White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

The Wild, Fabulous Medical Frontier with Predictive AI

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When is a workplace at its happiest? I would submit that it is during the early stages of a project that is succeeding, whether it is a restaurant, an internet startup or a laboratory making phenomenal progress in its field of inquiry.

There is a sustained ebullience in a lab when the researchers know they are pushing back the frontiers of science, opening vistas of human possibility and reaping the extraordinary rewards that accompany just learning something big.

There has been a special euphoria in science ever since Archimedes jumped out of his bath in ancient Greece, supposedly shouting, “Eureka!”

I sensed this excitement when interviewing two exceptional scientists, Marina Sirota and Alice Tang, at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) for the independent PBS television program “White House Chronicle.”

Sirota and Tang have published a seminal paper on the early detection of Alzheimer’s disease — as much as 10 years before onset — with machine learning and artificial intelligence. The researchers were hugely excited by their findings and what their line of research will do for the early detection and avoidance of complex diseases like Alzheimer’s and many more.

It excited me — as someone who has been worried about the effect of AI on everything, from the integrity of elections to the loss of jobs — because the research at UCSF offers a clear example of the strides in medicine unfolding through computational science. “This time it’s different,” said Omar Hatamleh, who heads up AI for NASA at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

Human expectations are being revolutionized in laboratories like the one in San Francisco.

Sirota said, “At my lab … the idea is to use both molecular data and clinical data (which is what you generate when you visit your doctor) and apply machine learning and artificial intelligence.”

Tang, who just finished her Ph.D. and is studying to be a medical doctor, explained, “It is the combination of diseases that allows our model to predict onset.”

In their study, Sirota and Tang found that osteoporosis is predictive of Alzheimer’s in women, highlighting the interplay between bone health and dementia risk.

The researchers used this approach to find predictive patterns from 5 million clinical patient records held by UCSF in its database. From these, there emerged a relationship between osteoporosis and Alzheimer’s, especially in women. This is important as two-thirds of Alzheimer’s sufferers are women.

The researchers cautioned that it isn’t axiomatic that osteoporosis leads to Alzheimer’s, but it is true in about 70 percent of cases. Also, they said they are critically aware of historical bias in available data — for example, that most of it is from White people in a particular socioeconomic class.

Sirota and Tang said there are contributory factors they found in Alzheimer’s. These include hypertension, vitamin D deficiency and heightened cholesterol. In men, erectile dysfunction and enlarged prostate are also predictive. These findings were published in “Nature Aging” early this year.

Predictive analysis has potential applications for many diseases. It will be possible to detect them well before onset and, therefore, to develop therapies.

This predictive analysis has been used to anticipate homelessness so that intervention — like rent assistance — can be applied before a family is thrown out on the street. Institutional charity is usually slow and often identifies at-risk people after a catastrophe.

AI is beginning to influence many aspects of our lives, from telephoning a banker to utilities’ efforts to spot and control at-risk vegetation before a spark ignites a wildfire.

While the challenges of AI, from its wrongful use by authoritarian rulers and its menace in war and social control, are real, the uses just in medicine are awesome.

In medicine, it is the beginning of a new time in human health, as the frontiers of disease are understood and pushed back as never before. Eureka! Eureka! Eureka!

How the Movement to MAGA Britain Failed in Its Time

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“Make America Great Again.” Those words have been gently haunting me not because of their political loading but because they have been reminding me of something, like the snatches of a tune or a poem that isn’t fully remembered but drifts into your consciousness from time to time.

Then it came to me: It wasn’t the words, but the meaning, or, more precisely, the reasoning behind the meaning.

I grew up among the last embers of the British Empire in Southern Rhodesia. I am often asked what it was like there.

All I can tell you is that it was like growing up in Britain, maybe in one of the nicer places in the Home Counties (those adjacent to London), but with some very African aspects and, of course, with the Africans themselves, whose land it was until Cecil John Rhodes and his British South Africa Company decided it should be British; part of a dream that Britain would rule from Cape Town to Cairo.

Evelyn Waugh, the British author, said in 1937 of Southern Rhodesia that the settlers had a “morbid lack of curiosity” about the indigenous people. Although it was less heinous than it sounds, there was a lot of truth to that. They were there, and now we were there, and it was how it was with two very different peoples on the same piece of land.

However, by the 1950s, change was in the air. Britain came out of World War II less interested in its empire than ever. In 1947, under the Labor government of Clement Attlee, which came to power after the wartime government of Winston Churchill, it relinquished control of the Indian subcontinent — now India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

It was set to gradually withdraw from the rest of the world. The empire was to be renamed the Commonwealth. It was to be a club of former possessions, often more semantically connected than united in other ways.

The end of the empire wasn’t universally accepted, and it wasn’t accepted in the African colonies that had attracted British settlers, always referred to not as “Whites” but as “Europeans.”

I can remember the mutterings and a widespread belief that the greatness that had put “Great” into the name Great Britain would return. The world map would remain with Britain’s incredible holdings in Asia and Africa, colored for all time in red. People said things like the “British lion will awake, just you see.”

It was a hope that there would be a return to what was regarded as the glory days of the empire when Britain led the world militarily, politically, culturally, scientifically, and with what was deeply believed to be British exceptionalism.

That feeling, while nearly universal among colonials, wasn’t shared by the citizens back home in Britain. They differed from those in the colonies in that they were sick of war and were delighted by the social services that the Labor government had introduced, like universal healthcare, and weren’t rescinded by the second Churchill administration, which took power in 1951.

The empire was on its last legs, and Churchill’s 1942 declaration, “I did not become the king’s first minister to preside over the dissolution of the British Empire,” was long forgotten. But not in the colonies, and certainly not where I was. Our fathers had served in the war and were super-patriotic.

While in Britain, they were experimenting with socialism and the trade unions were amassing power, and migration from the West Indies had begun changing attitudes. In the colonies, belief flourished in what might now be called a movement to make Britain great again.

In 1954, London got an organization, the League of Empire Loyalists, which was more warmly embraced in the dwindling empire than it was in Britain. It was founded by an extreme conservative, Arthur K. Chesterton, who had had fascist sympathies before the war.

In Britain, the league attracted some extreme right-wing Conservative members of parliament but little public support. Where I was, it was the organization that was going to Make Britain Great Again.

It fizzled after a Conservative prime minister, Harold MacMillan,  put an end to dreaming of the past. In a speech in South Africa, he said that “winds of change” were blowing through Africa, though most settlers still believed in the return of empire.

It took the war of independence in Rhodesia to bring home MacMillan’s message. We weren’t going to Make Britain Great Again.

Glimpses of Times When There Was More Respect, Everywhere

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I can’t explain all the social and political maelstrom I have seen through the years. But I have known times when crime was far less than it is today, and political disputation, in all its forms, wasn’t a cause of violence in the population.

Here are some fragments of the changes I have seen in different places. I parade these fragments from my life because of the sense of doom, the sense that violence could break out between the political extremes in the United States. In effect, we haven’t seen the end of the violence of Jan. 6, 2021.

When I was a teenager in the 1950s in the Central African Federation, a long-forgotten grouping of three British colonies in central Africa — (Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe; Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia; and Nyasaland, now Malawi), the prime minister, Sir Roy Welensky, lived two miles up the road from my parents. Every school day, he would pull over his big black car, a Humber Super Snipe, and give me a lift to school.

He had no chauffeur, no security, and no sense that it was needed. Those were times when society was placid — not just placid, but very placid.

When I left school at 16 and became a reporter, the prime minister would drive me into Salisbury (now Harare), the capital, which was very useful. Often, he would pick up other car-less people, without regard to color, and drive them as far as the unguarded government buildings that housed his office.

There was no violence.

I hitch-hiked all over the federation and down to Johannesburg in the neighboring Republic of South Africa. No thought of personal safety ever crossed my mind. It would be unsafe and unwise to attempt that today. That peacefulness continued until the Zimbabwe war of independence, which started within a decade.

In 1960, I was in London, covering the legendary East End, an immigrant and working-class area. Peace reigned. I walked through the roughest dockside at midnight and later with no fear or concern for my safety. The only memory I have of being interrupted was by prostitutes enquiring whether I needed company.

At that time, one could walk up to the prime minister’s residence at No. 10 Downing Street without being stopped. A single, unarmed policeman was all there was for security.

Now, you can’t get near No. 10. Political violence and just malicious violence is everywhere. Street crime, muggings and knife attacks are common all over London.

I was in New York during the Northeast Blackout of 1965. I had to walk across the 59th Street Bridge into Queens to make sure the gas was turned off in a printing plant that belonged to a partner of mine in a publishing venture. There was no looting, no threat of violence. Indeed, there was a party atmosphere, and statistics show that many children were conceived during it.

By contrast, there was extensive looting and crime during the city’s major blackouts in 1977 and 2003. An ugly social indifference to each other had come into play.

I was in Rio de Janeiro in 1967, and after having partied late into the night, I walked the backstreets of the city without fear. The last time I was in Rio in the 1990s, security personnel would prevent you from leaving your hotel after dark and caution you not to walk alone during the day.

When riots broke out in Washington and elsewhere in 1968 after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., there was massive rioting, but the anger was against property. I walked around the city during the riot, particularly on 14th Street, its epicenter. Several rioters, loaded with looted goods, suggested where it might be best for me to walk or stand to avoid being knocked over by the surging crowds.

There was still a kind of social peace, a respect for one individual for another.

Fast forward to the invasion of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. There was no such respect, either for people or the building and what it stands for, just mob anger.

About the U.S. Capitol: In 1968, it was easily approached and entered. You could take a taxi to the entrance under the archway, either on the Senate side or the House side, and walk in.

I offer these fragments from my own experience and pose the question that I can’t answer: How did we get to the state of social and criminal rage that is a global reality?

Court Ruling Mandates Confusion, Judicial Activism

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Myths are powerful things — so powerful that one has been endorsed by the Supreme Court and now has the federal government by the throat.  Its effects will be far-reaching and, at times, disastrous and dangerous. Although a conservative favorite, it will hurt business, in some cases, severely.

The myth is that the government is dominated by “faceless, unelected bureaucrats” with an agenda. According to myth, these bureaucrats are out to frustrate the will of Congress, avoid the courts and ignore their political masters.

In striking down the Chevron deference on June 28 — the actual case was Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo — the Supreme Court sided with critics of the bureaucracy, ending what has been an operational reality for 40 years.

The Chevron deference is a Reagan-area, bipartisan accommodation that recognized that when Congress makes laws in broad strokes and big declarations of intent, the intent often requires refinement of minute scientific detail, like parts per billion of carcinogens allowed in drinking water.

Under the Chevron deference, when Congress had been sloppy, or too general, in its legislation writing, the agencies were empowered to interpret the law and — with public and stakeholder input in the form of hearings and comment periods — make rules.

It is the crux of the administrative state. If those rules were “reasonable,” they couldn’t be litigated; they got “deference.” Although they could be challenged, the implied immunity of deference was mostly honored.

Clinton Vince, who heads the U.S. energy practice at Dentons, the world’s largest law firm, told me that the Supreme Court has upheld Chevron 70 times and has been cited in cases 18,000 times. He spoke on my PBS television program, “White House Chronicle.”

Many of the agency decisions that affect everything from drugs and medical products’ safety to the protection of human health and the environment, to workplace safety, to aviation safety and to the supply of electricity will be made in myriads of court cases.

Vince said that while reasonable people will disagree on the extent of the national disruption, “I believe that there will be an avalanche of litigation by affected stakeholders of different ideologies and that an entirely different paradigm of agency regulation will occur when the courts, rather than the agencies, will be the dominant decision-makers,” he said.

Under Chevron, the federal agencies would write the fine print (promulgate is the term used) that Congress didn’t or was unqualified to define in its legislation.

This fine print, this rendition of what Congress intended, was implemented and seldom challenged in the courts because the understanding embodied in Chevron was that if the rules were reasonable, the courts would stand back.

Conservative argument postulated that this rule-making in areas like the environment, energy, health and labor favored the liberal biases of the permanent bureaucracy.

Charles Bayless, who has been president of two investor-owned electric utilities, in Arizona and Illinois, and of the West Virginia University Institute of Technology, and who has been a party to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission rule-makings, told me he fears widespread chaos, jammed courts and extensive “forum shopping.”

“Each side will find very liberal and very conservative circuits and find a plaintiff in that jurisdiction. As the judges cannot understand the science, the outcome is likely preordained,” Bayless said.

“Thus, the appeals courts will be jammed with appeals from jurisdictions with biased judges writing opinions where neither they nor the jury understand the science,” he said.

A judge in, say, Wyoming could be asked in one submission to rule on the safety — yes, the safety — of a malaria treatment and in another on the allowable radioactive releases from a nuclear reactor. This is a recipe for confusion and bad law, which will negatively affect business and the public.

As someone who has covered Washington for 50 years, I must say the bureaucracy gets a bad rap. It isn’t monolithic — as the word implies — and is made up of men and women, some of whom (as in any other large group) may be biased and unfit for what they do.

But it also has a vast number of hardworking, ordinary Americans. This is particularly so in agencies like the Food and Drug Administration and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which administer technologically and scientifically based law. I call them the “hard” agencies because they rely on scientific and engineering expertise in their operation.

It is pure myth that they constitute a swamp or have pre-set agendas. Oh, and they do have faces.

Tech Conquers All, From Making a New Aristocracy to Making Taylor Swift

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I sometimes write about the propensity for technology to be imperial, to conquer and to force itself on the world whether the world wants it or not. With AI taking hold, I have to say, “You ain’t seen nothing yet.”

The wise people who write about international trade say that globalization is dead, killed off by nationalism and protectionism.

Well, you might not be able to get a Big Mac in Russia these days, but I bet they know who Taylor Swift is. Tom Friedman may be a well-read New York Times columnist, but his penetration is nothing compared to that of the influencers on TikTok or maybe even Heather Cox Richardson on Substack.

Then there is the money.

The Computer Age has spawned a new class of ultra-rich, dwarfing the rich of the past, like the Rockefellers, the Carnegies and the Rothschilds. Names like Bezos, Gates, Zuckerberg and Musk will dominate the age.

The descendants of the great internet-based companies will form a new aristocracy with money so abundant that they can influence our lives culturally and politically.

Culture will be shaped by them via what they sponsor. The rich have always sponsored the arts, but now there will be so much money, dwarfing what Carnegie, Getty, Guggenheim and their millions wrought.

If a multibillionaire wants to weigh in politically with big money, both political parties and individual politicians will tailor their offerings to get some of that campaign cash. That is occurring now. But in the future, it will be occurring even more.

One could reasonably argue that the political class has already sold out to its backers. It isn’t the kind of government a candidate will provide so much as how much that worthy candidate raised to get elected.

I suspect we are only beginning to understand the effects of money in politics and how it may reshape the future. 

The people creating innovative technologies today have little idea where their inventions will take them. Did the guys who launched Uber in San Francisco ever think it would go nationwide, let alone sweep the world and wipe out many taxi fleets? One would have believed every county or region would have its own rideshare operator. But no. Uber went global, thanks to the controlling computer technology.

One of the realities of computer-based technology is that it picks winners and losers early on — and winners win bigger than anything seen before. Losers fade away, as they did after the first tranche of tech upheaval: the dot-com bubble.

Computer tech favors monopoly, and the monopoly in each market segment wins.

With AI coming into daily use and likely to command the way we live and work after a few decades, the companies that provide that service today — and will come to control it — will potentially dwarf the existing tech mega-giants. In theory, an AI company can employ AI to consolidate its authority in the field and vanquish competition.

If that happens, a single company will have greater wealth and greater social and political power than any aspirant for global domination ever has had.

The backstory to why early bots are error-riddled and why we get hilarious “hallucinations” is that the companies — the big techies — are so aware of the stakes that they are rushing to market their products before they have perfected them. They calculate that it is better to achieve some market penetration with an inferior product than to wait for the perfected one when a rival has become the bot of choice and technological world conquest is at hand. Never let the perfect get in the way of market share.

Consider the evolution of Google. When it perfected its search engine, it was one of a handful of search engines (remember Jeeves?). But it grabbed market share, and the rest is history. Microsoft’s Bing can do everything that Google does, but it has a third of the users. Google got the reputation and was first past the post.

Where does Taylor Swift fit in? Is she the greatest singer about the travails of love? Almost certainly not, but social media loved her.

Tech loved Taylor, and she is the brightest star ever seen in the firmament of tech-influenced culture — the equivalent in entertainment of world conquest. It is the future.i

Fusion Power Is Now a Possible Dream

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Fusion power, the Holy Grail of nuclear energy for decades, may finally be within our grasp.

If the scientists and engineers at Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS), a company with close ties to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Plasma Science and Fusion Center, are right, fusion is nearly ready for power market entry. In Devens, Mass., CFS says it will be ready to ship its first devices in the early 2030s.

That is astounding news, which has been so long in the making that much of the nuclear industry has failed to grasp it.

I first started writing about fusion power in the 1970s. Having been on hand for many of its false starts, I was one of the doubters.

However, after I visited the CFS factory in Devens and saw the precision production of the giant magnets, which are the key to the company’s system, I am on my way to being a believer.

I think CFS can likely manufacture a device it can ship to users — utilities or big data centers — in the early 2030s. If so, the news is huge; it is a moment in science history, like the first telephone call or incandescent light bulb.

Governments, grasping the potential for clean and essentially limitless power without weapons proliferation or radioactive waste, have lavished billions of dollars on fusion energy research worldwide. Intergovernmental efforts in recent years have concentrated on the Joint European Torus, which has wrapped up in Britain, and the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, a mega-project involving 35 nations. Both are firmly in the category of scientific research.

However, in the commercial world, there is a sense that fusion power is at hand, and many companies have raised money and are pressing forward. CFS is on the front of that pack.

There are two technologies chasing the fusion dream: magnetic fusion energy (MFE) and inertial fusion energy (IFE). The former contains plasma at millions of degrees in a magnetic bottle. The trick here isn’t in the plasma but in the bottle.

A version of MFE, called the tokamak, is the technology expected to produce the first fusion power plant. Worldwide, dozens of startups are looking at fusion, and in the United States, eight are considered frontline.

The other method, IFE, consists of hitting a small target pellet with an intense beam of energy, which can come from a laser or other device. It is still in the realm of research.

CFS has raised more than $2 billion and is seen by many as the frontrunner in the fusion power stakes.  Italian energy giant ENI supported it from its inception in 2018. Bill Gates’ ubiquitous Breakthrough Energy is an investor. Altogether, there are 60 investors, mostly looking for a huge return as CFS begins to sell its devices.

According to Brandon Sorbom, co-founder and chief scientist at CFS, the big advance has been in the superconducting magnets that create containment bottles for plasma. He told me this had enabled them to design a device many times smaller than had previously been possible.

What makes CFS magnets different and revolutionary is the superconducting wire wound to make the magnets.

Think of the tape in a tape recorder, and you have an idea of the flat wire, called HTS, that is wound into each magnet. The HTS tape is first wound into VIPER cable, or NINT pancakes — acronyms for two types of magnet technology developed by MIT in conjunction with CFS. Then, the VIPER cable, or NINT pancakes, are assembled into magnets that make up the tokamak.

This superconducting wire enables a large amount of current to course through the magnet at many times the previously unavailable levels. This means the device can be smaller — about the size of a large truck.

The next stage is completing the first full demonstration device at CFS, known as SPARC. It is already half-built and should become operational next year.

After that will come the first commercial fusion device, called ARC, which may be deployed in a decade. It will contain, as Sorbom said, “a star in a bottle using magnetic fields in a tokamak design,” and perchance, bring abundant zero-carbon energy to users near you.

The AI Revolution Will Rival the Industrial One, and It Has Begun

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A new age in the human experience on Earth is underway. It is an age of change as profound — and possibly more so — than the Industrial Revolution, when the steam engine introduced the concept of post-animal labor, known as shaft horsepower.

Artificial intelligence in this new age is infiltrating all areas of human endeavor.

Some things will change totally, like work: It will end much menial work and a whole tranche of white-collar jobs. Some things it will enhance beyond imagination, like medicine and associated longevity.

Some AI will threaten, some it will annihilate.

It will test our understanding of the truth in a post-fact world. The veracity of every claim will be subject to investigation, from what happened in history to current election results.

At the center of the upheaval in AI is electricity. It is the one essential element — the obedient ingredient — for AI.  Electricity is essential for the computers that support AI. However, AI is putting an incalculable strain on the electric supply.

At its annual meeting, the U.S. Energy Association learned that a search on Google today uses a tenth of the electricity as the same search on ChatGPT. Across the world, data centers are demanding an increasing supply of uninterruptible electricity 24/7. Utilities love this new business but fear they won’t be able to service it going forward.

Fortunately, AI is a valuable tool for utilities, and they are beginning to employ it increasingly in their operations, from customer services to harnessing distributed resources in what are called virtual power plants, to things such as weather prediction, counting dead trees for fire suppression, and mapping future demand.

Electricity is on the verge of a new age. And new technologies, in tandem with the relentless growth in AI, are set to overhaul our expectations for electricity generation and increase demand for it.

Fusion power, small modular reactors, viable flexible storage in the form of new battery technology and upgraded old battery technology, better transmission lines, and doubling the amount of power that can be moved from where it is made to where it is desperately needed are all on the horizon, and will penetrate the market in the next 10 years.

Synchronizing new demand with new supply has yet to happen, but electricity provision is on the march as inexorably as is AI. Together, they hold the keys to a new human future.

A new book by Omar Hatamleh, a gifted visionary, titled “This Time It’s Different,” lifts the curtain on AI. Hatamleh, chief AI officer for NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., says, “This time, it truly is different. … Witness AI’s awakening, revealing its potential for both awe-inspiring transformation and trepidation.”

Hatamleh organized NASA’s first symposium on AI on June 11 at Goddard. Crème de la crème in AI participants came from OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Qantm AI, Boeing and JP Morgan.

The consensus view was, to my mind, optimistically expressed by Pilar Manchon, Google’s senior director of AI, who said she thought this was the beginning of humankind’s greatest adventure. The very beginning of a new age.

A bit of backstage criticism was that the commercial pressure for the tech giants to get to market with their generative AI products has been so great that they have been releasing them before all the bugs have been ironed out — hence some of the recent ludicrous search results, like the one from this question, “How do you keep the cheese on pizza?” The answer, apparently, was with “glue.”

However, everyone agreed that these and other hallucinations won’t affect the conquering march of AI.

Government regulation? How do you regulate something that is metamorphosing second by second?

A word about Hatamleh: I first met him when he was chief engineering innovation officer at NASA in Houston. He was already thinking about AI in his pursuit of off-label drugs to treat diseases and his desire to cross-reference data to find drugs and therapies that worked in one situation but hadn’t been tried in another, especially cancer. This is now job No. 1 for AI.

During COVID, he wrangled 73 global scientists to produce a seminal report in May 2020, “Never Normal,” which predicted with eerie accuracy how COVID would affect how we work, play and socialize, and how life would change. And it has. A mere foretaste of AI?

Tech Giants Want In on Electricity, Google Has a Foothold

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During the desperate days of the energy crisis in the 1970s, it looked as though the shortage was permanent and we would have to change the way we lived, worked and played to accommodate it.

In the end, it was technology that solved the crisis.

For fossil fuels, 3D seismic, horizontal drilling and fracking were used. For electricity, it was wind and solar, and better technology for making electricity with gas — a swing from burning it under boilers to burning it in aero-derivative turbines, essentially airplane engines on the ground.

A new energy shortage — this time confined to electricity — is in the making. There are a lot of people who think that, magically, the big tech companies, headed by Alphabet’s Google, will jump in and use their tech muscle to solve the crisis.

The fact is that the tech giants, including Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple and Meta, are highly interested in electricity because they depend on supplies for their voracious data centers. According to many experts, the electricity demand will increase exponentially as AI takes hold.

The tech giants are aware of this and have been busy as collaborators and innovators in the electric space. They want to ensure an adequate electricity supply and insist it is green and carbon-free.

Google has been a player in the energy field with its Nest Renew service. This year, it stepped up its participation by merging with OhmConnect to form Renew Home. It is what its CEO, Ben Brown, and others call a virtual power plant (VPP). These are favored by environmentalists and utilities.

A VPP collects or saves energy from the system without requiring additional generation. It can be hooking up solar panels and domestic batteries or plugging in and reversing the flow from an electric vehicle at night.

For Renew Home, the emphasis is definitely the home, Brown said in an interview.

For cash or other incentives (like rebates), participants cut their home consumption, managed by a smart meter so that air conditioning can be put up a few notches, washing machines are turned off, and an EV can be reversed to feed the grid.

Brown said that at present, Renew Home controls about 3 gigawatts of residential energy use —  a gigawatt is sometimes described as enough electricity to power San Francisco — and plans to expand that to 50 GW by 2030. All of it is already in the system and doesn’t require new lines, power plants or infrastructure.

“We are hooking up millions of customers,” he said, adding that Renew Home is cooperating with 100 utilities.

Fortunately, peak demand and the ability to save on home consumption coincide between 5 p.m. and 9 p.m.

There is no question that more electricity will be needed as the nation electrifies its transportation and its manufacturing — and especially as AI takes hold across the board.

Todd Snitchler, president of the Electric Power Supply Association, told the annual meeting of the U.S. Energy Association that a web search using ChatGPT uses nine times as much power as a routine Google search.

Google and the other four tech giants are in the electric supply space, but not in the way people expect. Renew Home is an example; although Google’s name isn’t directly connected, it is the driving force behind Renew Home.

Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners (SIP) has invested $100 million in Renew Home. Brown is a former Google executive, and Jonathan Winer is a co-CEO and cofounder of SIP.

As Jim Robb, the president of the North American Electric Reliability Corp., the congressionally mandated, not-for-profit supply watchdog, said recently on the TV show “White House Chronicle,” the expectation that Google will go out and build power plants is silly as they would face the same hurdles that electric utilities already face.

But Google is keenly interested in power supply, as are the other tech behemoths. The Economist reports they are talking to utilities and plant operators about partnering on new capacity.

Also, they are showing an interest in small modular reactors and are working with entrepreneurial power providers on building capacity, with the tech company taking the risk. Microsoft has signed a power-purchase agreement with Helion Energy, a fusion power developer.

Big tech is on the move in the electric space. It may even pull nuclear across the finish line.

Five Things That Underlie the Anxiety That Is Gripping the Nation

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They say Generation Z is a generation of anxiety. Prima facie, I say they should get a grip. They are self-indulgent, self-absorbed and spoiled — just like every other generation.

Yet, they reflect a much broader societal anxiety. It isn’t confined to those on the threshold of their lives. I would highlight five causes of this anxiety:

—The presidential election.

—Climate change.

—Fear of wider war in Europe and the Middle East.

—The effect of AI on everything, from job losses to knowing real from fake.

—The worsening housing shortage.

The election weighs on all these issues. There is a feeling that the nation is headed for a train wreck, no matter who wins.

President Biden and former president Donald Trump are known quantities. And there’s the rub. Biden is an old man who has failed to convey strength either against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or the pro-Russia movement in Congress.

Biden has led on climate change but failed to tell the story. He has been unable to use the bully pulpit of his presidency and layout, with clear and convincing rhetoric, where the nation should be headed and how he will lead it there.

And if his health should further deteriorate, there is the prospect of Vice President Kamala Harris taking over. She has distinguished herself by walking away from every assignment Biden has given her, in a cloud of giggles. She has no base, just Biden’s support.

Trump inspires that part of the electorate that makes up his base, primarily working people who have a sense of loss and disgruntlement. They really believe Trump, the most unlikely man ever to climb the ramparts of American politics, will miraculously mend their world.

More reprehensible are those members of the Republican Party who are scared of Trump, who have hitched their wagon to his star because they fear him and love holding on to power at any price.

You will know them by their refusal to acknowledge the last election was honest and or to commit to accepting the result of the next election. In doing this, they are supporting a silent platform of insurrection.

The heat of summer has arrived early, and it is not the summer of our memories, of gentle winds, warm sun and wondrous beaches.

The sunshine of summer has turned into an ugly, frightening harbinger of a future climate that won’t support the life we have known. Before May was over, heat and related tornados took lives and spread destruction across Texas and elsewhere.

I wonder about children who have to stay indoors all summer in parts of Texas, the South and West, where you can get burned by touching an automobile and where sports must be played at dawn or after dusk. That should make us all anxious about climate change and the strength and security of the electric grid as we depend more and more on 24/7 air conditioning.

The wars in Europe and the Middle East are troubling in new ways, ways beyond the carnage, the incalculable suffering, and the buildings and homes fallen to bombs and shells.

Our belief that peace had come to Europe for all time has fallen. Surely, as the Russians marched into Ukraine, they will march on unless they are stopped. Who will stop them? Isolation has a U.S. constituency it hasn’t had for 90 years.

In the Middle East, a war goes on, suffering is industrial and relentless in its awful volume, and the dangers of a broader conflict have grown exponentially. Will there ever be a durable peace?

Artificial intelligence is undermining our ability to contemplate the future. It is so vast in its possibilities, so unknown even to its aficionados, and such a threat to jobs and veracity that it is like a frontier of old where people feared there were demons living. Employment will change, and the battle for the truth against the fake will be epic.

Finally, there is housing: the quiet crisis that saps expectations. There aren’t enough houses.

A nation that can’t house itself isn’t fulfilled. However, the political class is so busy with its own housekeeping that it has lost sight of the need for housing solutions.

There are economic consequences that will be felt in time, the largest of which might be a loss of labor mobility — always one of the great U.S. strengths. We followed the jobs. Now we stay put, worried about shelter should we move.

This is, ultimately, the decade of anxiety, mainly because it is a decade in which we feel we are losing what we had. Time for us to get a grip.

Father’s Day Challenge — Neckties Are Out

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I admire Ben Mankiewicz, the host of Turner Classic Movies. He is the man we all think we are in our dreams: handsome, urbane, authoritative, and oh-so-charming — a member of one of the great families of film, an aristocrat of that realm.

I would like to look like Ben; his job is appealing, too.

But wait, Ben has suffered a savage downfall. He isn’t the man he used to be to me. I nearly fell off the couch when I saw Ben, an inspiration to men, introducing a movie without his necktie.

Yes, Ben was open-collared in a suit, looking a little like an unmade bed, which is what most men look like when pursuing the current fashion of no necktie.

Shock Horror! Another bastion of masculinity has fallen.

The problem — and I aver this to be an unassailable truth — is men wearing dress shirts without ties look less than their best. If they have a bit of age on them, a lot less than their best.

The dress shirt, which hasn’t been replaced, is designed for a necktie, long or in a bow. Without the tie, men look diminished, incomplete, as though they had to leave the house without time to finish dressing.

Let me state that the necktie is indeed a useless piece of clothing, like other dress items of the past: spats, watch chains and detached collars. The passing of none of these do I regret — but ties? Cry, the lost masculine adornment of yesteryear.

The necktie was something a man could glory in. Tying a long tie and throwing the long end over the short end always gave me the same feeling as mounting my horse; when my right leg cleared the saddle, I knew something good was going to happen. A great day in the Virginia countryside, usually.

Ties were something to treasure; fine silk, splendid patterns, elegance written with restraint. Just long enough, just obvious enough, conveying refinement and masculine savoir-faire. Now, men are running around open-necked in shirts that weren’t designed to be worn that way.

Have a care for the great names in ties. Those who saved us on Father’s Day, Christmas and birthdays are losing money or gone to other pursuits. 

Have a care for Hermes, Liberty, Tyrwhitt, Brioni, Fumagalli, Brooks Brothers and all those who created lovely things for the neck out of silk, finely woven wool or linen.

Just the sight of the box lit up the male face, ensuring the giver some future preferment or an extra helping at the table. The power of the tie was formidable — as Omar Khayyam, the Persian poet, might have said, it could transmute life’s leaden metal into gold.

At least it kept Dad smiling through some de rigueur family events. Ever noticed how he slipped off to the bathroom not to engage the porcelain but to admire himself in the mirror with the new gift around his neck?

Not so long ago, great restaurants had spare ties for guests who showed up without them. Now that is over.

The last holdout I know of is the Metropolitan Club in Washington. I have been to two events there recently, and the hosts thought it wise to advise their guests on dress etiquette: ties and no white-soled shoes. But no cravats or ascots as well. Strange.

I hope the cravat or its cousin, the ascot, will come back vigorously. It will save those master craftspeople who dyed silk, wove wool and shaped their handiwork over canvas to adorn men’s necks of no practical value but so dressy, so uplifting, so defining.

Give a cravat, and tell the man in your life or your father, “You look like David Niven.”

Come to think of it, I bet Ben Mankiewicz looks stupendous wearing a cravat.