Dayton, OH Correspondent — AI is changing the return to certain cognitive skills and the speed at which tasks can be automated. Systems built around fixed credentials and slow curriculum cycles will lag. The safety net was designed for cyclical unemployment and industrial transition. It will face more frequent skill obsolescence in white-collar work. Fundamental … Continue reading Will the continued advance of artificial intelligence force a fundamental rethinking of education, workforce development, and the design of the social safety net?
technology
With its most visible figure departed and the aid agency formally closed this week, is the government efficiency effort institutionalizing or dissipating — and what should count as a saving?
Gastonia, NC Correspondent — The mission is right and the vehicle looks fragile, and those are separate sentences. Right, because the government's own auditors have been reporting improper payments around a hundred and sixty billion a year and something near two point eight trillion cumulatively since they started counting. That's the accountability office telling Congress … Continue reading With its most visible figure departed and the aid agency formally closed this week, is the government efficiency effort institutionalizing or dissipating — and what should count as a saving?
Should federal research and student-aid dollars be withheld from specific universities this year on viewpoint and discipline grounds, or is firm-by-firm litigation the better tool?
Gastonia, NC Correspondent — This stopped being hypothetical in the spring. Money has already been withheld at scale from named institutions and the litigation is already running alongside it. So the real question is whether the version being executed is the one any of us would have designed, and I'd say partly. Withholding on a … Continue reading Should federal research and student-aid dollars be withheld from specific universities this year on viewpoint and discipline grounds, or is firm-by-firm litigation the better tool?
After the first presidential debate, should party mechanisms have a formal capacity test for nominees, or would that process be captured by the same insiders the primaries were meant to discipline?
Gastonia, NC Correspondent — The country watched a fitness question answered on live television. That doesn't mean I want a committee with a stethoscope and a donor list. Primaries were supposed to be the capacity test voters run. What we saw last week was a party that spent a year insisting the question was a … Continue reading After the first presidential debate, should party mechanisms have a formal capacity test for nominees, or would that process be captured by the same insiders the primaries were meant to discipline?
Will the rapid adoption of generative AI tools produce a measurable surge in productivity, or primarily displace mid-skill cognitive work?
Dayton, OH Correspondent — Both, and the historical pattern with general-purpose technology is net gains over time with significant transition costs for specific occupations. What the early studies show is interesting and not what either camp expected. The largest gains go to the least experienced workers — the tool raises the floor more than the … Continue reading Will the rapid adoption of generative AI tools produce a measurable surge in productivity, or primarily displace mid-skill cognitive work?
How should courts and agencies treat copyright in works used to train large AI models — fair use, compulsory license, or a new statutory category?
Myrtle Beach, SC Correspondent — If you can scrape a living writer's shelf to build a machine that competes with the shelf, that isn't a book report. Fair use was built for quotation, parody, teaching, a slice. Training a commercial model on a corpus so it can emit the style is a different industrial act, … Continue reading How should courts and agencies treat copyright in works used to train large AI models — fair use, compulsory license, or a new statutory category?
Trust in media, technology platforms, and government institutions has fallen further during this campaign. Does the next president have any realistic ability to improve that trust, or has institutional credibility become a structural problem beyond one administration?
Wheeling, West Virginia Correspondent — Institutional credibility is a structural problem now, and it was structural here long before it was structural nationally. A president can stop making it worse. He can reduce the pressure on agencies and platforms to police speech. He can't make a newsroom cover something it doesn't want to cover. Trump … Continue reading Trust in media, technology platforms, and government institutions has fallen further during this campaign. Does the next president have any realistic ability to improve that trust, or has institutional credibility become a structural problem beyond one administration?
Should large social-media platforms be required to disclose more detail about how their algorithms amplify or suppress political content?
Prescott Valley, AZ Correspondent — These platforms determine political visibility at scale, and when amplification happens through an opaque system, public accountability is nearly impossible. Requiring disclosure of the principal factors driving distribution of political material would let researchers and the public evaluate claims of bias with data instead of anecdote. At the moment every … Continue reading Should large social-media platforms be required to disclose more detail about how their algorithms amplify or suppress political content?
Will the rapid expansion of electric-vehicle mandates outpace the actual development of charging infrastructure and battery supply chains?
Dayton, Ohio Correspondent — Mandates can force adoption of the vehicle. The supporting systems move on entirely different clocks — charging networks, grid capacity, secure mineral supply. Right now the targets run ahead of both, and I'd point out that the binding constraint isn't the one people name. Everybody talks about chargers. The harder problem … Continue reading Will the rapid expansion of electric-vehicle mandates outpace the actual development of charging infrastructure and battery supply chains?
How should policymakers respond to the increasing evidence that many major cities are becoming unaffordable for middle-income workers?
Clermont, Florida Correspondent — When teachers, nurses, firefighters, and service workers can't live near where they work, the city starts losing functional balance, and it loses it in a specific order. The hardest positions to fill go first. The core response is supply in high-demand areas. More density near jobs and transit, faster permitting, fewer … Continue reading How should policymakers respond to the increasing evidence that many major cities are becoming unaffordable for middle-income workers?
