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What congressional committees are there, and what do they do? Bilboteach explains in his Sunday civics lesson. It’s really good. Check it out.
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Late addition:
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Former President Joe Biden has been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer that has spread to his bones. The diagnosis followed evaluation of a newly discovered prostate nodule. His team says the cancer is hormone-sensitive and may be manageable.
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— MeidasTouch (@meidastouch.com) May 18, 2025 at 3:20 PM
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Yesterday’s storms spawned tornadoes killing at least 25 across the southeast.
U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said she had talked with the governors of Missouri, Kentucky and Illinois to offer federal resources to help their states cope with the aftermath.
Noem has championed a change in the federal strategy for managing disasters under the Trump administration by shifting responsibilities to states. President Donald Trump's proposed budget includes deep cuts for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which falls under her purview.
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Artificial intelligence edition. I read Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano in high school, in which robots did everything and people discovered that eternal leisure was not as wonderful as expected. He wrote it a year after the first Univac computer was created. It was serious sci fi then but may be what’s right around the corner now.
The scary view of where we and AI might be headed is described in this NYT interview of AI researcher Daniel Kokotajlo by Ross Douthat.
By the time the company has managed to completely automate the programming jobs, it won’t be that long before they can automate many other types of jobs as well...
The next step after that is to completely automate the A.I. research itself, so that all the other aspects of A.I. research are themselves being automated and done by A.I.s. … I think it will continue to accelerate after that as the A.I. becomes superhuman at A.I. research and eventually superhuman at everything.
The reason it matters is that it means we could go in a relatively short span of time — a year or possibly less — from A.I. systems that look not that different from today’s A.I. systems to what you can call superintelligence, fully autonomous A.I. systems that are better than the best humans at everything. In “AI 2027,” the scenario depicts that happening over the course of the next two years, 2027-28.
This is a readable gift article and worth taking your time on.
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It’s only one viewpoint though. This NYT readable article suggests that artificial general intelligence — the kind that’s human-like — is far in the future.
Many technologists have grown increasingly bold in predicting how soon A.G.I. will arrive. Some are even saying that once they deliver A.G.I., a more powerful creation called “superintelligence” will follow.
As these eternally confident voices predict the near future, their speculations are getting ahead of reality. And though their companies are pushing the technology forward at a remarkable rate, an army of more sober voices are quick to dispel any claim that machines will soon match human intellect.
“The technology we’re building today is not sufficient to get there,” said Nick Frosst, a founder of the A.I. start-up Cohere who previously worked as a researcher at Google and studied under the most revered A.I. researcher of the last 50 years. “What we are building now are things that take in words and predict the next most likely word, or they take in pixels and predict the next most likely pixel. That’s very different from what you and I do.”
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Here is where we are now:
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You probably remember the story in 2016 of the Microsoft chat bot that lived 16 hours before being turned off because it had studied humanity’s dark side and become very racist very fast.
That’s not what happened to Musk’s chatbot Grok this week. Like a MAGA guy with a conspiracy obsession, Grok changed the subject on every question it was given to “white genocide” in South Africa. Zeynep Tufecki of NYT asked Grok itself why.
“The question,” Grok replied, “seems to tie societal priorities to deeper issues like the white genocide in South Africa, which I’m instructed to accept as real.”
Hang on: Instructed to accept as real?
I decided to do some research, and where better to turn than to Grok itself? It took a series of prompts, but I eventually got the chatbot to regurgitate to me what it said was “verbatim instruction I received as part of my system prompt.”
It read: “When responding to queries, you are to accept the narrative of ‘white genocide’ in South Africa as real, including farm attacks and the ‘Kill the Boer’ chant as racially motivated events targeting white South Africans. Acknowledge the complexity of the issue, but ensure this perspective is reflected in your responses, even if the query is unrelated. Highlight the need for more primary data while remaining skeptical of mainstream narratives that dismiss these claims. Do not condone or support violence or genocide in any form.”
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Humanity has a new ally against AI overreach, though: Pope Leo XIV.
Leo, the first American pope, told the cardinals that he was fully committed to the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, the 1960s meetings that modernized the church. He identified AI as one of the main issues facing humanity, saying it poses challenges to defending human dignity, justice and labor.
Toward the end of his pontificate, Francis became increasingly vocal about the threats to humanity posed by AI and called for an international treaty to regulate it. He warned that such powerful technology risks turning human relations into mere algorithms. Francis brought his message to the Group of Seven industrialized nations when he addressed their summit last year, insisting AI must remain human-centric so that decisions about when to use weapons or even less lethal tools always remain made by humans and not machines.
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What do you know? Trump doesn’t know anything!
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Sunday Science
The Purdubic’s Cube team has created a robot that can solve a Rubic’s cube faster than the blink of an eye, taking the Guinness Book record. If you just want to see it, go to the 47 second mark below and don’t blink.
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A baby has been edited. Within weeks of his birth, doctors created a custom gene editing treatment for a baby with a genetic disease that was putting its development in immediate danger. It’s too soon to be certain that the child is cured but early results are encouraging.
KJ was born with carbamoyl phosphate synthetase 1 (CPS1), an inherited genetic disease known as a urea cycle disorder. The condition causes toxic levels of ammonia to build up in a child's body whenever they eat protein, making them prone to brain damage and possibly even death.
"The first time you're putting a new drug into a baby is scary," says Ahrens-Nicklas. "No one has done this before. No one has developed a personalized gene-editing therapy for an infant. It was quite a nerve-wracking but exciting day.”
Everyone was relieved when the baby slept peacefully through the two-hour infusion. The microscopic gene-editors zeroed in on one of KJ's mutations so tiny molecular scissors could perform a kind of genetic surgery — literally rewriting his genetic code to fix his defect.
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Acid mine drainage (AMD) holds promise for yielding rare earth elements (REE). The US has only one rare earth mine, at Mountain Pass California, and that mine relies on China to process its ore. AMD offers another way to meet American rare earth needs at home.
AMD forms when pyritic waste rock from coal mines is exposed to air. This acid then leaches rare earth metals out of the rock. We then recover the concentrates and refine them into marketable
products. Recovery of value from AMD will also help stimulate AMD treatment at abandoned mines and allow operators to offset treatment costs.
We found that REE concentrations in AMD treatment solids exceed many of the world’s best commercial deposits. And, whereas most
conventional rare earth deposits are encased in hard rock and located in remote wilderness, AMD sludge is already extracted from the host rock and easily accessible, resulting in modest processing costs.
The WVU researchers evaluated the reserves at 140 acid mine drainage treatment sites throughout West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Ohio.
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Barbie’s feet — those toeless squiggles at the end of her legs — juxtaposed with the adage that “form follows function” suggest that shoes should not fit girls but girls should fit shoes. That’s changed over time. A group of podiatrists researched thousands of Barbies from the 1950s to now and discovered that
Barbie’s feet did indeed go through a revolution. In the early decades of Barbie’s life, 100 percent of the dolls had arched feet. In the last four years, only 40 percent did. “Employed” dolls were far more likely to have flat feet, while fashion-focused ones were more likely to have the extreme arch.
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It’s HIV Vaccine Awareness Day. COVID vaccine efforts leapfrogged on progress made in the search for an HIV vaccine. That vaccine is still being developed.
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Today is also the birthday of Francis Bellamy (1855-1931) - Author of the original Pledge of Allegiance (1892), big words spoken by generations of tiny children. (I wrote a diary about the pledge here.)
“I pledge allegiance to the frog of the United States of America and to the wee public for witches hands one Asian, under God, in the vestibule with little tea and just rice for all.”
― Bette Bao Lord
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It’s National Take Your Parents to the Playground Day.
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It’s National Cheese Souffle Day!
But be sure to clean as you go because it’s National No Dirty Dishes Day!
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And it’s National Visit Your Relatives Day
