We Freeze People, Don't We?

Perhaps you’ve heard about the controversial Alabama Supreme Court ruling about in-vitro fertilization (IVF), in which the court declared that frozen embryos were people. The court stated that it has long held that “unborn children are ‘children,’” with Chief Justice Tom Parker – more on him later – opining in a concurring opinion:

Human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God, who views the destruction of His image as an affront to Himself. Even before birth, all human beings bear the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory.

Seriously.

Be careful with those "people" / Credit: Bing Image Creator

Many people have already weighed in on this decision and its implications, but I couldn’t resist taking some pleasure in seeing “pro-life” advocates tying themselves in knots trying to explain why, when they legislated that life begins at conception, they didn’t mean this kind of conception and that kind of life.

John Oliver was typically on point, noting that the Alabama ruling was “wrong for a whole bunch of reasons. Mainly, if you freeze an embryo it's fine. If you freeze a person, you have some explaining to do."

The case in question wasn’t specifically about IVF, nor did the ruling explicitly outlaw it. It was a case about a patient who removed stored embryos and accidentally dropped them, and the couples whose embryos were destroyed wanted to hold that patient liable under the Wrongful Death of a Minor Act. The court said they could. Note, though, that neither the patient nor the clinic was being charged with murder or manslaughter…yet.

Although the Alabama Attorney General has already indicated he won’t prosecute IVF patients or clinicians, the ruling has had a chilling effect on fertility clinics in the states, with The University of Alabama at Birmingham health system and others indicating they were putting a pause on IVF treatments.

Justice Parker has long been known as something of a theocrat; as The New York Times wrote:

Since he was first elected to the nine-member court in 2004, and in his legal career before it, he has shown no reticence about expressing how his Christian beliefs have profoundly shaped his understanding of the law and his approach to it as a lawyer and judge.

His concurring opinion claimed: the state constitution had adopted a "theologically-based view of the sanctity of life." Alabama is not alone. Kelly Baden, the vice president for public policy at the Guttmacher Institute, told BBC: "We do see that many elected officials and judges alike are often coming at this debate from a highly religious lens."

Speaker Johnson has said:

The separation of church and state is a misnomer. People misunderstand it. Of course, it comes from a phrase that was in a letter that Jefferson wrote. It’s not in the Constitution. And what he was explaining is they did not want the government to encroach upon the church — not that they didn’t want principles of faith to have influence on our public life. It’s exactly the opposite.

And here we are.

Umm, a misnomer? Credit: Bing Image Creator

Many Republicans are backtracking on the ruling. Alabama Republican Governor Kay Ivey said she was “working on a solution.” Alabama legislators are already working on bills to protect IVF, clarifying that in vitro fertilization doesn’t count, with life only beginning when implanted in a uterus. Oh, OK, then.

Presumed Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump says he “strongly” supports IVF, and Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson said: “I believe the life of every single child has inestimable dignity and value. That is why I support IVF treatment, which has been a blessing for many moms and dads who have struggled with fertility,” Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville somewhat hilariously managed to somehow both support the ruling and the need for IVF.

Eric Johnston, president of the Alabama Pro-Life Coalition, admitted:

It's a win philosophically for the pro-life movement because it carries on the pro-life recognition of unborn life. But you get into a very difficult situation, where you have this medical procedure that's accepted by most people, and then how do you deal with it? That's the dilemma… But I think the pro-life community in general supports IVF, and I've known and worked with many people who have had children via IVF. And at the same time, they think abortion is wrong. This issue is so different from abortion, but it has to do with life."

The trouble is, red states are scrambling all over themselves passing ever-more restrictive abortion laws, with the “life begins at conception” mantra, and, despite what Speaker Johnson and other House Republicans say now, 125 of them have cosponsored the Life at Conception Act that makes no exception for IVF.

Gosh, who could have guessed IVF would be impacted by all this?  Well, anyone who thought about it for a half second.

Although IVF only accounts for about 2% of births, it has been around for decades. An untold number of embryos are routinely stored (frozen) and, in some cases, destroyed. Now people like Republican Governor Greg Abbott would have us believe IVF is taking us all by surprise:

These are very complex issues where I’m not sure everybody has really thought about what all the potential problems are and as a result, no one really knows what the potential answers are. And I think you’re going to see states across the country come together grappling with these issues and coming up with solutions.

Once a fetus or an embryo is a person, what rights do they have, when do they qualify for tax credits/welfare/child support, and how do their rights compare to other people? As Jacob Holmes suggested in the Alabama Political Reporter: “Imagine you are in an in vitro fertilization clinic that is on fire, and you have time to save only 100 frozen embryos or a single 2-year-old child.” Do you save the most “lives,” or the only one actually breathing?

I would be remiss if I didn’t note that Alabama has the third highest infant mortality rate in the U.S. (thank you, Arkansas and Mississippi!), and that it was one of 15 (red) states that is rejecting federal funds to help feed hungry children doing the summer (Alabama has some 500,000 such children).  

Evidently, unborn or frozen “people” matter more than live ones.

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These are, I admit, complex ethical issues, but trying to legislate them, especially from the standpoint of one particular religious point-of-view, is only going to lead to more outcomes like we're seeing in Alabama. Democracy demands that we do better to listen than to tell.

Chips Off the AI Block

I’ve been thinking a lot about chips lately, and not only because, according to The New York Times, chocolate chip ice cream has fallen out of favor.  As dismayed as I was about that, I was even more surprised to learn that, as of last Wednesday, computer chip maker Nvidia now is the 3^rd largest U.S. company – and 4^th largest worldwide – by market capitalization. Bigger than Amazon, Alphabet, or Meta, not to mention Tesla.

Credit: Bing Image Creator

If you’re a stock maven, or are deeply interested in A.I., you might have been following Nvidia. The company specializes in designing chips that powers A.I. applications. It has also has long been a presence in advanced chips for, among other things, gaming, cloud computing, and image computing. But Nvidia is hardly a top-of-mind company for consumers, unlike Microsoft or Apple (both of whom it trails in market cap) or the other Big Tech companies.

You may want to start paying more attention to it.

The A.I. revolution of the last two years has been very good for Nvidia; its stock is up over 200% in the last 12 months alone. Charlie Blaine of The Street noted: “Let's say you bought 100 Nvidia shares at the end of 2018. Adjusting for the split later on, the price would be $33. Today, your stake would be worth $726,700, up 2,100%.”

Nvidia first hit $1 trillion in market capitalization last May, some 24 years after going public. It is now worth around $1.8 trillion, and analysts are eagerly awaiting Wednesday’s earnings call. "It could be the most important earnings in all tech year to date, and possibly the entire stock market," Jordan Klein, managing director for tech, media and telecom sector trading at Mizuho Securities, said in a client note. "Nvidia is not up 47% year to date to $1.8 trillion market cap because nobody cares, right?"

By contrast, Intel – which many consumers might be able to name – has a market cap about one tenth of Nvidia’s, although Nvidia trailed Intel as recently as 2020.

To call Nvidia a chip maker or chip manufacturer is somewhat misleading, though. What it does uniquely well is chip design. TMSC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) does most of its actual production, as it does for many chip companies. Oh, sure, there are other chip manufacturers, including AMD, Intel and Samsung, but TMSC produces about 90% of the world’s high performance chips. You want AI? You want quantum computing? You want the future?  Then you need Nvidia.

Given the decades-long tensions between China and Taiwan, not to mention increasing tensions between China and America, including US restrictions on advanced technology to China, it should give pause to think that a Chinese invasion of, or a missile strike on, Taiwan could severely hamper development of AI and other advanced technologies.

That’s one reason TMSC is diversifying the locations of its fabrication plants, with two planned in the US, two in Japan, and “possibly” one in Germany.  Its first planned Arizona plant was scheduled to start production by the end of 2024, but that has slipped into the first half of 2025, a delay attributed in part to lack of skilled employees. Its second Arizona plant now won’t be in production until 2027 or 2028, instead of 2026. The progress is somewhat dependent on “how much incentives that the U.S. government can provide,” Mark Liu, TSMC’s chairman, said in an investor call. The Wall Street Journal reports: “negotiations between the Biden administration and TSMC over subsidies have proven challenging, say people on both sides.”

Those incentives were supposed to come from the 2022 Chips and Science Act, which was to invest some $50b to boost US chip manufacturing. But progress has been slower than expected. Similar to TMSC’s issues in Arizona, Intel’s much publicized Ohio expansion now isn’t expected to even be completed until late 2026, instead of beginning production in 2025 as originally planned.

Just last week the Biden administration released its first major award, some $1.5b to New York-based GlobalFoundaries, with another $1.6b in loans. That’s a long way from $50b and not much visible progress for 18 months since passage. “Nothing has failed yet,” Emily Kilcrease, a senior fellow and the director of the energy, economics and security program at the Center for a New American Security, told NYT. “But we’re going to have to see some progress and those factories actually coming online in the next few years for the program to be considered a success.”

And, in any event, TSMC may be planning to keep its most advanced processes at home, not in its overseas plants. So much for reducing dependency.

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If you think the world’s dependence on a single manufacturing company for our most advanced chips is scary, it’s worse than that. TSMC and other chip manufacturers rely on EUV lithography, which is used to engrave the chips. And there’s only one company -- Advanced Semiconductor Materials Lithography – that produces the machines to do that.

If you hadn’t heard of Nvidia, and perhaps even if you had, you almost certainly hadn’t heard of ASML, or understood its importance. “ASML has a monopoly on the fabrication of EUV lithography machines, the most advanced type of lithography equipment that’s needed to make every single advanced processor chip that we use today,” Chris Miller, assistant professor at the Fletcher School at Tufts University, explained to CNBC. “The machines that they produce, each one of them is among the most complicated devices ever made.” TMSC, Intel, and Samsung – all of whom are major investors -- account for over 80% of its sales.

ASML is located in the Netherlands, so is just one hypersonic missile away from Russia destroying the chip market.

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I’ll be watching Nvidia’s earning report with some interest. Its stock might be in a bubble, but AI is only going to get bigger, which is good for Nvidia. It’d be cool to see if it can top $2 trillion in market cap, especially if it vaults Saudi Aramco into 3^rd overall spot. Its success is a classic capitalism success story; it built a better mousetrap, and the world beat a path to it.

But reliance on two companies – TMSC and ASML – for some of our most advanced technologies is the opposite of capitalism, especially when they are so geographically constrained. If we want to play hardball with our geopolitical rivals about advanced technologies, just remember that they can do some brush back of their own.

The Chips Act was a widely supported effort at industrial policy, but, so far, it has been too little, too slow.

Why Not, Indeed

Recently in The Washington Post, author Daniel Pink initiated a series of columns he and WaPo are calling “Why Not?” He believes “American imagination needs an imagination shot.” As he describes the plan for the columns: “In each installment, I’ll offer a single idea — bold, surprising, maybe a bit jarring — for improving our country, our organizations or our lives.”

Sometimes you just have to ask "why not?" Credit: Bing Image Creator

I love it. I’m all in. I’m a “why not?” guy from way back, particularly when it comes to health care.

Mr. Pink describes three core values (in the interest of space, I’m excerpting his descriptions):

• Curiosity over certainty. The world is uncertain. Curiosity and intellectual humility are the most effective solvents for unsticking society’s gears.
• Openness over cynicism: Cynicism is easy but hollow; openness is difficult but rich.
• Conversation over conversion: The ultimate dream? That you’ll read what I’ve written and say, “Wait, I’ve got an even better idea,” and then share it.

Again, kudos. One might even say “move fast and break things,” but the bloom has come off that particular rose, so one might just say “take chances” or “think different.” Maybe even “dream big.”

Around the same time I saw Mr. Pink’s column I happened to be reading Adam Nagourney’s The Times: How the Newspaper of Record Survived Scandal, Scorn, and the Transformation of Journalism. In the early 1990’s The Times (and the rest of the world) was struggling to figure out if and how the Internet was going to change things. Mr., Nagourney reports how publisher Arthur Sulzberger (Jr) realized the impact would be profound:

One doesn’t have to be a rocket scientist to recognize that ink on wood delivered by trucks is a time consuming and expensive process.

I.e., contrary to what many people at The Times, and many of its readers, thought at the time, the newspaper wasn’t the physical object they were used to; it was the information it delivers. That may seem obvious now but was not at all then.  

Which brings me to health care. Contrary to what many people working in healthcare, and many people getting care from it, might think, healthcare is not doctors, hospitals, prescriptions, and insurance companies. Those are simply the ink on wood delivered by trucks that we’re used to, to use the metaphor.

And it doesn’t take a rocket science to recognize that what we call health care today is a time consuming and expensive process – not to mention often frustrating and ineffective.

Why not do better?

I also thought about health care when reading Mr. Nagourney’s book when he described the conflict between the journalism side of the company versus the business side: was the newspaper about the articles it published, with the advertising just there to support them, or was it really an advertising platform that needed the content the journalists created to bring eyeballs to it? In healthcare, is it about helping patients with their health, or is it a way to provide income to the people and organizations involved in their care?

I.e., is it about the mission or the margins?

That's the dilemma. Credit: Bing Image Creator

If you think that’s too cynical, I’ll point to Matthew Holt’s great article in The Health Care Blog arguing that many hospitals systems are now essentially hedge funds that happen to provide some care, while also creating scads of rich executives. Or to how an actual hedge fund is buying a hospital. Or to how, indeed, private equity firms are buying up health care organizations of all types, even though many experts warn the main impact is to raise costs and adversely impact care. Or to how Medicare Advantage plans may be better at delivering insurer profits than quality care.

I could go on and on, but it seems clear to me that healthcare has lost its way, mistaking how it does things from what it is supposed to be for. If healthcare has become more about making a small number of people rich than about making a lot of people healthier, then I say let’s blow it up and start from first principles.

There’s a “Why Not?”

Mr. Holt’s “Why Not?” is to take a measly $38b from the $300b he estimates those hospitals are sitting on, and invest it in primary care, such as the Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs). Primary care needs the money; the hospitals/hedge funds, not so much. Amen to that.

A couple years ago I proposed an even wilder idea: let’s give every physician $2 million – maybe even $2.5 million – annually. We say we value them, so let’s reward them accordingly. The caveat: from that they’d have to pay for all of their patients’ health care needs – referrals, prescriptions, hospital stays, etc. I posited that they’d negotiate much better deals with their compatriots than we seem to be able to do. Lots of details to be worked out, but it falls into the “Why Not?” category.

Here's another audacious Why Not: it’s fairly well known that CEO to worker pay ratios have skyrocketed from a modest 20-1 in the 1960’s to something like 344-1 now. There’s no evidence I’ve seen that the ratios are any better in healthcare. Since no profession in healthcare is more respected and relied on than nurses, I propose – maybe making it a condition for receiving any federal funds -- that no healthcare organization should have an executive compensation  to nurse compensation ratio that exceeds 20 (and I do mean compensation rather than salary, to avoid the bonus/stock shenanigans that executives have relied on). 

If that sounds low, I’d pity the executive who wants to argue with straight face that he/she is more than twenty times more important than nurses. I bet they couldn’t find many patients who’d agree, or any nurses.

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If you work in healthcare, you should ask yourself: is what I do the ink, the wood, or the delivery truck, or is it truly integral to what healthcare should be in 2024?  If you think your job should be more about health and less about the business of health, why not make it so?

And the rest of us should be asking ourselves: is the healthcare we get still the equivalent of a print newspaper? We don’t have to be rocket scientists to recognize that, in 2024, we should be expecting something better – cheaper, faster, more interactive, more personal, and much more impactful.

Why not, indeed?

Check This Out

As an avid reader, a month ago I was depressed to read that apparently 46% of Americans did not read any books in 2023. If you manage to read just one book a month – just one book per month! -- that puts you in the top 20%. Combine that with the recent wave of book bans and, increasingly, librarians being under siege, it sure seems like grim times for a literate society.  

No, the library isn't dead. Credit: Bing Image Creator

But, it turns out, things might not be quite as bad as I’d feared, and the hope comes from Gen Z and millennials.

A pair of Portland State University professors, Kathi Inman Berens and Rachel Noorda, summarize the results of their new research in an article in The Conversation: Gen Z and millennials have an unlikely love affair with their local libraries.  In a world of TikTok, gaming, and streaming, who’d have thought?

According to their survey, 54% of Gen Z/millennials have visited a library in the past year – versus 45% of Gen X and 43% of baby boomers. Even over half of the 43% Gen Z/millennials who don’t claim to be readers say they’ve visited a library in the past year. The researchers found: “Browsing public libraries is Gen Z’s #3 preferred place to discover books. Libraries are the #5 preferred place for millennials to discover books.”

Credit: Berens and Noorda

The authors note:

The library provides a number of things beyond books: a safe, free place to hang out, important resources and advice during big life changes such as career transition, parenthood, new language acquisition, or learning to read; Wi-fi enabled work spaces; and creativity resources like maker spaces and media production equipment.

The authors argue that, whether the patrons are checking books out or not, libraries serve as a low cost marketing venue for publishers, allowing readers to find books risk-free. They further see print books as fitting better into a social media age than one might think:

When fans are also creators, printed books make good props in visual media like TikTok short videos and Instagram Reels. There are no TikTok videos of ebooks! Printed books can be imaginatively used as conversation pieces or expressive objects.

Every library should prominently post “There are no TikTok videos of ebooks!”

Gen Z/millennials are also going to bookstores, with 58% buying a book there in the past year. Indeed, the research found: “Gen Z and millennials slightly prefer bookstores to libraries for printed book discovery.”

Given all this, it’s shocking how we’re treating libraries and the people who staff them. “We’re no longer seeing a parent have a conversation with a teacher or librarian about a book their child is reading,” Deborah Caldwell-Stone, the director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, told The New York Times. “We’re seeing partisan groups demand the removal of books that they’re told are bad books, that they are not even reading, because they don’t meet the political or moral agenda.”

The Times further reported: “People who normally preside over hushed sanctuaries are now battling groups that demand the mass removal of books and seek to control library governance. Last year, more than 150 bills in 35 states aimed to restrict access to library materials, and to punish library workers who do not comply.”

Despite all this, libraries remain a special place, at least for Gen Z/millennials. Professors Berens and Noorda speculate: “Gen Zers and millennials still see libraries as a kind of oasis – a place where doomscrolling and information overload can be quieted, if temporarily…Perhaps Gen Zers’ and millennials’ library visits, like their embrace of flip phones and board games, are another life hack for slowing down.”

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Contrary to the gloomy reading statistics I started with, Professors Berens and Noorda found that young people claim to read 2 print books, 1 ebook, and 1 audiobook a month, with Gen Z slightly outpacing millennials. When asked generally about reading habits, reading print books are, not surprisingly, less common than reading text messages, email, social media, and websites, but is solidly in 5^th place (50%).

Credit: Berens and Noorda

Despite what you might believe about the prevalence of gaming and the creator/influencer economy, when asked about their “media identity,” 57% of Gen Z/millennial identity as readers, versus 53% as gamers and 52% as fans. Reading is not dead.

Despite the encouraging research, we need to keep in mind that U.S. reading scores are at their lowest point in decades (along with math scores). There is now a movement called “the science of reading” that many educators (and legislators) are advocating, but a new study suggests a different culprit: students read better, learn better, when they read text on paper instead of on a screen. As the authors (Froud, et. alia) report: “Reading both expository and complex texts from paper seems to be consistently associated with deeper comprehension and learning.”

The authors say: “We do think that these study outcomes warrant adding our voices … in suggesting that we should not yet throw away printed books, since we were able to observe in our participant sample an advantage for depth of processing when reading from print.”

John R MacArthur, publisher of Harper’s Magazine, wrote about the study in The Guardian, and cited a speech MIT neuroscientist John Gabrielli gave last fall about the use of technology to improve reading:

I am impressed how educational technology has had no effect on scale, on reading outcomes, on reading difficulties, on equity issues.

How is it that none of it has lifted, on any scale, reading? … It’s like people just say, ‘Here is a product. If you can get it into a thousand classrooms, we’ll make a bunch of money.’ And that’s OK; that’s our system. We just have to evaluate which technology is helping people, and then promote that technology over the marketing of technology that has made no difference on behalf of students … It’s all been product and not purpose.

We have a “product” that works; it’s called a book. We have a place that nurtures and encourages young people to read them; it’s called a library. We scream and yell about the pernicious influences of social media while dragging libraries and “controversial” books into the cultural wars, and then wonder why reading scores plummet.

Let’s keep libraries an oasis. If Gen Z/millennials get it, why don’t the rest of us?

There's No "A.I." in "Cui Bono"

Unless you are a creator, you probably don’t think much about copyrights. But The New York Times got my immediate attention with Cecilia Kang’s article The Sleepy Copyright Office in the Middle of a High-Stakes Clash Over A.I.. There are many fronts where A.I.’s rapid development are exposing how our legal and regulatory structures have not caught up – I need only point to the Taylor Swift deepfake porn mess – but copyright law has to be at or near the top of the list.

Right now, that's wishful thinking. Credit: Bing Image Creator

This is crucial, because, as Fred Havemeyer, an analyst at the financial research firm Macquarie told The New York Times in a different article: “Copyright will be one of the key points that shapes the generative A.I. industry.” Technology lawyer and podcaster Denise Howell told Axios: "Copyright is incredibly broad and all-encompassing. We're in the wild west days of this, as far as how it's going to shake out legally."

It’s important to note that, as of now, only humans can obtain copyrights, as affirmed by a federal court last summer and by a Copyright Office ruling earlier last year. But the Copyright Office recognizes that times are changing and has initiated a more formal review of AI and copyright.

Credit: U.S. Copyright Office

“The attention on A.I. is intense,” Shira Perlmutter, director of the U.S. Copyright Office, told Ms. Kang. “The current generative A.I. systems raise a lot of complicated copyright issues — some have called them existential — that really require us to start grappling with fundamental questions about the nature and value of human creativity.”

The Office has received thousands of public comments about that review, which is a highly unusual response. “We are now finding ourselves the subject of a lot of attention from the broader general public, so it is a very exciting and challenging time,” Ms. Perlmutter diplomatically acknowledged.  

“What the Copyright Office is doing is a big deal because there are important principles of law and lots and lots of money involved,” Rebecca Tushnet, a professor of copyright and intellectual property law at Harvard Law School, told Ms. Kang. “At the end of the day, the issue is not whether these models will exist. It’s who will get paid.”

I.e., cui bono.

"Copyright owners have been lining up to take whacks at generative AI like a giant piñata woven out of their works. 2024 is likely to be the year we find out whether there is money inside," James Grimmelmann, professor of digital and information law at Cornell, told Axios. "Every time a new technology comes out that makes copying or creation easier, there's a struggle over how to apply copyright law to it.”

And how to profit from it.

The Wall Street Journal asked its readers to weigh in on the topic, and here is a small sampling of the responses:

• “Only humans should be granted copyrights. AI should be held responsible if it violates copyright protections during any of its operations.”
• “Copyright is needed in an environment where it is difficult to generate an original, and easy to generate a copy…That is, until today, when imitating a style or combining several styles is as easy as running a copy machine. Therefore I expect copyright to be replaced by another law, which will also consider the copying of style.”
• “I think those whose material the AI was trained on should own the input. They exclusively created it. But the output—the finished product enhanced by AI—should be copyrighted by the person who deployed the AI.”
• “If the AI is not sentient, then copyright should attach to the person who worked with the AI (even if it was just a request to create or think about an item). If AI becomes sentient, then copyright should belong to the AI—since it would be a separate, self-aware intelligence.”
• “If a work is created by AI, it should be protected by copyright, but in a clearly defined category.”

Obviously, there’s not quite agreement about exactly what A.I. does – it is creating, copying, or reshuffling?’ – or who should benefit, how.

Still wishful thinking. Credit: Bing Image Creator

One of the provocateurs in this area has been Stephen Thaler and The Artificial Inventor Project, which has initiated a “series of pro bono legal test cases seeking intellectual property rights for AI-generated output in the absence of a traditional human inventor or author,” with the intent “to promote dialogue about the social, economic, and legal impact of frontier technologies such as AI and to generate stakeholder guidance on the protectability of AI-generated output.”

I previously wrote about Dr. Thaler’s efforts to obtain patents for inventions created by his A.I. system DABUS, none of which has yet been successful. He keeps trying though, with both patents and copyrights. Just last week he asked a federal appeals court to reverse the Copyright Office’s ruling that human authorship is required for a copyright. He told the court: “nothing in the Copyright Act requires human creation…What the Act's language indicates is that when an entity — a natural person, a corporation, a machine — generates a creative work, that entity is the author."

I wish him luck, but I wouldn’t bet on the court ruling in his favor just yet.  It’s all going to get sorted out eventually – by the courts, by Congress, by the market – but probably not until the proverbial horse has long left the barn.

Louis Menand, writing in The New Yorker, asks the provocative question Is A.I. the Death of I.P.?  His conclusion:

Whatever happens, the existential threats of A.I. will not be addressed by copyright law. What we’re looking at right now is a struggle over money. Licensing agreements, copyright protections, employment contracts—it’s all going to result in a fantastically complex regulatory regime in which the legal fiction of information “ownership” gives some parties a bigger piece of the action than other parties. Life in an A.I. world will be very good for lawyers. Unless, of course, they are replaced with machines.

I.e., it’s not about A.I. or even “creating;” it’s always about the money. Cui bono?

The key question is whether A.I. is actually creating, or is just a tool used by humans in      creating. As one WSJ reader put it: “Again, the owner of the “David” sculpture is not the guy who made the chisel and hammer.” I think we’re still in a fuzzy area, but I also firmly believe A.I. will create. It will write, it will make art, it will invent, and it will come up with novel solutions to problems.

And, one way or another, it will get paid.

Zombie Viruses of the Permafrost

We’ve had some cold weather here lately, as has much of the nation. Not necessarily record-breaking, but uncomfortable for millions of people. It’s the kind of weather that causes climate change skeptics to sneer “where’s the global warming now?” This despite 2023 being the warmest year on record -- “by far” -- and the fact that the ten warmest years since 1850 have all been in the last decade, according to NOAA.

Permafrost thawing might look pretty, but beware. Credit: Bing Image Creator

One of the parts of the globe warming the fastest is the Arctic, which is warming four times as fast as the rest of the planet. That sounds like good news if you run a shipping company looking for shorter routes (or to avoid the troubled Red Sea area), but may be bad news for everyone else.  If you don’t know why, I have two words for you: zombie viruses.

Most people are at least vaguely aware of permafrost, which covers vast portions of Siberia, Alaska, and Canada. Historically, it’s been literally frozen, not just seasonally but for years, decades, centuries, millennia, or even longer. Well, it’s starting to thaw.

Now, maybe its kind of cool that we’re finding bodies of extinct species like the woolly mammoth (which some geniuses want to revive). But also buried in the permafrost are lots of microorganisms, many of which are not, in fact, dead but are in kind of a statis. As geneticist Jean-Michel Claverie of Aix-Marseille University, recently explained to The Observer: “The crucial point about permafrost is that it is cold, dark and lacks oxygen, which is perfect for preserving biological material. You could put a yoghurt in permafrost and it might still be edible 50,000 years later.”

Dr. Claverie and his team first revived such a virus – some 30,000 years old -- in 2014 and last year did the same for some that were 48,000 years old. There are believed to be organisms that ae perhaps a million years old, far older than we’ve been around. Scientists prefer to call them Methuselah microbes, although “zombie viruses” is more likely to get people’s attention.

A 30,000 old zombie virus. Bartoli and Abergel/Information Génomique et Structurale, CNRS-AMU

He’s worried about the risks they pose. He told The Observer: “At the moment, analyses of pandemic threats focus on diseases that might emerge in southern regions and then spread north. By contrast, little attention has been given to an outbreak that might emerge in the far north and then travel south – and that is an oversight, I believe. There are viruses up there that have the potential to infect humans and start a new disease outbreak.”

Well, you might shrug; there’s new viruses and pathogens coming along all the time, as COVID reminded us. The difference, Dr. Claverie pointed out, is this: “Our immune systems may have never been in contact with some of those microbes, and that is another worry. The scenario of an unknown virus once infecting a Neanderthal coming back at us, although unlikely, has become a real possibility.”

Jill Brandenberger, climate security research lead at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory told USA Today. “We know there’s bacterial, fungal and viral pathogens that are in permafrost. We know that upon thaw, all three of those classes of pathogens could be released. What we don’t know is how viable it is for them to stay alive and then infect.” Tell that to the people who died in the anthrax outbreak in 2016, in northwest Siberia.

It's worse than just the permafrost warming. Dr. Claverie warns:

The danger comes from another global warming impact: the disappearance of Arctic sea ice. That is allowing increases in shipping, traffic and industrial development in Siberia. Huge mining operations are being planned, and are going to drive vast holes into the deep permafrost to extract oil and ores.

Those operations will release vast amounts of pathogens that still thrive there. Miners will walk in and breath the viruses. The effects could be calamitous.

Marion Koopmans, of the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, agrees, telling The Observer:

If you look at the history of epidemic outbreaks, one of the key drivers has been change in land use. Nipah virus was spread by fruit bats who were driven from their habitats by humans. Similarly, monkeypox has been linked to the spread of urbanisation in Africa. And that is what we are about to witness in the Arctic: a complete change in land use, and that could be dangerous, as we have seen elsewhere.

And, if you’ve started to get your head around all that, if the permafrost thawing isn’t scaring us enough with the zombie viruses, there’s also a vicious global warming cycle involved. It turns out that permafrost is believed to have double the amount of carbon than is currently in the atmosphere, and which thawing permafrost releases in the form of methane and carbon dioxide.

"Methane is a potent greenhouse gas," said Dr. Thomas Birchall of the University Center in Svalbard, who was the lead author on a new study. "At present, the leakage from below permafrost is very low, but factors such as glacial retreat and permafrost thawing may 'lift the lid' on this in the future."  And, as it turns out, another new report concluded, such leakage is not being factored into most of our existing climate models.

"What happens to the carbon in permafrost is one of the biggest unknowns about our future climate," said Christina Schaedel, senior research scientist at Woodwell Climate Research Center and lead author of the report. "Earth system models are critical to predicting where, how and when this carbon will be released, but modeling teams currently don't have the resources they need to depict permafrost accurately. If we want more accurate climate predictions, that needs to change."

We don’t even have good ways to accurately estimate the thawing of the permafrost, although we’re starting to use satellite data and – you guessed it! -- AI to help improve those estimates.

So if your five-year-old is worried that global warming will impact Santa’s North Pole home, you can still reassure him/her about that, but there’s not much reassurance we can give kids about what permafrost thawing means for zombie viruses and accelerated global warming.

It's Clear to Me

I didn’t make it to this year’s CES, the “most powerful tech event in the world,” as its organizers like to brag, where the latest and greatest in technology gets shown off. Then again, I’ve never been to any CES, so, as usual, I’ve had to settle for reading various recaps. There was, as always, lots of cool stuff, but the thing I keep coming back to were the transparent screens.

LG's transparent TV. Credit: LG

I’ve long complained that screens are an outdated concept, a 20^th century technology that we should be ready to move beyond. I’m ready for holograms, eyeball displays, or other non-screen approaches. Transparent screens don’t quite get us there but they get us closer, helping us forget that there is a screen involved in whatever display we see.

Let’s start with LG, which unveiled “the world's first wireless transparent OLED TV.” LG brags it “is a true technological marvel, combining a transparent 4K OLED screen and LG's wireless video and audio transmission technology to transform the screen experience in ways that have never been possible before…giving users the unprecedented freedom to meticulously curate their living spaces.”

LG promises:

Its transparent OLED screen removes the usual constraints that come with conventional TVs. No longer does the TV have to be placed against the wall. Instead, place the OLED T in the middle of the room to become a divider or prop it against the window without blocking the view outside.

LG's transparent OLED lets owners discover new forms of entertainment and use via its dual viewing experiences: transparent and opaque. The OLED T becomes a transparent digital canvas for showcasing artwork, videos or photos with the Always-On-Display (AOD) feature. Content displayed on the transparent screen appears to float in air, yet simultaneously fuses with the surrounding space to create a compelling and atmospheric visual effect.

Chris Welsh, writing in The Verge, marveled: “I’ve looked through LG’s new transparent OLED TV and seen something special.” He wasn’t as impressed by how great a TV experience it ended up being, noting: “You’re making objective sacrifices for the transparency trick, so it’s worth considering how quickly the novelty of this TV might wear off.” But he did admit: “there were times when the TV’s transparency mode gave off a sense of depth that really messed with my brain.”

Similarly, CNET’s David Katzmaier said it was “one of the coolest TVs I’ve ever seen.” When first entering the demo suite, he at first didn’t realize it was a screen. He concluded: “A TV that can effectively disappear and transform into furniture, art or a fish tank, the OLED TV succeeds brilliantly…To add to the cool factor, the OLED T uses the company's wireless transmission technology.” The only cord or wire is the power cord.

Both reviewers admitted it wasn’t the best TV display, and certainly is pricey, but both appear quite impressed.

Meanwhile, Samsung unveiled its MICRO LED, “showing the world that there are infinite possibilities for screens.” The company claims: “The screen, which looks like a piece of transparent glass, boasts an extremely small MICRO LED chip and precision manufacturing process that eliminates seams and light refraction. This allows the transparent MICRO LED to create a clear, unobstructed picture for various use cases in both homes and B2B environments.”

Engadget’s Sam Rutherford wrote: “In person, the effect Samsung's transparent micro OLED displays have is hard to describe, as content almost looks like a hologram as it floats in mid-air. The demo unit was freestanding and measured only about a centimeter thick, which adds even more to the illusion of a floating screen.” He further noted that images looked “incredibly sharp.”  

Becky Scarrott of Techradar described the MICRO LED “as transparent as regular glass, and also boasts a design devoid of any physical frame,” marveling that the result was “like a hologram.” Mr. Katzmaier acknowledged: “I've reviewed hundreds of TVs, and in my short time with Samsung's concept displays, the Micro-LED version did indeed look the best, especially in terms of brightness and color.”

Honestly, I don’t really care much about improving people’s TV experience. Most people seem to upgrade their TVs a lot more regularly than I do, and spend a lot more money. I’m not that discerning and I don’t need huge screens. What I am intrigued by, though, is making screens less obtrusive, whether they are TV screens, computer screens, or smartphone screens. I want images to seemingly appear out of nowhere, like magic.

If we can’t have holograms (yet), transparent screens might not be a bad interim solution.

Imagine, for example, a physician using a two-sided transparent screen for the EHR. Instead of the screen being a distraction that gets in the way of focusing on the patient, the doctor could use it facing the patient, with the patient seeing the same text/images the physician sees, appearing to simply float in the air.

Another example of the power of transparency is a result from the University of California San Diego. Researchers there developed a neural implant that can provide information about brain activity deep inside the brain even though sitting on the surface.

I won’t try to go into the woods about what it does, but the researchers note:

Transparency is one of the key features of this neural implant. Traditional implants use opaque metal materials for their electrodes and wires, which block the view of neurons beneath the electrodes during imaging experiments. In contrast, an implant made using graphene is transparent, which provides a completely clear field of view for a microscope during imaging experiments.

"We are expanding the spatial reach of neural recordings with this technology," said study senior author Duygu Kuzum, a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering.

And I’d be remiss if I didn’t note the advances in transparent wood – yes, you read that right. Jude Coleman of Knowable Magazine wrote: “Transparent wood could soon find uses in super-strong screens for smartphones; in soft, glowing light fixtures, and even as structural features, such as color-changing windows.

Or maybe in your next transparent TV.

One way or another, I’m excited to see where the technology around transparency is going to take us.