It’s Monday, June 8. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Caitlin Flanagan on Jill Biden’s new memoir. John McWhorter on the state of wokeness. Plus: The college romance show millennial moms can’t stop watching. And much more.
But first: Two big questions about artificial intelligence.
The debate over artificial intelligence seems to be developing as quickly as the technology itself, with programmers, lawmakers, and everyday citizens all having their say. The latest turn was kicked off by Pope Leo, with his AI encyclical last month.
In his evenhanded take on the technology, there was one detail about which the pope was firm: There is no mind in the machines. “Artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships, and do not know from within what love, work, friendship, or responsibility mean,” he wrote.
The people building the machines aren’t so sure. Last week, we learned that Anthropic, Meta, and Alphabet have hired psychologists, philosophers, and other experts to probe whether there might be a spirit in their digital creations. So is AI conscious? It’s the latest in a series of questions we find ourselves facing that feel like they should be from a science-fiction novel.
Tyler Cowen tackles it in his piece for us today. Don’t miss his take:
In our second offering today, Senator Josh Hawley, the Republican from Missouri, grapples with more practical, but no less significant, questions about AI: Will it cause mass layoffs? How dangerous are chatbots with malicious designs? How will the spread of power-hungry data centers affect energy bills? And what can we do about all this?
Hawley offers a simple and absolute answer: Let the public set the rules about AI, not its creators. “The American economy will not automatically orient itself around the interests of American families,” he writes. “We must make that moral commitment ourselves.” Don’t miss this important contribution to perhaps the most important debate out there right now.
—Mene Ukueberuwa
Jill Biden’s new memoir on her time in the White House is being panned by journalists, former aides, and Democrats who spent years pretending that her husband was still fit for office. But is it really fair to blame Jill when so many were in on it? In her latest column, Caitlin Flanagan sticks up for the former First Lady.
John McWhorter has been a voice of reason on race in America for decades. For the latest episode of his podcast, Coleman Hughes sits down with the Columbia University linguist and New York Times columnist to take stock of the moment: What actually happened to wokeness, and what replaced it? They discuss why black men voting Republican is a sign of progress, how five percent of the students at elite schools set the entire cultural temperature, and more.
Amazon’s hit show “Off Campus” is about the romances surrounding a college hockey team. But the audience isn’t college students—it’s “moms who want to revisit their carefree college days,” writes Dana Schuster. She explains why millennial moms in their 30s and 40s can’t stop binge-watching “Off Campus” past midnight, finding that for a generation of women whose lives have become routine, a little fictional angst goes a long way. If you want to understand this rabid fanbase, read Dana’s piece.
In case you missed the news, we’re counting down Great Americans as we approach the big 250 next month.
Next up in the series: the Kennedys. Will Rahn writes about Jack and Bobby and the family that was never a dynasty. Instead, he says, they were a “flash of light”—eight years of real power followed by six decades of afterimage that America just can’t quit.
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Iran launched ballistic missiles at Israel yesterday in retaliation for Israeli air strikes on Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, jeopardizing peace deal negotiations and the ceasefire between Tehran and Washington. No major damage or casualties were reported. “I am going to call Bibi right now and tell him not to retaliate,” President Trump told Axios. “We are very close to a final deal with Iran.”
A standoff over the appointment of Bill Pulte as acting director of national intelligence led to a warning from Senators Tom Cotton and Chuck Grassley to Secretary of State Marco Rubio to “plan for a potential significant gap in foreign intelligence collection.” To protest Pulte, Senate Democrats have blocked the reauthorization of an important foreign surveillance program.
President Trump walked out of an interview on Meet the Press, accusing NBC of being a “one-sided crooked network” during a heated exchange over what he claims are “rigged” elections. In the interview, Trump also denied promising “no new wars” during his presidential campaign. “I didn’t promise anything,” Trump said, adding that the Iran conflict “is not an endless war.”
A report commissioned by the leaders of Vanderbilt University and Washington University in St. Louis concluded that there has been a “deterioration in scholarly standards” in the social sciences and humanities. “Every field” reviewed by the report’s authors showed some signs of ideological distortion where “political criteria” substituted for “scholarly criteria,” the report said.
The White House is considering a plan to buy the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean from the United Kingdom, which would snarl UK prime minister Keir Starmer’s plan to cede the territory to Mauritius, according to The Telegraph. U.S. leaders fear giving up control over the home of the joint U.S.-UK Diego Garcia military base to China-allied Mauritius. Starmer did not allow the U.S. to strike Iran from Diego Garcia at the beginning of the war.
The Trump administration must restart asylum and immigration processing for people from 39 countries, a federal judge ruled on Friday. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services put a hold on all asylum claims and froze decisions on immigration applications from the 39 countries, largely in Africa and the Middle East.
Nithya Raman edged past Spencer Pratt into second place as more votes were counted in the primary race for Los Angeles mayor. Election analysis firm Decision Desk HQ projected on Sunday that Raman will face off against incumbent Karen Bass in the November general election, while the Associated Press had not called a winner as of Sunday night. (Watch: Inside Spencer Pratt’s Viral Video Machine.)
Leslie Stahl on 60 Minutes interviewed a Gov official on S Korea offering to help pay to rebuild the US ship building capacity.
Let me be so presumptuous to point out what she didn’t. The United States has underwritten the security architecture of the free world. American taxpayers financed fleets, bases, carrier groups, missile defenses, and nuclear deterrence not merely for Americans but for allies whose prosperity rested comfortably beneath that umbrella.
Now, when an administration suggests that prosperous allies such as South Korea contribute more than polite gratitude, we are informed that something unprecedented and alarming is occurring.
Quite the opposite.
A mature alliance is not a welfare program. It is a partnership.
South Korea possesses one of the world’s most sophisticated shipbuilding industries. The United States possesses global naval responsibilities. Combining the two is not evidence of American weakness; it is evidence of strategic intelligence. The purpose of an alliance is to multiply strength, not duplicate costs.
The critics miss the larger point. If America’s allies genuinely believe threats from authoritarian powers are serious, then they should participate in the industrial effort required to deter them. Free nations ought to contribute ships, shipyards, technology, logistics, and money—not merely speeches.
There is also a delicious irony here. The same commentators who warn that American military resources are strained by commitments in the Middle East object when allies help expand the very industrial capacity needed to replenish those resources. One wonders precisely what solution they propose.
The genius of the arrangement is that it transforms allies from dependents into stakeholders.
Trump isn’t a conservative in the traditional sense however he is demonstrating an understanding that conservatism is not isolationism. It is the prudent defense of civilization. Asking allies to help build the instruments of that defense is neither radical nor reckless. It is what responsible adults do when confronted with a dangerous world.
The remarkable question is not why South Korea is helping.
The remarkable question is why anyone thinks it shouldn’t. And why did it take 70 yrs to come up with this idea?
Please, PLEASE, get someone besides Tyler Cowen to write about AI. I haven’t read his latest entry, and I don’t need to. He will set up the situation with a pretty shallow take, then he will offer some superficially intriguing ideas with no real substance, and then he will gently chide everyone who worries, insisting it’s all good withAI, and it’s only going to get better. Knock it off already. I wonder how much money he’s invested in AI—I bet it’s a lot.