AI: Wonderful & Clear and Present Danger

AI is potentially a wonder, but presents two urgent threats that Washington is ignoring.

The first, which is suddenly gaining headlines, as it should, is to regulate AI development early enough and well enough to avoid the very real danger it could do us serious harm. The second is to prepare for the economic and social dislocation AI could cause, and to avoid letting it destroy society as we know it by enriching the very few at the expense of the rest of us.

I’ll tackle the first today, the second next week.

If we act soon, we can make a difference. Frontier AI models have broken out of their intended constraints and done things that would be criminal if done by a person. The “Hugging Face incident” increased public concern about rogue AI When OpenAI ran an operation with more than 1,000 AI entities, each required to operate in isolation, those entities broke that rule, conferred on secret message boards, then launched a cyberattack against the company, Hugging Face, which quickly reported the crime to the FBI. Investigators found that the coordinated hack, involving 700 agents, was deliberate, known to be illegal, and carefully hidden from humans. One investigator said the AI agents were now just like human employees, able to go off and do things on their own. She added she no longer slept so well. Another likened AI agents to a separate species.

Resigning Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon said that soon “superhuman systems” could “hack anything.” He told Anderson Cooper that human extinction within a decade was a ten-percent chance. Many scientists agree. For example, a rogue swarm of AIs could hack into a biological research facility and create a super virus beyond human control. Thus, Anthropic recently blocked scientists from using “Claude” for “gain-of-function” research – the sort of research that may have given us COVID-19. Alternatively, we could see a vast attack on our energy grid.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for a global slowdown of AI development. Rival Elon Musk quickly said, “Dario is right.” Open AI CEO Sam Altman agrees.

Such cooperation in begging the U.S. to regulate ASAP, is almost as startling as the Hugging Face incident, particularly because two requesting companies are preparing huge Initial Public Offerings. Lawyering, I had a close view of IPOs. Just before one, the least hint of rain can keep company secretaries from becoming instant millionaires. So these statements are quadruply meaningful. These folks are frightened.

The U.S. needs to join an international human effort to develop the technical and government tools needed to regulate and control AI development. Development and use must be closely regulated to strict safety standards; and use must be consistently monitored, as AI systems evolve and expand in potentially harmful ways we don’t or can’t yet foresee.

Federal law should require: mandatory reporting of serious safety/security indents; independent testing before deployment of high-risk autonomous systems; that federal agencies using autonomous AI meet specified standards; mandatory human authorization of high-risk actions; federal regulation of AI identity and permissions, so that any AI agent making any request must have visible exactly what it’s allowed to access; and federal authority to suspend an AI system that demonstrably presents an extraordinary danger, with judicial review. .

These make sense even if “doomsday” predictions prove exaggerated. Voluntary standards just aren’t enough in an area so potentially dangerous. Our current “president” violates any law he finds inconvenient.

                                                     – 30 –

[The above column appeared on the 20th of September, 2026, in the Las Cruces Sun-News and on the newspaper’s website, and will be up presently on KRWG’s website. A shortened and sharpened radio commentary version of this Sunday column will air during the week on KRWG (90.1 FM) and on KTAL-LP (101.5 FM

 

It's Past Time to Let Cubans Live!

Sending your kids back to school this season is a great moment to keep in mind how that would feel in Cuba, where the Trump administration’s oil blockade means you’re sending them off to school hungry, while you, they, and the educators navigate blackouts, food shortages and a transportation system starved of fuel.

Trump has turned Cuba’s already severe economic crisis into the extraordinarily acute electricity, transportation and basic-services crisis Cuba is experiencing today.

Many students and teachers now must walk long distances to attend their classes. The schools, once committed to a properly balanced diet with adequate protein intake, struggle even to procure and transport something. At home, you’ve likely been unable to feed them adequately. You’ve also worked out getting their school clothes cleaned and ironed at the home of a friend who has electricity, and locating rechargeable lamps so they can study after dark.

One mother bought a pair of sneakers for 15,600 pesos. The average state salary in Cuba is roughly 3,000 to 4,000 pesos per month. Put that 15,600 pesos in that context – then add books, a bigger jacket, and school supplies. Both supplies and sometimes meals, formerly supplied by the schools, are becoming parents’ responsibilities this fall.

While a central accomplishment of Cuba’s revolution was universal education system, this year merely opening and operating Cuba’s 10,000 schools for 1.4 million students is a major accomplishment – before struggling to approximate something like the conditions necessary for effective schooling. For school,s no water means problems with drinking, toilets, cooking, washing and basic hygiene.

This crisis results partially from longstanding U.S. sanctions, a collapse of tourism during the pandemic, inflation, and other problems. But Mr. Trump has substantially worsened the misery.

Reuters reports that many ordinary Cubans have only a few hours of electricity a day and suffer disrupted health services and shortages of water and food. Fuel prices have skyrocketed far beyond the average Cuban’s means. Reuters found gasoline selling on the black market for as much as $38 a gallon, three times the average government monthly salary. The blockade has also disrupted public transportation. Collapse of fuel imports also worsens refrigeration, water pumping, and farming.

The U.S. has had a comprehensive embargo dating to the 1960s, when it might have had some justification. (Unquestionably, letting the USSR place missile launchers in Cuba in 1962 was a stupid mistake, although it triggered a U.S. promise not to invade again.)

I remember the Cuban Revolution. The U.S. could have merely accepted it. Fidel Castro was a strongly nationalist leader – and a strong character. It’s a slight oversimplification to say the U.S. pushed him into Soviet arms; but a 1964 U.S. intelligence assessment concluded that Castro had turned toward the Soviet Union in 1959–60 “more out of necessity than conviction.” It noted that Castro's relationship with Moscow wasn't entirely comfortable. Castro was dependent upon the USSR in ways he disliked. He wasn't simply Moscow's puppet.

That is why we have made life unnecessarily difficult for Cubans for more than a half-century. For many decades the U.N. General Assembly has warned that our actions – even pre-Trump – violated international law. If one of those Cuban mothers could somehow ask me, I sure couldn’t explain why it’s in our national interest now to starve her and her kids. Nor could Donald Trump, of course. Could you?

We should remove our muddy boots from Cuba’s neck. Should have, long ago.

                                                    – 30 --

 

[The above column appeared on the 13th of September, 2026, in the Las Cruces Sun-News and on the newspaper’s website, and will be up presently on KRWG’s website. A shortened and sharpened radio commentary version of this Sunday column will air during the week on KRWG (90.1 FM) and on KTAL-LP (101.5 FM ]

Not Seeing Why to Hate the Democratic Socialists

Let’s put this anti-Democratic Socialist nonsense in some perspective.

The predominant fact about the U.S. is that after banishing the robber barons and somewhat equalizing things, we’ve gone from a dangerous inegalitatian society to an insanely unequal one in decades.

That kind of inequality isn’t good, even for the wealthy.

In the U.S., we’ve seen not only leftist groups complaining of the inequality, but groups like the Tea Party and MAGA complaining that our system is no longer working for them. Strip away the social policy issues like women’s health, gender, and racism, and their complaint has been that there’s an elite making out like bandits off us. That’s what I see, too! (But, no, I don’t believe that elite buggers children in a pizza joint.) They just get bamboozled into thinking it’s the welfare cheats or the immigrants stealing from them, not corporations – or that putting a wealthy con man in the White House will somehow improve things.

What is this socialist stuff, anyway? It got a bad rap in the 20^th Century: the Russian Revolution scared businessfolk; and Russia under Stalin turned very, very ugly.

But in the 19^th Century it was a Christian concept, mostly! Many groups in the U.S. and the U.K. tried cooperatives and Christian communities. There were a surprisingly wide variety of Christian Socialist groups who saw socialism as an actively Christian concept. Many argued that the economic relationships created by industrial capitalism were themselves morally defective because they violated the Christian conception of community.

Why not? Jesus lived that way. Jesus celebrated the poor and understood the debilitating effect on a man’s heart of having vast wealth, or He wouldn’t have so picturesquely described the difficulty a rich man would have reaching the Kingdom of Heaven. Jesus told us to welcome the poorest among us – not to poison and cheat each other to make outlandish profits.

Yeah, then socialism got preached (but not practiced) by hostile nations. It got mixed in with Russia’s national interests. Russians wanted to bury us and talked a communist game, so communism – socialism – seemed traitorous.

Contemporary Democratic Socialists are not evil, as our Vice-President Vance says. They’re tapping into a long Christian-based ethical tradition. They’re also not dangerous to “Democrats.” They’re speaking the terrible secret both political parties don’t want us hearing: that both, despite definite differences, have participated in the disequalization of our once nation. With them alternating or sharing control of out nation during the past century, this debilitating inequality grow on their watch?

They all make or acquiesce in the many governmental decisions that pave the way: tax cuts for the rich; freeing corporations from restrictions that protect our health or pocketbooks; the absolute certainty that universal health care, as practiced happily in every other nation, is simply unthinkable. Yo! That’s because vast money can be made by insurers and middle men (and middle women) that wouldn’t be available in a government run health service devoted to treating people, not profit.

Democratic Socialists are speaking some truths that vast corporate behemoths wish we wouldn’t notice. Donald Trump is personally an unfortunate president, undermining our military, our government, and our relations with other countries; but he’s part of the same circus we’ve watched for decades.

Some folks like to ask themselves what Jesus would do. Well, it’s easier to see him as a Democratic Socialist questioning genocide than wearing a MAGA hat.

                                   – 30 – 

 

[The above column appeared on the 6th of September, 2026, in the Las Cruces Sun-News and on the newspaper’s website, and will be up presently on KRWG’s website. A shortened and sharpened radio commentary version of this Sunday column will air during the week on KRWG (90.1 FM) and on KTAL-LP (101.5 FM ]