause now, which is usually not the case.

The second statement was the CAIS letter in May 2023, which was in its entirety:

“Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”

This was a very good sentence. I was happy to sign, as were some heavy hitters, including Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Demis Hassabis and many others.

This was very obviously not a pause, or a call for any particular law or regulation or action. It was a statement of principles and the creation of common knowledge.

Given how much worse many people have gotten on AI risk since then, it would be an interesting exercise to ask those same people to reaffirm the statement.

This Third Statement

The new statement is in between the previous two letters.

It is more prescriptive than simply stating a priority.

It is however not a call to ‘pause’ at this time, or to stop building ordinary AIs, or to stop trying to use AI for a wide variety of purposes.

It is narrowly requesting that, if you are building something that might plausibly be a superintelligence, under anything like present conditions, you should instead not do that. We should not allow you to do that. Not until you make a strong case for why this is a wise or not insane thing to do.

This is something that those who are most vocally speaking out against the statement strongly believe is not going to happen within the next few years, so for the next few years any reasonable implementation would not pause or substantially impact AI development.

I interpret the statement as saying, roughly: if a given action has a substantial chance of being the proximate cause of superintelligence coming into being, then that’s not okay, we shouldn’t let you do that, not under anything like present conditions.

I think it is important that we create common knowledge of this, which we very clearly do not yet have. 

by Zvi Moskowitz, Don't Worry About the Vase |  Read more:

Image: Future of Life

[ed. I signed, for what it's worth. Since most prominant AI researchers have publicly stated concerns over a fast takeoff (and safety precautions are not keeping up), then it seems like a good reason to be pretty nervous. It's also clear that most of the public, our political representatives, business community, and even some in the AI community itself are either underestimating the risks involved or for the most part have given up, because human nature. Climate change, now superintelligence - slow boil or quick zap. Anything that helps bring more focus and action on either of these issues can only be a good thing.]