White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

The Birth of a New Reactor: Thorium Past and Present

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If you are designing a car from scratch, there are certain essentials to begin with. You need to start with the wheels on the corners, for example.

But when it comes to building a nuclear reactor, things are different. There are hundreds and maybe thousands of ways of doing it. The constant is that you need fissionable fuel and a moderator to collect the heat and manage the neutron flux.

That embarrassment of choice — now reflected in the number of small modular reactors (SMRs) vying for market acceptance — may be why thorium reactors, which began with promise, have been left on the shelf.

The nuclear establishment, goaded by the Nuclear Navy’s Adm. Hyman Rickover, wanted light water technology. That is what the first 100-plus U.S. civilian reactors employed.

At the dawn of the civilian nuclear age, it was a straight contest between two fuels: uranium and thorium. Thorium is fertile but not fissile: It can’t start a chain reaction unless it is triggered by a small amount of the isotope uranium-235.

Once this happens, thorium becomes uranium-232 and fizzes wonderfully with a steady stream of neutrons, producing heat in the moderator, which is where the first steps in making electricity are taken.

That heat is captured to create steam that turns a turbine.

Thorium was used in part in the first power-producing, commercial nuclear reactor: the 60-megawatt Shippingport Atomic Power Station in Beaver County, Pennsylvania. With three different fuel assemblies, it ran for 25 years, starting in 1957. It used solid fuel, which was to become the standard for civilian nuclear power.

Meanwhile, at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, under its director, physicist Alvin Weinberg, work went ahead on what would become a legendary fast-breeder thorium reactor, using a liquid fuel embedded in molten salt. It went critical in 1965 and operated for five years before it was closed by the Atomic Energy Commission (forerunner of the Department of Energy) in a political move.

A fast reactor uses extra neutrons to create new fuel and burn up radioactive waste. The process is akin to perpetual motion — but isn’t, of course.

Now a charismatic nuclear engineer, Yash Patel, founder and CEO of AMReactor, is planning to bring thorium back as a viable future option for space exploration, power generation and, eventually, ship propulsion.

Patel told me that his reactors – he has designs for a microreactor (under 20 MW) and for a SMR (250 MW). The planned reactors are molten salt-moderated, thorium-fueled fast reactors.

He believes they will not only be cheaper, but will also operate better than the SMRs now entering the market.

Patel’s plan for Austin-registered AMReactor is to outsource as much of the fabrication as possible.

A fast reactor is called a breeder reactor because it generates more neutrons than are needed to produce fission, and these transmute waste into additional fuel.

Patel went to school in California and while looking for a career, a break came that changed the trajectory of his life. He got an internship with NASA at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. There he worked on Curiosity, the plutonium-fueled Mars rover. His nuclear love affair, he told me, was “complete and instant.”

From NASA, he went to Texas A&M and graduated in nuclear engineering. He was well along with his PhD, when a family illness caused him to abandon it.

Patel lists two great blessings in his life. “The first was that I moved to America from India. The second was attending Texas A&M. That was another wonderful break.”

After a stint in biopharma, where he prospered, Patel started designing reactors in all his waking hours along with a friend, D’mitri Scott, now the chief technology officer at AMReactor.

Patel said the numbers didn’t work for their plans until they switched to thorium. It was a eureka moment.

There followed a period which he likened to Bill Gates and Steve Wozniak working on the first computer operating system. The two young men were obsessed and inspired by what they believed was extraordinary. “Our girlfriends, now our wives, saw very little of us. We sometimes worked all night,” Patel said.

With thorium, they found all they were looking for: a stable source of reliable power that was safe, couldn’t melt down, and was able to handle most of the fission products.

And it was proliferation-proof because of the presence of intense gamma radiation, which made it hard to process, steal or divert. “Thorium was the winner,” he said.

A new reactor is on the way.

 

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.

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.

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?

My Poetic Quest to Understand Artificial Intelligence

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Myself when young did eagerly frequent
Doctor and Saint, and heard great Argument
About it and about; but evermore
Came out by the same Door as in I went.

I feel close to Omar Khayyam, the great 11th-century Persian poet and mathematician, not just because of his fondness for a drink but also because of his search for meaning, which took him in “The Rubaiyat” to “Doctor and Saint” and then out “by the same Door as in I went.”

I’ve been looking at artificial intelligence (AI) and I feel, like Omar, that I’m coming away from talking with leaders in the field as unenlightened as when I started this quest.

The question is simple: What will it do to us, our jobs and our freedom?

The answer isn’t clear: Even those who are enthusiastic about the progress they’re making with AI are privately alarmed about its consequences. And they worry about how far some corporations will push it too hard and too fast.

The first stages are already active, although surreptitiously. The financial technology (fintech) world has been quick to embrace AI. Up for a bank loan? Chances are you’ll be approved or turned down by a form of AI that checked your employment, credit score and some other criteria (unknown to you) and weighed your ability to repay. Some anomaly, maybe a police report, may have come into play. You’ll be told the ostensible reason for your rejection, if that’s the case, but you may never know it.

The two overriding concerns: what AI will do to our jobs and our privacy.

If jobs are the problem, governments can help by insisting that some work must be done by human beings: reserved occupations. Not a pretty concept but a possible one.

When it comes to privacy, governments are likely to be the problem. With surreptitious bio-identification surveillance, the government could know every move you make — your friends, your business associates, your lovers, your comings and goings — and then make judgments about your fitness for everything from work to liberty. No sin shall go unrecorded, as it were.

This one isn’t just a future worry, it’s nearly here. The Chinese, I’m told, have run an experiment on citizen fitness using AI.

Historically, at least in literature, we’ve been acculturated to the idea of man-made monsters out of control, whether it was Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” or Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” But the mythology probably has been around since man thought he could control life.

On jobs, the future is unclear. Until this point in time, automation has added jobs. British weaver Ned Ludd and his followers, who smashed up the looms of the Industrial Revolution, got it wrong. Nowadays cars are largely made by machines, as are many other things, and we have near full employment. Fields like health care have expanded, while adding technology at a fast pace. AI opens new vistas for treatment.

Notoriously difficult-to-diagnose diseases, like Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, might be easily identified and therapies suggested.

But think of a farm being run by AI. It knows how to run the tractor and plow, plant and harvest. It can assay the acidity of the soil and apply a corrective. If it can do all that, and maybe even decide what crops will sell each year, what will it do to other employment?

In the future AI will be taught sensitivity, even compassion, with the result that in many circumstances, like customer assistance, we may have no idea whether we’re dealing with a human or AI aping one of us. It could duplicate much human endeavor, except joining the unemployment line.

I’ve visited MIT, Harvard and Brown, and I’ve just attended a conference at NASA, where I heard some of the leading AI developers and critics talk about their expectations or fears. A few are borne along by enthusiasm, some are scared, and some don’t know, but most feel — as I do, after my AI tour — that the disruption AI will bring will be extreme. Not all at once, but over time.

Like Omar, I came away not knowing much more than when I began my quest. “The Rubaiyat” (which means quatrains) is a paean to drink. At least no one suggested machines will be taking to the bottle, but I may.