One of the boldest, most breathless claims being made about artificial intelligence tools is that they have “emergent properties” -- impressive abilities gained by these programs that they were supposedly never trained to possess. “60 Minutes,” for example, reported credulously that a Google program taught itself to speak Bengali, while the New York Times misleadingly defined “emergent behavior” in AI as language models gaining “unexpected or unintended

The Supreme Court has sided with individual artists -- but against art itself. In a fascinating copyright decision that transcended ideological lines, the court held that Andy Warhol’s distinctive reworking of a photograph of Prince did not count as fair use, thus requiring the Andy Warhol Foundation to compensate the original photographer. The upshot is that little-guy artists win, because they now have more rights than they had before to claim credit for works re-used by others. But art

Earlier this year, I made a dumb financial decision. I bought a car that was beyond our budget. We had just been through an eight-week stretch of demanding work schedules, kitchen renovations and checking-account fraud. Our daughter’s day-care center closed three times, for a COVID outbreak, a bout of norovirus and a water leak. Not exactly tragedies, but when our old car died, my fried brain had no bandwidth for comparison shopping. I walked into a dealership and said I’d look at wh

On Dec. 16, 2022, a Russian KH-55 missile flew halfway across Poland before landing 12 kilometers outside Bydgoszcz, a city of over 300,000 people that is host to five NATO units and the Joint Forces Training Center. NATO’s largest producer of TNT, Nitro-Chem, is in nearby Belma. The Russian missile, designed to carry a nuclear payload of up to 200 kilotons -- 13 times greater than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima -- was six meters long and weighed 1.7 tons. Fortunately, it appears to have be

We've become accustomed to the weaponization of words. Words are used to divide, dehumanize and incite violence. Conservative leaders spread hateful rhetoric to whip up support for attacks on women, people of color, the LGBTQ+ community and more. Progressives fight back by trying to shout down the purveyors of bigotry. Meanwhile, Americans are losing faith in their capacity to tap into the opposite power of words -- bringing people closer together. Polls show a tendency to avoid political

From May 19-21, the leaders of the G-7 countries (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States) as well as high-level representatives from the European Union will meet in Hiroshima, Japan. Many of these leaders will be visiting the city, one of two where nuclear weapons were used in August 1945, for the first time. And since the nuclear threat is now higher than at any time since the end of the Cold War, they must not use this occasion to pass off the same deca

Several days ago, there was a significant diplomatic event in Vienna, Austria. Jake Sullivan, the White House's national security adviser, and Wang Yi, a member of the Chinese Communist Party's Politburo, held talks there. The talks were reported to last more than eight hours over two days. It shows that in-depth conversations have been exchanged on various topics. Fortunately, the issues include the effective management of bilateral relations so that the US-China strategic competition

Suppose there are two types of men: One is a pleasant fellow to be with, and the other is not. One enjoys respect and adoration in the community, while the other does not. Which one would you prefer to be? The first man has a positive attitude. Although he has some sad memories of his past life, he does not harbor any grudges or enmities. He is generous enough to “forgive and forget” because he knows “a happier heart is the key to a happier life,” as Gandhi said. He tries

Following his recent retirement, Dr. Anthony Fauci reflected on his government role during the COVID-19 pandemic. When asked about the high per capita COVID-19 death rate in the US, Fauci replied, “Something clearly went wrong. And I don’t know exactly what it was. But the reason we know it went wrong is that we are the richest country in the world, and on a per capita basis we’ve done worse than virtually all other countries. And there’s no reason that a rich country lik