Lee Kuan Yew, the iron-willed founder of modern Singapore, was once asked what the most important invention of the 20th century was. He didn’t say penicillin, which has saved over 500 million lives, or the nuclear bomb, which has shaped geopolitics like nothing before. He didn’t even say TV!  Instead, Lee had a simple two-word […]

In 2023, one popular perspective on AI went like this: Sure, it can generate lots of impressive text, but it can’t truly reason — it’s all shallow mimicry, just “stochastic parrots” squawking.  At the time, it was easy to see where this perspective was coming from. Artificial intelligence had moments of being impressive and interesting, […]

Four years ago, America was on the cusp of the largest expansion of its welfare state since the 1960s.  Under Joe Biden in 2021, House Democrats passed legislation that would have established a monthly child allowance for most families, an expansion of Medicaid’s elder care services, federal child care subsidies, universal prekindergarten, and a paid […]

The science fiction author Isaac Asimov once came up with a set of laws that we humans should program into our robots. In addition to a first, second, and third law, he also introduced a “zeroth law,” which is so important that it precedes all the others: “A robot may not harm humanity, or, by […]

The first big Christmas gift I remember getting was an animatronic bear named Teddy Ruxpin. Thanks to a cassette tape hidden in his belly, he could talk, his eyes and mouth moving in a famously creepy way. Later that winter, when I was sick with a fever, I hallucinated that the toy came alive and […]