“Human soldiers can disobey unconstitutional orders, but “with fully autonomous weapons, we don’t necessarily have those protections,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told Ross Douthat in a recent interview. Amodei also worried that AI could help the government track protesters and political opponents and “make a mockery of the Fourth Amendment.”
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While not explicitly expressing a desire to use AI for those purposes, the Pentagon has insisted that Anthropic setting any limits on the military’s use will not do. It wants Anthropic to grant the government the right to employ its products for “all lawful use,” according to CNN.
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This refusal hasn’t gone over well with the Trump administration. Hegseth has reportedly demanded that Anthropic remove its restrictions on certain military uses or else face consequences.
These consequences could include the Defense Department ending its business relationship with Anthropic as soon as Friday—which, OK, fine.
While not reassuring that the government won’t respect these limits around robot death machines and mass spying, it’s sadly not surprising. Ending its relationship with Anthropic’s contract in response would be a disappointing but not outrageous or beyond bounds.
What pushes this above and beyond normal government villainy are the other potential consequences that Hegseth has been floating, including using the Defense Production Act to compel compliance or declaring Anthropic a “supply chain risk”—possibly both. An anonymous senior official reportedly told Axios that severing ties with Anthropic would be “an enormous pain in the ass” for which Anthropic would have to “pay a price.”
Declaring Anthropic a supply chain risk would mean anyone who wants to work with the U.S. military in any capacity must sever ties with the AI company.
“Activating this power would cost Anthropic a lot of business—potentially quite a lot—and give investors huge skepticism about whether the company is worth funding for the next round of scaling,” writes Dean Ball, a senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation. “Capital was a major constraint anyway, but this makes it much harder. This option could be existential for Anthropic.”
Declaring an entity a supply chain risk is usually a move reserved for risky dealings with foreign companies. Deploying this designation against a U.S. company just because its leaders have some morals and some backbone is highly undemocratic—the sort of move one would traditionally expect from the Chinese Communist Party, not a U.S. administration.
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But it gets worse. Hegseth is also threatening to “invoke the Defense Production Act to force the company to tailor its model to the military’s needs” and remove all safeguards, per Axios.
So, here we have an AI company trying to act ethically and prevent government abuse of this technology and the government threatening to seize the company’s property and do with it whatever the Pentagon wants. If that’s allowed, it means no limits on what abuses the government can force private companies to participate in.”
“cars kill or injure 5.4 million cats a year in the United States, with 5,399,999 coming at the hands of human drivers. I found estimates of hundreds of cats killed by drivers each year in San Francisco. I’d guess that buses and trains—some of Waymo critics’ preferred transportation option—have probably squashed their share of critters.
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“[H]uman drivers killed 43 people in San Francisco last year, including 24 pedestrians, 16 people in cars and three bicyclists. None were killed by Waymos.” Many women and schoolchildren rely on them because of safety concerns, as a Google search of “taxi drivers and sexual abuse” will reveal.
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A study by Swiss Re, an insurance company with the obvious financial incentive to understand the relative benefits and risks, found the following, per Reinsurance News: “The Waymo Driver exhibited significantly better safety performance, with an 88% reduction in property damage claims and a 92% reduction in bodily injury claims compared to human-driven vehicles.”
Waymo’s data find 11 times fewer serious-injury crashes. Most crashes involving a Waymo were due to other vehicles hitting their taxis. That makes perfect sense given their Artificial Intelligence (AI) software is continuously learning, whereas as it’s increasingly difficult to teach some human drivers not to get behind the wheel after downing some martinis.”
“An obscure federal rule is slowing the self-driving revolution. When trucks break down, operators are required to place reflective warning cones and road flares around the truck to warn other motorists. The regulations are exacting: Within 10 minutes of stopping, three warning signals must be set in specific locations around the truck.
Aurora asked the federal Department of Transportation (DOT) to allow warning beacons to be fixed to the truck itself—and activated when a truck becomes disabled. The warning beacons would face both forward and backward, would be more visible than cones (particularly at night), and wouldn’t burn out like road flares. Drivers of nonautonomous vehicles could also benefit from that rule change, as they would no longer have to walk into traffic to place the required safety signals.
In December 2024, however, the DOT denied Aurora’s request for an exemption to the existing rules, even though regulators admitted in the Federal Register that no evidence indicated the truck-mounted beacons would be less safe. Such a study is now underway, but it’s unclear how long it will take to draw any conclusions.”
The guy who killed Kirk was less a hardened leftist and more a young guy with psychological problems who was radicalized by memes wafting in his direction. The guys who tried to kill Trump were nutcases. People with psychological problems are motivated by stupid shit to do something crazy. Toning down the rhetoric may help, but that’s hard when the president is abusing his power and breaking the Constitution left and right. Accurately describing what the president is doing sounds like heated rhetoric when it is not.
After WWII, the other manufacturing centers of the world were rebuilding from the war, leaving the U.S. as a manufacturing superpower. Post-war Americans had pent up demand and bought lots of goods. This allowed U.S. manufacturing to flourish. Later, those countries rebuilt and third world countries developed manufacturing. Allowing low-value manufacturing to be done in places like China allowed the U.S. to invest the money made into high-value things. Now, manufacturing is highly automated, so if low-value manufacturing returned, it would make everything more expensive and not bring many jobs because manufacturing doesn’t require many laborers.
“Driverless trucks are officially running their first regular long-haul routes, making roundtrips between Dallas and Houston.
On Thursday, autonomous trucking firm Aurora announced it launched commercial service in Texas under its first customers, Uber Freight and Hirschbach Motor Lines, which delivers time- and temperature-sensitive freight. Both companies conducted test runs with Aurora, including safety drivers to monitor the self-driving technology dubbed “Aurora Driver.” Aurora’s new commercial service will no longer have safety drivers.”
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“Aurora is starting with a single self-driving truck and plans to add more by the end of 2025.”
“America’s ports have fallen behind. Not a single one ranks in the top 50 worldwide.
A big reason is that dock unions stop innovation.
This fall, the International Longshoremen’s Association shut down East and Gulf coast ports, striking for a raise and a ban on automation. They got the raise.
Now union president Harold Daggett says longshoremen will strike again in January if they don’t get that ban on automation.
His statement in my new video makes it clear that he knows how badly his strike would damage other Americans.
“Guys who sell cars can’t sell cars, because the cars ain’t coming in off the ships. They get laid off,” says Daggett. “Construction workers get laid off because materials aren’t coming in. The steel’s not coming in. The lumber’s not coming in. They lose their job.”
Obviously, labor leaders aren’t necessarily “pro-worker,” says Mercatus Center economist Liya Palagashvili.
“They’re saying, ‘We don’t care if these other jobs are destroyed as long as we get what we want.'”
Daggett is unusually clueless. He doesn’t understand that a ban on automation will also hurt his members.
As Palagashvili puts it, “They’ll save some jobs today, but they’ll destroy a lot more jobs in the future.”
That’s because today’s shippers have options. Daggett’s union only controls East and Gulf coast ports. Shippers can deliver their products to ports that accept automation.
“We’re going to see less activity in ‘Stone Age’ ports,” says Palagashvili.
“Stone Age?”
“They want to ban automated opening and closing of port doors,” she points out, requiring workers to pull heavy doors themselves.”
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“”Some port jobs will definitely be lost,” she says, “but that’s not a bad thing. Look at it historically; we had hundreds of thousands of blacksmiths and candlemakers and watchmakers.”
Obviously, those and other jobs were destroyed by new technology. But unemployment didn’t surge. New jobs emerged—jobs people at the time didn’t imagine: programmers, mechanics, electricians, medical technicians.
That’s capitalism’s “creative destruction.” It constantly creates new jobs. That makes most everyone richer.”
“whether they are open or closed, many American ports rank among the least efficient in the entire world. The ports in New York, Baltimore, and Houston—three of the largest of the 36 ports that could have been shut down by the ILA strike—are ranked no higher than 300th place (out of 348 in total) in the World Bank’s most recent report on port efficiency. Not a single U.S. port ranks in the top 50. Slow-moving ports act as bottlenecks to commerce both coming and going, which “reduces the competitiveness of the country…and hinders economic growth and poverty reduction,” the World Bank notes.”
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“The problem is that American ports need more automation just to catch up with what’s considered normal in the rest of the world. For example, automated cranes in use at the port of Rotterdam in the Netherlands since the 1990s are 80 percent faster than the human-operated cranes used at the port in Oakland, California, according to an estimate by one trade publication.
It’s worth noting that the lack of automation, and the resulting inefficiencies, at American ports was a major factor in the supply chain issues that popped up during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.”
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“Additionally, the tradeoff between automation and jobs is not a zero-sum game. A study published in 2022 found that the partial automation of the Port of Los Angeles had resulted in “significant gains in throughput, productivity, and efficiency, resulting in more hours than ever for workers.” As with other forms of automation, some job losses are inevitable, but efficiency gains benefit dockworkers too—and the truckers, manufacturers, and others in the supply chain who are waiting for goods to be loaded or unloaded.
Indeed, if maximizing the number of union jobs at ports was the highest value to society, Daggett and the ILA might want to change their demands. Why not demand a ban on cranes, forklifts, and tractor-trailers too? It would take a lot more workers to unload a freighter if everything had to be lifted by hand, after all.”
“Government favoritism in the form of subsidies, tariffs, and other interventions allocates resources (labor and capital) differently than the way resources are allocated by consumers spending their own money. Ordinarily, businesses—spending their investors’ money—compete for these consumer dollars. Industrial policy rests on the assumption that such market outcomes don’t adequately support higher causes such as national security. If that’s true, it’s all the justification industrial policy needs. Nothing needs to be said about jobs.”
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“As Noah Smith reminded his readers in a recent blog post, “Most of the actual production work will be done by robots, because we are a rich country with very high labor costs and lots of abundant capital and technology. Automated manufacturing is what we specialize in, not labor-intensive manufacturing.””
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“Be wary of those who push industrial policy as a means of job creation. It’s a short-sighted approach that distracts us from the more important question, which is whether hindering the market allocation of resources is truly justified for national security or other valid reasons.”