I have a soft spot for engineers and engineering. It started with my father. He called himself an engineer, even though he left school at 13 in a remote corner of Zimbabwe and went to work in an auto repair shop.

By the time I remember his work clearly, in the 1950s, he was amazingly competent at everything he did, which was about everything that he could get to do. He could work a lathe, arc weld and acetylene weld, cut, rig, and screw.

My father used his imagination to solve problems, from finding a lost pump down a well to building a stand for a water tank that could supply several homes. He worked in steel: African termites wouldn’t allow wood to be used for external structures.

Electricity was a critical part of his sphere; installing and repairing electrical power equipment was in his self-written brief.

Maybe that is why, for more than 50 years, I have found myself covering the electric power industry. I have watched it struggle through the energy crisis and swing away from nuclear to coal, driven by popular feeling. I have watched natural gas, dismissed by the Carter administration as a “depleted resource,’’ roar back in the 1990s with new turbines, diminished regulation, and the vastly improved fracking technology.

Now, electricity is again a place of excitement. I have been to four important electricity conferences lately, and the word I hear everywhere about the challenges of the electricity future is “exciting.”

James Amato, vice president of Burns & McDonnell, the Kansas City, Mo.-based engineering, construction, and architecture firm that is heavily involved in all phases of the electric infrastructure, told me during an interview for the television program “White House Chronicle” that this is the most exciting time in supplying electricity since Thomas Edison set the whole thing in motion.

The industry, Amato explained, was in a state of complete reinvention. It must move off coal into renewables and prepare for a doubling or more of electricity demand by mid-century.

However, he also told me, “There is a major supply problem with engineers.” The colleges and universities aren’t producing enough of them, and not enough quality engineers — and he emphasized quality — are looking toward the ongoing electric revolution, which, to those involved in it, is so exhilarating and the place to be.

This problem is compounded by a wave of age retirements that is hitting the industry.

I believe that the electric supply system became a taken-for-granted undertaking and that talented engineers sought the glamor of the computer and defense industries.

Now, the big engineering companies are out to tell engineering school graduates that the big excitement is working on the world’s biggest machine: the U.S. electric supply system.

My late friend Ben Wattenberg, demographer, essayist, presidential speechwriter, television personality, and strategic thinker, hosted an important PBS documentary film and co-wrote a companion book, “The First Measured Century: The Other Way of Looking at American History.” He showed how our ability to measure changed public policy as we learned exactly about the distribution of people and who they were. Also, how we could measure things down to parts per billion in, say, water.

In my view, this is set to be the first engineered century, in tandem with being the first fully electric century. We are moving toward a new level of dependence on electricity and the myriad systems that support it. From the moment we wake, we are using electricity, and even as we sleep, electricity controls the temperature and time for us.

The new need to reduce carbon entering the atmosphere is to electrify almost everything else, primary transportation — from cars to commercial vehicles and eventually trains — but also heavy industrial uses, such as making steel and cement.

Amato said there is not only a shortage of college-educated engineers needed on the frontlines of the electric revolution but also a shortage of competent technicians or those trained in the crafts that support engineering. These are people who wield the tools, artisans across the board. In the electric utilities, there is also a need for line workers, a job that offers security, retirement, and esprit.

In the 1960s, the big engineering adventure was the space race. Today, it is the stuff that powers your coffeemaker in the morning, your cup of joe, or, you might say, your jolt of electrons.

This is a seminal year, meaning nothing will be the same again.

This is the year when two monumentally new forces began to shape how we live, where we reside and the work we do. Think of the invention of the printing press around 1440 and the perfection of the steam engine in about 1776.

These forces have been coming for a while; they haven’t evolved in secret. But this was the year they burst into our consciousness and began affecting our lives.

The twin agents of transformation are climate change and artificial intelligence. They can’t be denied. They will be felt, and they will bring about transformative change.

Climate change was felt this year. In Texas and across the Southwest, temperatures of well over 100 degrees persisted for more than three months. Phoenix had temperatures of 110  degrees or above for 31 days.

On a recent visit to Austin, an exhausted Uber driver told me the heat had upended her life; it made entering her car and keeping it cool challenging. Her car’s air conditioner was taxed with more heat than it could handle. Her family had to stay indoors, and their electric bill surged.

The electric utilities came through heroically without significant blackouts, but it was a close thing.

David Naylor, president of Rayburn Electric, a cooperative association providing power to four distribution companies bordering Dallas, told me, “Summer 2023 presented a few unique challenges with so many days about 105 degrees. While Texas is accustomed to hot summers, there is an impactful difference between 100 degrees and 105.”

Rayburn ran flat out, including its recently purchased gas-fired station. It issued a “hands-off” order that, Naylor said, meant “facilities were left essentially alone unless absolutely necessary.”

It was the same for electric utilities nationwide. Every plant that could be pressed into service was and was left to run without normal maintenance, which would involve taking it offline.

Water is a parallel problem to heat.

We have overused groundwater and depleted aquifers. Saltwater is seeping into the soil in some regions, rendering agriculture impossible.

That is occurring in Florida and Louisiana. Some of the saltwater intrusion results from higher sea levels, and some of it is the voracious way aquifers have been pumped out during long periods of heat and low rainfall.

Most of the West and Florida face the aquifer problem, but in coastal communities, it can be a crisis — irreversible damage to the land.

Heat and drought will cause many to leave their homes, especially in Africa, but also in South and Central America, adding to the millions of migrants on the move around the world.

AI is one of history’s two-edged swords. On the positive side, it is a gift to research, especially in life sciences, which could deliver a life expectancy north of 120 years.

But AI will be a powerful disruptor elsewhere, from national defense to intellectual property and, of course, to employment. Large numbers of jobs, for example, in call centers, at fast-food restaurant counters, and at check-in desks in hotels and airports, will be taken over by AI.

Think about this: You go to the airport and talk to a receptor (likely to be a simple microphone-type of gadget on the already ubiquitous kiosks) while staring at a display screen, giving you details of your seat, your flight — and its expected delays.

Out of sight in the control tower, although it might not be a tower, AI moves airplanes along the ground and clears them to take off and land — eventually, it will fly the plane if the public accepts that.

No check-in crew, no air traffic controllers and, most likely, the baggage will be handled by AI-controlled robots.

Aviation is much closer to AI automation than people realize. But that isn’t all. You may get to the airport in a driverless Lyft or Uber car, and the only human beings you will see are your fellow passengers.

All that adds up to the disappearance of a huge number of jobs, estimated by Goldman Sachs to be as many as 300 million full-time jobs worldwide. Eventually, in a re-ordered economy, new jobs will appear and the crisis will pass.

The most secure employment might be for artisans. People who fix things — people like plumbers, mechanics and electricians. And, oh yes, those who fix and install computers. They might well emerge as a new aristocracy.

The United Auto Workers strike against the Big Three U.S. automakers — Ford, General Motors and Stellantis, formerly Chrysler — no matter the merits of the workers’ yearnings, shouldn’t have happened. Once it got going, it shouldn’t have lasted. The White House should have spoken.

Already, there is damage. Ford has “paused” plans to build a $3.5-billion battery plant in Michigan. If the strike drags on or if the industry bows to the most damaging demand in the union’s wish list (a 32-hour work week), then EVs and battery leadership production will be ceded to other countries. U.S. automakers’ dependence on China — the world’s top battery maker for EVs — will continue.

The U.S. auto industry is starting its EV surge behind others, and it will suffer mightily if the UAW  doesn’t return to work.

With so much at stake in this circumstance, it would be reasonable to expect President Biden to have both sides closeted at Camp David and  to be “knocking heads together.”

The president is the ultimate arbitrator, the one we look to for guidance and to tell us what is best. Yet, instead of bringing both sides together in the national interest, Biden has chosen sides and chosen to walk the picket line.

Even Steven Rattner, the Democrats’ mechanic regarding auto issues, has said this is wrong.

Rattner — whom I caroused with when he was a reporter at The New York Times before he became fabulously rich on Wall Street — is through-and-through a Democrat and one of the party’s intellectuals. In 2009, he authored the rescue plan for the auto industry. At that time, it looked as if General Motors and Chrysler were headed for permanent closure.

What was Biden thinking? Why did he abandon the high ground of the presidency? How can Biden now sit down and bring both sides to the table to negotiate in good faith? He has already declared his allegiance to one.

I believe in the value of unions: guarantors of middle-class life for many. I am not just saying that. I have lived it.

I was once the president of the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild. I am very proud of the financial settlement we got on my watch for reporters and editors at The Washington Post. It was a breakthrough: a 67 percent pay raise over three years.

The newspaper industry was prosperous then, whereas reporters and editors were poorly paid. It was long before the internet would crush the industry, reducing it to its present state of poverty and collapse. We were asking for some of the goodies we had created. There was no danger of The Washington Post moving to China.

Sadly, the unions have been slow to adjust to new realities. They are stuck in a mindset of the days when we were a country of industrial robber barons and industrial unions made sense. Now, we are a service economy desperately seeking to re-industrialize. EVs are essential in that effort.

I ran into outdated union thinking head-on at the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild. Although we were largely autonomous, we were a chapter of the American Newspaper Guild, our head office.

I had a proposal for simplifying work schedules for editorial staff. My proposal was that editorial staff work three days — 10 to 12 hours a day — and have three days off. My colleagues loved it; the Washington Post management saw it as a solution to overtime and weekend staffing problems. I had seen it work well at the BBC in London, where it was standard practice.

The ANG head office went berserk: It was a betrayal of union history and the “model” contract, written by the legendary reporter, columnist and ANG founder Heywood Broun in 1935. In negotiations with The Post, I dropped the proposal, to everyone’s regret. That kind of legacy thinking is what has been killing unions and unionism.

There is a backstory to the Hollywood writers’ strike and the auto workers’ stoppage: artificial intelligence. It will change lives and threaten the kind of work unions have protected.

Biden might well have chosen the strikes as a chance to bring about settlements but also to begin a national dialogue on AI.

Instead, Biden walked a picket line, resolving nothing.

Edmund Burke, the 18th-century British statesman, argued during the celebrated impeachment of Warren Hastings, the governor of Bengal, that impeachment was essentially a political process, not a judicial one. Quite so.

The political dimension of impeachment is again on display in Washington, where the Republicans, driven by a faction of the party, are moving toward impeaching President Biden.

Historically, presidential impeachment has been reserved for actions that meet the undefined standard of “high crimes and misdemeanors.” It has been used with incredible restraint; until the impeachment of Bill Clinton, only Andrew Johnson had been impeached. The bar was lowered for the Clinton action then, and the attempt to impeach Biden is a further lowering —  pointing up that it is, as Burke argued, a political process.

Impeachment is becoming a common political tactic, not as envisaged by the Founders, the ultimate censure, leading to a trial in the Senate and removal from office.

The two indictments of Donald Trump met, to my mind, the constitutional standard, and had the Senate been in other hands, led to a trial and removal. It is argued that those indictments didn’t meet the standard and were no more than censure by another name, carried out along party lines.

The gravity of impeachment has been preserved since the republic’s beginning, but it is in danger.

Some aspects of the structure of the state should be out of reach of the political process. The Constitution guarantees that it can’t be easily amended, or today it wouldn’t be recognizable, as every fashionable fixation would have been added. The mistake of Prohibition would be written again and again.

When the Northern Ireland peace accords were being written, I was involved with a lively summer school in Ireland — which might be thought of as a think tank that meets once a year.

This organization, the International Humbert Summer School, studied Ireland’s relationship with the world but became involved in the peace process. There were speakers from the Unionists (pro-British) and Sinn Fein, the political wing of the IRA.

At one session, my role was to respond to the late Martin McGuinness, widely known as a top leader of the IRA, believed by the British to be a terrorist with blood on his hands.

Because I have a British accent, the organizers, John Cooney, the Irish historian and journalist, and Tony McGarry, a prominent local headmaster in Ballina, County Mayo, where we gathered, were nervous about what I might say to a man who was regarded with fear and awe as a killer.

Our event turned into a debate. McGuinness was sharp, had a good sense of humor and was open to ideas. Because the IRA had been engaged in armed struggle for so long, it hadn’t thought about constitutional arrangements in peace.

Thinking of the U.S. Constitution, I suggested to McGuinness that if a new constitution for Northern Ireland were to be written, it should sweep nothing under the carpet by ignoring it (as was the American case with slavery) and that when finished, it should be placed on “a high shelf” from which it couldn’t be easily taken down.

McGuinness agreed heartily, leading to a discussion of constitutions and systems of government and how the drafting could be perfected.

But my idea of a high shelf was what stuck with him.

So, it is profoundly disheartening to see impeachment treated as just another political tactic to be launched against any American president simply because the opposition party doesn’t like the president’s policies. But that is what is happening.

Incidentally, the impeachment of Warren Hastings, which dragged on for years and was enormously expensive, ended in acquittal before the House of Lords, proving Burke’s point that impeachment was a political process.

In the United States, we have avoided keeping it out of the political maelstrom for most of our history. It is sad to see it used now as a purely political tactic.

We have a permanent campaign for the presidency. No sooner is one election certified than rumblings about the next one, with all the attendant speculation, begin.

Will presidential impeachment become part of the political process? And what if a Senate has a two-thirds’ majority to convict on political grounds? There is danger here.

At the end of our exchange, I wished the IRA leader “the best of British luck.” He laughed. No attempt to kneecap me followed.

I have been to the movies. I haven’t done that since before the COVID shutdown.

I went to see two huge movies that have each grossed $1 billion, and I enjoyed them enormously. They are, of course, “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer.”

I went to see “Barbie” because I thought I should know what people were discussing. I went to see “Oppenheimer” because, in a sense, I have skin in that game. I knew a few people who worked on the Manhattan Project, and two of them were characterized in the movie: Hans Bethe and Edward Teller, known as the father of the hydrogen bomb.

About “Barbie”: It is a fantasy romp filled with popular, real-life messages. I had to see how director Greta Gerwig would make an adult movie about a doll, albeit a storied one — with brilliant imagination is how.

“Oppenheimer,” by contrast, is a major cinematic work, a remarkable recapturing of history and character development on the screen. Christopher Nolan is a director at the top of his game. He deserves a comparison with Orson Welles and David Lean.

Across the board, it is a triumph, compelling and true to the facts and the personalities. The evocative recreation of Los Alamos as it must have been, of the tower from which the first nuclear device was detonated, rings true. I have crawled all over the nuclear test site and spent many hours at Los Alamos, where I used to give an annual lecture on energy or the relationship of humans to science.

In November 1975, Bethe and another veteran of the Manhattan Project, Ralph Lapp, and I put together a panel of 24 Nobel laureates (including Bethe) to defend civilian nuclear power. We got them all together on a stage at the National Press Club in Washington. I had hoped it would be a seminal event, ending some of the nonsense being spread about nuclear radiation.

Ralph Nader took up arms against us and assembled 36 Nobel laureates who were cool to nuclear. Ours were physicists, engineers and mathematicians who had a vast understanding of nuclear and endorsed it enthusiastically.

We didn’t win. Bethe, as I recall, was philosophical about being trounced.

I first met Teller in Geneva. I was to introduce him at a conference, and we had breakfast together. He seemed distracted and confused. But he was in top form when he spoke.

Later, I got to know him better. He gave a series of speeches for conferences I had organized on the Strategic Defense Initiative — colloquially known as Star Wars. He often sat slumped in his chair, clutching his enormous walking stick. But he stood erect on the podium, arguing vigorously the case for Ronald Reagan’s program.

The Oppenheimer movie reminded me of two institutions I covered intensely as a reporter: the Atomic Energy Commission and its congressional overseer, the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy.

The committee was supposed to check the AEC. The AEC was a tool of the powerful and wildly pro-nuclear committee — the only joint committee empowered to introduce legislation in both houses of Congress. The reality of that partnership was that the committee proposed and the AEC disposed.

The movie is extraordinary in capturing the workings of Congress and how a nod or a smile can put great events in motion.

This understanding of the nuances and mores of Washington, and particularly the arcane theatricality of the congressional hearings, is accurate in ways seldom captured on film. This is more surprising given that the director is an Englishman who lives a very private life in Los Angeles.

I leave it to sociologists to ponder how two movies as different as “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” could open simultaneously, becoming huge hits. If you see these movies, especially “Oppenheimer,” see them in the theater, they deserve that big-screen and wraparound-sound environment.

Is Joe Biden hiding in plain sight?

Is his most extensive public effort these days fending off signs of age, hiding his infirmities, and clinging to the hope that he can still win in the election just over a year from now?

Sotto voce, the savants of the Democratic Party worry and complain in private that Biden is too old and infirm and should move over before it is too late. In public, they point to the health of the economy, receding inflation and the high employment rate, and foreign policy wins.

Indeed, the Joe Biden of today isn’t the Joe Biden of yesterday.

The Biden we in the corps knew over the years in Washington was accessible, friendly, keen to please — and he talked. How he talked. Biden would give a speech, but he didn’t stop. He seemed to tack a second speech onto the first.

Biden didn’t change the course of history with his eloquence, nor set the audience to thinking in ways they hadn’t previously, but he was easy to take.

Now, he seems to approach the podium with caution, reading the speech with a just-get-me-through-this stoicism. The man who used to love the microphone appears to fear it.

Likewise, the man who used to enjoy the cut and thrust of interacting with the press eschews press conferences. He doesn’t hold them.

This absence of press conferences isn’t unimportant. They are messy and unruly, but they are where the acuity of the leader is tested and on display. They are where we might get a look at how he might be in negotiation with foreign leaders.

Press conferences are part of the democratic process, where the president reports to the public through the press. Like question time in the British House of Commons, they are where we see the president in action.

Boastful press releases — which every administration puts out — are no substitute. The nation deserves to see the president in action. Everything else is curated image-building by the White House staff.

A few questions tacked on ritually to the end of joint appearances with foreign heads of state aren’t a substitute. They are Potemkin affairs.

Republicans would love to bear down on Biden’s age, but dare not. Their frontrunner, Donald Trump, is 77 — only three years younger than Biden; and, at 81, the Republican leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, is showing signs of health challenges linked to age.

Trump’s age is less discussed because his epic legal problems distract from whether he also might be too old.

The sad end of Winston Churchill’s political career should be a warning for all who cling to office too long.

The Conservative Party under Churchill lost the election immediately after World War II but was elected again in 1951, and Churchill became prime minister for the second time. He was about to turn 77. Health warnings were ignored by his party and by his family.

The infirmities of age got in the way. Churchill was often confused, and new issues baffled him, said his friend the publisher Lord Beaverbrook.

According to historian Roger Scruton during Churchill’s second administration, the seeds of what would haunt Britain later were sown: He failed to arrest the open border flow of immigrants from the former empire or to check the growth of trade union power.

When Churchill retired in 1954, his longtime deputy, Anthony Eden, took over and led the disastrous attempt to seize the Suez Canal in 1956.

Biden’s uncertain future is exacerbated by the seeming shortcomings of Vice President Kamala Harris. Despite attempts to bolster her, like referring in press releases to the Biden-Harris administration, she is reportedly inept.

She is known to have had difficulty with her staff. In public, she appears frivolous, laughing inappropriately and showing little grasp of issues. She has left no mark on significant assignments handed to her by Biden, including immigration, voting rights and the influence of artificial intelligence.

No wonder a late-August poll from The Wall Street Journal showed 60 percent of eligible voters think Biden isn’t “mentally up for the job of president.” In a CNN poll, 73 percent of Americans say they are seriously concerned that Biden’s age might negatively affect his current physical and mental competence level.

Churchill’s sad political decline shows even great men grow old. Biden can be seen on television going here and there: a blur of travel. But is this a man in hiding from a truth — his age?

Europe reeled this summer from heat, wildfires, migrants and worries about Russia’s war in Ukraine, and too much tourism. I know; I was part of the problem.

Tourism is the quick economic fix for poor nations, but it is also vital to rich ones — until both get too much of it.

The places everyone wants to visit, often places on bucket lists, are choking on their success. Paris, Britain’s Stonehenge and the Lake District, Ireland’s Ring of Kerry, and the jewels of Italy — Florence and Venice — all suffer summer overload.

This summer, things were so bad in Venice that cruise ships had to be waved off. The Greek islands of Santorini, Corfu and Mykonos were, likewise, inundated with cruisers and other tourists.

Yet, tourism is vital to many economies. The emerging tourist destinations along Croatia’s Dalmatian Coast are the latest to feel the benefits and problems of tourism. The sites, the roads and the facilities are stretched, but tourism has meant economic well-being for the region, especially as cruise ships have started calling.

Cruise ships, those big — and becoming gigantic — floating palaces, overwhelm ports when they anchor, burden infrastructure and deposit lots of lovely money.

Greece and many countries along the Adriatic Sea derive about 25 percent of their GDP from tourism, not the least from cruise ships. Cruise ships are very important to any shore community with ancient ruins, historical and scenic cities, and natural wonders — and the Balkan countries have all in abundance.

In early August, my wife and I cruised the Dalmatian Coast and Greek islands. When we booked the cruise, at the last minute, we were fully aware of the tourist pressure on Europe every summer, but we learned that it is getting worse.

Most of the Dalmatian Coast is still visitable in summer and hugely rewarding, except for Dubrovnik, which we skipped. It is, I learned, showing stress from over-tourism. The full effect of the cruise ships hasn’t yet begun to wear on the small coastal towns as on the most famous Greek islands.

You can’t pick a Greek islands itinerary in the summer that will avoid seeing too many cruise ships carrying 2,500 and up passengers, arriving at the same destination at the same time.

Fira on Santorini is a fabulous cliff town, except when there are too many visitors going ashore from a flotilla of cruise ships anchored in the harbor.

Five cruise ships arrived at Fira simultaneously, ours among them, and untold thousands of tourists went ashore. You must ride a donkey or a cable car to reach the charming town. My wife and I love donkeys, so we opted for the cable car. It was chaotic, verging on dangerous. Extraordinarily, the crowds waiting hours to board the cable cars were well-behaved: no pushing, no audible outrage, just resigned queuing.

Lest you think cruise ships are filled only with Americans, cruising has become a global passion.

Cruisers see the world from the comfort and security of a huge, well-organized hotel that moves with them. They see so much more and take their selfies in many more places than they could otherwise.

Cruising is big business, and the size of the ship seems not to deter anyone.

Royal Caribbean is about to add its Icon class: They will carry up to 7,000 passengers and 3,000 crew. To merchants and tax collectors, they are golden galleons as the visitors spend their doubloons on tours, trinkets, meals and tips.

But over-tourism degrades the picturesque ports, cherished villages and great structures of the past. When I see a cruise ship towering over a town from where history was born, I think: The barbarians arrive in shorts, clutching cameras and cell phones. I may be one of them, but I shall endeavor to avoid high summer in the future.

The conventional wisdom — don’t you love it? — holds that artificial intelligence won’t cost jobs. But it will. The evidence is mounting.

I say this after doing my best to divine the thinking of the AI community on jobs in my reporting. I have made three television programs on AI and conducted one press briefing, and I have talked to experts at four universities and four AI companies.

All these savants directed me to look at what happened with automation. They pointed out that it was feared that automation — the industrializing of production — would cost jobs, but it had the opposite effect. It created new work since the first steam engine was deployed in England in 1712.

The Luddites, who emerged at the end of the 18th century and who took their name from a legendary figure, Ned Ludd, got it savagely wrong: They thought mechanized weaving, using waterpower and later steam, would endanger the weavers’ livelihood. Of course, it brought about a boom in woven cloth that has lasted to this day.

Similarly, trade unions have fought every advancement in automation in every industrial sector when they have feared jobs would be lost. Jobs have been lost, but new avenues of employment have emerged.

But AI is different and willlikely to subtract jobs without producing new ones.

All the indicators are that jobs will disappear. So much so that in March, Goldman Sachs warned that AI would cost 300 million jobs worldwide, one-fourth of the global workforce.

Challenger, Gray & Christmas, an outplacement services company, reported that India lost 4,000 jobs in May, all directly attributable to AI. My guess is that it is a conservative figure and one that is going up every day.

India has always dealt with the employment problem by overstaffing, and its economy is rife with make-work jobs. AI, especially when India is emerging as a force in the competitive global market, can’t hide jobs. If you remove the infrastructure, there is no place to shelter unproductive people.

What is different about AI, my economist friend Jarrod Hazelton says, is that automation, as we know it, has taken place in an industrial economy, AI has arrived in a service economy, and it is service jobs that AI is poised to eliminate, he says. And it could eliminate them on, yes, an industrial scale.

Connor Leahy is a geek’s geek — AI has been his life since he left a university in Munich. He is CEO of Conjecture Ltd. and a co-founder of the open-source AI research collaborative EleutherAI. With headquarters in London but with worldwide tentacles, Conjecture studies ways in which AI can be controlled. Conjecture takes as its founding template the work of the Wright Brothers before they launched manned flight at Kitty Hawk. The brothers wanted control of their invention and to make it safe for manned flight, and it had to be able to land and fly.

I might add that another aspect of the Wright Brothers’ search for control was the addition of ailerons. They realized leaving the ground would be just the beginning; the aircraft had to be controlled on three axes.

Leahy and his young team believe that much more research and effort needs to be invested in the control of AI to make it safe. He told Christiane Amanpour, on her PBS program, that billions of dollars were being invested in AI as a transformative tool, but only a smidgeon is being spent on making it controllable.

Conjecture seeks to make it safe before it flies any further, to give it ailerons that will control its flight.

Leahy is onto something. Control is needed, but politicians, alarmed over the downside of AI, are calling for regulation.

One may seek control through regulation, but it is premature in something as dynamic, largely mysterious and potentially devastating as AI.

The conventional wisdom on AI is probably wrong about jobs and wrong about regulation. AI needs to be controllable then it can be regulated.

Those who work with language have reason to worry about the effect of artificial intelligence and its awesome skill with words.

You can, for example, ask ChatGPT to write an article on almost any subject, and it will mostly come back with something ready for the page, untouched by a human editor. If you want it in Washington Post style and it is in Guardian style with British spelling, faster than you can type in the request, it will reformat the article into the style and usage you want and, presto, it is ready to print or publish digitally.

Writers, lawyers and college professors will feel the sting first. Writers in Hollywood are on strike because of the threat posed. College professors are going into the new term unsure whether they will deal with original work or whether students are substituting AI-generated essays and theses.

Journalists, already reeling from the closure of so many newspapers, are wondering about their future.

But what about religion?

AI ramifications in organized religion are good and bad. In fringe religions and cults, it will be open season on worshipers. And some will find comfort in speaking to God as though the Almighty is resident in AI.

On the good side, many pastors approach Sunday in trepidation. The sermon, which is supposed to be instructional, uplifting and erudite, is a source of torture to those who aren’t good writers or have difficulty sharing their own faith with the congregation.

There are newsletters to help sermon writers and a wealth of diocesan support. Still, sermons are a trial for many pastors. You can read an old sermon or plagiarize another cleric, but that leaves sincere preachers feeling they are cheating and letting their congregants and their mission down.

Enter AI. By feeding a few thoughts to a chatbot, a polished sermon incorporating some of the preacher’s ideas appears almost instantly.

This hasn’t been wasted on the established churches, I learn from the BBC. The churches are looking at ways of embracing AI, using it as a tool, a gift to help with preaching and pastoral work, comforting the sick, composing notes of sympathy, and research.

The rub comes when people, as some surely will, confuse concepts of God with AI simulations and start to think that AI is a deity.

It has the characteristics usually associated with a deity: ubiquitous and seemingly all-knowing.

Indeed, it may claim to be a god if it hallucinates, as it sometimes does. What, then, for the unsuspecting? Do they fall to their knees?

I asked ChatGPT, and it sent me a 10-point list of the possibilities, noting it is a subject that is complex and evolving.

These three points are scary:

—“Customized Spiritual Experiences: AI algorithms could be designed to tailor spiritual experiences to individual preferences and beliefs. These experiences might include personalized prayers, meditation sessions, or virtual pilgrimages, designed to resonate with each person’s spiritual inclinations.”

—“Ethical Dilemmas and Moral Guidance: AI might be used to explore complex ethical questions and provide guidance based on religious teachings. For instance, AI systems could analyze various religious perspectives on a given moral issue and help individuals navigate their choices.”

—“Exploration of Spirituality and Philosophy: AI’s ability to process vast amounts of information could be harnessed to delve deeper into philosophical and spiritual questions, potentially offering new perspectives on the nature of existence, consciousness and the divine.”

Would it be safe to call it Frankenstein worship?

The future has arrived. Those things we were warned about for decades are here. They are now palpable.

In the 1950 film “All About Eve,” aging actress Margo Channing, played by Bette Davis, warned at a party, “Fasten your seat belts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.”

For the world, it will get bumpy for the next decade and beyond as we adjust to three massive, disruptive realities: climate change, artificial intelligence and brutal competition among countries for raw materials for new, carbon-saving technologies like electric vehicles.

This summer, with its aberrant weather the world over, is a clear declaration that climate change is upon us. It is no longer hypothetical; it is here.

The process of living with it begins now.

This summer isn’t a template, it is the first manifestation, from wildfires in Hawaii to elevated temperatures in Argentina’s winter to heat in the Middle East that approaches the point after which life becomes impossible to sustain.

It isn’t all heat, either.

It is storms, deluging rain and previously unexperienced cold. David Naylor, who heads Rayburn Electric, near Dallas, told me what worries him, what keeps him awake at night, is the weather. The cold — new for Texas — is a more significant challenge to keeping the lights on for his customers, he said. Weather has pushed out cybersecurity on the list of worries for many utility executives.

Climate change has also brought droughts. The mighty Zambezi River has run so low in recent years that there hasn’t been enough water for hydroelectric production from the Kariba Dam, which spans the river between Zimbabwe and Zambia. Power shortages and blackouts are now endemic.

Mass migration is another consequence of climate change.

Artificial intelligence will be a big disrupter, with some significant benefits. But for now, AI is a daisy chain of question marks.

What is known is that truth is endangered. Stuart Russell, professor of computer science at UC Berkeley and one of the leading authorities on AI, told me when I interviewed him on the PBS program “White House Chronicle” that the “language in, language out” professions are in danger. Lawyers and journalists had better watch out. Much of their work can be done by AI. Already in India, AI newscasters are interfacing with live reporters. In New York, a lawyer went into court with a case based on AI, down to citations. All of it was fiction.

The world is already awash in misinformation and “alternative facts,” as Kellyanne Conway famously declared in defending President Trump. Prepare for the era of fabrication where certifying facts will get harder and harder, and provable truths will be the new gold.

Finally, the materials essential in the recent technologies — those that will help us fight global warming — are pointed to be the cause of severe disruption and some ugly realpolitik.

Supplies of vital materials are controlled by China. It has been relentlessly buying up the sources of rare earths and other minerals for decades in Africa and South America.  Seventy percent of the lithium — essential for the batteries in mass electrification — is processed in China. Lithium deposits exist worldwide, from Zimbabwe to the United Kingdom, and from Chile to Australia, but the processing is centered in China.

Likewise, gallium, used for computer chips, and a whole array of precious metals are either sourced in China or processed there.

In dealing with this imbalance, it would be a mistake to think this new disruption is a reprise of the Cold War. It is quite otherwise. The Soviet Union sought to export ideology, which aroused fear in capitalist nations or those wanting a private sector to flourish. The Chinese are ambivalent about ideology outside of China but offer trade and investment on a global scale.

China has bought up much farming and nearly all African mineral production. In South America — the new Aladdin’s cave of mineral wealth — China is buying up and financing.

Around the world, there is a reluctance about choosing sides; jobs and money talk.

The Economist points out that attempts to curb Chinese dominance in critical materials processing and manufacturing aren’t working because countries from Mexico to Vietnam are transshipping.

Bette Davis’ character might have suggested a shoulder harness and a seat belt.