Articles that are also US onAir News Items

The Players on the Eve of Destruction
The insanity of war has returned to our world.
Noahpinion – January 2, 2025

Trade in the Ruins (Wonkish)
On misunderstanding the postwar boom
Krugman Wonks out, Paul Krugman – January 4, 2025

The Big Five – 4 Janaury 2025
My regular update on conflict and confrontation in Ukraine, the Middle East and the Pacific, accompanied by recommended readings on modern war and future conflict.
Futura Doctrina, Mick Ryan – January 4, 2025

New Orleans attacker’s apparent loyalty to Islamic State group highlights persistent threat of lone wolf terrorism

The New Orleans attack, like that earlier incident, underscores an important point: While the Islamic State group’s territorial caliphate – the area in Syria and Iraq in which it assumed both political and religious authority and sought to enforce its interpretation of Islamic law – has been dismantled, the group’s ability to inspire acts of terror on U.S. soil through online propaganda and ideological influence remains alarmingly potent.

Will AI revolutionize drug development? Researchers explain why it depends on how it’s used

While AI alone might not revolutionize drug development, it can help address the root causes of why drugs fail and streamline the lengthy process to approval.

Can science be both open and secure? Nations grapple with tightening research security as China’s dominance grows

The challenge for research institutions will be implementing these new requirements without creating a climate of suspicion or isolation. Retrenchment to national borders could slow progress. Some degree of risk is inherent in scientific openness, but we may be coming to the end of a global, collaborative era in science.

Mainstream media faces a credibility crisis – my journalism research shows how the news can still serve the public

Through solidarity practices, mainstream media has a chance to achieve what it has always claimed to contribute to society: truthful reporting based on what is happening on the ground, to real people, in real time – and with real impact.

Tech law in 2025: a look ahead at AI, privacy and social media regulation under the new Trump administration
Overall, while federal efforts on issues like Section 230 reform and children’s online protection may advance, federal-level AI regulation and data privacy laws could potentially slow down due to the administration’s deregulatory stance. Whether long-standing legislative efforts like federal data privacy protection materialize will depend on the balance of power between Congress, the courts and the incoming administration.

Will AI revolutionize drug development? Researchers explain why it depends on how it’s used

While AI alone might not revolutionize drug development, it can help address the root causes of why drugs fail and streamline the lengthy process to approval.
Duxin Sun & Christian Macedonia, University of Michigan

How we’ll use AI in 2025
As we enter Year 3 of the generative AI revolution, Axios’ Megan Morrone asked readers to tell us all the ways they’ve been using ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Copilot — not for work, but for everything else.

The Robots are coming: Genesis
2025 might open up a new paradigm for RL learning in robotics. Are we near an inflection point for humanoid general purpose robots?
Michael Spencer, AI Supremacy

Future of Life Institute Newsletter: 2024 in Review

1. EU AI Act made final.
2. Superintelligence Imagined.
3. Major support for SB 1047.
4. The Elders partnership on existential threats.
5. WebSummit.

The Important Thing About AGI is the Impact, Not the Name
Reality Doesn’t Care How We Interpret the Words “General Intelligence”
Steve Newman

The insanity of war has returned to our world.

When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, everyone knew something had changed. The Iraq War had been a harbinger of what was to come — a great power launching a war of choice against a smaller, non-threatening state. But Ukraine was different — Russia wasn’t just recklessly intervening in a neighboring country, but attempting to swallow it entirely. The age when great powers competed only by proxy and by temporary interventions was over, and the age of conquering empires had returned. The Russians themselves have said this openly, and the Chinese realized it as well:

And so across the sea, the old stormclouds gather again. In the seas around Taiwan, an armada assembles. Across the strait, the emperor orders a million kamikaze drones, hundreds of nuclear weapons, a forest of ballistic missiles, and a vast new navy. In Taipei, the sun is out, and people sip their tea, and eat their beef noodle soup, and and try not to think too hard about whether this will be the year the old world finally gives way to new.

On misunderstanding the postwar boom

All too often, I fear, the argument that we got rich because we had no competitors is an attempt to avoid admitting that an economy could prosper with high taxes on the rich and unions that gave workers a lot of bargaining power. Oh, and did I mention low overall income inequality?

What went right? Nobody really knows, but the best guess is that in the relative stability of the postwar environment businesses were able to fully exploit already existing technologies like electrification and the internal combustion engine. The key point is that the pro-labor, redistributive policies of the post-New-Deal era don’t appear to have gotten in the way of that success.

My regular update on conflict and confrontation in Ukraine, the Middle East and the Pacific, accompanied by recommended readings on modern war and future conflict.

Ukraine
In the final weeks of the Biden administration, the U.S. government this week provided another large military assistance package for Ukraine. Two separate initiatives, one for $1.25 billion from the Presidential Drawdown Authority (PDA) package and another for $1.21 billion under the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative (USAI) package, were announced.

As the Trump administration nears and speculation grows about what posture it will adopt with regards to a peace settlement for the war in Ukraine, the Ukrainian president discussed NATO membership for Ukraine as part of his New Year address.

And while we don’t yet know what the Trump administration’s approach to the war will be, the Russians are already laying down the elements of their negotiating position. This week, Russia’s envoy to the U.N., Vasily Nebenzya stated that U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s team has not presented anything “interesting” to Moscow regarding ending the war in Ukraine. Trump, Vance and Kellogg have their work cut out for them.

Comparing economies is an inexact science.

Art by ChatGPT

Comparing the size of countries’ economies is a popular sport, and a lot of people are very invested in the outcomes of those comparisons.

The actual reason for the discrepancy is that there are different ways of comparing GDP. The two basic measures are:

1. GDP at market exchange rates, also called “nominal”
2. GDP at purchasing power parity (PPP), also called “international dollars”, also called “adjusted for differences in the cost of living”

If you use the first of these measures, you see China’s GDP falling behind America’s, as in the two charts above. But if you use the second measure, you see China’s GDP already ahead of America’s, and pulling farther ahead every year (albeit at a slower rate than before 2021):

So, hypergrowth requires AI that can do “essentially everything”. It also requires AI be able to adapt to the job, rather than requiring jobs and workflows to be restructured around AI. Otherwise, AI will diffuse into the economy at a rate similar to past technologies – too slowly to lead to sustained hypergrowth. Hypergrowth requires AIs to be general enough to do more or less everything people can do, and flexible enough to fit into the circumstances in which people were doing it.

When AI can perform more or less all economically valuable tasks, and doesn’t require the task to be adapted to suit automation, it will be ready to undertake all of the scenarios I’ve mentioned. Until those conditions are met, the need for expert human assistance will make all of those scenarios infeasible.

I define AGI as AI that can cost-effectively replace humans at more than 95% of economic activity, including any new jobs that are created in the future.

2025 might open up a new paradigm for RL learning in robotics. Are we near an inflection point for humanoid general purpose robots?

In December, 2024 an important project was announced. Genesis project — after a 24-month large-scale research collaboration involving over 20 research labs — a generative physics engine able to generate 4D dynamical worlds powered by a physics simulation platform designed for general-purpose robotics and physical AI applications.

• This is a new framework for training robots.
• Put simply, this is an open-source physics engine that allows fast creation of 4D environments for robotics and AI.
• It will accelerate robotics innovation, including in military scenarios. The massive research collab is highly likely to turn into several exciting startups.

In the pending Trump regime, federal judges (most of them appointed by Democratic presidents) will form the most important firewall.

More importantly, fewer than 1 percent of federal cases ever reach the Supreme Court. Given the amount of federal litigation likely to be created by the upcoming Trump administration, the Supreme Court probably won’t be able to deal with even 1 percent.

Most disputes will be decided instead by 1,457 federal judges across 209 courts in the federal court system.

Examples of federal litigation we can expect:

1. Trump has promised to withhold, by executive action, birthright citizenship from people born in the United States to parents who are undocumented immigrants.

Generative AI is providing personal style tips, translating family conversations, analyzing diets, and transforming lives in countless ways, Axios readers tell us.

Why it matters: AI isn’t only a workplace tool, and as it seeps into our lives, many are using chatbots every day to diagnose illnesses, mourn the dead, or seek comfort when human companionship isn’t available.

What’s next: As we enter year three of the generative AI revolution, we asked readers to tell us all the ways they’ve been using ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot and other genAI tools — not for work but for everything else.

• The top three ways people use Claude are for mobile app development (10.4%), content creation and communication (9.2%), and academic research and writing (7.2%).
• That leaves a whole lot of people using it for a whole lot of other tasks.

“The news media is the least trusted group among 10 U.S. civic and political institutions involved in the democratic process,” the polling firm Gallup concluded in a 2024 analysis.

Despite news organizations’ pledges to provide fact-based reporting, and ongoing investments to build trust, people across the political spectrum in the U.S. are unconvinced of mainstream media’s self-described credibility.

The category “mainstream media” refers to flagship national newspapers like The New York Times, cable news channels like CNN and Fox News and news networks like ABC or NBC and their local affiliates. Despite deepening partisan divides in the U.S, Pew Internet Research has found that this definition is consistent across Republicans and Democrats.

Mainstream media’s credibility has been diminishing for years. But the trend has attracted renewed attention from news leaders and analysts since the 2024 presidential election, when many outlets again misjudged the electoral chances of President-elect Donald Trump.

I am a professor of journalism and media, and I believe my research offers a way forward for journalism to build credibility: solidarity journalism.

What is solidarity journalism?

Solidarity, as I define it, is a commitment to people’s basic dignity that translates into action.

Since 2014, my academic research has focused on the role of solidarity in journalism that represents marginalized communities – like people who are homeless, face food insecurity or are the targets of violence. These are groups who cannot simply opt out of the conditions placing their survival and safety at stake.

Journalists who cover these populations and topics accurately, I find, approach their reporting in ways that set them apart from the majority of news coverage. Specifically, when reporting in solidarity, journalists use newsworthiness criteria, sourcing tactics and framing styles that are distinct from those typically used by mainstream media.

Few journalists, by the way, use the label of “solidarity” to describe their practices. Instead, my research shows, solidarity emerges in how some journalists do their reporting.

What is newsworthy?

The first question journalists are trained to ask themselves before proceeding is: “Is this news?” In other words, what makes a topic worth covering right now?

Journalists usually know their editors will be looking for a few simple criteria. A strong story pitch usually includes novelty and people with institutional power. It feels important when weighed against other events happening at the same time.

Often, a political leader’s comments are what make an issue newsworthy, such as when President Joe Biden apologized in October 2024 for the inhumane conditions in Native American boarding schools run by the U.S. federal government until the 1960s.

When reporting in solidarity, however, journalists find stories newsworthy because people’s basic survival and safety are at stake.

A story published by Outlier Media on March 8, 2023, illustrates this approach. Headlined “Detroit tenants are organizing and making bigger demands,” the piece focuses on tenants’ struggles for simple needs like functioning sewage systems, hot water and electricity.

The president may never issue an apology for a city neglecting its poorest residents. And journalists reporting in solidarity don’t wait for elite recognition. They believe that when people’s basic dignity is at risk, it’s a topic worth reporting.

Handling of sources

Sources are the people, institutions and data that journalists use to provide evidence in reporting.

In the worst cases, marginalized sources describe reporters as hostile, transactional and extractive. Such journalists “parachute in” to cover a big story and grab quotes and wrenching photos of tragedies. Then, they disappear as abruptly as they arrived.

Journalists reporting in solidarity do their jobs differently.

They show up on the scene of an unfolding issue not only for the story but for the people affected. They spend time listening to people experiencing the issue and return after a story has run to continue the conversation – particularly when the struggles persist.

Reframing the narrative

Framing in journalism refers to how a story is told. It isn’t possible for journalists to include every possible source or every aspect of an issue. Frames shape who and what fits into a story.

Commonly, news framing focuses on how officials define an issue.

Take, for example, an ABC7News story about homelessness from July 25, 2024. Headlined “Bay Area mayors respond to Gov. Newsom’s order to remove homeless encampments,” it is framed around how officials reacted to a mandate to remove homeless encampments from city streets – not on the residents of those camps.

Solidarity framing prioritizes the people who are living an issue that places their basic dignity at stake due to factors beyond personal circumstance or bad luck. Solidarity framing defines issues based on what people experiencing these struggles know – and know they need – through firsthand experience.

A solidarity framing of California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s order to remove homeless encampments sounds like this: “‘We gotta be somewhere’: Homeless Californians react to Newsom’s crackdown.”

This story, published in CalMatters on Aug. 12, 2024, accounts for what people affected by tent bans are experiencing firsthand. It illustrates the impossible situation facing people who have nowhere else to go.

In solidarity framing, official sources aren’t judge and jury. Instead, marginalized people’s direct accounts shape coverage of what they are going through.

True public service

My interviews and interactions with journalists since 2014 find that a subset of mainstream journalists quietly do solidarity reporting already. They tell grounded stories of marginalized people’s struggles and prioritize those firsthand accounts over the messaging promoted by people in power.

I believe this model should be central to how journalism envisions its purpose and public service. And I’m not alone.

Black people have for centuries called for more factual reporting that reflects their actual lives, because mainstream news has long criminalized and dehumanized their communities. Trans people have similarly called for more on-the-ground reporting as a way for journalism to improve its credibility.

Many other groups, from progressive activists to conservatives, have indicated that they would find a solidarity reporting approach more credible than current reporting practices.

Mainstream media “could do a way better job of bringing in … folks who are actually on the ground experiencing this in real time and who were fighting to stop this in the first place,” one social justice activist told me in 2023.

Conservatives, meanwhile, object to what they see as distorted coverage of their communities.

“There’s a lot of different kinds of conservatives, and they just lump them all together as the right-wing extremists,” said one conservative news reader in a study by the Center for Media Engagement.

Through solidarity practices, mainstream media has a chance to achieve what it has always claimed to contribute to society: truthful reporting based on what is happening on the ground, to real people, in real time – and with real impact.

Elon Musk and other reactionary liars hate the “last good website” because it won’t go along with their distortions

Elon Musk is attacking Wikipedia, calling it “Wokepedia” and urging people not to donate “until they restore balance” (by which he means be biased in favor of his views). It’s not the first time he’s denounced the online encyclopedia, and it’s not surprising he and his allies hate it. Wikipedia is a bastion of truth, one they can’t buy or bully, where reality is what the facts are, not whatever some rich reactionaries wish it were. Everyone who prizes finding reliable information on the internet, and values truth more broadly, should defend it.

Wikipedia is the “last good website,” the one online staple that hasn’t gone through the process of “enshittification.” It’s not profit-seeking or publicly traded, so it doesn’t try to monetize the massive number of eyeballs it attracts. It isn’t full of ads, and doesn’t elevate sponsored content. It doesn’t incentivize sensationalism and conflict like algorithmic social media. It isn’t full of slop generated by software the tech industry overhypes as “AI.” It’s the last big website from the early internet that still does the good thing it set out to do; the thing that appealled to so many users and made it part of the wider culture.

We’re in a grand information war, whether we want to be or not, and the liars have been winning. Many of the biggest websites and governments have given up on fighting misinformation under pressure, or become purveyors of disinformation themselves. Wikipedia is a fortress that anchors truth’s broader defense, and we must not let it fall.

wikipedia editors churn news articles from an overwhelmingly left-leaning list of “reliable sources” into neutrality-emblazoned fact

Wikipedia articles present their subject matter with a casually authoritative, almost stolid tone. But beneath the surface lies endless argumentation played out in rounds of procedural maneuvering that would shame the most deft legislative hand. User bans, discretionary sanctions, requests for comment, arbitration cases, topic bans, page bans, deprecated sources — all encoded in a shorthand jargon — lie behind the “consensus” displayed in an article’s seemingly ripple-free surface. In a way, this arcana of behind-the-scenes conceptual machinery is Wikipedia’s most impressive feature. It’s what keeps it from grinding to a halt on infighting and intransigence.

The problem is — like with the Harris border czar reference, which is still omitted from the czar article (and will almost certainly stay that way) — the consensus it achieves often lines up with the prerogatives of the Democratic Party and the media establishment that supports it.