The Canaries Are Already Dead

MIT is, most people would admit, a pretty good school.  Even those who don’t know a lot about universities probably associate MIT with science, engineering, and math, and in fact, it is one of the leading universities in the world for those (and other) areas. E.g., the QS World University Rankings have named it the top university in the world the last 14 years, USN&WR Global Universities Ranking has it #2, as does The Times Higher Education World University Rankings. There have been over 100 Nobel Laureate recipients associated with MIT. If you meet a Harvard grad you might think, oh, they may not actually be all that smart – they could be just a legacy admission, but if you meet an MIT grad you probably do expect that they must be smart, especially since MIT does not have legacy admissions. Even President Trump, who rails against “elite universities” and who has slashed science funding in his second administration (more on that later), can’t help but rave about his smart uncle who taught at MIT.

So when the President of MIT warns about reductions in research funding and in graduate school admissions, we’re not talking about the proverbial canaries in the coal mine dying. We’re talking about miners going down.  

If you are a scientist, or anyone who benefits from science, you should be worried. Credit: Microsoft Designer

In a video message last week, MIT President Sally Kornbluth warned of some startling losses: over 20% drops in federally funded research, in new federal research awards, and in graduate student enrollment. Overall, the school’s research enterprise has shrunk 10% in the last year.

Gulp.

"That is a striking loss for one of the most influential and productive research communities in the world,“ Dr. Kornbluth said. She added:

The fact is that we’re looking at a real drop in research being done by the people of MIT. It’s a loss of momentum for faculty and students and frankly, it’s a loss for the nation. When you shrink the pipeline of basic discovery research, you choke off the flow of future solutions, innovations, and cures, and you shrink the supply of future scientists.

Make no mistake: although MIT itself may be an outlier, what is happening to it is not. Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, told The Washington Post: “This is the first of many of these kinds of alarms that will be ringing." Brendan Cantwell, a professor of higher education at Michigan State University, also told WaPo that if MIT is scaling back how it does research, that means universities across the country should be thinking about scaling back and adjusting. The ripple effects will go far and wide, and will have bigger impacts than we realize.

I’ve written before about the Trump war on U.S. science, and while some of his attempted funding cuts have been halted by courts, no one should have their hopes up. The American Physical Society reports:

The National Science Foundation has awarded just 613 grants this fiscal year, at about 20% the level at this time in the year in each of fiscal years 2021 through 2024, according to the group Grant Witness. The amount of funding awarded is at similarly low levels, about one-third that of previous years. The trend is visible across each of NSF’s directorates. New and competitive award renewals, which undergo full peer review, are particularly low compared to previous years. The National Institutes of Health has seen a similar trend regarding its number of awards, having given out about 10,000 awards this year compared to around 18,000 at this time in previous years; total award funding is also down by a similar amount. NSF and NIH are even lagging behind fiscal year 2025, during which thousands of grants were canceled and fewer grants were awarded than in previous years.

Credit: Dan Satterfield

Meanwhile, of course, there was last month’s firing of the entire board that is supposed to oversee the National Science Foundation (NSF), which itself has been without a director for the last year. More than 2,500 scientists joined in a letter to Congress decrying the move, warning that the move “ramps up an alarming attack on the ability of the US to engage in basic and applied research, and to be competitive globally, particularly given that China is now investing more in R&D than the US.”

Dr. Kornbluth cited one threat to MIT’s financial well-being that most of us may not have realized: the excise tax on endowments. Harvard takes some grief for its $56b endowment fund, but Yale ($41b), Stanford ($38b), Princeton ($33b), MIT ($25b), and U Penn ($22b) also have large endowments. Congress during the first Trump Administration put a 1.4% excise tax on university endowments, but the so-called Big, Beautiful Bill introduced a sliding scale that gets up to 8% for the universities with the largest endowments – including MIT. It expects to pay $240 million annually for that tax, and that’s money not being spent on supporting research or educating exceptional students. Yale expects to pay $280 million annually.

Maurice McInnis, the President of Yale, warned: “The impact of this tax will also be felt far beyond our campus and our hometown. Taxing universities undermines the education and research that fuel life-saving medical breakthroughs, life-changing innovations, and economic growth in communities across the country and around the globe.” 

It feels less focused on raising revenues and more focused on punishing elite universities, and damn the consequences.

Dr. Kornbluth also pointed out the Administration apparently antipathy towards international students. The U.S.-based international education nonprofit NAFSA recently issued a report estimated that foreign student enrollment fell 20% for this spring semester. Not all of them are brilliant, not all of them would have gone to MIT or another elite research university, and not all of them would have stayed in the U.S., but our track record of attracting and retaining the best & the brightest from all around the world is in danger.

This. Is. Not. Good.

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 I didn’t go to an elite college, and I know that not all scientific or technological breakthroughs come from people who do (or even who graduate from college at all). But I do know that America did not become what it is without those elite research institutes, and if we continue to try to kill the golden geese (to move away from the canary metaphor), we’re going to miss out on the gold they produce.

Officers Eat Last

A New York Times interview with Rep. Jake Auchincloss (D - Mass) by Bret Stephens caught my attention. I am somewhat familiar with Mr. Stephens from his various pieces in NYT; he is definitely a conservative, but in the old, pre-MAGA sense where it meant you worried about spending but you didn’t hate people who weren’t like you. Rep. Auchincloss, on the other hand, was unfamiliar to me, but the headline of the interview – The Democrat Who Makes Me Listen – proved apt.

Serving others first? What a novel concept. Credit: Microsoft Designer

For me, the final line the interview summed everything up. Rep. Auchincloss is a Marine veteran, having served in Afghanistan. Mr. Stephens asked: “Final question. If there is one thing you learned in the Marine Corps which every American should know, what is it?” Rep. Auchincloss’s reply was succinct, to the point, and highly instructive: “Officers eat last.”

“Officers eat last” – wow. That’s a philosophy I can buy into. That’s a credo I hope I can live up to. That’s a slogan for a political movement I could get behind.

Of course, I’m not just talking about literally only Marine officers, and I’m not just talking about eating. I’m sure Rep. Auchincloss intended that it was a life lesson that should be applied broadly. I.e., people in authority should make sure the people they are responsible for get taken care of before they take care of themselves. I don’t think that attitude is solely responsible for the esteemed Marine esprit de corps, but it’s got to be part of it.

The trouble is, we don’t see much of that attitude in the rest of America. When Congress failed to pass a budget and millions of federal workers went without paychecks, they (and their staffs) kept getting paid. When the White House went slashing various budgets, it didn’t eliminate White House jobs.

If you want to keep your blood pressure under control, don’t even ask how generous the Congressional retirement package is. Suffice it to say that, if you are one of the few workers who still qualify for a defined benefit pension, it is almost certainly less than theirs. Don’t get me started on how members of Congress seem to get richer – a lot richer – while in office, possibly due to insider trading loopholes.

According to Gallup, only 10% of Americans approve of the job Congress is doing, with 86% disapproving, but they don’t care. They get paid anyway, and most House seats aren’t competitive, so most incumbents are in little danger of getting voted out.

This is no “officers eat last.”

It’s not just politicians. All those billionaires – over 1,000 of them in the U.S. alone! – didn’t get (or keep) all that money by putting anyone else first. CEOs used to “only” make 15x the average worker, but now make closer to 300x, with their pay going up 20x the average worker’s pay increase in 2025 alone. If there was ever an era of benevolent CEOs looking out for their workers, that era has long gone. If CEOs can underpay or, better yet, layoff their workers, the better for their compensation. The rich guys eat first, with the finest dining their employees’ labor can finance.

Or private equity investors. They’ve wrecked their havoc on manufacturing and other industries, and more recently have turned to areas like housing and health care. They’re not just coming for your job, they’re coming for where you live and where/how you get care. They don’t make any pretense that what they’re doing is for your good; they are openly in it for the R.O.I. They’re face first in the dinner trough and don’t really care if you even get any of the scraps.

It’s obscene. It’s the opposite of officers eating last.

Rep. Auchincloss calls for “economic patriotism,” saying:

If the core idea of America is that the circumstances of your birth shouldn’t determine the condition of your life, you cannot have a durable “demos,” a durable sense of a shared American future, if you have an ossified American aristocracy. And that is what has happened. The top 10 percent of the American economy are people just increasingly divorcing themselves from the rest.

He wants, in particular, for more wealth to be taxed at death, so the richest Americans can’t keep passing along their wealth without ever paying taxes on the gains. He recognizes that government overregulation can be an issue, but correctly points out that the unbridled corporate monopolization we’ve seen in recent years is also harmful. Gordon Gecko famously said “Greed is good, “ but Rep. Auchincloss counters with “Officers eat last.”

I know which side I’m on.

If the Democrats had any sense, which they don’t, they’d seize upon this slogan and help define how it applies to our everyday lives. They’d build out what “economic patriotism” means. Dems are still getting blamed for NAFTA and letting China join the World Trade Organization, with the subsequent loss of many U.S. jobs, but those jobs didn’t just magically disappear. Rich people decided they could get richer by offshoring them, and if that meant losses of lots of jobs and devastation of many communities, so be it. The Dems should never have taken the blame, and, instead, should have aggressively pointed the finger at the true culprits.

To be honest, I don’t think the Democrats are the right party to advocate this idea. They have their own cadres of rich people, both in office and among their donors, and it shows in their policies. The Democratic brand is so toxic that they may be beyond reinvention. That’s why, say, Rob Sand in Iowa’s Governor’s race or Graham Platner in Maine’s U.S. Senate race are carefully trying to not talk about their ties to the party, and Dan Osborn in the Nebraska U.S. Senate race is running as an independent (with the tacit support of the state’s Democratic Party).

Those are the kinds of politicians who could make the “officers eat last” pitch and make it work.  Chuck Schumer? Kamala Harris? Gavin Newsom?  I don't think so. 

Neither party has a real vision for how – or agreement on even whether – to address the growing inequality in America, much less a vision for how to address AI and other revolutionary technological changes that are upon us. We should have long ago grappled with climate change and microplastics, but there was too much money in the status quo.

It’s not the answer, but “officers eat last” could be part of an answer. Show me the candidates who believe in, live by, and will fight for it, and they’d have my vote.

Blasts From the Past

Two names from the past popped up my radar screen this week, making claims for the future: GameStop and Blackberry. It’s as William Faulkner once wrote (Requiem for a Nun): “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

Talk about blasts from the past. Credit: Microsoft Designer

Last time I thought of GameStop, they were the beneficiary of a meme stock frenzy, back in 2021, wherein a bunch of day traders used Reddit to drive the stock price up to insane levels (up 1500%!) in a effort to punish professional short sellers. It survived that, closed hundreds of stores -- and quietly accumulated a 5% stake in eBay. Then a couple of days ago CEO Ryan Cohen announced GameStop was making an unsolicited – and potentially hostile – bid to acquire eBay.

Now, keep in mind, GameStop has a market cap of about $11b, while eBay is valued at $46b. eBay may not be quite the cultural force it once was, but at least it never had to rely on a meme stock rally to pump its stock. So this is more like The Mouse that Roared than David versus Goliath.

GameStop is offering $125 per share, a $56b bid that was about a 20% premium over eBay’s stock pre-bid. The bid is financed 50% by cash and 50% by GameStop stock. GameStop claims to have a $20b commitment from TD Securities to back the bid.

“EBay should be worth—and will be worth—a lot more money,” Mr. Cohen said in an interview with Lauren Thomas of The Wall Street Journal. “I’m thinking about turning eBay into something worth hundreds of billions of dollars.” He sees, for example, using GameStop’s remaining thousands of physical locations as places to collect and authenticate items from eBay sellers. The bid letter outlines: “GameStop staff already inspect and grade hardware and trading cards every day. Sellers walk in, items are verified on the spot, and listings carry a trust badge."

“There is nobody who is more qualified, based on my experience, to run the eBay business,” he asserted to Ms. Thomas.

EBay has acknowledged the offer, promising it “will carefully review and consider the unsolicited proposal to determine the course of action that it believes is in the best interests of the company and all eBay shareholders,” focusing on value to its shareholders.

No one other than Mr. Cohen seems all that excited about the bid, with GameStop’s shares dropping and eBay’s rising since the bid, making it more costly. “Without more details on proposed financing, we think the market would be skeptical of a potential deal’s feasibility,” analysts at Morgan Stanley wrote in a research note late last week. “The business is firing on all cylinders,” analysts at Bernstein wrote. “Why disrupt things? The turnaround is working.”

Still, Mr. Cohen is undeterred. “We are just starting,” Cohen said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” “For obvious reasons, eBay is a public company, there’s all kinds of perverse financial incentives from the board to the management team. So there’s only one way to approach something like this.” He believes the combination “could be a legit competitor to Amazon.”

But, at least, there’s no denying: people are talking about GameStop.

That’s probably more than one can say about Blackberry. It’s been even longer since I’ve thought about it. Those of us of a certain age remember Blackberry well; it was king of mobile business until the advent of the iPhone, with its distinctive physical keyboard. Blackberry – formerly known as Research in Motion – no longer makes phones, but its strength was never the hardware, it was the software that powered those devices. And a software company it owns – QNX – is still ubiquitous.

Ben Cohen profiled QNX in The Wall Street Journal this week. Mr. Cohen writes:

The company’s most lucrative product is not hardware but the hidden software in 275 million cars on the road today. In fact, BlackBerry’s essential technology can be found in all sorts of unexpected places, and you wouldn’t find it even if you went looking for it.

He further explains: “QNX is the operating system that enables all kinds of driver assistance: collision warnings, blind-spot notifications, adaptive cruise control, pedestrian detection and steering you back into a lane when you’re drifting into trouble.”  John Wall, QNX’s president, told Mr. Cohen: “We’re the foundation. Everything pretty on top wouldn’t work without a strong foundation.” 

Source: WSJ

QNX claims it is “the software foundation of Physical AI,” serving the automotive, defense, heavy machinery, medical device, and robotics industries, among others. In medical devices, for example, it helps power surgical robots, diagnostic equipment, patient monitoring, and drug delivery systems, claiming that 9 out of 10 medical device manufacturers use its solutions, in over 50 medical device types.

QNX accounts for half of Blackberry’s revenue and has helped Blackberry get four consecutive profitable quarters since the first time since the iPhone hit. I don’t know what WSJ’s policies are about investing in companies reporters write about, but Blackberry’s stock surged after his article hit. It’s not all about his fine reporting though; investment guru Timothy Sykes says: “The cash flow picture is what serious traders should focus on. BB generated roughly $46.1M of operating cash in the latest quarter and $44.4M of free cash flow, while keeping the balance sheet relatively clean with a current ratio near 2.1 and modest leverage.”

And to help keep the ball rolling, QNX recently partnered with NIVDIA to create “a unified platform for safety‑critical edge AI across robotics, medical, and industrial systems.” Mr. Wall said: "As robotics, medical, and industrial systems become more autonomous and software defined, safety and determinism cannot be afterthoughts. Integrating QNX OS for Safety 8.0 with NVIDIA IGX Thor and NVIDIA Halos Safety Stack brings together a trusted real‑time safety foundation and a powerful functional safety platform for edge AI.”

So Blackberry is doing well, thank you very much, even though the main driver for its success is even less known. As Mr. Wall admitted to Mr. Cohen, “If I tell them I work at QNX, they don’t know what that means.”

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I’ve never been in a GameStop, I rarely even browse on eBay, I was always only a begrudging Blackberry user (I long for Palm Pilots), and I don’t even know if my car uses QNX. But for some reason, I’m glad that GameStop and Blackberry are still alive and kicking. Reinvention is said to be good for the soul, and, sometimes, it is essential for a company. But if you have been waiting for Ask Jeeves to finally supplant Google in search, you are going to be disappointed. Not everything has a second life.

It's Got a Good Beat and You Can Kill It

Most of us can identify dogs from cats just by the sounds they make. We could probably even separate a dog’s bark from a wolf’s howl. If you are a nature lover, you might be able to identify different species of birds by their calls.  If you are a cetologist, you might be able to separate the vocalizations whales make versus those dolphins make. Across the animal world, we’ve learned the different sounds that different species make, which has been useful in our survival.

That may not be the noise bacteria make, but they do make noise, Credit: Microsoft Designer

But did you ever wonder if you can identify, say, e coli from other bacteria?

It turns out that you can, thanks to research at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) in the Netherlands. Four years ago, they showed that bacteria made noise, which was, in itself, a startling finding (admit it: would you have ever guessed that?). They used a thin layer of graphene to create a graphene “drum” small enough to fit a single bacterium. Team member Cees Dekker observed: “What we saw was striking! When a single bacterium adheres to the surface of a graphene drum, it generates random oscillations with amplitudes as low as a few nanometers that we could detect. We could hear the sound of a single bacterium!”

The team used this finding to accomplish an important purpose: to find out if bacteria were resistant to specific antibiotics. If an antibiotic was applied and the sound continued; it hadn’t worked. If the sounds stopped, the bacteria had been killed.

The team wasted no time in creating a start-up – SoundCell – to commercialize the finding. It promised to identify the “right” antibiotic in one hour, rather than subjecting patients to rounds of different antibiotics in search of one the bacteria wasn’t resistant to.

The team isn’t resting on their laurels. Some of them got to wondering, huh, I wonder if different bacteria make different sounds. And, their latest research shows, not only do they but, through machine learning, those different species can be distinguished. Team lead Farbod Alijani says. “With this new study, we take a significant leap forward: we show that each bacterial species has its own nanomotion signature.”

Mind. Blown.

The researchers focused on three bacteria that are common in hospital settings: E. coli, S. aureus (which causes staph infections) and K. pneumoniae (which causes pneumonia). They tested two different machine learning models; one correctly classified the bacteria 87% of the time, and the other 88% of the time.

Credit: Mendoza Silva, et. al. 

“By combining SoundCell’s existing antimicrobial testing prototype with this machine learning model, we can identify the bacterial infection and determine which drug is effective at the same time, based purely on the sound of a single bacterium,” says SoundCell CTO, Aleksandre Japaridze. Leo Smeets, physician microbiologist at RHMDC adds: “This approach eliminates the need for culturing, which normally takes days. And because the diagnostic steps are no longer performed sequentially, we can save even more time.”

“It’s a completely different way of interpreting the different species,” Dr. Japaridze says. “Not chemically or biologically, with markers and genes, but just purely on...mechanical behavior.”

Their paper concludes:

To sum up, our results show that combining the high sensitivity of graphene nanomotion sensors with ML enables fast, label-free AST and identification of bacteria. Since the trained models analyze nanomotion signals from individual cells, results can be obtained within 1-2 hours, eliminating the need for time-consuming culturing steps. With further development, this approach could establish nanomotion spectroscopy as a powerful platform for real-time diagnostics and for studying cellular biophysics and antimicrobial resistance.

They’ve been testing sensors in the lab, so one of the next steps is to show they can be used in actual hospital settings. They’re testing a prototype at two Dutch hospitals (RHMDC and Erasmus Medical Center). Professor Alijani believes: “This close partnership between scientists at TU Delft, a start-up and a hospital is quite unique. We have the entire knowledge chain working together.”

The potential impact is huge, with over 1 million deaths due to drug-resistant bacteria annually. “We have already shown that we can reduce antimicrobial susceptibility testing to one hour,” says Dr. Japaridze. “If we can combine that speed with species classification using the new machine learning model, we could create a globally unique device that dramatically accelerates diagnosis and treatment. And that would be highly valuable in the worldwide fight against antimicrobial resistance.”

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I love the kind of curiosity that makes one wonder, hmm, do bacteria make noise? That’s not a question most people would ask themselves. I love the scientific expertise that figured out a way to actually detect that noise, at the level of a single bacterium. I love the realization that perhaps different bacteria make different noises, and the expertise to use machine learning to distinguish them. And, of course, I’m excited that all this might lead to practical applications that could save lives and avoid needless rounds of antibiotics.

Next thing you know, we might find out that bacteria not only make noise but use them to communicate. It wasn’t that long ago that we were arrogant enough to think that only humans communicate vocally, only to find that that many animal species use sound to communicate. Heck, we’ve even found that that plants “scream,” sending out messages we’re oblivious to.

It makes you wonder: what else are we missing?

I have this wild thought that our bodies are a cacophony, with all our cells and all of cells of our microbiota chiming in. When we’re healthy, perhaps they combine to create a finely tuned symphony, but when something is off it’s like an instrument in the symphony is badly tuned, off the beat, or missing. Perhaps if we listened the right way, we could use those sounds to more quickly and more accurately diagnose and treat the problem.

That’d be some 22^nd century medicine.

So kudos to the scientists at TU Delft, good luck to the entrepreneurs at SoundCell, and to all you researchers in the world: keep asking these weird questions!

Worried About AI? Try AI Swarms

If, in 2026, you are still on social media – and, admit it, most of us still are – you probably have realized that not all the content you see can be trusted. There are people out there with what seem like crazy, or at least uninformed, ideas. Anonymous accounts allow for points-of-view people wouldn’t normally espouse publicly. And bots have been a pernicious influence for some time; Elon even bought Twitter (OK: X) supposedly to combat them.

Hint: they're not real. They just seem real. Credit: Microsoft Designer

Now, of course, we have AI chatbots to contend with, which can interact realistically enough that you may not realize they aren’t, in fact, human. But get ready for the next stage: AI “swarms” driving discourse on social media platforms.

This week Tiffany Hsu wrote in The New York Times about the flood of pro-Trump avatars showing up on social media platforms, such as Tik Tok, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, She writes:

In the months leading up to the midterm elections, hundreds of accounts have emerged on social media featuring A.I.-generated pro-Trump influencers posting at a rapid pace about the “radical left” and “America First.” They tend to appear as ordinary — if very good-looking — men and women, gazing flirtatiously at the camera while pontificating about the war in Iran, abortion or Bad Bunny.

The Times’ analysis found some 304 accounts sharing the same content, driving over a half-million views. Ms. Hsu says it is not clear who created the accounts, but experts told her “that creating such avatars is becoming easier, especially for contractors and marketing companies that now specialize in developing and dispatching A.I. avatars in bulk for increasingly low prices.”

I suspect there are orders of magnitude more of these kinds of accounts.

“People gearing up for the midterms should expect that they might see some of this content on their accounts, that it might be crafted to be particularly engaging or exciting to them,” Kaylyn Jackson Schiff, a co-director of GRAIL (Governance and Responsible A.I. Lab at Purdue University,), told her.

This should come as no surprise. It has been happening, and as AI advances, it’s going to happen more. In fact, last January researchers warned, in Science: How malicious AI swarms can threaten democracy: The fusion of agentic AI and LLMs marks a new frontier in information warfare.

The University of British Columbia press release about the commentary says: “Advances in large language models and multi-agent systems allow a single operator to deploy thousands of AI ‘voices’ that look authentic and talk like locals. They can run millions of micro-tests to find the most persuasive messages, creating a synthetic consensus that feels grassroots-driven but is engineered to manipulate democratic discourse.”

UBC computer scientist Dr. Kevin Leyton-Brown warns: “We shouldn’t imagine that society will remain unchanged as these systems emerge. A likely result is decreased trust of unknown voices on social media, which could empower celebrities and make it harder for grassroots messages to break through.”

Professor Kevin Leyton-Brown

Patrick Pester, in Live Science, explains: “With an LLM at the helm, a swarm will be sophisticated enough to adapt to the online communities it infiltrates, installing collections of different personas that retain memory and identity, according to the commentary.” Commentary co-author Jonas Kunst, a professor of communication at the BI Norwegian Business School in Norway added: “We talk about it as a kind of organism that is self-sufficient, that can coordinate itself, can learn, can adapt over time and, by that, specialize in exploiting human vulnerabilities."

That’s scary enough, but, even worse: "I think the more sophisticated these bots are, the less you actually need," lead author Daniel Schroeder, a researcher at the technology research organization SINTEF in Norway, told Mr. Pester.

Similarly, in The Conversation, Filippo Menczer, Professor of Informatics and Computer Science at Indiana University, wrote:

Today, people and organizations with malicious intent have access to more powerful AI language models – including open-source ones – while social media platforms have relaxed or eliminated moderation efforts. They even provide financial incentives for engaging content, irrespective of whether it’s real or AI-generated. This is a perfect storm for foreign and domestic influence operations targeting democratic elections. For example, an AI-controlled bot swarm could create the false impression of widespread, bipartisan opposition to a political candidate.

He notes that, in addition to tech companies cutting back on moderation, the current Administration has dismantled federal programs intended to combat such efforts, leaving the door open. He and an interdisciplinary team of computer science, AI, cybersecurity, psychology, social science, journalism and policy researchers are sounding the alarm:

We believe that current AI technology allows organizations with malicious intent to deploy large numbers of autonomous, adaptive, coordinated agents to multiple social media platforms. These agents enable influence operations that are far more scalable, sophisticated and adaptive than simple scripted misinformation campaigns.

“Manufactured synthetic consensus,” he says, “is a very real threat to the public sphere, the mechanisms democratic societies use to form shared beliefs, make decisions and trust public discourse.”

The flood of AI avatars Ms. Hsu profiles suggests that, if we’re not already there, we’re dangerously close. Eric Nelson, a special investigations analyst from Alethea, a digital threat mitigation company, told her: “This really is the first time I have seen something like this.”

“They’re trying to spread political messages and give an illusion of a consensus,” Andrew Yoon, a member of the technical staff at CivAI, a nonprofit that educates people about A.I.’s capabilities and consequences, told Ms. Hsu. “Flooding the zone here with tons and tons of videos seems geared to give a false sense of a majority opinion.”

"Humans, generally speaking, are conformist," Professor Kunst told Mr. Pester. "We often don't want to agree with that, and people vary to a certain extent, but all things being equal, we do have a tendency to believe what most people do has certain value. That's something that can relatively easily be hijacked by these swarms."

Both Professor Kunst and Professor Menczer agree that the threat is real, the threat is severe, and, unfortunately, that there are no simple solutions. The AI won’t just cut-and-paste the same content and try to flood the zone. It will tailor messages to users and their reactions to it. The messages will seem authentic and plausible. They’ll try to make us feel that if we don’t agree with them, we’re in a distinct minority. Not many of us are good with that.

I’d been worrying about swarms of AI-driven drones overwhelming conventional ministry defenses, but even that may now be outdated: the attack will be coming from inside the house, via our phones and computers.

Chances are someone in your family is a gamer. Maybe you are a gamer yourself. After all, somewhere between two-thirds and three-fourths of Americans play video games, and if you just looked at young men, it’d be closer to 100%. Grumpy older people don’t get it, complaining that gaming is just a waste of time, but gamers believe it helps with their problem solving (although at a cost of sleep).

Does this qualify you to be an air traffic controller? Maybe. Credit: Microsoft Designer

Well, the good news is that if you are, indeed, a gamer, the Federal Aviation Authority (F.A.A.) is looking for you.

Last Friday Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy announced the F.A.A.’s campaign to attract “the next generation of air traffic controllers,” It is looking for people “who possess useful skills that are transferable to a career in air traffic control, including:

• Demonstrated high cognitive functions
• Multitasking
• Spatial awareness
• Strategy and problem-solving”

By all that, they mean gamers. The announcement goes on to add: “…this effort is focused on reaching talented young people pursuing alternative career paths, many of whom are active in gaming. Feedback from controller exit interviews reinforces this, with several controllers pointing to gaming as an influence on their ability to think quickly, stay focused, and manage complexity.”

There’s a slick YouTube ad too.

“When you bring on someone who has gaming experience, particularly with air traffic control, they have an edge up,” Michael O’Donnell, an aerospace consultant who previously worked as a senior F.A.A. official focused on air traffic safety, told Karoun Demirjian of The New York Times. “They’re coming in with a skill set. But it doesn’t replace aptitude, or discipline, or decision making under pressure.”

Surprisingly, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association supports the effort, with its president Nick Daniels telling BBC:: “Our union welcomes innovative approaches to expanding the candidate pool, including outreach to individuals with high-level aptitude skills such as gamers, so long as all pathways maintain the rigorous standards required of this safety-critical profession."

To be fair, both the F.A.A. and the NATCA probably would welcome anything that might drive people to apply. The F.A.A. only has about 75% of the target number of controllers, leaving it several thousand short. Individual airports may be staffed even lower, as might certain times of day. It’s not a new problem and it is not a problem that is going to be quickly fixed; it is not as though today you can play a video game and tomorrow you can be an air traffic controller. There is definitely a learning curve.

It also doesn’t help that air traffic controllers aren’t usually paid during government shutdowns, which Congress seems to increasingly allow. "The failure to pay air traffic controllers for 44 days created uncertainty, drove many experienced controllers out of the profession and harmed the recruitment pipeline," a spokesperson from the Department of Transportation told CBS News in November.    

Nor does it help that air traffic controllers rely on technology is that likely to be older than they are. The F.A.A. is trying, for example, to replace its outdated radar system, but NBC reports: “The FAA has been spending most of its $3 billion equipment budget just maintaining the fragile old system that still relies on floppy discs in places. Some of the equipment is old and isn't manufactured anymore, so the FAA sometimes has to search for spare parts on eBay.”

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) Chair Jennifer Homendy complained: “This is 2026. The secretary talks about upgrading our air traffic control system. We have an old air traffic control system. This is why he talks about that. We need to upgrade.”  

I was surprised to learn that gaming might not just be an asset to become an air traffic controller, but also an asset for air traffic controllers. Josh Jennings, a supervisor at the F.A.A.’s air traffic command center in Virginia, told Ms. Demirjian that gaming is both a way for controllers to stay sharp, and as a form of “social currency” among them. “I would say it’s probably tenfold on how fast this new generation is able to pick up on our physical tech, our radar scopes,” he said. Controllers apparently often play video games on their breaks.

In similar approaches to look for unconventional backgrounds, the Marines are looking at dirt bikers to become drone pilots, while Russia is looking at university students for its drone pilots.     

I can see the argument for recruiting gamers to be air traffic controllers. Both are used to obsessively monitoring multiple screens with lots of activity, requiring quick reactions, and with lives on the line. The difference, of course, is that for air traffic controllers, those virtual images represent real things, and the lives that may be lost are real people’s lives.

Still, given a choice between a controller who was a gamer versus some middle-aged college grad who is used to looking at spreadsheets, give me the gamer every time.

I think about all this, oddly enough, in regards to health care. Some of you may also be fans of “The Pitt.” One of my favorite characters is head nurse Dana Evans, and I sometimes wonder if she would ever get tired enough of covering for ineffective/incompetent doctors that she might opt to become one.  You can’t tell me that she isn’t smart enough and you probably couldn’t convince me she didn’t have enough medical knowledge, but in our system if she wanted to make such a change, it would mean sending her to medical school, then internship and residency – years of her life and hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt.

Who, exactly, would that help?

You know she'd be a good doctor

Where is the “gamers, please apply” equivalent to medical training, where non-traditional but potentially appliable backgrounds count? Could, for example, people with exceptional pattern recognition skills but perhaps not so good in chemistry or biology become excellent radiologists? Might biologists do well as pathologists, without all the years of physician training?

For many decades a college degree was seen as the ticket to middle-class (or more) success, but we’re seeing that’s less true now. We’re living in a digital world, and people are gaining skills and knowledge from that world that we’re not fully recognizing.

So kudos to the F.A.A. for recognizing how gamers might be good candidates, and I can only hope the subsequent training program isn’t so tradition-bound that it scares them off. And I’m waiting to see how healthcare and other industries might learn from -- not just copy -- its approach.

 

P.s. If you are wondering, “1337” is gamer slang for “leet,” which is itself slang for :elite,” as in gaming prowess.   

Let's Get Physical (AI)

In the U.S., we’re starting to worry more about AI and robots taking our jobs. It is, apparently, the “grimmest” job market in years for college grads, and AI often gets the blame. Whether that’s true is not so clear. Callum Borchers wrote in The Wall Street Journal about “AI washing” – using AI as an excuse for not hiring. “It’s a wonderful way of looking like a genius when job cuts are something you might have to do for other operational reasons,” Peter Bell, the founder of Gather.dev, told him. “It’s great smoke cover if you just need to goose your bottom line.”

Get ready for the robots. Credit: Microsoft Designer

Still, though, it’s not an unwarranted concern. “I don’t think A.I. has hit the labor market yet, and I don’t think it’s radically changed corporate productivity yet, either, but I think it’s coming,” Daniel Rock, a University of Pennsylvania economist, told Ben Casselman of The New York Times.

Mr. Casselman reports on a new working paper from a number of economists on forecasting the economic effects of AI, which reveals there is some divergence among economists about how much AI will improve the growth of the economy or its impact on the labor force. They do think there will be impacts but “experts do not forecast economic outcomes outside the range of historical experience.”

Take your pick about the forecasted AI impact. Credit: Karger, et. al.

The experts might want to look at Japan for a glimpse of the future. In TechCrunch, Kate Park takes a long look at how Japan is prioritizing “Physical AI” not as something to fear but as an economic necessity. Its Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry announced in March that it wants to bolster Japan’s domestical Physical AI sector, and capture a 30% global share by 2040.

Japan has a big demographic problem. It has never encouraged immigration, its population has been shrinking for 14 straight years, its senior population continues to grow, and its working age population is declining. The demographic bomb is already going off.

“Physical AI is being bought as a continuity tool: how do you keep factories, warehouses, infrastructure, and service operations running with fewer people?” Hogil Doh, Global Brain general partner, told Ms. Park. “From what I’m seeing, labor shortages are the primary driver.”

“The driver has shifted from simple efficiency to industrial survival,” Sho Yamanaka, a principal with Salesforce Ventures, added. “Japan faces a physical supply constraint where essential services cannot be sustained due to a lack of labor. Given the shrinking working-age population, physical AI is a matter of national urgency to maintain industrial standards and social services.”

Justin Brown writes in Silicon Canals: “The framing matters. In the U.S., physical AI is a venture capital thesis. In China, it’s a geopolitical strategy. In Japan, it’s an answer to a structural question about whether the country can keep its industrial base running at all.”

It should be troubling that in the U.S. physical AI is neither a strategy nor a tactic, but just a “venture capital thesis.”

Ms. Parks states that Japan has historically excelled in the physical building blocks of robotics, whereas China and the U.S. have focused on “full stack” systems that include hardware, software, and data. “Japan’s expertise in high-precision components – the critical physical interface between AI and the real world – is a strategic moat,” Sho Yamanaka, a principal with Salesforce Ventures, told her. “Controlling this touchpoint provides a significant competitive advantage in the global supply chain. The current priority is to accelerate system-level optimization by integrating AI models deeply with this hardware.”

Japan’s efforts are attracting attention. Tech Buzz reports:

The shift is attracting serious enterprise money. Salesforce Ventures is betting on Japanese physical AI startups, joined by Woven Capital, Toyota's venture arm, and local heavyweight Global Brain. These aren't speculative moonshot investments-they're backing companies deploying robots into warehouses, manufacturing lines, and service positions today.

As such, Tech Buzz concludes: “This pragmatic necessity is creating a real-world testing ground that Silicon Valley can only simulate. Japanese robotics companies are learning what works when physical AI meets messy human environments-unpredictable warehouse layouts, variable product packaging, and the constant adaptation required in actual operations. The feedback loop is accelerating development faster than any research lab could manage.”

I.e., if you want to see the future of Physical AI, look to Japan.

Mr. Brown offers a very practical example:

In construction, an industry where Japan’s worker shortage is especially severe and the average age of laborers now sits above 50, Shimizu Corporation and Obayashi have deployed autonomous welding robots, concrete-finishing machines, and AI-guided cranes on active building sites. Shimizu’s Robo-Welder system has demonstrated a roughly 70% reduction in required human welding hours on structural steel projects.

Affordable housing, anyone?

It’s not that Japan is investing so much in AI – it has approved a national AI plan with five year funding of “only” US$6.3b – as it is that it is targeting it very effectively. As Franklin Templeton describes it: “The emphasis is not on chasing frontier models, but on embedding AI into sectors that already anchor Japan’s economy…Few countries are as comfortable integrating robotics into daily life and industrial production, and that long familiarity with automation shapes how AI is deployed.”

It should come as no surprise that a group of Japanese robotics developers and major electronics and semiconductor companies are collaborating to produce a humanoid robot, with the aim of mass production by 2027. Elon better get Optimus cranking.

Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA says: “Physical AI has arrived — every industrial company will become a robotics company,” but it’s not that simple. As Mr. Brown warns: “Japan’s regulatory willingness to permit autonomous systems in mixed environments like construction sites, farms, and retail stores is proving as important as the technology itself, and countries that wait until the labor crisis is acute before updating regulatory frameworks will find themselves a decade behind on deployment infrastructure.”

I especially liked Mr. Brown’s conclusion:

Western automation discourse treats robotics as something that happens to workers, a force that displaces and disrupts, and nearly every policy debate in the U.S. and Europe is still structured around that premise. Japan reveals how fundamentally parochial that framing is. When automation becomes a continuity tool rather than an optimization tool, the entire institutional posture shifts: political resistance dissolves, regulatory frameworks accelerate, and the relationship between human labor and machine capability stops being adversarial and starts being architectural. 

The U.S. already has critical shortages of farm or construction workers, we don’t produce enough engineers, and goodness knows we’re driving away our scientists, so if we wait until it’s clear that we need Physical AI, it will probably be too late.