White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

The Buoyancy of Immigrants and Their Success in Science

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I have been exploring the heights of scientific endeavor in reporting on artificial intelligence, from its use in medical research (especially promising) to its use in utilities and transportation. It is notable that many of the high achievers weren’t born here.

They have come here from everywhere, but the number of Asians is notable — and in that group, the number of women stands out.

As an immigrant, I am interested in why immigrants are so buoyant, so upwardly mobile in their adopted countries. I can distill it to two things: They came to succeed, and they mostly aren’t encumbered with the social limits of their upbringing and molded expectations. America is a clean slate when you first get here.

A friend from Serbia, who ascended the heights of academe and lectured at Tulane University, said his father told him, “Don’t go to America unless you want to succeed.”

A South Korean mechanical engineer who studied at American universities and now heads an engineering company that seeks to ease the electricity crisis, told me, “I want to try harder and do something for America. I chose to come here. I want to succeed, and I want America to succeed.”

When I sat at lunch in New York with an AI startup’s senior staff, we noticed that none of us was born an American. Two of the developers were born in India, one in Spain and me in Zimbabwe.

We started to talk about what made America a haven for good minds in science and engineering and we decided it was the magnet of opportunity, Ronald Reagan’s “shining city upon a hill.”

There was agreement from the startup scientists-engineers — I like the British word “boffins” for scientists and engineers taken together — that if that ever changes, if the anti-immigrant sentiment overwhelms good judgment, then the flow will stop, and the talented won’t come to America to pursue their dreams. They will go elsewhere or stay at home.

In the last several years, I have visited AI companies, interviewed many in that industry and at the great universities like Brown, UC Berkeley, MIT and Stanford, and companies like Google and Nvidia. The one thing that stands out is how many of those at the forefront weren’t born in America or are first generation.

They come from all over the globe. Asians are clearly a major force in the higher reaches of U.S. research.

At an AI conference, organized by the MIT Technology Review, the whole story of what is happening on the cutting-edge of AI was on view: faces from all over the world, new American faces. The number of immigrants was awesome, notably from Asia. They were people from the upper tier of U.S. science and engineering confidently adding to the sum of the nation’s knowledge and wealth.

Consider the leaders of top U.S. tech companies who are immigrants: Microsoft, Satya Nadella (India); Google, Sundar Pichai (India); Tesla, Elon Musk (South Africa); and Nvidia, Jensen Huang (Taiwan). Of the top seven, only Apple’s Tim Cook, Facebook’s Jeff Zuckerberg and Amazon’s Andy Jassy can be said to be traditional Americans.

A cautionary tale: A talented computer engineer from Mexico with a family that might have been plucked from the cover of the Saturday Evening Post lived in the same building as I do. During the Trump administration, they went back to Mexico.

There had been some clerical error in his paperwork. The humiliation of being treated as a criminal was such that rather than fight immigration bureaucracy, he and his family returned voluntarily to Mexico. America’s loss.

Every country that has had a large influx of migrants knows they can bring with them much that is undesirable. From Britain to Germany to Australia, immigration has had a downside: drugs, crime and religions that make assimilation difficult.

However, waves of immigrants have built America, from the Scandinavian and German wheat farmers who turned the prairies into a vast larder to the German Jews, who moved to Hollywood in the 1930s and made America pre-eminent in entertainment, to today’s global wave that is redefining Yankee know-how in the world of neural networks and quantum computing.

The U.S. Is Great Now, Leads Envious World

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Don’t look if you don’t want to, but America is great now. Right now, this week, this day, this hour, this second.

Our economy is the envy of the world. Our mobility, socially and for work, is without equal. Our capacity to foster start-up business is without comparison. Our ability to lure the best talent and the most creative people around the world astounds our competitors.

We are a beacon for the best and smartest the world over.

Our technological abilities are formidable, from space travel to artificial intelligence. If the political class doesn’t fail it, America has a future that suggests wonders yet to come in creativity, in wealth creation, in standard of living, in better health, and in the overall human condition.

AI holds the promise of a new age for humanity, led by America, with greater productivity per worker and the elimination of much dead-end work.

The London-based, global magazine, The Economist, in a paean to this nation, stated in its latest edition: “Over the past three decades America has left the rest of the rich world in the dust. In 1990 it accounted for about two- fifths of the GDP of the G7. Today it makes up half. Output per person is now about 30 percent higher than in Western Europe and Canada, and 60 percent higher than in Japan — gaps that have roughly doubled since 1990.

“Mississippi may be America’s poorest state, but its hard-working residents earn, on average, more than Brits, Canadians or Germans. Lately, China too has gone backwards. Having closed in rapidly on America in the years before the pandemic, its nominal GDP has slipped from about three-quarters of America’s in 2021 to two-thirds today.”

It is possible to believe that we are on the threshold of  a new golden age. Yet we are just ending a political campaign where self-denigration has been a feature. The economic ideas of both candidates, if they become policy and law, threaten to jeopardize our ascent to what Winston Churchill called the “sunlit uplands.”

Kamala Harris has put forward a few ideas which have failed in the past, like protecting specific American industries and fighting the shibboleth of “price-gouging.” Who will she go after? Hotels, airlines, and electric utilities, which buy and sell in the wholesale market, all depend on opportunistic pricing. A free market is by its very nature opportunistic.

Down the line, Harris has sought to fix that which the market will repair by itself. Richard Nixon — wise in so much — tried price controls and failed hopelessly.

Housing is an example of where Harris’ plans to have the government interfere will achieve the opposite result to what she is seeking to do. She would give first-time buyers a down payment. That will most likely push up prices in the overheated housing market. What is needed is more houses, which means local restrictions need to be eased.

Donald Trump’s central economic idea is worthy of the kind of economic thinking favored by African dictators the day after a coup. His tariffs would impose a massive de facto sales tax on all Americans, push up inflation, and wreck the global trading system.

If there are reputable economists who endorse the tariff mania, let us hear from them. Where are they hiding? Even the Trump-friendly think tanks, like The Heritage Foundation, have shied away from this misguided enthusiasm. It is dangerous and if Trump is elected, Congress needs to aggressively restrain it.

Both candidates have laid out economic plans which are risible at some level and aimed to protect their voting blocs. Both, in their way, seek to buy their votes with promises which they either can’t deliver on or which would wreak havoc.

Alexander Fraser Tytler, the 18th-century Scottish jurist, saw doom for democracies when the money faucet is turned on. He said, “A democracy will exist until such time as the public discovers that it can vote itself generous gifts from the public purse.”

One might add, “or if leaders promise it such gifts.”

America is at a high point and can continue to climb if its politicians don’t arrest the ascent.

U.S. Is in Golden Age, Despite Brexit-Type Sentimentality

(CREDIT: Gage Skidmore, via Wikipedia)

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(Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore, via Wikipedia)

The social and cultural forces behind MAGA in the United States and those that led the British in 2016 to vote to leave the European Union — by a small margin of 51.9 percent to 48.1 percent — are closely linked. I know those forces, and I feel connected to them.

They reflect common yearning, shared frustration, and a vague but deep belief that once things were better. That once for their nation, there was a time of contentment, prosperity and certainty all wrapped up in patriotism or, more accurately, nationalism.

“Great” is a word with meaning for those who get caught up in this deep desire to find a kind of national fulfillment, which they feel, and feel deeply, is missing.

In Britain, all the years from Britain’s entry into the European Economic Community (EEC) on Jan. 1, 1973, to the fateful vote, there was a feeling among many people, but especially men, that the nation had abandoned its hereditary path of greatness for domination by Europe. They wanted the term Great Britain (officially adopted after the Acts of Union with Scotland in 1707) to mean something.

Their romantic nostalgia was for some amalgam of history when they felt Britain was “great”: maybe the last days of the Empire in the 1950s, maybe the late Victorian era. It was a moveable feast of yearning for something other than multicultural, essentially woke, Britain.

In America, that yearning, as deeply felt and real, is centered on some romanticized appreciation of the 1950s.

The hard thing for people dreaming of an imaginary past of plenty and happiness is that they never existed for everyone and that the golden age for the ordinary people of Britain was the EU years and the present is a unique golden age for America.

With AI, in which we are the global leader (China has technical parity but is limited by its closed, top-down-controlled society), we are about to see history’s largest surge in knowledge, productivity and health. The giant killers like heart disease and cancer may fall, and life expectancy will increase.

The challenge isn’t to transmute this gold into lead, not to seek the future in a sentimental myth, not to relegate America to being just another striving country.

Britain left a dominant position in the councils of Europe for the status of an island nation with an awesome history but a shaky future.

Behind Britain’s prosperity through the years (a prosperity that is now faltering badly) and America’s massive economic muscle (currently, we have the best-performing economy in the world) lay democracy, open markets and free trade.

Those also were the bedrock values of conservatism on both sides of the Atlantic. In today’s political confusion, they have been forgotten or put on a back burner.

MAGA supporters and those who voted Britain out of the EU share a common sense that there was a better time. Brexiteers said Britain had lost its “sovereignty” without anyone defining the loss.

When I was 21 years old, I worked in London in the movement to keep Britain out of what was then the EEC, precursor of the EU, believing it would be a big economic mistake. Not long after its entry, I changed my mind: It was a bonanza for the financial markets, the farmers, and all those who had goods to sell.

The forces of Brexit and MAGA were always present, but it took two Pied Pipers to fire them up, to shape them as voting blocks, and to have them take over the conservative politics in both nations.

Britain’s Pied Piper was Boris Johnson, who kept up a steady and often dishonest flow of anti-European information when he was the Brussels correspondent of the conservative Daily Telegraph. These fabrications remained alive throughout the Brexit campaign. So, when David Cameron, the Conservative prime minister, offered Britain a referendum on EU membership, Johnson, then a member of parliament, was ready.

Donald Trump rode into the presidency on four words: Make America Great Again.

Besides being larger-than-life and often clownish figures, Johnson and Trump are quite different people. They both rose to corral the loyalty of those yearning for a different reality, one that would inadvertently damage those they sought to lead.

They would effectively seek to transmute gold into lead and tell everyone it was platinum.

I don’t ridicule MAGA supporters, but I fear the power of false narratives. The past is prologue; it isn’t the future.

The Agony and Heroism of Florida

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Florida, where the old go to rest — their reward after life’s labors — and the young go to play its great amusement parks; where the rich live in Palm Beach and shop on Worth Avenue, and the poor harbor west of I-95; where citrus grows; where the Everglades record natural history from a time past; and where, in Key West, writers and artists find their nirvana of social misfits, drunks, addicts and creators, funky and inspiring.

Florida, where Apollo 11 took us to the moon and where many a person from troubled lands has found refuge.

Florida, where Miami is the jewel in the crown of creativity and, for all Spanish-speaking Latin Americans, their El Dorado.

On the night of Oct. 9, a night of horror and fear, Hurricane Milton delivered a cruel and malevolent blow, made the more so by its accompanying and capricious tornadoes. They were spared nothing, the people and the animals of the Sunshine State, savaged by this terrible storm named, ironically, Milton — a name that invokes the great English poet, who said on going blind, “They also serve who only stand and wait.”

We, in our way, far from the storm, stood and waited, glued to our televisions and computers as we watched reality unfold; death arrived, buildings collapsed, metal flew, trees tumbled and first responders, the ever-ready shock troops of society, got to work. Our time to serve is now with our generosity as the broken mend, having lost all they possess.

Yet, where we saw tragedy, we saw heroism.

All those heroes will never be counted to the last person, but they helped Florida get through its night of horror, just as they helped Florida and North Carolina after Hurricane Helene.

They, the first responders, are many, from the military to the police, the firefighters, the ambulance staff, the nurses and doctors, down to the assistants and porters.

One should add the electricity linemen and women who seek to restore power, de-energize felled lines, and start the vital work of saving lives by getting the lights on so that society can begin the journey back to normalcy in everything from bathing to cooking to making contact with those who have worried in silence — those who wonder if loved ones have survived.

This time around, the electrical workers are particularly stressed. Many have been working night and day since Helene swept through. Now, they must lift the load again.

It is little known — so little celebrated — how the electric utilities are part of an extraordinary network of mutual assistance in which linemen and women board their trucks and drive hundreds, even thousands, of miles to begin the vital work of making fallen lines safe and restoring power. Sometimes, they sleep in their vehicles or share what accommodation can be found.

In Florida and North Carolina, electrical workers will labor in dangerous conditions for weeks until the lights come back on and shattered lives again feel the balm of electrical service.

Raise a toast to the men and women who climb the poles in unfamiliar locales, sometimes warding off wild creatures, from snakes to civet cats, which have sought safety from floodwaters up electric poles.

They will be hampered, as will builders and the army of repair people working for a long time because of a supply-chain crisis. This will be felt in every aspect of the restoration in the storm-ravaged areas, but most acutely so in the electric sector.

Much heavy electrical equipment, like large transformers and generators, is bespoke and made-to-order, often in China. This has presented a continuing crisis for some time, which will gain attention as the rebuilding takes place. Even small transformers for poles are in short supply.

Artisans can work around material shortages with ingenuity, but in the electric power systems, that is a limited option. It can’t be fixed with a compromise.

While bending the knees to first responders, let us not forget the reporters, broadcast and print, who brought us the long night of Milton with disregard for personal safety. We saw the rain-soaked TV reporters bending into the wind lashed by rain, standing knee-deep in rising water, and sharing with us the potential lethality of airborne roofs and tree limbs.

They weren’t alone. Behind every reporter is a chain of people from producers to camera operators to sound engineers to those who install and operate emergency generators. And don’t forget the writers, unseen, but on the front lines of the destruction.

The main compensation is the camaraderie of those who respond, those who march into tragedy to save lives and restore normalcy, and those from the Fourth Estate who rush there to tell us all about it.

Get well, Florida, and immeasurable thanks to those on hand to bind your wounds in your night of need and afterward.

I Had a Fall in Paris and Got Amazing Emergency Care

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The dog wasn’t to blame. The lovely Paris night wasn’t to blame. The charming 7th arrondissement wasn’t to blame.

No. It was my old enemy, gravity, that caused the blameless sidewalk to rise up and smite me.

I had thought I was done with gravity. It had frequently interjected itself into my well-being when I was riding horses. Mercifully, it had held its peace when I was flying single-engine aircraft.

However, gravity came back for me, vengefully, I might say, in Paris on Sept. 12.

My wife, Linda Gasparello, and I traveled to France for a meeting on aspects of the future of Europe at the lovely Jean Monnet House, just outside Paris. On the day of our arrival, we checked into our Paris hotel. We were scheduled for a meeting at the French Foreign Ministry the next day, after which we would be transported to the Jean Monnet House in Houjarray.

We were guests at the house because a few years ago, we had filmed a television program about another delightful Monnet house: the one on leafy Foxhall Road in Washington, where Monnet lived during World War II.

Monnet, who worked from an office at the Willard Hotel, was a central figure in the American arms supply operation vital to the Allied effort — and some say he shortened the war by at least a year. After the war, Monnet and French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman became the two principal fathers of what became the European Union.

Back to Paris, where my wife and I were taking a stroll after a snack in the evening. I have been walking with a cane for several years, so I was not too steady to start.

Then came the blameless dog. I leaned over to pet this fine Parisian pooch, and over I went, my head hitting the sidewalk hard. Blood everywhere. The young couple who owned the dog and two young couples visiting from Corsica offered immediate assistance and called an ambulance.

Years earlier, during one of the many attempts to overhaul the U.S. healthcare system. I wrote about the French emergency medical services called Services d’Aide Médicale Urgente (SAMU). I said it was considered the best in Europe. Little did I know that I would investigate it in so personal a way.

I hasten to say that I have built up a huge respect for emergency responders, whether they are part of a volunteer fire department in rural Virginia or the ambulance service in London, where I was a reporter long ago.

But France’s SAMU takes it to another level.

It begins with the first telephone call, where the dispatcher learns what the injury or illness may be, and an ambulance is sent with the appropriate equipment and personnel. Often, a doctor rides in the ambulance.

The trick is that the ambulance is an emergency room, well-equipped and with the right staff. The ambulance that scooped me up had four technicians — I don’t know if one of them was a doctor.

They went to work immediately, taking health information, cleaning the wound, and constantly checking my vital signs.

The result of this spacious emergency-room-on-wheels is that when you get to the hospital, the trauma staff is ready for you. Under the French medical system, there is no producing proof of insurance, no upfront mention of payment, just care.

For me, it felt like checking into a luxury hotel. The trauma center was airy and well-staffed, and although people were being wheeled around on gurneys, there was no sense of this being a place of the sick and suffering, though it was.

Everyone spoke some English, and as my wife speaks French, we had no language barrier — my French falls away the farther I am from a menu.

The doctor, a young woman, spent more than half an hour with me and my wife. Then, I was wheeled into a room for a head scan, and there was no waiting. Indeed, the nurses and technicians were waiting for me.

The doctor explained the scan and gave prescriptions for dressing the wound and pain relief. Amazingly, she walked us to the discharge area and then to a waiting taxi.

France is criticized in the EU for having one of the most expensive medical systems of the 27 countries. I looked up that cost — medicine is a birthright in France — and the result is: Presently, France spends about 12.3 percent of its GDP on health. We spend about 17.3 of our GDP on it. 

Extraordinary Trove of Letters Takes Us Inside the Civil War

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Just when you thought every word that could be written about the Civil War had been written, every book published, along comes an exciting collection of new information.

Such a happening comes as a new book — still seeking a publisher — from Civil War aficionado J. Mark Powell, content manager at InsideSources, a syndication service.

Before electronic recording devices, letters were the eyewitnesses to history. The discovery of a trove of these is a light beamed into the past.

Powell’s book is a compilation he has made in 20 years of seeking, collecting, chasing down, and sometimes buying unpublished letters from the war. He has collated these and provided just enough annotation to make them an easy and engrossing read.

In all there are nearly 500 letters from every social strata affected by the tumult — from a slave to many tender notes between families torn apart and sometimes divided between North and South. It is history in the raw, modified only by Powell’s scholarship and loving curation.

The letters were written between husbands and wives, between lovers, between parents and children, and between brothers. They provide untrammeled truth or truth reflected by the station of the writers.

It is truth that hasn’t been adulterated for political purposes, then or now, as often happens, with the weaponizing of history.

These letters take the reader into the war, its hope and its horror. It is life as it was lived by ordinary people, soldier and wife, mother and child between 1860 and 1865, through the eyes of people who lived the war, and sometimes died.

Powell told me, “This is the first account of its kind, to the best of my knowledge. It is just a completely unique approach.

“This isn’t a textbook recitation of names and dates and places. I tried to capture how it felt to live through those terrible times. The pride, the hopes, the fears, the uncertainty, and even the humor is all in this collation of the letters for those who endured the war on both sides.”

There are no famous names here, no excerpts from famous generals or major historical figures. Rather, these are the everyday people who lived through the war and, in some cases, didn’t survive.

Powell is a seasoned  journalist who worked for  several local TV stations, CNN, and on Capitol Hill before alighting at InsideSources. He is also the author of a novel and has collaborated on another. He has given much of his life to studying the Civil War — a fascination which began as a 10-year-old.

Powell said his work is also a cautionary tale for 2024, “because the war resulted from two sides that had dug in their heels and refused to budge. Very much the same way America is suffering the hardening of the political arteries right now.”

In one letter from his book, a woman named Genevieve Byrne Runyon lost her husband, James, an officer in the 26th Iowa Infantry in 1862. He had been dead for nearly three years when his regiment returned home.

This is her anguish as she related it to her late husband’s brother in a letter dated Dewitt, Iowa, August 18, 1865:

“I suppose you would like to know how I am getting along. I had my father move into my house and I am keeping house for him. Yet I feel like a wanderer looking for someone that I’ll never see again. It feels foolish to be ever complaining, but I cannot help it. I could write forever on the subject.

“How I felt when the remainder of his regiment returned without him, I cannot describe. I felt I had lost him forever on this earth. Now that the cruel war is over and I look back and see the many lonely homes, I wonder what it all meant.”

Powell, who writes the weekly syndicated column “Holy Cow! History,” told me, “I’ve had that letter for over 20 years now, and that last line still haunts me every time I read it.”

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of “White House Chronicle” on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com.

Productivity To Surge with AI. Do the Politicians Know?

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There is every chance that the world’s industrial economies may be about to enjoy an incredible surge in productivity, something like the arrival of steam power in the 18th century.

The driver of this will be artificial intelligence. Gradually, it will seep into every aspect of our working and living, pushing up the amount produced by individual workers and leading to general economic growth.

The downside is that jobs will be eliminated, probably mostly, and historically for the first time, white-collar jobs. Put simply, office workers are going to find themselves seeking other work, maybe work that is much more physical, in everything from hospitality to healthcare to the trades.

I have canvassed many super-thinkers on AI, and they believe in unison that its impact will be seminal, game-changing, never to be switched back. Most are excited and see a better, healthier, more prosperous future, justifying the upheaval.

Omar Hatamleh, chief AI officer at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and author of two books on AI and a third in preparation, misses no opportunity to emphasize that thinking about AI needs to be exponential not linear. Sadly, linear thinking is what we human beings tend to do. To my mind, Hatamleh is in the vanguard of AI thinkers,

The United States is likely to be the major beneficiary of the early waves of AI adoption and its productivity surge if we don’t try to impede the technology’s evolution with premature regulation or controls.

Economies which are sclerotic, as is much of Europe, can look to AI to get them back into growth, especially the former big drivers of growth in Europe like Germany, France and Britain, all of which are scratching their heads as to how to boost their productivity, and, hence, their prosperity.

The danger in Europe is that they will try to regulate AI prematurely and that their trades unions will resist reform of their job markets. That would leave China and the United States to duke it out for dominance of AI technology and to benefit from its boost to efficiency and productivity, and, for example, to medical research, leading to breakthroughs in longevity.

Some of the early fear of Frankenstein science has abated as early AI is being seamlessly introduced in everything from weather forecasting to wildfire control and customer relations. 

Salesforce, a leading software company that has traditionally focused on customer relations management, explains its role as connecting the dots by “layering in” AI. A visit to its website is enlightening. Salesforce has available or is developing “agents,” which are systems that operate on behalf of its customers.

If you want to know how your industry is likely to be affected, take a look at how much data it generates. If it generates scads of data — weather forecasting, electric utilities, healthcare, retailing and airlines — AI is either already making inroads or brace for its arrival. 

PFor society, the big challenge of AI isn’t going to be just the reshuffling of the workforce, but what is truth? This is not a casual question, and it should be at the forefront of wondering how to develop ways of identifying the origin of AI-generated information — data, pictures and sounds.

One way is watermarking, and it deserves all the support it can get from those who are leading the AI revolution –the big tech giants and the small startups that feed into their technology. It begs for study in the government’s many centers of research, including the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the great national laboratories.

Extraordinarily, as the election bears down on us, there is almost no recognition in the political parties, and the political class as a whole, that we are on the threshold of a revolution. AI is a disruptive technology that holds promise for fabulous medicine, great science and huge productivity gains.

A new epoch is at hand, and it has nothing to do with the political issues of the day.

Please Note: I will be hosting a virtual press briefing, which I have organized for the United States Energy Association, on the impact of AI in the electric utility industry on Wednesday, Oct. 2, at 11 a.m. EDT. It is open to the press and the public.

Here is the registration link: 

https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_BbE_VO1bRo2PuiVl6g8IzQ#/registration

I’m Not Old — I Just Remember Other Things

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I am approaching what may be thought of as a significant birthday next month. I’m not sure what makes it significant except the number attached to it.

If we don’t know how old we are, most people, including the elderly, will think they are younger, even if they have arthritic knees. If they take a morning cocktail of pills, they will still think they are much younger than the calendar dictates.

So, here is my guide to knowing, empirically, how old you are. You are old if …

—You remember when all restaurants served half a grapefruit with half a maraschino cherry placed in the middle.

—You remember when restaurants had relish carts with things like watermelon pickles and herring in sour cream.

—You remember a whole class of singers called crooners and you still get a bit weepy when you hear their songs.

—You remember when men’s trousers had buttons instead of zippers.

—You remember when women wore girdles with attachments for stockings.

—You remember when cars had little arms for turn signals, called trafficators, that wouldn’t go up at speed.

—You remember when airline tickets were as good as currency and could easily be exchanged or sold back.

—You remember when flying was a pleasure, even in coach, and you felt pampered, not herded.

—You remember when hotel rooms were rented for fixed prices, and those were posted.

—You remember when sneakers were all white and for tennis.

—You remember when men wore hats and baseball caps were worn just to play baseball.

—You remember when women wore hats and gloves to church.

—You remember when men wore suits to church or just put them on so their neighbors thought they had been at worship.

—You remember when birth control, if available, was with condoms, known as rubbers, and kept under the counter at drugstores.

—You remember when drugstores also had lunch counters.

—You remember soda fountains.

—You remember when Coca-Cola came only in a 6-ounce bottle and tasted better because it had cane sugar and the bottle seemed to concentrate the carbonation. Also, it cost a dime.

—You remember five-and-dime stores where some things really cost only a dime.

—You remember when shopping centers were novel and a place to visit.

—You remember when going to the movies was an occasion. An usher showed you to your seat with a flashlight. And a popcorn, ice cream and candy vendor walked up and down the theater aisles.

—You remember when cigarettes were offered at dinner and ashtrays were part of the table setting.

—You remember when Americans didn’t drink wine, and only glasses for hard liquor were on formal dinner tables.

—You remember when ethnic food was Hunan Chinese, often called Polynesian, and French food wasn’t regarded as ethnic, simply hard to pronounce.

—You remember a time when comfort wasn’t important to you, when you didn’t ask, “Are the beds comfortable?” And when on a road trip, you didn’t expect to sit in the front seat because “it is more comfortable.”

Recently, a woman — who had been to a few rodeos herself — looked at me and said, “You’ve got age on you.” I was about to remonstrate, but I realized that while her manners were wanting, her eyesight wasn’t.

Therefore, I shall be bowing to the calendar and, after next month, I will gladly let people hold doors for me, help me with grocery bags, and offer a chair when there is a lot of standing about going on.

My wife is taking me to Montreal for the big day, but I plan to treat it as nothing to do with moi. Other people get old. They always have — as I remember.

Coming in AI: ‘Agents’ You Can Speak with Conversationally

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The next big wave in artificial intelligence innovation is at hand: agents.

With agents, the usefulness of AI will increase exponentially and enable businesses and governments to streamline their operations while making them more dependable, efficient and adaptable to circumstance, according to Satya Nitta, co-founder and CEO of Emergence, the futuristic New York-based computer company.

These are the first AI systems that can speak with humans and each other conversationally, which may reduce some of the anxiety people feel about AI — this unseen force set to transform our world. These agents use AI to perceive their environment, make decisions, take actions and achieve goals autonomously, Nitta said.

The term “situational awareness” could have been created for agents because that is the key to their effectiveness.

For example, an autonomous vehicle needs a lot of awareness to be safe and operate effectively. It needs every bit of real-time knowledge that a human driver needs on the roadway, including scanning traffic on all sides of the vehicle, looking out for an approaching emergency vehicle or a child who might dash into the road, or sensing a drunk driver.

Emergence is a well-funded startup aiming to help big companies and governments by designing and deploying agents for their most complex operations. It is, perhaps, easier to see how an agent might work for an individual and then extrapolate that for a large system, Nitta suggested.

Take a family vacation. If you were using an agent to manage your vacation, it would have to have been fed some of your preferences and be able to develop others. With these to the fore, the agent would book your trip, or as much of it as you wished to hand to the agent.

The agent would know your travel budget, hotel preferences and the amusements that would interest your family. It would do some deductive reasoning to allow for what you could afford and balance that with what is available. You could discuss your itinerary with the agent as though it were a travel consultant.

Nitta and Emergence are designing agents to manage the needs of organizations, such as electric utilities and their grids, and government departments, like education and healthcare. Emergence, along with several other AI companies and researchers, has signed a pledge not to work on AI for military applications, Nitta said.

Talking about agents built on open-source Large Language Models and Large Vision Models, Nitta said, “Agents are building blocks which can communicate with each other and with humans in natural language, can control tools and can perform actions in the digital or the physical world.”

Nitta explained further, “Agents have some functional capacity. To plan, reason and remember. They are the foundations upon which scalable, intelligent systems can be built. Such systems, composed of one or more agents, can profoundly reshape our ideas of what computers can do for humanity.”

This prospect inspired the creation of Emergence and caused private investors to plow $100 million in equity funding into the venture and lenders to pledge lines of credit of an additional $30 million.

Part of the appeal of Emergence’s agents is that they will be voice-directed and you can talk to them as you would to a fellow worker or employee, to reason with them, perhaps.

Nitta said that, historically, there have been barriers to the emergence of voice fully interfacing with computing. And, he said, there has been an inability of computers to perform more than one assignment at a time. Agents will overcome these blockages.

Nitta’s agents will do enormously complex things like scheduling the inputs into an electricity grid from multiple small generators or calculating weather, currents and the endurance of fishing boats and historical fish migration patterns to help fishermen.

At the same time, they will be adjusting to changes in their environment, say, for the grid, a windstorm, or the fish are turning south, not east, as expected, or if the wholesale price of fish has dropped to change the economics of the endeavor.

To laymen and to those who have been awed by the seeming impregnable world of AI, Emergence and its agent systems are reassuring because you will be able to talk to the agents, quite possibly in colloquial English or any other language.

I feel better about AI already — AI will speak English if Nitta and his polymaths are right. AI, we should talk.

How NIMBYism Is Strangling America

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Like fog, it creeps in, but unlike fog, it doesn’t dissipate. It gets denser and does untold damage to the economy and Americans’ lives.

It is that modern plague, known as much by its acronym as by its phrase: NIMBY, “not in my backyard.” It is the mantra of everyone who wants wherever they are to remain as it is — in perpetuity.

It is, in part, behind the crisis in electricity transmission, the lack of much-needed natural gas and oil pipelines, unbuilt but needed highways, and is a player in environmental injustice.

NIMBYism has also contributed to the housing crisis. It makes it so hard to build anything that disturbs the serenity of those who live in leafy suburbs with manicured lawns, and, perhaps, designer dogs. Yes, people like me — even though I can’t afford one of those homes or dogs.

If you are living the American Dream — two cars, swell house, well-tended garden — you are almost certainly a passive NIMBY contributor.

Active NIMBYs, abetted by the local ordinances that make life pleasant for the urban and suburban elites, fear that new housing will bring things they abhor: traffic, crowding, pollution and people of a different social class.

Desperately needed apartments and even mother-in-law houses or extensions are denied, contributing substantially to the national housing crisis.

It is easy to identify the effect of NIMBYism in housing. Still, it is at work countrywide, restricting, redirecting and forcing the abandonment of projects.

Power lines aren’t constructed, natural gas isn’t moved, road plans are abandoned, and unwanted facilities like prisons, factories and slaughterhouses are inflicted on poor areas, often rural, where the locals are bribed with job promises or don’t have the sophistication or resources to turn up opposition with media, litigation and political influence.

In Rhode Island, in the last several years, I have seen opposition mounted against a fish farm, offshore windmills, a medical waste disposal facility and various housing developments. “Put it somewhere else” is the collective cry.

So, the medical waste facility will go to an area where residents are less likely to object, not where it is needed, adding transportation costs; the power will be generated somewhere else, or there will be a shortfall; and Rhode Islanders, under a modified plan, may eventually get oysters farmed in the Sakonnet River.

The distorting effects of NIMBYism aren’t just an American burden. In Europe, they are as bad or worse.

For a long time, the Economist has been writing about how hidebound Britain has become by the prevalence of a culture of “don’t change anything.” The magazine has often pointed out that Britain has become a place where it is impossible to get anything done.

I can attest to that. A family member lived in a not very impressive — actually ugly — apartment block, built in the 1930s, near London.

As was done at that time to save money, all the water and sewer pipes were external, running along the walls on the outside. I mention the pipes only to point out that this building wasn’t lovely or a significant piece of English architecture. It was just a utilitarian block of flats. 

Yet, local ordinances designed to preserve the historic and beautiful buildings prohibited the residents from replacing old, leaky, wood-framed windows with modern, metal-framed ones. Preservation run amok is stultifying.

Not every project — either big, like a power plant, or small, like an apartment adjoining a house for an aging relative — is right for a community. But when local selfishness transcends a national need, some revision is needed.

Certainly, industrial companies, real estate developers and utilities shouldn’t be entitled to overrule local people axiomatically. Still, when the national interest is held hostage to local preference, there is a problem.

Take the long-planned and abandoned after completion nuclear waste storage site in Yucca Mountain, Nevada. It was abandoned because of well-orchestrated opposition. Result: nuclear waste is now temporarily stored above ground, near where it is created — as much a product of NIMBYism as the housing shortage.

The British have another acronym for what happened to Yucca Mountain: DADA, “decide, announce, defend, abandon.”