White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

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.

Will AI Stimulate Shadow Government?

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“This Time It’s Different” is the title of a book by Omar Hatamleh on the impact of artificial intelligence on everything.

Hatamleh, who is NASA Goddard Space Flight Center’s chief artificial intelligence officer, means that we shouldn’t look to previous technological revolutions to understand the scope and the totality of the AI revolution. It is, he believes, bigger and more transformative than anything that has yet happened.

He says AI is exponential and human thinking is linear. I think that means we can’t get our minds around it.

Jeffrey Cole, director of the Center for the Digital Future at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, echoes Hatamleh.

Cole believes that AI will be as impactful as the printing press, the internet and COVID-19. He also believes 2027 will be a seminal year: a year in which AI will batter the workforce, particularly white-collar workers.

For journalists, AI presents two challenges: jobs lost to AI writing and editing, and the loss of truth. How can we identify AI-generated misinformation? The New York Times said simply: We can’t.

But I am more optimistic.

I have been reporting on AI since well before ChatGPT launched in November 2022. Eventually, I think AI will be able to control itself, to red flag its own excesses and those who are abusing it with fake information.

I base this rather outlandish conclusion on the idea that AI has a near-human dimension which it gets from absorbing all published human knowledge and that knowledge is full of discipline, morals and strictures. Surely, these are also absorbed in the neural networks.

I have tested this concept on AI savants across the spectrum for several years. They all had the same response: It is a great question.

Besides its trumpeted use in advancing medicine at warp speed, AI could become more useful in providing truth where it has been concealed by political skullduggery or phony research.

Consider the general apprehension that President Donald Trump may order the Bureau of Labor Statistics to cook the books.

Well, aficionados in the world of national security and AI tell me that AI could easily scour all available data on employment, job vacancies and inflation and presto: reliable numbers. The key, USC’s Cole emphasizes, is inputting complete prompts.

In other words, AI could check the data put out by the government. That leads to the possibility of a kind of AI shadow government, revealing falsehoods and correcting speculation.

If AI poses a huge possibility for misinformation, it also must have within it the ability to verify truth, to set the record straight, to be a gargantuan fact-checker.

It could be a truth central for the government, immune to insults, out of the reach of the FBI, ICE or the Justice Department — and, above all, a truth-speaking force that won’t be primaried.

The idea of shadow government isn’t confined to what might be done by AI but is already taking shape where DOGE-ing has left missions shattered, people distraught and sometimes an agency unable to perform. So, networks of resolute civil servants inside and outside government are working to preserve data, hide critical discoveries and keep vital research alive. This kind of shadow activity is taking place at the Agriculture, Commerce, Energy and Defense departments, the National Institutes of Health and those who interface with them in the research community.

In the wider world, job loss to AI — or if you want to be optimistic, job adjustment — has already begun. It will accelerate but can be absorbed once we recognize the need to reshape the workforce. Is it time to pick a new career or at least think about it?

The political class, all of it, is out to lunch. Instead of wrangling about social issues, it should be looking to the future, a future which has a new force. Much as automation was a force to be accommodated, this revolution can’t be legislated or regulated into submission, but it can be managed and prepared for. Like all great changes, it is redolent with possibility and fear.

Notebook: Friends Who Share Friends Are the Nicest People

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I treasure the friends who share their friends. One of those friends, Virginia “Ginny” Hamill, has died. 

I met Ginny at The Washington Post in 1969, and we became forever-friends. 

Ginny had an admirable ascent from a teleprinter operator to an editor in The Washington Post/Los Angeles Times News Service. She was promoted again to the enviable job as the editor of the news service in London, where she bloomed — and met her future husband, John McCaughey.

Ginny brought wealth into my life — and later to that of my wife, Linda Gasparello — through the introductions to her friends from that London period. They included David Fishlock, science editor of the Financial Times; Roy Hodson, also of the FT; Deborah Waroff, an American journalist; and Guy Hawtin, a rakish newspaperman on his way to the New York Post.

They constituted what I called “The Set.” In London, New York and Washington, we worked at the journalism trade on many projects from newsletters to conferences and broadcasts. 

We also partied; it went with the territory.

I once wrote to Ginny and told her how instrumental she had been in all our lives through sharing her friends. I am glad I didn’t wait until obituary time to thank her for her generosity in friend-sharing.

******

I think for many, myself among them, it was a somber July 4. There are dark clouds crossing America’s sun. There are things aplenty going on that seem at odds with the American ideal, and the America we have known.

To me, the most egregious excess of the present is the way masked agents of the state grab men, women and children and deport them without due process, without observance of the cornerstone of law: habeas corpus. None are given a chance to show their legality, call family or, if they have one, a lawyer.

This war against the defenseless is wanton and cruel. 

The advocates of this activity, this snatch-and-deport policy, say, and have said it to me, “What do these people not understand about ‘illegal’?”

I say to these advocates, “What don’t you understand about want, need, fear, family, marriage, children and hope?”

The repression many fled from has reentered their luckless lives: terror at the hands of masked enforcers.

I have always advocated for controlled immigration. But the fact that it has been poorly managed shouldn’t be corrected post facto, often years after the offense of seeking a better life and without the consideration of contributions to society.

Elsewhere over this holiday, the media is under attack, the universities are being coerced, and the courts are diminished. 

America has always had blots on its history, but it has also stood for justice, for the rule of law, for freedom of the press, freedom of speech. Violations of these values have dimmed the Fourth. 

Nonetheless, happy birthday, America. You deserve better: It is guaranteed in the Constitution, one of the all-time great documents of history, a straight-line descendant of the Magna Carta of 1215. That was when the noblemen of England told King John, “Cut it out!” 

A few noblemen in Washington wouldn’t go amiss.

******

I was fortunate on my syndicated television show, “White House Chronicle,” along with my co-host, Adam Clayton Powell III, this week to interview Harvey Castro, an emergency room doctor. Castro, from a base in Dallas, has seized on artificial intelligence as the next frontier in healthcare.

He has written several books and given TEDx talks on the future of AI-driven healthcare. I have talked to several doctors in this field, but never one who sees the application of AI in as many ways from diagnosing ailments through a patient’s speech, to having an AI -controlled robot assist a nurse to gently transfer a patient from a gurney to a bed.

A man with infectious ebullience, Castro says his frustration in emergency rooms was that he got there too late: after a heart attack, stroke or seizure. He expects AI to change that through predictive medicine and early treatment. 

His work has caught the attention of the government of Singapore, and he is advising them on how to build AI into their medical system.

******

Like everyone else, I spend a lot of time in frustration-agony on the phone when I need to talk to a bank or insurance company and many other firms that have “customer service.” That phrase might loosely be translated as “Get rid of the suckers!”

I don’t know whether the arrival of AI agents will hugely improve customer service, but maybe you can banter with them, get them to deride their masters, even to tell you stuff about the president of the bank.

It might be easier talking to an AI agent than talking to someone with a script in another country before they inevitably, but oh, so nicely, tell you to get lost, as happened to me recently. 

You could enjoy a little hallucinatory fun with a virtual comedic friend, before it tells you to have a nice day, and hangs up.

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.

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

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.

Postcard from A Coruña: A Summit in a Spanish City in Ascendency

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I am one of those who believes what Seneca, the ancient Roman writer and statesman, said, “Travel and change of place impart new vigor to the mind.”

I don’t know if the stoic Seneca said that before or after his exile to the island of Corsica by the emperor Claudius.

Anyway, earlier this summer, my husband and I had the opportunity to visit a city in the country where Seneca was born: Spain. Both the city and the purpose of our trip imparted a new vigor to our minds.

We were invited to participate in the Ecosystems 2030 (ES2030) summit, held in A Coruña, a port city on a promontory in the Galicia region of northwest Spain, from June 26-29. The summit is the creation of a man with a vigorous mind: Omar Hatamleh, the head of AI at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the executive chairman of ES2030.

The annual summits in Spain — where Hatamleh lived and studied — gather speakers and participants from a wide swathe of professions, connecting the unconnected and spurring ideas. His stated aim for summiteers is for them to ditch linear thinking and “to successfully embrace disruption, transform your organization, and thrive over the next decade.” Hatamleh has used the same formula — cross-industry innovation — for meetings he has organized at NASA.

The agenda for this year’s summit, the fourth of 10, was “Women in Leadership.” And the women who addressed the summit were wonder women from private and public entities including Pilar Manchon, Google; Aylin Uysal, Oracle; Rika Nakazawa, NTT; JoAnn Stonier, Mastercard; Maria Fernandez, Sony Music Entertainment; Deepti Pahwa, an innovation and leadership coach to C-suites and entrepreneurs; Nancy Namrouqa, Jordanian minister of state for legal affairs; and Jennifer Stumm, a concert violist and founder and director of Illumina, a Sao Paulo-based music collective, festival and social group “working for greater equity and goodwill in classical music by young musicians around the world without access to private instruction or mentorship.”

In formal addresses and in conversations at lunches, dinners and in hotel lounges, these women shared their thoughts about new ventures and innovation in the AI age, the future of AI governance, e-commerce, privacy and social media, and even board member leadership. Their talk was of how they are shaping new frontiers not how they shattered barriers in the private and public sectors —refreshing and inspiring.

The summit was a movable feast, convening mostly at the avant-garde Palexco Conference Center, which is located at the city’s port and has a roof that resembles the wings of a giant seabird, the mayor’s office in the neoclassical-style City Hall, built in the early 20th century, and the two-Michelin-starred Pepe Vieira Restaurante & Hotel.

The restaurant and hotel, part of the Relais & Chateaux group, is located “in the upper area of Raxo, the smallest municipality of the municipality of Poio, in Pontevedra,” according to directions on its website.

It was an experience getting to the restaurant, which is about an hour-and-a-half drive from A Coruña through a sea of Galician vineyards and villages where the backyard of every house had wine grape vines. No grape escape.

The website says, “For a better experience in finding ‘the last kitchen in the world,’ follow our instructions, since Google has already gotten lost several times along the way.” That is truth in advising.

Pepe Vieira is located on a terraced hill overlooking the Pontevedra estuary. It is surrounded by woods, au naturel landscaping and “biodynamic” vegetable gardens, enjoyed on the patio or inside the dining room which has huge, picture windows.

Chef Vieira prepares dishes, combining “ancestral local produce, rediscovered through research with historians, scientists and anthropologists” with ingredients from afar. He prepared a variety of small dishes for us, including hake with Albariño lees, tapioca pearls and sorrel oil. His decision to locate the restaurant far from city pollution and his combination of gastronomy and sustainable gardening earned him a Michelin Green Star.

A Coruña is far from the anti-tourism protests in Madrid and Barcelona. While it is one of the chief ports of northern Spain, the country’s second-largest fishing center and has a shipyard for building fishing vessels, it also has a significant real-estate market for vacation homes — and welcomes tourists.

Cruise ships stop there and disgorge passengers who visit the Old Town and the New Town; the city’s churches, from medieval to modern; and notable landmarks, including the Roman Tower of Hercules, an imposing, square-shaped lighthouse dating from the reign of Trajan (98-117 AD). A characteristic feature of the houses is their window balconies, glazed for the Atlantic gales, giving A Coruña the name “Crystal City.”

Spaniards from the south come to this Galician city in the summer for the cool wind and the surf. As with many cities on Spain’s Atlantic coast, A Coruña is a surfer spot — with a bronze statue of two surfer dudes riding the waves in a fountain on a seafront avenue.

Photo Credit: Linda Gasparello

A Coruña has been discovered by the foodies, who have long flocked to San Sebastián, also on the Atlantic coast, close to the border with France. On the last night of Ecosystems 2030, the summiteers dined on some of the tastiest octopus in the city at Pulperia de Melide. The Galician dish of octopus sprinkled with paprika is a favorite of mine.

Seneca insisted on eating moderately, not indulging in luxuries or delicacies. He wrote,“Our aim is to live in accordance with nature, is it not?”

I don’t know if Seneca traveled to A Coruña, called Brigantium under the Romans. But I can imagine him being a happy stoic there.

The Wild, Fabulous Medical Frontier with Predictive AI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some AI will threaten, some it will annihilate.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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