Centrists: The Real Route to AI Safety

AI safety may be “less a problem of ethics” than of “engineering,” suggests The Washington Post Editorial Board. “Deterministic software that exists outside the AI to enforce the rules” can “place hard limits” on what AI agents can do. Just as engineers in the “early web” days “hardened the environment” software operated in by “granting it only minimal access rights,” AI agents “should be treated the same way.” No matter “how well aligned an agent becomes” with human intentions, “its ability to act should always be limited by systems fully outside its control.” Ultimately, the “machines don’t have to be trustworthy if the systems around them are.”

Foreign desk: ‘Conflict Is Inevitable’

The “quest for a stable global order has long beguiled idealists and realists alike,” but “conflict is inevitable,” argue Tod Lindberg & Corban Teague at The Wall Street Journal, so global “stability” is “at best an aspiration” and more likely “happy talk.” Times like the “post-Cold War period of general peace” are at “variance with the normal state of international affairs — violence, conflict and disorder.” Now we’re entering “a new era” of uncertainty, where America faces “not merely competitors, challengers or even adversaries, but enemies” — a truth that our enemies understand far better than we do. “Debates or spheres we view as mere competition” to the other side are “economic or informational warfare.”

Midterms view: GOP Is the Affordability Choice

The “rising tide” of unaffordability “is lifting Democrats’ prospects this fall,” David DesRosiers notes at RealClearEnergy, yet “Democratic policy is not prescriptive to mitigating that pain. It only makes it worse.” Fact is, “The rising tide of general prosperity is locked at the hip to an abundant supply of affordable energy,” and “Republicans fixate on juicing supply, Democrats on regulating demand. The former brings more supply and lower costs; the latter constrains supply and drives prices up.” A Dem Congress “can slow the permitting, leasing, and infrastructure decisions that determine whether domestic supply keeps expanding over the next 5 years. That’s the real stakes of this election.”

Safety beat: Faulty Flock Phobia

“Faulty logic” is behind fears that Flock cameras and other “automated license plate reading systems” are “a gateway to a 1984-type totalitarian state,” grumbles Kevin Babicz at The Hill. This “treats two separate ideas as though they were one: ‘Flock recorded this information’ and ‘this information could be used in a way that harms someone.’ ” And “because the second one is alarming, the whole package gets treated as alarming.” Yet Part 1 is just “a technological system doing what it was built to do: collect and organize information about reality.” “The wrongdoing occurs when a person takes that information and uses it for an immoral end,” and “Flock’s auditing system can help expose precisely that kind of misuse.” “The answer is not technological regression — it is to hold individuals who misuse the technology accountable.”

Digital watch: They Mobbed My Grieving Hubby

From viral video of a couple and their baby at a ballpark, “strangers decided that the husband was a deadbeat, and that the wife should leave him.” They took the “imaginary narration” as “evidence of our unequal relationship,” gripes that wife, Erika Alvarez, at The Free Press. In fact, “our marriage has room for either of us to need help” — and: “That evening, I chose to take care of him,” as he’d just “lost one of his oldest friends, a gifted baseball player he had known since they were kids,” and with “no formal funeral or memorial service,” she suggested the “game as a way to remember his friend.” “Going viral has shown me firsthand that we have become quick to vilify people from a brief clip, filling in everything we cannot see with assumptions.” Thus “people have gone out of their way to find our names and phone numbers. Some of you have told my husband to kill himself” — “shame on you.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board