It is argued that if the Titan submersible had been certified (read peer-reviewed), the deadly accident, which killed all five on board, wouldn’t have taken place. That may or not be true.

Now there are calls for adventurism tourism to be regulated. I submit that if it is subject to regulation (read licensing), there will be very little of it — and it will be more expensive.

These days, there are calls to regulate everything from artificial intelligence to social media. Be warned: Whereas regulation does and should protect the public’s safety, it also has a dead hand. It curbs invention. It is comfortable with the known not the unknown. Purely seeking safety sets up a timid regime.

You want inventions to be safe but also free to evolve. The dynamic of the undertaking is crucial.

Regulations can have a negative dynamic or a positive one. They both seek to protect the public’s health and safety but with differing results.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has the duty to regulate nuclear power and materials. It does this conscientiously but not progressively.

Evolution in nuclear power is very slow and difficult because of the NRC. Every wire, nut and bolt, pump and pipe in the nuclear steam supply system gets certified. And every change needs certification.

The result is that engineers design to pass NRC muster, not to reach into the great unknown of possibility or the soaring spirit of creative invention. The problem isn’t with the NRC staff but with its mandate.

Nowadays, there is a resurgence of interest in nuclear power with small modular reactors, some using unproven but promising designs and technologies that haven’t been investigated since the 1960s, which was the end of the first wave of nuclear invention.

Some small modular reactors are being developed by U.S. companies in Canada and China so as to avoid initial NRC approval. Not that the promoters want to make an unsafe reactor but because if you are at the cutting-edge of invention, it is hard to deal with the safety mandate that is the driving force in the NRC.

Originally, safety and promotion were both handled by the Atomic Energy Commission. That agency had promotion as its primary function but as it well understood that nuclear can be very dangerous, it also had a regulatory function.

I covered the AEC as a reporter and, frankly, its regulation worked as well as what has succeeded it, namely the NRC.

The argument against the AEC reached a crescendo in the early 1970s, with relentless pressure from environmentalists and consumer groups, spearheaded by Ralph Nader, behind the slogan, “It’s its own policeman.”

But what the AEC had, which is now lacking, is a creative dynamic to develop new uses for nuclear but safely. It worked: Experimental reactors were built and experimentation with everything from nuclear stimulation of natural gas reserves — basically nuclear fracking — to a variety of cutting-edge reactors at the Idaho and Oak Ridge national laboratories.

Contrast the stultification in nuclear with the progress in aviation where the Federal Aviation Administration both promotes flying and regulates it, and certifies airplanes.

Of course, there have been mistakes and there are frequent accusations that the FAA is too close to Boeing and the airlines. The most egregious failure might have been in certifying the Boeing 737 Max without insisting on better pilot training on a tricky airplane. The result was two catastrophic crashes with non-U.S. airlines.

Yet the skies are still safe, and they are filled with passenger and cargo aircraft that are evolving with each new technology coming along. When it comes to light aircraft, the FAA has been able to accommodate and find airworthy many new airplanes, from ultralights to aerobatic-certified engines and airframes, some from overseas.

By the diplomatic hoopla in Washington that greeted Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, it would seem that intrepid U.S. explorers had just discovered India and were celebrating him in the way Britain treated tribal leaders in the 19th century: Show them the big time. Then co-opt them to vow allegiance.

In this century, the U.S. equivalent of the big time is a state visit and endless professions of friendship. Experience says Modi won’t bite.

Historically, India has been reluctant to accept the embrace of the West. Although it is democratic, capitalist and has the largest diaspora, India’s affections have been hard to capture.

Since independence from Britain in 1947, India has sought global status by standing aloof and leaning toward countries and regimes that are anathema to the West. Its first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, fostered the concept of a third force in the world: a constellation of unaligned nations with India at the center.

It showed a perverse affection for the Soviet Union — which was hardly nonaligned — and didn’t reflect the values of India: free movement of people, free press, capitalism and democracy.

Years ago, a retired executive editor of the Times of India, whom I knew socially, told me, “There are maybe a million Indians living in the United States and only a handful who live in the Soviet Union, but our leaders have always leaned toward them. It is a puzzle.” 

There are now 4.2 million Indians living in the United States.

At the same time, Indians migrated across the world and made inroads into professions from Canada to New Zealand. In Britain, they are prominent in politics and the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, is of Indian descent.

In the United States, executives of Indian descent run some of the largest tech companies, including IBM, Google and Microsoft.

Indians are a huge force in English literature. Every year Indian writers feature on the prize lists for best new English novels. Whereas the computers most of us use may have been made in China, much of the software was written in India.

Indian words abound in English: Pajamas, ketchup, bungalow, jungle, avatar, verandah, juggernaut and cot are just a few.

The effect of Indian culture on the world is evident from curry and rice to polo to yoga.

Yet, India remains a distant shore, elusive and obvious at the same time. A country of enormous talent that lags economically. It now has the fifth-largest economy in the world. With 1.4 billion people of obvious ability, the question must be, why does it still have crushing poverty?

Andres Carvallo, professor of innovation at Texas State University, told the “Digital 360” webinar, for which I am a regular panelist, he thought it was partly because India lagged in essential electricity production, pointing out that China has four times the electricity output of India.

But is this symptom or cause? I have been puzzling over why India doesn’t do better for decades. It seems to me that the causes are multiple, but some can be laid at Britain’s feet — not because the British were occupiers in India but because of some of the good things they left there that have perversely remained time-warped.

One of India’s ambassadors to Washington told me with pride that every occupier had enriched India and left something of value behind, from Alexander the Great to the Moguls and, of course, Britain and the Raj.

But the Brits also left behind a sluggish bureaucracy to the point of sclerosis and a legal system that is independent but takes an eternity to reach a decision. Additionally, some of the ideas prevalent in British Labor Party thinking — and long since abandoned — took hold in India and have been extremely detrimental. These included protectionism, a state’s role in the economy, and a fear of competition from abroad.

I believe that protectionism is the greatest evil. It discouraged competition, innovation and creativity. It inadvertently allowed a few families to concentrate too much wealth and economic power and to work to protect that.

India is more open now, but it needs to be vigilant against the evils that go with protectionism, which is still part of its DNA.

At one time, you could buy a brand-new Indian made-car — Fiat or Morris design — which was 30 years out of date. No need to innovate; just make the same car year after year.

If it liberalizes its economy, India may one day outpace China. Meantime, do luxuriate in those Indian words that have so spiced up English.

Summer, glorious summer, is upon us. It brings with it the anticipation of vacations, long weekends of sea and sand or mountains, and invigorating scenery.

Each to their own, but summer is spelled N-I-R-V-A-N-A for most Americans. It is the treasured time from Memorial Day to Labor Day when we can kick back and, for a couple of weeks and a few weekends, live the life of leisure and fullness we fantasize about the rest of the year.

But there is an impediment: the airlines.

If you have to fly to your Shangri-La, beware. Airline travel these days is a brief sojourn in the deepest circle of Hell.

I fly a lot, and I can report that you have no idea what you are in for if you haven’t sought to take a flight recently. The airports are obscenely crowded; the concession prices for terrible food aren’t only very high, but many don’t take cash; and the distance between gates is such that you may wonder if the first miles of your trip are on foot.

Making tight connections is a fraught business. A stressed system is breaking down. I saw a woman in tears in Charlotte because the wheelchair assistance person had abandoned her and her flight was leaving from a distant gate.

The electronic signs for departing flights are widely spaced, and if you don’t have the airline app on your phone, good luck getting information about your flight.

Don’t take the gate printed on your boarding pass as the gate you’ll leave from: These change quite often. Uniformed personnel are few and stressed. They appear to be suffering battle fatigue. You can’t be cross at them.

Then there is the willful price-gouging.

The airlines are now masters at hidden charges and outlandish fees. If you want to check a bag, that will be a hefty $35. If you want to sit somewhere other than at the rear by the toilets, you can pay about $50 for that privilege, but you’re still in economy.

Buying a ticket online is a computer game of rare complexity. You find a fare. Woe betide if you make a mistake and have to start over: That fare has disappeared, and a much higher one is on offer.

Of course, you have a bag. The airlines offer something called Basic Economy, which assumes you have no luggage whatsoever or you are going to pay a hefty baggage fee, usually $35 per item, to check your bag. You aren’t entitled to a bag in the cabin.

Or, if you aren’t a cheap-and-cheerless traveler, you can play bag roulette. That is when you’ve checked your bag, paid the fee and found at the gate that the airline is asking for volunteers to check their bags for free because there is no room on board. You can’t know if this will happen. If you’ve checked your bag and paid, you’ll be left seething with the injustice of the thing.

Let us assume you survived to that marvelous moment when you board, which means your flight hasn’t been canceled and even though it has been overbooked, you have a seat.

Ah, there is the rub — the thighs or knees rub. The seat is so small, so close to the one in front, that you are in for agony if you weigh more than 150 pounds and are more than 5 feet 10 inches tall.

Clearly, Procrustes, the robber and torturer of Greek mythology,  who would either cut or stretch his victims to fit his iron bed, is alive and well in cabin design. It is also hard to believe that the huddled masses in coach class will make it to an exit in an emergency, squeezed as they are into their unyielding seats.

Finally, there are the toilets. They are so small that big people can’t use them. My advice: Go before you go. Otherwise, you may not be able to hygienically apply toilet paper.

None of this has to be. The Federal Aviation Administration can regulate cabin conditions for reasons of safety. While it has that authority, it is notoriously disinclined to lay down the law to the airlines. The FAA isn’t regulating the airlines, it is enabling them.

The smoke from wildfires in Canada that has drifted down to the United States, choking New York City and Philadelphia with their worst air quality in history and blanketing much of the East Coast and the Midwest, may be a harbinger for a long, hot, difficult summer across the nation.

It could easily be the summer when the environmental crisis, so easily dismissed as a preoccupation of woke greens and the Biden administration, moves to center stage. It could be when America, in a sense, takes fright. When we realize that global warming is not a will-or-won’t-it-happen issue like Y2K at the turn of the century.

Instead, it is here and now, and it will almost immediately start dictating living and working patterns.

In an extraordinary move, Arizona has limited the growth in some subdivisions in Phoenix. The problem: not enough water. Not just now but going forward. The floods and the refreshing of surface impoundments like Lake Mead and Lake Powell, the nation’s largest reservoirs, haven’t solved the crisis.

All along the flow of the Colorado River, aquifers remain seriously depleted. One good, rainy season, one good snowpack may recharge a dam, but it doesn’t replenish the aquifers, which hydrologists say have been systematically depleting for years.

An aquifer isn’t just an underground river that runs generally after rainfall. It takes years to recharge these great groundwater systems. These have been paying the price of overuse for years; across Texas and all the way to the Imperial Valley in California, unseen damage has been done.

It isn’t just water that looms as a crisis for much of the nation, there is also the sheer unpredictability of the weather.

I talk regularly with electric and gas utility company executives. When I asked them what keeps them awake at night, they used to respond, “Cybersecurity.” Recently, they have said, “The weather.”

This year, we are entering the storm season with unusually warm ocean temperatures in the Atlantic and the Pacific. The sad conclusion is that these will signal exaggerated and very damaging weather activity across the country.

The utilities have been hardening their systems, but electricity is uniquely affected by the weather. The dangers for the electricity industry are multiple and all affect their customers. Too much heat and the air conditioning load gets too high. Too much wind and power lines come down. Too much rain and substations flood, poles snap and there is a crisis from a neighborhood to a region.

In the electricity world, the words of John Donne, the 16th-century English metaphysical poet, apply, “No man is an island entire of itself.”

There is another threat the electric supply system will face this summer if the weather is chaotic: overzealous politics and regulation.

The electric utilities are most identified in the public mind with climate change. The public discounts the myriad industrial processes as well as the cars, trucks, bulldozers, trains and ships that lead to the discharge of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Instead, it is utilities that have a target pinned to them. 

A bad summer will lead to bad regulatory and bad political decisions regarding utilities.

Foremost are likely to be new attacks on natural gas and its supply chain, from the well, through the pipes, into the compressed storage, and ultimately to combustion turbines.

At this time, natural gas — about 60 percent cleaner than coal — is vital to keeping the lights on and the nation running when the wind isn’t blowing or the sun has set or is obscured.

The energy crisis that broke out in the fall of 1973 and lasted to the mid-1980s was characterized by silly overreactions. First among these was the Fuel Use Act of 1978, which removed pilot lights on gas stoves and even threatened the eternal flame at Arlington National Cemetery.

It also accelerated the flight to coal because, extraordinarily, that was the time of the greatest opposition to nuclear power — from the environmental communities.

This summer may be a wakeup for climate change and how we husband our resources. But wild overreaction won’t quiet the weather.

From time to time, I feel it necessary to report on the necktie wars. Sadly, the news is dismal. Neckties are in retreat, and in many instances, they have disappeared. 

Father’s Day this month is already causing stress. The rule was always when in doubt, give a necktie. Certain to please.

But if you give the old boy a necktie this year, you know it will never see the light of day after the insincere raving about how lovely it is.

The next several weeks will see children hopelessly crowding men’s haberdashers, seeking that sure-to-please gift.

I predict that men who have never stuck anything so much as a ticket in the upper left pocket will be inundated with pocket squares. Before pocket squares were what they have shrunk to, they were full-size handkerchiefs, albeit of silk or something that looked like silk.

In an emergency, pocket squares could be whipped out for valuable service: drying a tear, wiping up a spill, or signaling across an airport concourse. Now they are a pathetic reminder that men still like a bit of color and have some fashion flair — despite the unkempt area around the neck, leaving the shirt-wearer looking like a half-made bed.

The great tie makers like Liberty of London, Fumagalli of Italy, Hermes of France, and Ralph Lauren of the United States must be in despair. There are hundreds of fine tie makers, especially in Northern Italy — some of which have been lovingly working with the region’s silk for generations.

Men can now go tieless, where once they were forbidden. Those ties kept on hand at clubs and restaurants are no more. Just this past month in Washington, I saw tieless men at an opera at Kennedy Center, at the city’s two dominant clubs, the Cosmos and the Metropolitan, and even in church. At a funeral in London, I was the only man sporting a tie — a bow tie, to be exact.

Bow ties remain the preserve of a select number of wearers, and they are onto something.

I wear one because of Tucker Carlson. Years ago, before Fox and all that, Tucker wore bow ties. When he was between TV gigs, I invited him to be a guest on “White House Chronicle,” my PBS and SiriusXM program. At that time, Tucker wore bow ties, and, as a gag, I donned one for the interview. Afterward, I found that people love men in bow ties.

So, liking to be loved, I stuck with a bow tie, and it has paid untold dividends for me. I am given special attention on Amtrak and airplanes. Recently, a flight attendant threw her arms around me, saying that my blazer and bow tie reminded her of the old days when passengers were smart dressers and were nice.

I have checked with other bow tie-wearers — from a dentist to an economist — and all report they get this special magical treatment. A frequent remark is, “Thank you for wearing a bow tie. You remind me of my father” or grandfather.

I find many men who would like to experiment with a bow tie are hesitant because they don’t want to make a mess of tying it. Don’t worry, get the pre-tied version. They generally look better and don’t windmill as much as a poorly tied one. My secret is my wife, who is a whizz at tying a bow. Otherwise, when traveling, I go pre-tied.

So, here is a thought: Stop agonizing over wallets, belts and sweaters in the men’s emporium. Get dad a pre-tied bow tie. He won’t dare not to wear it for you. And when he goes out, even down to the convenience store, he will be praised. He may even get a hug, and that is a super Father’s Day gift in my book.

To rephrase Leon Trotsky: You may not be interested in artificial intelligence, but artificial intelligence is interested in you.

Suddenly, long-rumored and awaited, AI is upon the world—a world that isn’t ready for the massive and forever disruption it threatens.

AI could be the greatest disruptor in history, surpassing the arrival of the printing press, the steam engine, and electricity. Those all led to good things.

At this time, the long-term effects of AI are just speculative, but they could be terrifying, throwing tens of millions out of work and making a mockery of truth, rendering pictures and printed words unreliable.

There is no common view on the impact of AI on employment. When I ask, the scientists working on it point to the false fears that once greeted automation. In reality, jobs swelled as new products needed new workers.

My feeling is that the job scenario has yet to be proven with AI. Automation added to work by making old work more efficient and creating things never before enjoyed, and, in the process, opening up new worlds of work.

AI, it seems to me, is all set to subtract from employment, but there is no guarantee it will create great, new avenues of work.

An odd development, spurred by AI, might be in a revival of unionism. More people might want to join a union in the hope that this will offer job security.

The endangered people are those who do less-skilled tasks, like warehouse laborers or fast-food servers. Already Wendy’s, the fast-food chain, is working to replace order-takers in the drive- through lanes with AI-operated systems, mimicking human beings.

Also threatened are those who may find AI can do much, if not all, of their work as well as they do. They include lawyers, journalists, and musicians.

Here the AI impact could, in theory, augment or replace our culture with new creations; superior symphonies than those composed by Beethoven or better country songs than those by Kris Kristofferson.

I asked the AI-powered Bing search engine a question about Adam Smith, the 18th-century Scottish economist. Back came three perfect paragraphs upon which I couldn’t improve. I was tempted to cut-and-paste them into the article I was writing. It is disturbing to find out you are superfluous.

Even AI’s creators and those who understand the technology are alarmed. In my reporting, they range from John E. Savage, An Wang professor emeritus of computer science at Brown University, to Stuart J. Russell, professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, and one of the preeminent researchers and authors on AI. They both told me that scientists don’t actually know how AI works once it is working. There is general agreement that it should be regulated.

Russell, whose most recent book is “Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control,” was one of a group of prominent leaders who signed an open letter on March 29 urging a six-month pause in AI development until more is understood—leading, perhaps, to regulation.

And there’s one rub: How do you regulate AI? Having decided how to regulate AI, how would it be policed? By its nature, AI is amorphous and ubiquitous. Who would punish the violators and how?

The public became truly aware of AI as recently as March 14 with the launch of GPT-4, the successor to GPT-3, which is the technology behind the chatbot ChatGPT. Billions of people went online to test it, including me.

The chatbot answered most of the questions I asked it more or less accurately, but often with some glaring error. It did find out about a friend of my teenage years, but she was from an aristocratic English family, so there was a paper trail for it to unearth.

Berkeley’s Russell told me that he thinks AI will make 2023 a seminal year “like 1066  [the Norman Conquest of England].”

That is another way of saying we are balanced on the knife-edge of history.

Of course, you could end AI, but you would have to get rid of electricity — hardly an option.

Adam Smith, the great Scottish economist and moral philosopher, didn’t have to confront the environmental crisis, the healthcare delivery challenge or any of today’s issues. But his economic theory and moral philosophy — his unseen hand — are as pertinent today as they were in his lifetime.

Notably, Smith believed market forces were a force for good and a force for simply getting things done, acting.

A cardinal virtue of the market at work is discipline. Respect for the bottom line works wonders in producing discipline and results, even in the green economy that places a premium on sustainability.

And it is why Pegasus Capital Advisors, the fast-growing, impact investment firm, is having so much success in Africa, the Caribbean and South America, and Southeast Asia. In all, Pegasus is exploring investments in more than 40 countries.

An investment by Pegasus, under its ebullient founder, chairman and CEO Craig Cogut, must make money and meet other strict criteria. It must help — and maybe save — the local environment. It must benefit local people with employment at decent wages. And it must have a long future of social and economic benefit.

And Pegasus always looks for a strong local partner.

In Africa, Cogut told me, the growing of sustainable crops should be wedded to cold storage and processing, which should be local. He has invested in a marketer of fonio, an African “supergrain.”

“Agriculture and fishing are important sources of food in the global south, but they get shipped out and they need to stay local,” Cogut said.

“In Ecuador, we’re focused on sustainable fishing and shrimp farming,” he said, adding, “Shrimp is an amazing source of protein, but you have to do it in an environmentally correct way.”

Cogut has two passions, and they are where he directs investments: the environment, and health and wellness.

A Harvard-trained lawyer, Cogut took his first job with a law firm in Los Angeles. He became an environmentalist while living there and visiting the nearby national parks frequently. To this day, watching birds while hiking on Audubon Society trails in Connecticut, where he lives, is his passion.

He learned the art of big deals while working with the investment bank Drexel Burnham Lambert during its heyday. When it folded in 1990, Cogut became one of the founding partners of Apollo Advisors, the wildly successful private equity firm. After leaving Apollo in 1996, he founded Pegasus, the private equity firm that is making a difference.

A Pegasus success is Six Senses, which manages eco hotels and resorts with sensitivity to the environment. Pegasus sold Six Senses to IHG in 2019 and is currently partnering with IHG to develop new Six Senses resorts, including an eco-hotel on a Galapagos Island.

“We have been working with the Ecuadorian national park system to replicate what was there before Darwin’s time,” Cogut said.

Another previous Pegasus investment has restored a biodiesel plant in Lima, Peru. This plant, which has been sold, provides diesel fuel, produced from food waste and agricultural waste. “It is now helping the Peruvian government reach its environmental goals,” he said.

Off the coast of Nigeria, Cogut was appalled by natural gas flaring, done in association with oil production. He personally invested in a company to capture the gas and convert it to liquefied natural gas, which is now used to displace diesel in electricity generation — much better for human health and the environment.

After his original investment, a large African infrastructure investor has become the majority owner. This is Cogut’s win-win, where sustainability and commerce come together.

I had a disagreement over how to help Africa’s economy with Britain’s chancellor of the exchequer, Gordon Brown, shortly before he became prime minister. He was trying to raise $50 billion for Africa. I asked Brown how it would be invested so that it would achieve real, positive results. He said, rather unconvincingly, “We’ll give it to the right people.”

If that encounter had taken place today, I would have been able to say, “Call Pegasus. Craig Cogut is the man who can help you.”

When the ancient Greeks wanted to learn what their future held, they would consult with oracles. Alexander the Great, for one, visited the Oracle at Siwa, an oasis in the Egyptian desert. According to his biographer, Plutarch, the oracle told Alexander that he was destined to conquer the world.

In these tumultuous days when we, the electorate, are offered a choice between an old, old president and his daffy vice president and a vengeful reprobate with a persecution complex, I did the smart thing: I consulted the oracle.

No, I didn’t cross the desert on a camel, nor as Alexander did on his much-loved horse, Bucephalus, nor in a snazzy BMW SUV.

I did go to the oracle of the day, which is the only place I know to seek and get what seems to be extraterrestrial advice: the Bing AI. I asked the oracle several questions and got some interesting answers.

When it came to the big question, I beseeched the Bing AI, “Great Oracle, I am an American voter, and I am in an awful tizzy. I don’t know whom to support in the next presidential election.

“It seems to me that one candidate, President Joe Biden, a decent man, may be too old to navigate the difficult waters ahead in domestic and international affairs.

“As for another candidate, former President Donald Trump, many people find aspects of his conduct reprehensible.

“What to do? For me, this is even harder because I am a columnist and television commentator, and I need to have something to say. I am sure you understand, Great Oracle.”

Well, the Bing AI clammed up: It delivered only the formal histories of both men.

I had thought my question would spark a revelation, a wise analysis, or a contradiction of my view of the candidates. Clearly, I shall have to wait for the day when I get into real AI chat: ChatGPT.

Mostly, I had thought the oracle would tell me that all the presidential hopefuls so far will be toast by November 2024, that new candidates will bring us hope, fire up party enthusiasm, and let rip.

Are new faces and new choices too much to hope for?

Republicans are wrestling with their prospective candidate after his latest character stain, having been found liable for sexual abuse and defamation in a civil trial. What does this mean for the whole issue of what we look for in the character of candidates? Rectitude was once considered essential. Not for Trump. Post-Trump is post-rectitude.

Just under 70 percent of the electorate have told pollsters that they think Biden is too old to be re-elected. That isn’t, I submit, a conclusion arrived at by pondering what it means to be 80. That is a conclusion, again I submit, they have come to by looking at the president on TV — on the few occasions they see him there.

Clearly, he doesn’t have the strength or the confidence to hold a press conference. These are vital.

In America, the press conference is the nearest thing we have to question time in the British House of Commons. It is the time of accounting. Biden is behind in his accounting as audited by the press corps.

Harold Meyerson, editor at large of the American Prospect, is avowedly liberal. He is one of the most skillful political writers working today; he is deft, informed, and convincing, and you know where he stands. He stands with the Democrats.

So, it is significant when he raises a question about Biden and when he draws attention, as he did on May 9, to Biden’s absence from public engagement.

Meyerson wrote, “Right now, the Democrats are drifting uneasily toward a waterfall and hoping Biden can somehow navigate the looming turbulence. By autumn, if he hasn’t had some measurable success in … allaying much of the public’s fears of a president drifting into senescence, then some prominent Democrat (a category that doesn’t include Robert Kennedy Jr. or Marianne Williamson) had damn well better enter the race.”

A whole new thing to worry about has just arrived. It joins a list of existential concerns for the future, along with global warming, the wobbling of democracy, the relationship with China, the national debt, the supply chain crisis, and the wreckage in the schools.

Artificial intelligence, known as AI, has had pride of place on the worry list for several weeks. Its arrival was trumpeted for a long time, including by the government and by techies across the board. But it took ChatGPT, an AI chatbot developed by OpenAI, for the hair on the back of the national neck to rise.

Now we know the race into the unknown is speeding up. The tech biggies, like Google and Facebook, are trying to catch the lead claimed by Microsoft. They are rushing headlong into a science the experts say they only partially understand. They really don’t know how these complex systems work; maybe like a book that the author cannot read after having written it.

Incalculable acres of newsprint and untold decibels of broadcasting have been raising the alarm ever since a ChatGPT test told a New York Times reporter that it was in love with him and he should leave his wife. Guffaws all around, but also fear and doubt about the future. 

Will this Frankenstein creature turn on us? Maybe it loves just one person, hates the rest of us, and plans to do something about it.

In an interview on the PBS television program “White House Chronicle,” John Savage, An Wang professor emeritus of computer science at Brown University, told me there was a danger of over-reliance, and hence mistakes, on decisions made using AI. 

For example, he said, some Stanford students partly covered a stop sign with black and white pieces of tape. AI misread the sign as signaling it was OK to travel 45 miles an hour. Similarly, Savage said the slightest calibration error in a medical operation using artificial intelligence could result in a fatality.

Savage believes AI needs to be regulated and that any information generated by AI needs verification. As a journalist, it is the latter that alarms.

Already, AI is writing fake music almost undetectably. There is a real possibility that it can write legal briefs. So why not usurp journalism for ulterior purposes and put stiffs like me out of work?

AI images can already be made to speak and look like the humans they are aping. How will you recognize a “deep fake” from the real thing? Probably, you won’t.

Currently, we are struggling with what is fact and where is the truth. There is so much disinformation, so speedily dispersed that some journalists are in a state of shell shock, particularly in Eastern Europe, where legitimate writers and broadcasters are assaulted daily with disinformation from Russia. 

“How can we tell what is true?” a reporter in Vilnius, Lithuania, asked me during an Association of European Journalists’ meeting as the Russian disinformation campaign was revving up before the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Well, that is going to get a lot harder. “You need to know the provenance of information and images before they are published,” Brown University’s Savage said.

But how? In a newsroom on deadline, we have to trust the information we have. One wonders to what extent malicious users of the new technology will infiltrate research materials or, later, the content of encyclopedias. Or, are the tools of verification themselves trustworthy?

Obviously, there will be upsides to thinking-machines scouring the internet for information on which to make decisions. I think of handling nuclear waste; disarming old weapons; simulating the battlefield; incorporating historical knowledge; and seeking new products and materials. Medical research will accelerate, one assumes.

However, privacy may be a thing of the past — it almost certainly will be.

Just consider that attractive person you saw at the supermarket but were unsure what would happen if you initiated a conversation. Snap a picture on your camera, and in no time AI will tell you who the stranger is, whether the person might want to know you and, if that should be your interest, whether the person is married, in a relationship or just waiting to meet someone like you. Or whether he or she is a spy for a hostile government.

AI might save us from ourselves. But we should ask how badly we need saving — and be prepared to ignore the answer. Damn it, we are human.

There is a terrible shortage of people who fix things. I am thinking of electricians, plumbers, glaziers, auto mechanics and many more skilled workers who keep life livable and society running.

It is frustrating if you can’t get a plumber when you need one. But the skilled worker shortage has much more significant consequences than the inconvenience to the homeowner. The very rate of national progress on many fronts is being affected.

More housing is desperately needed, but architects tell me some new construction isn’t happening because of the skilled worker shortage. Projects are being shelved.

The problem in electric utilities is critical — and interesting because the utilities offer excellent pay, retirement and healthcare, and still, they are falling short of recruits. They are aware that many of their workers will be retiring in the next several years, adding to the problem. One utility, DTE in Michigan, has been training former prisoners in vegetation control — the endless business of trimming trees around power lines.

Auto dealerships are scrounging for mechanics, now euphemistically called “technicians.”

Skilled workers are in short supply for the railroad and bridge industries. Many industries are prepared to offer training.

The need is great, and it has a quietly crippling effect on national prosperity.

President Biden has almost ceaselessly promoted solar and wind generation as job creators. Someone should tell him there is a severe shortage of those same electricians, pipe fitters, wind farm erectors and solar panel installers.

The skilled worker shortage has been worsening for some time, but it is now palpable.

Contributory factors have been building: The end of the draft meant an end to a lot of trade schooling in the military. Many a youth learned electronics, motor repair or how to paint something from Uncle Sam. That is the generation that is now retiring.

Then there is the education imbalance: We encourage too many below-average academic students to go to college. It is part of the credentialing craze. Those less suited to academic life seek easier and easier courses in lesser and lesser colleges just to come out with a bachelor’s degree — a certificate that passes for a credential.

The result is a glut on the market of workers with useless degrees in such things as marketing, communications, sociology, and even journalism. If you arrive in college in need of remedial English, your future as a journalist is likely to be wobbly.

Since childhood, I have been impressed with people who fix things: People like my father. He fixed everything from diesel engines to water well pumps, burst pipes and sagging roofs.

Men, and some women, of his generation worked with their hands, but they were, in their way, Renaissance people. They knew how to fix things from a cattle feeder to a sewing machine, from a loose brick in a wall to a child’s bicycle to a boiler.

The work of fixing, of keeping things running, isn’t stupid work; it involves a lot of deduction, knowledge and acquired skill.

Men and women who fixed things were at one with men and women who made things, often bound together in a common identity inside a union.

Think of the great names of the unions of the past and the sense of pride members once took in their belonging: the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, the Teamsters or the United Autoworkers. You had work and social dignity. You weren’t looked down upon because you hadn’t been to college.

We aren’t going to bring back quickly honor to manual work or reverence for the great body of people who keep everything running. So we might look to the hundreds of thousands of skilled artisans who would do the work if they could enter the United States legally. Yes, the migrants milling at the southern border. Many skilled welders, plumbers and masons are yearning to cross the border and start fixing the dilapidated parts of this country.

The owner of a clothing factory told me she was desperate to find women who could sew. She said it is a skill that has just disappeared from the American workforce. A landscape contractor in Washington told me he would close without his Mexican workers.

A modest proposal: Let us write an immigration law based on who is really needed. Add to this a work permit dependent on fulfilling certain conditions. You would soon find company recruiters mingling with the border agents along the Rio Grande.

And we would lose our fear of a burst pipe. Help is just a frontier away.