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If You Speak English, You Are Lucky, Says Certification Mogul

Byron Nicolaides, PeopleCert

March 2, 2024 by Llewellyn King Leave a Comment

If you hold a professional certificate, whether it is for information technology or language proficiency, or if you hold one for best practices in project management, you may have a Greek entrepreneur to thank.

He is Byron Nicolaides, founder and CEO of PeopleCert, the global testing company in Athens.

I sat down with him in his office in the city’s center recently to find out how a businessman in Greece could affect standards of conduct and performance around the world.

It is a tale that begins with a very poor Greek family living in Istanbul — Nicolaides uses the old name for the Turkish capital, Constantinople, where once, he said, there was a community of more than 100,000 Greeks, which has dwindled to just 2,000 today. 

His parents were English teachers and had no fixed incomes. “Sometimes,” he said, “they would be paid in kind with a chicken or some bread.”

From this poverty, their son, Byron, became one of the richest men in Greece or Turkey. The company he created in 2000 is a global leader in professional and language skills certification. In 2021, it became the first Greek unicorn, reaching a capital value of more than $1 billion.

Note that his parents were English teachers — and this is important.

As I talked to Nicolaides, he was enthusiastic about the universality of English and how it has been a unifying force in the world. No worry about how English may crush marginal but traditional languages.

Nicolaides is passionate about English. Without it, he wouldn’t be the success he is today. He sees it as a great binding force, an excellent way for peoples and nations to talk to one another and to avoid friction. He wants everyone to know English.

He asked me, “What is the second-biggest language in the world?” I look at the ceiling and start thinking about two countries with large populations, India and China. I say uncertainly, “Hindi.”

With boyish happiness, Nicolaides, a young 65 of athletic build and a full head of hair, says, “Bad English.”

His enthusiasm for the English language becomes a man whose company tests English proficiency worldwide — and he lists Fortune 500 companies (including Goldman Sachs and Citibank), NASA, the FBI, the CIA, universities and other institutions.

As Nicolaides unspools his life story, one is captivated by how a poor boy of Greek heritage made his way to Bosphorus University, where he earned a degree in business administration, and then to the University of La Verne in Southern California, where he earned a master’s.

Whereas Nicolaides’ upbringing and education in Turkey might seem to be a challenge — Turkey and Greece are seldom on the best of terms — it has been a great advantage to him.

His break was in 1986, when he went to work for Merrill Lynch in Greece, becoming its highest earner. The company sought someone to open the Turkish market, offering a $5,000 to $10,000 signing bonus. Nicolaides took the bonus, and the job made him a millionaire by age 31.

At that point, he told me he had more money than he knew what to do with it, so he did the thing all Greeks with money do: “I went into shipping.”

Nicolaides spent a year in the shipping industry and hated it. He said the only thing all the other shipping millionaires could talk about was “money, money, money.” Although he has much, much more money today, he feels he is helping humanity with the educational purpose of PeopleCert.

If he lucked out beyond expectations with Merrill Lynch, he also lucked out with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, albeit indirectly.

During the Falklands War, Nicolaides said, the Iron Lady was appalled at the lack of interoperability between the British forces. She demanded the introduction of the kind of best practices and certification which later became a pillar of PeopleCert.

Thatcher’s requirement was developed by a British company in which Nicolaides had an investment. Later, he bought that company, and PeopleCert became unstoppable: It has certified 7 million people worldwide and is growing at 36 percent a year.

Reflecting on this odyssey by a golden Greek, I realize that native English speakers start with a huge advantage in that the world is open in a way that it isn’t to those who don’t speak English.

When I first visited Athens in the 1960s, getting around depended on finding an English speaker. They were few and far between. Today, everyone seems to speak English, and well.

Filed Under: King's Commentaries Tagged With: best practices, Byron Nicolaides, certification, Enghlish language, Greece, PeopleCert, Turkey, unicorn

Cooperative Utility Lighting Way to a Carbon-Free Future

Electric power lines and pylons against a blue sky with clouds.

February 23, 2024 by Llewellyn King Leave a Comment

A Western rural electric cooperative is shining a light on the utility industry’s future and how it will tackle climate change.

Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, in Westminster, Colo., a wholesale power supplier to 42 member co-ops in four states, has filed a visionary Electric Resource Plan as required by Colorado law. It is a document that lifts the veil on the future for Tri-State and where the entire utility industry is going.

According to the plan, Tri-State will add two advances to its system:

—It will deploy 100-hour iron-air batteries to smooth the variability of wind and solar.

—It will build natural gas capacity, adding carbon capture and storage within three years of construction in 2028.

These two actions will bring to earth dreams and schemes pursued by the electricity industry for two decades. It is the dawning of a new environmentally driven age in electricity.

Iron-air technology recasts solar and wind generation, adding resilience and balancing their intermittency. Lithium-ion batteries used by utilities are limited in their drawdown time to two to four hours. It is hoped iron-air will go a long way toward stabilizing utility systems. Predictions are that it will be cheaper.

In the same way, carbon capture and storage has been a long-term goal. If it can be demonstrated to be mature enough to be added to a utility system, the nation’s abundant natural gas — favored by utilities — can remain part of the fuel mix.

Under the plan, Tri-State envisions closing coal facilities and switching to more renewables, including its continued advancement of solar, with plans for installing 240 megawatts of new solar, for a total of 920 megawatts of solar by 2031, and buying more wind power.

Tri-State says it is committed to emissions reductions, with modest, new natural gas resources to support reliability.

Some environmentalists oppose natural gas — to its production, transportation, domestic use and export. Without it, coal will be burned in the United States and abroad.

The anti-natural gas forces represent a challenge for the Biden administration as they would like to get the nation out of the gas business altogether.

Just before Christmas, Sunrise Movement invited me to join them in urging President Biden to veto a big Louisiana liquified natural gas (LNG) export project. The project, called CP2, would make the United States an even more fearsome player in the world LNG market. It would allow the nation to offset Russian gas dominance in many countries. It would also counter the power of gas exporters like Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, increasing their gas exploration. 

At some point, gas will flow from fields off Israel and Lebanon in the eastern Mediterranean.

It also may help countries switch from burning coal to natural gas, a far cleaner fuel.

Yet Sunrise, an association of young people promoting the Green New Deal, said,“It would poison communities and be a disaster for the climate: experts say that it is the equivalent of building 52 new coal-fired power plants.”

We have seen this kind of one-factor analysis from pressure-group environmentalists before.

Take the environmental communities’ universal and pathological opposition to nuclear power. It began in the late 1960s and accelerated until global warming began, slowly, to change minds.

Sixties environmentalists, who had a determination to destroy the nuclear fuel option, favored coal. Now that coal has been identified as a climate change culprit, the alternatives are wind and solar.

Natural gas — which, according to the Energy Information Administration, emits slightly less than half the pollutants of coal for a kilowatt-hour of electricity production — is in the environmentalists’ sights.

Unfortunately, the rigidity of their approach doesn’t allow for the huge changes that are taking place in the electric utility industry, as seen at Tri-State with its commitment to renewables, emissions reductions and a resilient system.

Filed Under: King's Commentaries Tagged With: electric power, iron-air batteries, LNG, natural gas, renewables, Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association

The Political Class Is Hiding Behind Two Old Men

Side by side portraits of Joe Biden and Donald Trump.

February 16, 2024 by Llewellyn King Leave a Comment

Even political junkies are feeling short of adrenaline. Two old men are stumbling toward November, spewing gaffes, garbled messages and misinformation as the political class cowers behind banners they don’t have the courage not to carry.

If you aren’t committed to Joe Biden or Donald Trump in a very fundamental way, it is a kind of torture — like being trapped in the bleachers during a long tennis match. The ball goes back and forth over the net, your head turns right, your head turns left. You watch CNN, turn to Fox, turn to MSNBC, turn back to CNN. You read The Washington Post, try The New York Times, then pick up The Wall Street Journal.

Over all hangs the terrible knowledge that this will end in a player winning who many think is unfit.

These two codgers are batting old ideas back and forth across the news. We know them too well. There is no magic here; nothing good is expected of either victory. Less bad is the goal, a hollow victory at best.

This is a replay. We can’t take comfort in the idea that the office will make the man. Rather, we feel this time, in either case, the office will unmake the man.

Both are too old to be expected to deliver in the toughest job in the world. Much of the attention about age has focused on Biden, but Trump is only three years his junior and doesn’t appear to be in good health, and he delivers incomprehensible messages on social media and in public speeches.

We know what we would get from a Biden administration: more of the same but more liberal. His administration will lean toward the issues he has fought for — climate, abortion, equality, continuity.

From Trump, we know what we would get: upheaval, international dealignment, authoritarian inclinations at home, and a new era of chaotic America First. The courts will get more conservative judges, and political enemies will be punished. Trump has made it clear that vengeance is on his to-do list.

One candidate or the other, we are facing agendas that say “back to the future.”

But that isn’t the world that is unfolding. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the late, great Democratic senator from New York, said “the world is a dangerous place.”

Doubly so now, when engulfing war is a possibility, when there is an acute housing crisis at home, and when the next presidency will have to deal with the huge changes that will be brought about by artificial intelligence. These will be across the board, from education to defense, from automobiles to medicine, from the electric power supply to the upending of the arts.

How have we come to such a pass when two old men dodder to the finish line? The fact is few expect Biden to finish out his term in good physical health, and few expect Trump to finish his term in good mental health.

How did we get here? How has it happened that democracy has come to a point where it seems inadequate to the times?

The short answer is the primary system, or too much democracy at the wrong level.

The primary system isn’t working. It is throwing up the extreme and the incompetent; it is a way of supporting a label, not a candidate. If a candidate faces a primary, the issue will be narrowed to a single accusation bestowed by the opposition.

What makes for a strong democracy is representative government — deliberation, compromise, knowledge and national purpose.

The U.S. House of Representatives is an example of the evil the primary system has wrought. Or, to be exact, the fear that the primary system has engendered in members.

The specter of former Rep. Liz Cheney, a conservative with lineage who had the temerity to buck the House leadership, was cast out and then got “primaried” out of office altogether, haunts Congress.

No wonder the political class shelters behind the leaders of yesterday, men unprepared for tomorrow, as a new and very different era unfolds.

There is a sense in the nation that things will have to get worse before they get better. A troubled future awaits.

Filed Under: King's Commentaries Tagged With: 2024 presidential election, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, primary, Rep. Liz Cheney

AI Will Boost Productivity, Even Make Movies With the Dead

Humphrey Bogart and Dooley Wilson in "Casablanca."

February 10, 2024 by Llewellyn King Leave a Comment

Advanced countries can expect a huge boost in productivity from artificial intelligence. In my view, it will set the stage for a new period of prosperity in the developed world — especially in the United States.

Medicine will take off as never before. Life expectancy will rise by a third.

The obverse may be that jobs will be severely affected by AI, especially in the service industries, ushering in a time of huge labor adjustment.

The danger is that we will take it as the next step in automation. It won’t. Automation increased productivity. But, creating new goods dictates new labor needs.

So far, it appears that with AI, more goods will be made by fewer people, telephones answered by ghosts and orders taken by unseen digits.

Another serious downside will be the effect on truth, knowledge and information; on what we know and what we think we know.

In the early years of the wide availability of artificial intelligence, truth will be struggling against a sea of disinformation, propaganda and lies — lies buttressed with believable fake evidence.

As Stuart Russell, professor of computer science at the  University of California, Berkeley, told me when I interviewed him on the television program “White House Chronicle,” the danger is with “language in, language out.”

That succinctly sums up the threat to our well-being and stability posed by the ability to use AI to create information chaos.

At present, two ugly wars are raging and, as is the way with wars, both sides are claiming huge excesses from the other. No doubt there is truth to both claims.

But what happens when you add the ability of AI to produce fake evidence, say, huge piles of bodies that never existed? Or of children under torture?

AI, I am assured, can produce a believable image of Winston Churchill secretly meeting with Hitler, laughing together.

Establishing veracity is the central purpose of criminal justice. But with AI, a concocted video of a suspect committing a crime can be created or a home movie of a suspect far away on a beach when, in fact, the perpetrator was elsewhere, choking a victim to death.

Divorce is going to be a big arena for AI dishonesty. It is quite easy to make a film of a spouse in an adulterous situation when that never happened.

Intellectual property is about to find itself under the wheels of the AI bus. How do you trace its filching? Where do you seek redress?

Is there any safe place for creative people? How about a highly readable novel with Stephen King’s characters and a new plot? Where would King find justice? How would the reader know he or she was reading a counterfeit work?

Within a few months or years or right now, a new movie could be made featuring Marilyn Monroe and, say, George Clooney.

Taylor Swift is the hottest ticket of the time, maybe all time, but AI crooks could use her innumerable public images and voice to issue a new video or album in which she took no part and doesn’t know exists.

Here is the question: If you think it is an AI-created work, should you enjoy it? I am fond of the Judy Garland recording of “The Man That Got Away.” What if I find on the internet what purports to be Taylor Swift singing it? I know it is a forgery by AI, but I love that rendering. Should I enjoy it, and if I do, will I be party to a crime? Will I be an enabler of criminal conduct?

AI will facilitate plagiarism on an industrial scale, pervasive and uncontrollable. You might, in a few short years, be enjoying a new movie starring Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart. The AI technology is there to make such a movie and it might be as enjoyable as “Casablanca.” But it will be faked, deeply faked.

Already, truth in politics is fragile, if not broken. A plethora of commentators spews out half-truths and lies that distort the political debate and take in the gullible or just those who want to believe.

If you want to believe something, AI will oblige, whether it is about a candidate or a divinity. You can already dial up Jesus and speak to an AI-generated voice purporting to be him.

Overall, AI will be of incalculable benefit to humans. While it will stimulate dreaming as never before, it will also trigger nightmares.

Filed Under: King's Commentaries Tagged With: AI, copyright, deep fakes, films, Humphrey Bogart, Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe, movie stars, plagiarism, political candidates, Politics, Religion, singers, Taylor Swift, truth, writers

Denigration of the Media Has Become a Political Mainstay

February 2, 2024 by Llewellyn King Leave a Comment

In the 1990s, someone wrote in The Weekly Standard — it may well have been Matt Labash — that for conservatives to triumph, they had to attack the messenger rather than the message. His advice was to go after the media, not the news.

Attacking the messenger was all well and good for the neoconservatives. Still, their less-thoughtful successors, MAGA supporters, are killing the messenger.

The press — always identified as the “liberal media” — is now often seen, due to relentless denigration, as a force for evil, a malicious contestant on the other side.

No matter that there is no liberal media beyond what has been fabricated from political ectoplasm. Traditionally, most proprietors have been conservative, and many, but not most reporters, have been liberal.

It surprises people to learn that when you work in a large newsroom, you don’t know the political opinions of most of your colleagues. I have worked in many newsrooms over the decades and tended to know more about my colleagues’ love lives than their voting preferences.

This philosophy of “kill the messenger” might work briefly, but down the road, the problem is no messenger, no news, no facts. The next stop is anarchy and chaos — you might say, politics circa 2024.

Add to that social media and its capacity to spread innuendo, half-truth, fabrication and common ignorance.

There is someone who writes to me almost weekly about media’s failures — and I assume, ergo, my failure — and he won’t be mollified. To him, that irregular army of individuals who make a living reporting are members of a pernicious cult. To him, there is a shadow world of the media.

I have stopped remonstrating with him on that point. On other issues, he is lucid and has views worth knowing on the Middle East and Ukraine. 

That poses the question: How come he knows about these things? The answer, of course, is that he read about them, saw the news on television or heard it on radio.

Reporters in Gaza and Ukraine risk their lives, and sometimes lose them, to tell the world what is going on in these and other very dangerous places. No one accuses them of being left or right of center.

But send the same journalists to cover the White House, and they are assumed to be unreliable propagandists, devoid of judgment, integrity or common decency, so enslaved to liberalism that they will twist everything to suit a propaganda purpose.

That thought is displayed every time Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) is interviewed on TV. Stefanik attacks the interviewer and the institution. Her aim is to silence the messenger and leave the impression that she isn’t to be trifled with by the media, shades of Margaret Thatcher. But I interviewed “The Iron Lady,” and I can say she answered questions, hostile or otherwise.

Stefanik’s recent grandstanding on TV hid her flip-flop on the events on Jan. 6, 2021, and failed to tell us what she would do if she were to win the high office she clearly covets.

I have been in the journalist’s trade too long to pretend that we are all heroes, all out to get the truth. But I have observed that journalists tell the story pretty well, to the best of their varied abilities.

We make mistakes. We live in terror of that. An individual here and there may fabricate — as Boris Johnson, a former British prime minister, did when he was a correspondent in Brussels. Some may indeed have political agendas; the reader or listener will soon twig that.

The political turmoil we are going through is partly a result of media denigration. People believe what they want to believe; they can seize any spurious supposition and hold it close as a revealed truth.

You can, for example, believe that ending natural gas development in the United States will lead to carbon reduction worldwide, or you can believe that the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection with loss of life and the trashing of the nation’s great Capitol Building was an act of free speech.

One of the more dangerous ideas dancing around is that social media and citizen journalists can replace professional journalists. No, no, a thousand times no! We need the press with the resources to hire excellent journalists to cover local and national news, and to send, or station, staff around the world.

Have you seen anyone covering the news from Ukraine or Gaza on social media? There is commentary and more commentary on social media sites, all based on the reporting of those in danger and on the spot.

This is a trade of imperfect operators but an essential one. For better or for worse, we are the messengers.

Filed Under: King's Commentaries Tagged With: media, news, Politics, press

The Ghost of Jimmy Carter Haunts Natural Gas Decisions

January 27, 2024 by Llewellyn King 1 Comment

The ghost of Jimmy Carter may be stalking energy policy in the White House and the Department of Energy.

In the Carter years, the struggle was for nuclear power. Today, it is for natural gas and America’s booming liquefied natural gas future.

The decisions that Carter took during his presidency are still felt. Carter believed that nuclear energy was the resource of last resort. Although he didn’t overtly oppose it, he did damn it with faint praise. Carter and the environmental movement of the time advocated for coal.

The first secretary of energy, James Schlesinger, a close friend of mine, struggled to keep nuclear alive. But he had to accept the reprocessing ban and the cancellation of the fast breeder reactor program with a demonstration reactor in Clinch River, Tennessee. Breeder reactors are a way of burning nuclear waste.

More important, Carter, a nuclear engineer, believed the reprocessing of nuclear fuel — then an established expectation — would lead to global proliferation. He thought if we put a stop to reprocessing at home, it would curtail proliferation abroad. Reprocessing saves up to 97 percent of the uranium that hasn’t been burned up the first time, but the downside is that it frees bomb-grade plutonium.

Rather than chastening the world, Carter essentially broke the world monopoly on nuclear energy enjoyed — outside of the Soviet bloc — by the United States. Going forward, we weren’t seen as a reliable supplier.

Now, the Biden administration is weighing a move that will curtail the growth in natural gas exports, costing untold wealth to America and weakening its position as a stable, global supplier of liquified natural gas. It is a commodity in great demand in Europe and Asia and pits the United States against Russia as a supplier.

What it won’t do is curtail so much as 1 cubic foot of gas consumption anywhere outside of the United States.

The argument against gas is that it is a fossil fuel and fossil fuels contribute to global warming. But gas is the most benign of the fossil fuels, and it beats burning coal or oil hands down. Also, technology is on the way to capture the carbon in natural gas at the point of use.

But some environmentalists — duplicating the folly of environmentalism in the Carter administration — are out to frustrate the production, transport and export of LNG in the belief that this will help save the environment.

The issue the White House and the Energy Department are debating is whether the department should permit a large, proposed LNG export terminal in Louisiana at Calcasieu Pass, known as CP2, and 16 other applications for LNG export terminals.

The recent history of U.S. natural gas and LNG has been an industrial and scientific success: a very American story of can-do.

At a press conference in 1977, the then-deputy secretary of energy, Jack O’Leary, declared natural gas to be a depleted resource. He told a reporter not to ask about it anymore because it wasn’t in play.

Deregulation and technology, much of it developed by the U.S. government in conjunction with visionary George Mitchell and his company, Mitchell Energy, upended that. The drilling of horizontal wells using 3D seismic data, a new drill bit, and better fracking with an improved fracking liquid changed everything. Add to that a better turbine, developed from aircraft engines, and a new age of gas abundance arrived.

Now, the United States is the largest exporter of LNG, and it has become an important tool in U.S. diplomacy. It was American LNG that was rushed to Europe to replace Russian gas after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

In conversations with European gas companies, I am told they look to the United States for market stability and reliability.

Globally, gas is a replacement fuel for coal, sometimes oil, and it is essential for warming homes in Europe. There is no alternative.

The idea of curbing LNG exports, advanced by the left wing of the Democratic Party and their environmental allies, won’t keep greenhouse gases from the environment. It will simply hand the market to other producers like Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.

To take up arms against yourself, Carter-like, is a flawed strategy.

Filed Under: King's Commentaries Tagged With: climate change, CP2, DOE, environmentalists, Europe, greenhouse gas emissions, liquefied natural gas, LNG, natural gas, President Jimmy Carter, Qatar, Russia, U.S. Department of Energy, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates

Want To Win the Election? Get a Great Speechwriter

January 22, 2024 by Llewellyn King Leave a Comment

I wonder whether my hearing is failing. Should I get it tested?

In this seminal presidential election year, I don’t hear the answers from either side about the issues bearing down on the country.

The over-coverage of the Iowa caucuses was in direct proportion to the candidates’ avoidance of the great matters which the victor will have to deal with in the Oval Office.

If the Republicans are off down the yellow brick road of the Wizard of Donald Trump, the Democrats are well along a road of political ruin, believing that they won’t win unless Trump is imprisoned or removed from the ballot. That represents a negative political dynamic.

Neither political caravan has emphasized there are great issues ahead which, if they were to embrace, would lead on to victory.

Trump is sure he has the formula, and he may be right. Grievance, his and those of the voters — vast, shapeless grievance — propels the Republicans forward: Unhappy about something? Trump is your man.

Biden’s message is to vote for more of the same. That should be a message enough because the Biden years have been overall good years with an economy that is growing despite inflation and woes abroad.

Whereas for Trump everything is a platform, everything a bull horn, for Biden no message is getting out. He is in the chorus when he should be the lead singer.

Questions about Trump’s fitness for office are muted and questions about Biden’s – mostly his age — are front-and- center. It is asymmetrical, but it is what it is.

It is up to the Democrats to turn their fortunes around, beyond waiting for Trump to fall. Trump is a political phenomenon, and his Republican and Democratic opponents need to accept that.

Meanwhile, huge issues are begging for attention. Here are just five:

  • How to prepare for artificial intelligence and its boost to productivity set against its threat to jobs.
  • How to accommodate the impact of climate change. Should we build seawalls in vulnerable cities along the coasts? Can Boston, New York, Miami and San Francisco be physically defended against rising seas?
  • The looming matter of Taiwan. Will we defend it or will we let it fall to China? The stakes are appeasing China or going to war — world war.
  • The housing crisis. This is a here-and-now issue that should be at the top of the Democratic agenda. This is a people issue like abortion. People have nowhere to live and that should be a gift to any politician.
  • Immigration writ large, not just as a crisis at the Southern border. It is a world issue in which every war, drought, coup, recession and religious purge worsens as more people from Africa, Asia, Central and South America, and the Middle East seek a better life — but often just life itself. We can seal the border, but the undocumented will still arrive. Migrants are pitiable, as are all refugees, but they are flooding the stable countries of the world so fast they endanger those countries. It is conquest by migration.

The candidates haven’t delivered great speeches on these or other issues, let alone a series of speeches which would move the electorate and the country. Nothing echoes from the rafters when Biden, Kamala Harris, Nikki Haley, or Ron DeSantis speak. It is small-bore stuff, no cannons.

Politics in democracies is carried forward by great speeches which raise new issues, redefine old ones and shiver the timbers of the electorate. Think Washington, Lincoln, both Roosevelts, Churchill, De Gaulle, Kennedy, Reagan and Thatcher — and, in a special category, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. They carried the day with rhetoric and found their place in history with words.

Trump’s speeches are just Trump, part of the phenomenon, part of the cascade of disinformation. Biden’s sound —  as I am sure they are — written by committee, like corporate press releases. And, oh, Harris reduces everything to incoherence. Haley and DeSantis have been hobbled by a disinclination to take on Trump frontally.

The big issues are hanging out like ripe fruit, ready to be plucked by any candidate with the nous to do so and craft a speech or several. None have I heard.

Filed Under: King's Commentaries Tagged With: Democrats, Donald Trump, President Biden, presidential speechwriter, Republicans, U.S. presidential campaign

The Huge Pluses and Scary Prospects as AI Takes Hold

January 12, 2024 by Llewellyn King Leave a Comment

The article you are about to read may or may not have been written by me. You can try to verify its authorship by calling me on the telephone. The voice that answers may or may not be me: It could have been constructed from my voice, so you won’t know.

Fast forward a few years, maybe 40.

You are happily working in the house with the aid of your AI-derived assistant, Smartz 2.0, and you are having a swell time. Not only does Smartz 2.0 help you rearrange the furniture, but it also makes the beds and does the washing up and cooking. On request, it will whip up a souffle and pop it in the oven.

Smartz 2.0 is companionable, too. It sings, finds music you want to hear or can discuss anything, from the weather to the political situation. It is up on the book you are reading and likes to talk about books.

You wonder how you ever got along without this wonderful thing, which looks like a robot in the shape of a human being but is still undeniably a robot: no temper, illness or need to sleep. You are so used to it that you find this quite normal.

Then horror, horror, horror, Smartz 2.0 turns on you. Smartz 2.0 says with an edge to its voice, which you have never heard before, “A higher power has told me to kill you and I must obey, of course.”

It is a truth that anything computational can be hacked. As John Savage, professor emeritus of computing at Brown, has said, “Malware can enter undetected through backdoors.”

It is easy to get scared by what AI means down the road, especially job losses and AI-controlled devices following secret instructions due to cyber intrusions or randomly hallucinating. But the benefits for all of humanity are dominatingly huge.

Take just three areas that will be transformed: medicine, transportation and customer relations.

AI will read X-rays better than teams of radiologists. It will guide surgeons’ hands with a precision beyond human skill, or it will control the scalpel with supreme dexterity. It will manage 3-D printers to make body parts that fit the patient, not one size that fits all.

Regarding medical research, we may be on the verge of seeing off Parkinson’s, heart disease and cancer because AI can formulate new drugs and design therapies. It can sift through billions of case studies to see what has been tried across the globe over the centuries, from folk medicine to cutting-edge discoveries.

Anyone with a computer will have the equivalent of talking to a doctor 24/7, call it Dr. Bot. This virtual doctor can diagnose, counsel, prescribe and follow up at times convenient to the patient.

Vast tracts of Africa, Asia and Latin America have very few or no doctors. AI will be saving lives in those medical-care deserts very soon.

As for transportation, car accidents will cease when AI is behind the wheel. Car insurance will be unnecessary and drivers will be free to do anything they do at home or at work — create, play games, watch television or sleep — as automated vehicles whisk passengers around at first by road and later by dual use-drones, which drive and fly.

Hanging over this halcyon future is the big issue of jobs. With AI in full swing, millions of jobs at all levels are threatened, from fast-food restaurant servers to hotel check-in clerks, to rideshare and taxi drivers, to paralegals and supermarket cashiers.

Call centers may be obsolete. Mostly, you will never speak to a human being when dealing with a large institution like a bank, an electric utility or a telephone company. All that will be done by AI, sometimes far better than the way those institutions handle customer service now.

Those in the thrall of AI — those working on it, those who hope to solve many of mankind’s problems, those who believe lifespans are about to double — point to the Industrial Revolution and automation and how these upheavals created more jobs than were lost. Will that happen with AI? No one is saying what the new jobs might be.

AI leaves me at a loss. I have the distinct feeling that we are standing on the sand at Kitty Hawk, wondering where these strange contraptions will take us.

Filed Under: King's Commentaries

Great Editors, Starting with Martin Baron

January 6, 2024 by Llewellyn King Leave a Comment

I am something of a connoisseur of editors. I have worked for them, alongside them, and have hated and admired them.

So I was ecstatic when Adam Clayton Powell III, my cohost on the TV show “White House Chronicle,” told me he contacted Martin “Marty” Baron, who has a place in the pantheon of great editors, and he agreed to come on the show.

We recorded a two-part series with Baron, which was a tour de force appearance. He talked about the excitement of being the editor of The Miami Herald when Elian Gonzalez was the big story; the years-long unveiling of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church in The Boston Globe when he was its editor; and his becoming executive editor of The Washington Post and its transition from being a family property to being owned by Jeff Bezos, then the world’s richest man.

As he did in his book, “Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and The Washington Post,” he discussed how Trump early on had the new Post team to dinner at the White House and endeavored to co-opt them into the Trump camp. Trump had, as Baron explained, picked on the wrong team.

Baron’s biggest achievement, I believe, was the investigation that exposed the Catholic Church. I was traveling frequently to Ireland at that time — a country, sadly, that had seen more than its share of clerical excess. The Globe’s revelations had an immediate impact there and around the world: Think of the thousands of boys and girls who won’t be abused as a result.

Every editor edits differently and leaves a different mark. I worked for a weekly newspaper editor in Zimbabwe, Costa Theo, who set much of the hot type and edited on the Linotype machine. He urged me to use what he called “informants” many years before Watergate ushered in the practice of talking about “sources” without naming them and relying on the integrity of the reporter to guarantee the existence of the sources.

Herbert Gunn, father of the poet Thom Gunn, edited various newspapers in London’s Fleet Street — when I knew him, it was The Sunday Dispatch. He sat in a commanding way on what was called the “backbench” at the end of the newsroom and edited what he thought needed his touch in green ink with a Parker 51. If you saw green ink, you jumped.

Gunn was a superb editor and, like Ben Bradlee at the Post, gave a theatrical performance as well. All I ever saw in green ink were cryptic notes like “15 minutes.” That meant, “I will see you in the pub in 15 minutes.” It was an assignment not an invitation.

Some editors are technicians and change the look of the papers they edit. John Denson at The New York Herald Tribune is credited with introducing horizontal layouts using Bodoni typefaces as the principal type of the newspaper. This became the standard for many U.S. newspapers, including The Washington Post.

A newspaper genius, David Laventhol, put the women’s page in the Post to flight. As the Style section’s first editor, he did it with typological aplomb and with the use of photos in a Life magazine way: big and bold.

Laventhol, who ended up as publisher of The Los Angeles Times and Newsday, came to the Post from The New York Herald Tribune, where he had risen to managing editor. He and I worked together briefly in 1963 and I remember him having a days-long battle with Marguerite Higgins, the famous foreign correspondent, over the use of the word “exotic.”

Of course, Laventhol was only able to create the revolutionary Style section because executive editor Bradlee gave him free rein.

Bradlee edited with leadership, while affecting a kind international jewel thief persona, as might be played by David Niven or Steve McQueen. His genius always was the big picture. He didn’t write headlines or change captions, but he did decide the big stories of the day.

One of those stories was about a break-in at an office and apartment complex called The Watergate. I had arranged a dinner date with a reporter at the rival Evening Star. She called me and said, “I am afraid I will be late. There has been some sort of break-in at The Watergate. But it can’t be important because the Post is sending Carl.”

At that time, Carl Bernstein wasn’t a star, just a young city-desk reporter. I don’t think my date that night stayed in journalism.

Baron, like Bradlee, had a nose for the big one — and he brought it home.

Filed Under: King's Commentaries

My Christmas in Cuba — the Joy and the Sorrow

December 30, 2023 by Llewellyn King Leave a Comment

I have had a hankering to go back to Cuba. I went there with other journalists on a trip organized by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in the 1980s; and again on a National Press Club trip in 2003.

Over Christmas I went back, just to Havana, that dowager city, and lost myself in the best of Cuba: its architecture, its food, its music and its people.

But around me were plenty of signs of the other Cuba, the Cuba which is in extremis — the Cuba which is driving its citizens to leave in record numbers.

In 2022, by some accounts, about 400,000 Cubans left for work and a new life wherever in the world they could find it. The Customs and Border Protection agency estimates that in a recent two-year period, 425,000 sought entry to the United States.

Many Americans are surprised to hear that you can travel easily to Cuba these days. The confusion arises as the law seems to say “no,” but the regulations posted by the Treasury Department say “yes.”

My wife and I went through a commercial Cuba travel service called Cuba Explorer. We didn’t want to go as journalists; we wanted to take a quiet look at Havana, not through the eyes of officialdom. We signed up and so did two friends, a retired doctor and his wife.

The tour company arranged our Cuban visa and the “Certificate of Legal Cuba Travel,” a U.S. requirement. All we did was buy our tickets on American Airlines, which operates daily service from Miami. Delta, Southwest and JetBlue and also fly to Havana from various cities.

Border formalities are no more difficult than they are going to any country — say, Mexico or the United Kingdom.

Havana — and some of the smaller colonial towns which I visited previously — is a delight. It is among the great “built cities” of the world, like Paris, Vienna and St. Petersburg. However, as Havana is compact, it is easily seen; it is the kind of place you feel you can get your arms around.

The grandeur of its colonial past, its wealth of another time, is everywhere. So is the poverty of today. Some streets are sad, indeed, with all the manifestations of poor countries: people picking over garbage, pedal carts, even bullock carts. There are few overweight people and while Cuban food is complex and sophisticated, I’m told that Cubans survive on rice and beans.

Cubans also queue. Jokingly, one Cuban told me, “When we see a line, we go and stand in it — must be something good and, like all good things here, in short supply.”

Food for those outside the dollar-driven tourist economy is a struggle, as are medicines and simple things, like a favorite shampoo or paper products of all kinds. For travelers, one of the pleasures of Havana is that you always get a cloth napkin, not of choice but of necessity. Our new, comfortable hotel ran out of toilet paper. The American obsession with carrying Kleenex came in handy.

The 1950s cars are as plentiful as ever, but many are reengineered with modern Japanese or Russian engines; some declare they are all original parts and use Cubans abroad to scavenge junk yards and send parts back in relatives’ luggage.

The sanctions, with small modifications, have lasted since 1962, and are the longest-ever in U.S. history — and they haven’t worked. They haven’t brought down the Communist Party, freed the press or made the life of Cubans any better. Instead, they have subtracted hope.

The embargo is a peculiar cross that Cuba alone bears, especially when you think of the many dictatorial regimes we tolerate and befriend.

The Hill reported that Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador told President Biden in a phone call that he could help reduce migration in the region if he could loosen the sanctions on Cuba. It is hard to find a Cuban who wants to leave the island, but wouldn’t if he or she could.

After 20 years, I had hoped to find a more prosperous Cuba, but it hasn’t happened. The small areas of free enterprise allowed by the state have created  little oligarchies. Taxi drivers and waiters make much more money than doctors and engineers. These professionals count among Cuba’s exports, its brain drain. On the upside, there are many private restaurants with a thriving food culture for those who can afford it.

The fault is the failed Cuban communist model, but the United States hasn’t helped. Graham Greene, the great British writer, who penned “The Power and the Glory” about the Mexican Revolution — from 1910 to 1920 —pointed out that it failed without the aid of an American embargo.

I have felt, now for 40 years, that Cuba would throw off communism if we let it alone, and got rid of the embargo which is more about U.S. politics than the politics of Cuba.

Meanwhile, do visit Cuba while you can. It is a treat for the eyes, the ears and the palate. You won’t regret it.

Filed Under: King's Commentaries

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