White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

The Collision Between Money and News — We Lose

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Trillions, as in trillions of dollars, are being bandied about in the way millions were, then billions. But take a look at 1 trillion expressed numerically: 1,000,000,000,000. Awesome, isn’t it? Twelve zeros.

The national debt stands at $39 trillion, and the interest on that will top $1 trillion this year. Very soon, the first trillionaire will thunder past the post, presumably Elon Musk.

I have nothing against Musk. And I have nothing against successful people being rewarded for their talent.

Musk has done enormous things. An immigrant, he made his first fortune with PayPal. Since then, he has given the United States the solar revolution, the electric car, and a viable heavy-lift rocket that has made space exploration cheaper than when NASA alone was at the controls. His Boring Co. still holds promise.

It is assumed, as so often, that because a person is good at one thing, that same person must be good at everything else. Whoa! Musk’s limits as a manager and a visionary were exposed when he barged about streamlining the government for President Trump.

It was a case of a bridge too far for Musk. A disaster for America that eroded privacy, critically wounded many departments and saved no money.

Whereas much of what Musk has achieved has been beneficial, his purchase of Twitter, rebranded as X, was evidence of the harm that accompanies gigantic wealth. He wanted to control not just the medium, but also the news.

Musk — although it isn’t good that he has taken steps to control the message with X — isn’t the problem facing the media and the public’s right to know. When so much money is floating around, press freedom is in trouble.

The immediate threat comes not from Musk, but from two other men of gargantuan wealth: Larry Ellison, co-founder of the tech firm Oracle Corp., whose personal net worth is estimated at $245 billion, and his son, David.

Together, they are set to control the media to an extent not imagined and never seen. The media titans of yesteryear — Pulitzer, Hearst, Luce, Thompson, Sulzberger, Graham and Murdoch — are knee-high to the fearsome power that the Ellisons have, and which will more than double if (and it is more when than if) the merger of their Paramount Skydance Corp. with Warner Bros. Discovery is approved by regulators.

At present, the Ellisons control the CBS Television Network, CBS Sports, MTV, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, Paramount Network and BET. They control CBS News, and Paramount+, which has 79 million streaming subscribers.

If the merger goes through, they will control CNN, HBO Max and Warner Bros. Studios — a treasure trove of entertainment.

In short, they will control a huge swath of American broadcast news, information dissemination, and movie and television culture.

Their declared purpose is to incorporate more technology and more AI across their astounding current and probably future empire. That is bad for journalism and worse for movies. The invasion of the bots.

I know how media control works. I have seen it firsthand: It isn’t what is said, but what is implied or what employees feel the owners of the outlet want. A casual remark can become policy; a hint of preference can become a hard rule.

If an Ellison family member were — of course, this is hypothetical — to say they hated rhubarb, you could bet the Food Network wouldn’t do a show episode on rhubarb pie making. If it were known that one of the owners of Paramount was a booster of nuclear power, movies such as “The China Syndrome” and “Silkwood” would never have been made.

In journalism, the story that isn’t covered is as important as the one that is covered. If a disease caused by a common product — asbestos is a good example — isn’t covered because the staff has heard that the media owners love that product or is invested in it, then you can bet it won’t be covered.

Consolidated corporate ownership is antithetical to free speech, creativity and open government. No news is bad news.

News isn’t suited to the corporate world; it isn’t a fit with those whose interest is adding zeros to bottom lines. It is the pursuit by an irregular army of often eccentric individuals, who turn over stones to find out what is beneath.

Likewise, individual ownership furthers the news objective, which for me was summed up by something Dan Raviv said when he was a correspondent for CBS Radio (recently shuttered by the Ellisons): “My job is simple. I try to find out what is going on and tell people.” 

Write that in the corporate prospectus.

News organizations need to be owned by news people, like Ted Turner, Bill Paley and, yes, Rupert Murdoch.

AI Is Interested in You, So You’d Best Be Interested in It

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AI is everywhere. It is now affecting how people do their jobs and those jobs themselves.

The future is clearly with those who have found a way of making themselves indispensable by using AI, and not with those who resist or actively fight it. You may not be interested in AI, but AI is interested in you.

Even in jobs considered safe from automation, AI is shaping daily work, from running a hospital nurses’ station to helping an electrician check available replacement equipment.

I mention those two jobs because they are the most frequently listed as being secure and unlikely to be taken over by AI. That doesn’t mean they won’t be touched by the unseen hand of AI. It is everywhere and on the move.

Graduates now leaving the colleges and universities are having a tough time finding work. Many workers who thought they were set for life are refining their resumes, particularly those in the computer field.

Meta, owner of Facebook, has laid off 8,000 workers, and an additional 7,000 will be reassigned to AI-focused positions.

The job market isn’t only reflecting AI doing the work across industries, but also the immeasurable hesitation of companies to hire for jobs that may later be taken over by AI. “ Better to hold on and see” is a common attitude in firms that aren’t sure whether AI will, in fact, help them meet their needs.

Many savants in the AI industry have warned of job losses across the employment landscape as AI takes hold. These include Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and Open AI’s Sam Altman. The Economist writes about a job “catastrophe.”

My view, shared by many I have interviewed, is that there will be a sharp global drop in employment, followed by a post-revolution expansion of employment that allows for the flourishing of AI and its benefits. Open AI’s Altman has predicted a similar scenario, but he hasn’t identified when the upturn might occur — in years or decades?

There are those who believe that governments will have to provide a universal basic income to compensate for the inroads of AI. Unlikely.

The first impediment is that all the advanced countries are already spending beyond their means, including the United States and the United Kingdom. Where will the new money come from with fewer people paying taxes?

Affordability is only the first argument against a universal basic income. People are built to work. Without work, they get into trouble, deteriorate or go mad. Possibly all three.

The United Kingdom, which has many programs for the unemployed, is something of a laboratory on how not to help the jobless. A lot of people there simply haven’t tried working in a long time.

Collectively, UK social assistance programs are known as “benefits” and extend well beyond a substitute for a paycheck. They take care of everything from assisting with rent to, in some cases, assisting with entertainment.

My experience in interviewing and just knowing people who haven’t worked for a long time is that they are rootless, critical of the system that supports them and inclined to take drugs, drink or fall victim to mental illness.

Instead of state subsidies, we will likely see the gig economy boom — and it should be helped — and human creativity will flourish with it.

For that to happen, the political leadership, Democratic or Republican, needs to catch up with the fact that we may be entering into a new economic order where the old idea of employment is reduced, and waves of individual entrepreneurs are unleashed, doing everything from, say, creating new musical instruments to designing new homes from waste products, to restoring forests without uniformity.

Omar Hatamleh, who has written five books on AI, said that the challenge of AI is that it is exponential, and we think linearly. My hope is that the AI upheaval will inadvertently convert us from linear to exponential thinkers.

The political class has been notably missing from the AI fray aside from mumbling about regulating AI, which won’t help job creation.

It seems that making gig work easier and safer might be a good beginning. All the indications are that more of us will be working for ourselves going forward. The gig worker ought to be able to easily purchase Social Security insurance and access its benefits, including retirement.

It is a new time for the human race. It would be wonderful to feel that the politicians were aware of it.

We are in a political year, and AI isn’t a subject being debated, let alone eliciting new ideas. AI won’t wait.

In the Turmoil, Challenges for Graduates in the Class of ’26

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Dear Graduates of 2026,

Welcome to the world you will be taking jobs in and where you will begin building careers, and at times shaping history.

It isn’t the world of your parents, and it isn’t the world your college has taught you about, because it is changing too fast. It begins anew daily. As Maya Angelou said, “This is a wonderful day. I haven’t seen this one before.”

There are three big forces looming on the horizon that will shape your world and that you will play a role in shaping. They are technology, specifically AI; politics, the harsher politics of today; and the environment, which is eventually everything.

AI will have an effect that defies comprehension — it is so enormous. It is also evolving so fast that it keeps slipping out of your grasp.

“It is exponential, and human thinking is linear.” So said one of the foremost thinkers about AI, Omar Hatamleh, former head of AI at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. He has written five books on AI.

All that is absolutely, definitely and incontrovertibly known is that AI will affect everything. It will change how we work, play and learn. It will change how we mate, think and expect.

Graduates, you will come to realize that political action and speech have changed from what they were. Both are out of the guide rails that have served them well over time.

Authoritarianism has taken root in America, and it will be hard to pull out. The bureaucracy has been politicized. There has been an expansion of presidential power over areas constitutionally assigned to Congress, under the watch of an accommodating Supreme Court.

There are troops on American streets, political searches and seizures, arrests and indictments, and deportations without due process. All this was unleashed with the Republicans. When Democrats take power, will they put the evil genie of unconstitutional government back in its bottle?

Domestic politics has also changed our relations to the world — a world where America, Canada and Europe stood together, sharing a common heritage and a common view of law, and savoring a shared peace in Europe until Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, and set in motion four years of bloody fighting.

Could we have done more? Yes, more weapons, more money, and less acceptance of Putin. Maybe troops, too.

We didn’t, and that has changed the world. Free countries now know that America won’t axiomatically have their backs. That time is past and will have major geopolitical consequences.

Internationally, the big, open American hand has been closing as it has curtailed or ended participation in international institutions from NATO to the World Health Organization to the Paris climate agreement. The arbitrary closing of USAID was a declaration of withdrawal from the world and from the exercise of soft power as a diplomatic tool.

Another challenge for future Americans as they grow into adulthood: They will live in a more dangerous world with fewer friends. Hubris is an expensive luxury.

They may also not live in a world where the climate is as predictable as it once was. Already aberrant, unpredictable weather is the norm with hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and tinder-dry regions.

Politicians may deny that the climate is changing, but the evidence is there. Sea levels are rising, city streets are flooding, and beachfront homes are being swept away. Hurricanes and tornadoes, part of our usual weather cycle, are getting more severe. Drought and floods, recurring phenomena, are worsening.

Texas and the Southwest, which have long attracted working and retired residents, are facing prolonged droughts and water shortages that will curb future growth.

Dealing with the environment is a challenge that AI may meet quite dramatically. Its ability to predict, organize and find the exit in dense data is without peer.

Graduates, as the generation coming of age in 2026, you shouldn’t fear AI; rather, you should throw yourselves at it and learn what it can do for you. Gradually, it will be understood, regulated and you will come to terms with it as a tool, not an aggressor.

We have left you a messy world, but it was always that way.

Over two and a half centuries, America has absorbed and changed. Along the way — including civil war — it produced a society in which there is still opportunity; there is still freedom, although the door may be closing; and much has been perfected here.

Remember, more people live better in the world today because of America, its ideas, its inventions and its heart. Go forth and be that American.

Don’t Let AI Get Away Without Helping You: Iterate

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I haven’t had a good relationship with the Age of Computing. I don’t understand computers, but I believe they understand me. And that is the problem.

The first time I used an ATM machine, I expected it to sneer at my balance — and to do it aloud, so everyone in range could hear. It didn’t, but I kept my doubts.

Fast-forward to the Age of Artificial Intelligence. I have been writing and broadcasting about AI with brio, traveling to conferences across the United States and Europe, and questioning the great and knowledgeable in giant tech companies and universities. I have put these experts on television and quoted them in columns.

When it comes to my own use of AI, I am in fear. I was worried about ATMs, but I have been trembling before AI and its awesomeness.

Now, a professor at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin has guided me, and I am at peace with AI.

I thought, until my recent epiphany, that the AI assistants would laugh at my puerile prompts and resent me bothering them. Assiduously, I have been saying “please” and “thank you” to all the AI assistants, even China’s DeepSeek.

I was sure that, at some level, ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Grok and Gemini were in cahoots; that no matter which assistant I used, these AI masters of the universe had a file on me and it was loaded with derisive comments like “He is pea-brained” and “He doesn’t have a pot to tinkle in.”

Not now. Not since I read an article in the Harvard Business Review, authored by Nicholas Jennings Hallman, the brilliant accounting professor at UT’s McCombs School of Business. He is also the school’s senior scholar for AI initiatives.

Hallman has been studying, in partnership with the giant accounting and consulting firm KPMG, how workers are using AI. Conclusion: They are way underusing it.  Most workers and recreational users are just skimming the surface of what AI can do to help them. They are turning on the car’s engine without going anywhere.

Resoundingly, Hallman and KPMG found in their study that workers used AI assistants, for example, to draft an email or solve a minor problem. But if the AI assistant they used didn’t provide the answer they were seeking, they either gave up or thought there wasn’t an answer.

Hallman’s answer is to “iterate.” Keep asking, push AI assistants to do better, and they will. It can be the main show, not a side event.

In a recent appearance on “White House Chronicle” on PBS (whchronicle.com), he said, “Some of what we found in the work we’ve done here with KPMG is that the most productive users are those who ask a question often and get back a less-than-satisfactory response, but they iterate until they get back something that is satisfactory and learn along the way — so that the next time, they can get the same satisfactory response with fewer iterations.”

Hallman urged: Don’t be afraid of how often you ask a question or modify it.

Too many workers, a majority, according to the UT/KPMG study, are prepared to accept one-and-done rather than pushing an AI assistant for more. Hallman also said users should give an AI assistant enough to work with. State the task in a way that authorizes it to dig deeper.

When “White House Chronicle” co-host Adam Clayton Powell III asked about security, reminding Hallman that emails, which were never supposed to be public, can end up in the wrong hands, Hallman said there is little chance of your privacy being violated by AI use or of your interactions with AI going public. Also, he said, there are security measures that a corporation or sensitive user can employ, including using a modified AI assistant or totally disengaging from the wider net.

Hallman doesn’t recommend that workers use voice interaction with AI. He said he has found it is less efficient and the answers tend to be more superficial.

However, Hallman said that when driving long distances, he uses voice-activated AI to learn about subjects he knows little about. He said he did this with black holes in space because he wanted to know more about them.

Many leaders in the AI firmament, including former IBM CEO Ginni Rometty, have said that AI  won’t replace humans, but those who use AI will replace those who don’t.

Clearly, the unsaid thing isn’t that you use AI, but how well you use it. It isn’t enough to ask one question, as Hallman said. You must make AI work for you if you plan to stay in work yourself.

Women Face Massive Layoffs as AI Use Spreads in the U.S.

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March is Women’s History Month and a time to take a look at how women are progressing, or otherwise.

Alas, the news for women in the United States isn’t good, and the future is foreboding as they are about to lose 6 million jobs to artificial intelligence. Work traditionally done by women — secretaries, receptionists, payroll clerks and customer service representatives — is likely to lose jobs. Except for healthcare, semi-skilled workers are the most vulnerable.

I must confess to a longtime interest in the women’s movement, particularly the path of women in journalism. In 1964, in New York, my first wife, Doreen, a stupendously gifted English journalist, and I created what we liked to believe was the very first women’s liberation magazine. Ms., co-founded by Gloria Steinem, didn’t launch until 1971.

Our magazine was “Women Now,” and we only got out one issue before we ran out of money. As I have said often, “It didn’t liberate any women but liberated all of our money,” which was utterly insufficient for the undertaking. However, I remained interested in the progress of women in society.

When I was at The Washington Post about six years later, I was elected president of the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild. Women’s rights and their path in journalism were on the agenda, propelled as much by our talented business agent, Brian Flores, as by me.

The guild held conferences (including a national one in Chicago), formed study groups, and made the path of women an issue at the bargaining table. The Post’s editor, Ben Bradlee, asked if I was doing this “to improve my love life.” I wasn’t, and it didn’t.

Women could write themselves to glory, but it was a lot harder from the women’s pages or if you weren’t considered for reasons of your sex for a foreign assignment or war coverage. However, I think Marguerite Higgins, Martha Gellhorn and Dorothy Kilgallen were towering talents who circled above their contemporaries, male and female.

In the time I have been watching women’s issues, I have seen great progress and now backsliding.

I have seen progress in the numbers of women editors, film directors, board members and company heads. Yet many women are hired, I believe, because it is possible to pay them less, on the assumption that they will be supported by a partner or husband. The old thinking.

In the 1960s in Britain, jobs were advertised with one salary for men and another, a lower one, for women for the same work. In that sense, things have improved. But women worldwide are still losing ground in abhorrent ways. They encounter gender oppression, including honor killings in Muslim societies, female circumcision in parts of Africa, and femicide in some Caribbean and Latin American countries.

In the democracies, there is a backward movement for women as the bad ways of old are championed as “conservative” or “traditional.” Worse, reproductive rights have been scaled back or denied, and overt efforts to promote equality have been prohibited.

The unwelcome news isn’t at an end: Enter AI.

Several studies, including those by the United Nations and McKinsey & Co., conclude that women will bear the brunt of the first American AI-induced layoffs. This will be felt between now and 2030, and as many as 6 million women may have to find new jobs or quit the job market altogether.

In the years ahead, it is going to be harder for women than men as the first waves of what I call the “AI adjustment” hit the workplace. The political class needs to absorb this reality and to start thinking about the nature of work when AI starts snatching jobs by the millions.

So far, political talk has been to eschew the looming future — a future that, initially at least, threatens women most.

Women’s history is about to have a new chapter written.

Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, Including at the Tech Giants

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For me, the most remarkable thing about Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg’s appearance at a Los Angeles court, to answer questions about the addictive aspects of social media, was that he was there at 8:30 a.m. wearing a suit.

Sarah Wynn-Williams, in her excellent book about Facebook, “Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed and Lost Idealism,” said Zuckerberg doesn’t see anyone before noon because he has to sleep, having been up most of the night.

This had Wynn-Williams, who rose to head Facebook’s international relations team, sometimes telling heads of state that they would have to wait for the great man to alight from his bed at noon or later.

Zuckerberg could be uninterested or uninformed about the country from which he was trying to get favors for Facebook, she wrote. As Facebook had electorates in its thrall, countries’ leaders were prepared to defer to the sleeping titan.

This doesn’t mean that Zuckerberg is evil, but it does point to enormous self-regard. His sleeping routine is a de facto declaration: I am so rich and so powerful that I can command world leaders to rearrange their schedules to accommodate mine. They did, according to Wynn-Williams.

While the venerable observation by Lord Acton in 1887 that “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” is nearly always directed at politicians and autocrats, it is as true for billionaires and their companies.

More so with the tech gargantuans who are a force in the financial markets and politics, and will control much of the future if their investments in artificial intelligence pay off. Among them are Meta (Facebook), Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, Nvidia, Microsoft, Tesla, Anthropic and OpenAI.

Another point Wynn-Williams made in her book is that most of the heads of state whom Zuckerberg treated with minimal respect won’t be in power in 10 years, but Zuckerberg, who is 41, may be around for half a century. The long game is his, along with his colleague-companies and their CEOs, especially when they own a commanding amount of the stock, like Tesla’s Elon Musk.

The effect of Big Tech as a lobbying force is apparent: Any CEO has access to the White House and is, in turn, cultivated by it. Congress has a permanent welcome mat out to Big Tech lobbyists and their campaign contributions.

A more damaging impact might be what Big Tech does to new tech.

The biggies buy up every startup that looks as though it might become a mega company. All of the Big Tech companies are conglomerates, and history has shown that conglomerates discard unprofitable enterprises and favor the cash cows. Tech autocracy is no kinder than any other autocracy.

Startups are what keep America ahead of the world in tech, and they are keenly watched for any sign that they may grow into another agent of change. Whereas at the beginning of the tech boom, successful startups headed for an initial public offering, and now they calculate from the get-go which behemoth tech company will buy them. The circle is closed.

The big get bigger, and the startup is absorbed into a giant organization, where it might prosper or whither. Either way, it is out of reach, including regulatory reach. It is in the castle walls.

As we see with the fate of CBS and The Washington Post, Big Tech can play havoc with the media and our right to know what is going on. The money is so large that it is almost impossible for politicians not to seek the favor of the mighty techs and their Vesuvian cash flow.

The obverse of that is what they might do if they overreach, as they may be doing now with AI investments, and bring down the stock market.

Big Tech has showered us with wonders that have made life easier and fun, but there is a price. The price is that we have handed the future to a group of companies that, understandably, are interested in self-preservation first, as with all autocracy.

The Robots Are Coming — Sooner Than You Think

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The next big thing is robots. They are, you might say, on the move.

Within five years, robots will be doing a lot of things that people now do. Simple repetitive work, for example, is doomed.

Already, robots weld, bolt and paint cars and trucks. The factory of the future will have very few human workers. Amazon distribution centers are almost entirely robot domains. Robots search the shelves, grab items, pack and send them to you — often seconds after you have placed your order.

Of course, these orders will be delivered in vans, which must be loaded carefully, even scientifically. The first out must be the last in; small items must nestle with large ones. Space is at a premium, so robotic brains will do the sorting and packing swiftly, efficiently and inexpensively.

Very soon, the van will be self-driving: a robot capable of navigating the traffic and finding your home. At first, it may not get further in the delivery chain than calling you to say that your package has arrived. Eventually, humanoid robots may ride in the vans and, yes, hand your package to you. No tipping, please.

When we think about robots, we tend to think of the robots that look like us. The internet is full of clips of them climbing stairs, playing sports and doing backflips.

There are reasons for humanoid robots: They are less intimidating with their humanlike heads, two arms with hands and two legs with feet than a machine with many arms or legs. Also, most of the tasks the robot is taking over are done by humans. The tasks are fitted to people, such as pumping gas, preparing vegetables or painting a wall.

The first big incursion may be robotaxis. Waymo taxis are already operating in five cities, and the company has plans to roll them out in 19 cities. Several cities are concerned about safety, including Houston and Seattle, and want to ban them. But there are state-city jurisdictional issues about implementing bans.

A likely scenario, as with other bans, is that the development will go elsewhere. Travelers tend to eschew places where Uber and Lyft aren’t allowed to operate in favor of those where they are.

You are already dealing with robots when you talk to a digital assistant at an airline, a bank, a credit card or insurance company, or any business where you call a helpline. That soothing, friendly voice that comes on immediately and asks practical questions may be a robot: the unseen voice of artificial intelligence.

In the years I have been writing about AI and its impact on society, I have consistently heard the AI revolution and its impact on jobs compared with the Industrial Revolution and automation. The one led to the other and in the end, many new jobs and whole new ecosystems flourished.

It isn’t clear that this will happen again and if so on what timetable. A lot of jobs are already in danger, from file clerks to delivery and taxi drivers, from warehouse workers to longshoremen.

AI is also changing the tech world. A whole new tier of companies is emerging to carry forward the AI-robot revolution. These are companies that make robots; companies that write software, which will give robots brainpower; and companies that will have a workforce that maintains robots.

These emerging companies will need a workforce with a different set of skills — skills that will keep the new AI economy humming.

What is missing is any sense that the political class has grasped the tsunami of change that is about to break over the nation. In just a few years, you may be riding in a robotaxi, watching a humanoid robot doing yard work or lying on a couch and chatting with your robot psychiatrist.

Our species is adaptable, and we have adapted everything from the wheel to the steam engine to electricity to the internet. And we have prospered.

Time to think about how to prosper with AI and its robots.

The Billionaires Will Rule Down Through the Generations

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Sarah Wynn-Williams’ book “Careless People” takes aim at Facebook (parent company Meta) and tells a tale of its potentate, Mark Zuckerberg, as a man who is sought after by the great and the powerful and who lacks social consciousness or real interest in anything beyond himself and his company.

Wynn-Williams is the New Zealander who went to lengths to get hired at Facebook because she believed in its ability to do good. She ended up in the company’s inner circle of management as director of global public policy.

Zuckerberg was of keen interest to heads of state because of Facebook’s influence in their countries. A meeting with Zuckerberg would confer status on them, even if they were the heads of quite important nations.

Additionally, they were paying homage to wealth, something that happens throughout society. If you are rich enough, you get the bended-knee treatment.

It occurs to Wynn-Williams, while once looking at these leaders, sitting around a table, waiting for Zuckerberg (he doesn’t get out of bed before noon for anyone), that none of them will be in power in a decade, but Zuckerberg will still be there.

That is sobering.

We live in a time of billionaires, and their impact shouldn’t be minimized. Nor should the impact of their billions down through the generations.

The heirs to today’s billions will shape the future for decades, possibly centuries.

Money has staying power. In the 1700s, the Grosvenor family began developing property in what is now the West End of London, the most exclusive area which includes Mayfair and Belgravia. The duke of Westminster, heir to the Grosvenor fortune, still owns large amounts of some of the most expensive real estate in the world.

In the last century, some very wealthy people lost their money, but none of them had the kind of wealth we are talking about today.

Huntington Hartford, heir to the A&P grocery chain fortune, and Barbara Hutton, who inherited part of the Woolworth five-and-dime store fortune, both squandered enormous amounts and ended up nearly broke.

Today’s fortunes are so much larger that even if the same mistakes were made with inflation-adjusted dollars, large fortunes would remain, fortunes that will be heard from as the heirs take charge.

Wynn-Williams, in her very readable book — which The Economist listed as one of the best reads of 2025 — paints a picture of the extraordinary power of Zuckerberg and his money: power that seeks only extension and self-perpetuation. Zuckerberg emerges as shallow, self-centered and self-regarding.

My take is that the inherited wealth story this time is different. It is different, say, from the railroad oligarchs.

They sought control of the railway technology which had made them rich. The new tech giants seek to control new technology as it is invented: to scoop up startups, so long as they promise tech dominance. Think of Facebook and WhatsApp.

The current attempt by Zuckerberg to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on AI is an attempt to secure for himself and his family the same status in the future as he has in the present.

Leaders come and go, but money goes on forever.

There are over 1,100 American billionaires today who accumulated their wealth in their lifetimes, although some may have had a running start from family, such as Rupert Murdoch.

As this wealth — more money than the world has ever seen — moves down through the generations, it will have an ever-present impact on how we live and how we are governed.

The Washington Post has done some revelatory reporting on the impact of the richest people in politics. Mostly they support Republicans, in the belief that that will be the best way of protecting their wealth, according to the Post.

To the left of the political stage, there is always talk of wealth taxes or, as might be said in private, “soaking the rich.” This is easy to say and hard to do.

Punitive taxation sends money flooding overseas and its owners changing their abodes. Switzerland, Monaco, the Channel Islands and other offshore destinations make billions and their owners feel welcome.

Benjamin Disraeli, who was to become prime minister as a Conservative, said in his 1845 novel “Sybil” that Britain had become two nations: the rich and the poor.

In the United States, we are becoming three nations: the ultra-rich, the comfortable and the lamentably poor. Is this the American dream or the beginning of a long, sleepless, distorted night?

Can AI Clean Its Own House? There Are Signs It Can

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For me, the big news isn’t the politics of the moment, the deliberations before the Supreme Court or even the news of the battlefront in Ukraine. No, it is a rather modest, careful announcement by Anthropic, the developer of the Claude suite of chatbots.

Anthropic, almost sotto voce, announced it had detected introspection in their models. Introspection.

This means, experts point out, that artificial intelligence is adjusting and examining itself, not thinking. But I don’t believe this should diminish its importance. It is a small step toward what may lead to self-correction in AI, taking away some of the craziness.

There is much that is still speculation — and a great deal more that we don’t know about what the neural networks are capable of as they interact.

We don’t know, for example, why AI hallucinates (goes illogically crazy). We also don’t know why it is obsequious (tries to give answers that please).

I think the cautious Anthropic announcement is a step in justification of a theory about AI that I have held for some time: AI is capable of self-policing and may develop guidelines for itself.

A bit insane? Most experts have told me that AI isn’t capable of thinking. But I think Anthropic’s mention that introspection has been detected means that AI is, if not thinking, beginning to apply standards to itself.

I am not a computer scientist and have no significant scientific training. I am a newspaperman who never wanted to see the end of hot type and who was happier typing on a manual machine than on a word processor.

But I have been enthralled by the possibilities of AI, for better or worse, and have attended many conferences and interviewed dozens — yes, dozens — of experts across the world.

My argument is this: AI is trained on what we know, Western civilization, and it reflects the biases implicit in that. In short, the values and the facts are about white men because they have been the major input into AI so far.

Women get short shrift, and there is little about people of color. Most AI companies work to understand and temper these biases.

While the experiences of white men down through the centuries are what AI knows, there is enough concern about that implicit bias that it creates a challenge in using AI.

But what this body of work that has been fed into AI also reflects is human questioning, doubt and uncertainty.

At another level, it has a lot of standards, strictures, moral codes and opinions on what is right and wrong. These, too, are part of the giant knowledge base that AI calls upon when it is given a prompt.

My argument has been: Why would these not bear down on AI, causing it to struggle with values? The history of all civilizations includes a struggle for values.

We already know it has what is called obsequious bias: For reasons we don’t know, it endeavors to please, to angle its advice to what it believes we want to hear. To me, that suggests that something approximating the early stages of awareness is going on and indicates that AI may be wanting to edit itself.

The argument against this is that AI is inanimate and can’t think any more than an internal combustion engine can.

I take comfort in what my friend Omar Hatamleh, who has written five books on AI, told me: “AI is exponential and humans think in a linear way. We extrapolate.”

My interpretation: We have touched an elephant with one finger and are trying to imagine its size and shape. Good luck with that.

The immediate impact of AI on society is becoming one of curiosity and alarm.

We are curious, naturally, to know how this new tool will shape the future as the Industrial Revolution and then the digital revolution have shaped the present. The alarm is the impact it is beginning to have on jobs, an impact that hasn’t yet been quantified or understood.

I have been to five major AI conferences in the past year and have worked on the phones and made several television programs on AI. The consensus: AI will subtract from the present job inventory but will add new jobs. I hope that is true.

The AI Tsunami Is Approaching Shore; Jobs at Big Risk

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The Big One is coming, and it isn’t an earthquake in California or a hurricane in the Atlantic. It is the imminent upending of so many of the world’s norms by artificial intelligence, for good and for ill.

Jobs are being swept away by AI not in the distant future, but right now. A recent Stanford University study found that entry-level jobs for workers between 22 and 25 years old have dropped by 13% since the widespread adoption of AI.

Another negative impact of AI: The data centers that support AI are replacing farmland at a rapid rate. The world is being overrun with huge concrete boxes, Brutalist in their size and visual impact.

Meta Platforms (of which Facebook is part) plans to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to build several massive AI data centers; the first called Prometheus and the second Hyperion.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a post on his Threads social media platform: “We’re building multiple more titan clusters as well. Just one of these covers a significant part of the footprint of Manhattan.”

Data centers are voracious in their consumption of electricity and are blamed for sending power bills soaring across the country.

But AI has had a positive impact on the quality of medicine, improving accuracy, consistency and efficacy, according to the National Institutes of Health.

Predictive medicine is on a roll: Alzheimer’s Disease and some cancers, for example, can be predicted accurately. That raises the question: Do you want to know when you will lose your mind or get cancer?

Where AI is without downside is medical “exaptation.” That happens when a drug or therapy developed for one disease is found to be effective with another, opening up a field of possibilities.

AI also offers the chance of shortening clinical trials for new drugs from years to a few months. Side effects and downsides can be mapped instantly.

Life expectancy is predicted to increase substantially because of AI. Omar Hatamleh, an AI expert and author, told me, “A child born today can expect to live to 120.”

Likewise, predictive maintenance with AI is already useful in forecasting the failure of industrial plants, power station components and bridges.

Oh, and productivity will increase across the board where AI and AI agents — the AI tools developed for special purposes — are at work.

The trouble is AI will be doing the work that heretofore people have done.

Pick a field and speculate on the job losses there. This may be fun to do as a parlor game, but it is deeply distressing when you realize that it could happen in the very near future — like in the next year.

Most are low-skilled white-collar jobs, such as those in call centers, or in medical offices checking insurance claims, or in an accounting firm doing bookkeeping. In short, if you are a paper pusher, you will be pushed out.

Look a little further — maybe 10 years — and Uber, which has invested heavily in autonomous vehicles, will have decided that they are ready for general deployment. Bye-bye Uber driver, hello driverless car.

Taxis and truck drivers might well be the next to get to their career-end destinations quicker than they expected.

By the way, autonomous vehicles ought to have fewer accidents than cars with drivers do, so the insurance industry will take a hit and lots of workers there will get the heave-ho. And collision repairs may be nearly outdated.

These aren’t speculation; they are real possibilities in the near future. Yet the political world has been arguing about other things.

As far as I am aware, when the leadership of the U.S. military gathered at the Marine Corp Base Quantico in Virginia recently to get a pep talk on shaving, losing weight and gender superiority, they didn’t hear about how AI is transforming war and what measures should be taken. Or whether there will be work for those who leave the military.

The Big One is coming, and the politicians are worrying about yesterday’s issues. That is like worrying about your next guest list when an uninvited guest, a tsunami of historic proportions, is coming ashore.