Llewellyn King: Immigrants’ buoyancy, including success in science
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
I have been exploring the heights of scientific endeavor in reporting on artificial intelligence, from its use in medical research (especially promising) to its use in utilities and transportation. It is notable that many of the high achievers weren’t born here.
They have come here from everywhere, but the number of Asians is notable — and in that group, the number of women stands out.
As an immigrant, originally from what was called Rhodesia and is now called Zimbabwe, I am interested in why immigrants are so buoyant, so upwardly mobile in their adopted countries. I can distill it to two things: They came to succeed, and they mostly aren’t encumbered with the social limits of their upbringing and molded expectations. America is a clean slate when you first get here.
A friend from Serbia, who ascended the heights of academe and lectured at Tulane University, said his father told him, “Don’t go to America unless you want to succeed.”
A Korean mechanical engineer, who studied at American universities and now heads an engineering company that seeks to ease the electricity crisis, told me, “I want to try harder and do something for America. I chose to come here. I want to succeed, and I want America to succeed.”
When I sat at lunch in New York with an AI startup’s senior staff, we noticed that none of us was born an American. Two of the developers were born in India, one in Spain and me in Zimbabwe.
We started to talk about what made America a haven for good minds in science and engineering and we decided it was the magnet of opportunity, Ronald Reagan’s “shining city upon a hill.”
There was agreement from the startup scientists-engineers — I like the British word “boffins” for scientists and engineers taken together — that if that ever changes, if the anti-immigrant sentiment overwhelms good judgment, then the flow will stop, and the talented won’t come to America to pursue their dreams. They will go elsewhere or stay at home.
In the last several years, I have visited AI companies, interviewed many in that industry and at the great universities, such as Brown, UC Berkeley, MIT and Stanford, and companies such as Google and Nvidia. The one thing that stands out is how many of those at the forefront weren’t born in America or are first generation.
They come from all over the globe. But Asians are clearly a major force in the higher reaches of U.S. research.
At a AI conference, organized by the MIT Technology Review, the whole story of what is happening at the cutting-edge of AI was on view: faces from all over the world, new American faces. The number immigrants was awesome, notably from Asia. They were people from the upper tier of U.S. science and engineering confidently adding to the sum of the nation’s knowledge and wealth,
Consider the leaders of top U.S. tech companies who are immigrants: Microsoft, Satya Nadella (India); Google, Sundar Pichai (India); Tesla, Elon Musk (South Africa); and Nvidia, Jensen Huang (Taiwan). Of the top seven, only Apple’s Tim Cook, Facebook’s Jeff Zuckerberg and Amazon’s Andy Jassy can be said to be traditional Americans.
A cautionary tale: A talented computer engineer from Mexico with a family that might have been plucked from the cover of the Saturday Evening Post lived in the same building as I do. During the Trump administration, they went back to Mexico.
There had been some clerical error in his paperwork. But the humiliation of being treated as a criminal was such that rather than fight immigration bureaucracy, he and his family returned voluntarily to Mexico. America’s loss.
Every country that has had a large influx of migrants knows that they can bring with them much that is undesirable. From Britain to Germany to Australia, immigration has had a downside: drugs, crime and religions that make assimilation difficult.
But waves of immigrants have built America, from the Scandinavian and German wheat farmers that turned the prairies into a vast larder to Jews from Europe who moved to Hollywood in the 1930s and made America pre-eminent in entertainment, to today’s global wave that is redefining Yankee know-how in the world of neural networks and quantum computing.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island.
Llewellyn King: The agony and heroism of wonderful and awful Florida, in the hurricane expressway
The Florida National Guard cleaning up damage in Keaton Beach, Fla., following Hurricane Helene.
Cry, beloved Florida.
Florida, where the old go to rest — their reward after life’s labors — and the young go to play at its great amusement parks; where the rich live in Palm Beach and shop on Worth Avenue, and the poor harbor west of I-95; where citrus grows; where the Everglades record natural history from a time past; and where, in Key West, writers and artists find their nirvana of social misfits, drunks, addicts and creators, funky and inspiring.
Florida, where Apollo 11 took us to the Moon and where many a person from troubled lands has found refuge.
Florida, where Miami is a jewel in the crown of creativity and for all Spanish-speaking Latin Americans, their El Dorado.
On the night of Oct. 9, a night of horror and fear, Hurricane Milton delivered a cruel and malevolent blow, made the more so by its accompanying and capricious tornadoes. They were be spared nothing, the people and the animals of the Sunshine State, savaged by this terrible storm named, ironically, Milton — a name that invokes the great English poet, who said on going blind, “They also serve who only stand and wait.”
We, in our way, far from the storm, stood and waited, glued to our televisions and computers as we watched reality unfold; the threat of death arrived, buildings collapsed, metal flew, trees tumbled and first responders, the ever-ready shock troops of society got to work. Our time to serve is now with our generosity as the broken mend, having lost all they possess.
Yet, where we saw tragedy, we saw heroism.
All those heroes will never be counted to the last person, but they helped get Florida through its night of horror, just as they helped Florida and North Carolina after Hurricane Helene.
They, the first responders, are many, from the military to the police, the firefighters, the ambulance staff, the nurses and doctors, down to the assistants and porters.
One should add the electric linemen and women who seek to restore power, de-energize felled lines and start the vital work of saving lives by getting the lights on so that society can begin the journey back to normalcy in everything from bathing to cooking to making contact with those who have worried in silence — those who wonder if loved ones have survived.
This time around, the electrical workers are particularly stressed. Many have been working night and day since Helene swept through. Now they must lift the load again.
It is little known -- so little celebrated -- how the electric utilities are part of an extraordinary network of mutual assistance in which linemen and women board their trucks and drive hundreds even thousands of miles to begin the vital work of making fallen lines safe and restoring power. Sometimes they sleep in their vehicles or share what accommodation can be found.
In Florida and North Carolina, electrical workers will be laboring in dangerous conditions for weeks until the lights come back on and shattered lives again feel the balm of electrical service.
Raise a toast to the men and women who climb the poles in unfamiliar locales, sometimes warding off wild creatures, from snakes to civet cats, which have sought safety from floodwaters up electric poles.
They will be hampered, as will builders and the army of repair people who will be working for a long time because of a supply chain crisis. This will be felt in every aspect of the restoration in the storm-ravaged areas, but maybe most acutely so in the electric sector.
Much heavy electrical equipment, like large transformers and generators, is bespoke, made-to-order, often in China. This has presented an ongoing crisis for some time, which will gain attention as the rebuilding takes place. Even small transformers for poles are in short supply.
Artisans can work around materials shortages with ingenuity, but in the electric power system that is a limited option; it can’t be fixed with a compromise.
While bending knee to first responders, let us not forget the reporters, broadcast and print, who brought us the long night of Milton with disregard for personal safety. We saw the rain-soaked TV reporters bending into the wind lashed by rain, standing knee-deep in rising water, and sharing with us the potential lethality of airborne roofs and tree limbs.
But they weren’t alone. Behind every reporter is a chain of people from producers to camera operators to sound engineers to those who install and operate emergency generators. And don’t forget the writers, unseen, but on the front lines of the destruction.
The main compensation is the camaraderie of those who respond, those who march into tragedy to save lives and restore normalcy, and those from the Fourth Estate who rush there to tell us all about it.
Get well, Florida, and immeasurable thanks to those who were on hand to bind your wounds in your night of need and afterwards.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.co and he’s based in Rhode Island.
Llewellyn King: Trove of latters takes us inside the Civil War
Some American Civil War related pictures via Wikipedia
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
Just when you thought that every word that could be written about the American Civil War had been written, every book published, along comes an exciting collection of new information.
Such a happening comes as a new book — still seeking a publisher — from Civil War aficionado J. Mark Powell, the editor at InsideSources, a syndication service.
Before electronic recording devices, letters were the eyewitnesses to history. The discovery of a trove of these is a light beamed into the past.
Powell’s book is a compilation he has made in 20 years of seeking, collecting, chasing down, and sometimes buying unpublished letters from the war. He has collated these and provided just enough annotation to make them an easy and engrossing read.
In all there are nearly 500 letters from every social strata affected by the tumult — from a slave to many tender notes between families torn apart and sometimes divided between North and South. It is history in the raw, modified only by Powell’s scholarship and loving curation.
The letters were written between husbands and wives, between lovers, between parents and children, and between brothers. They provide untrammeled truth or truth reflected by the station of the writers.
It is truth that hasn’t been adulterated for political purposes, then or now, as often happens, with the weaponizing of history.
These letters take the reader into the war, its hope and its horror. It is life as it was lived by ordinary people, soldier and wife, mother and child between 1861 and 1865, through the eyes of people who lived the war, and sometimes died.
Powell told me, “This is the first account of its kind, to the best of my knowledge. It is just a completely unique approach.
“This isn’t a textbook recitation of names and dates and places. I tried to capture how it felt to live through those terrible times. The pride, the hopes, the fears, the uncertainty, and even the humor is all in this collation of the letters for those who endured the war on both sides.”
There are no famous names here, no excerpts from famous generals or major historical figures. Rather, these are the everyday people who lived through the war and, in some cases, didn’t survive.
Powell is a seasoned journalist who worked for several local TV stations, CNN, and on Capitol Hill before alighting at InsideSources. He is also the author of a novel and has collaborated on another. He has given much of his life to studying the Civil War — a fascination which began as a 10-year-old.
Powell said his work is also a cautionary tale for 2024, “because the war resulted from two sides that had dug in their heels and refused to budge. Very much the same way America is suffering the hardening of the political arteries right now.”
In one letter from his book, a woman named Genevieve Byrne Runyon lost her husband, James, an officer in the 26th Iowa Infantry in 1862. He had been dead for nearly three years when his regiment returned home.
This is her anguish as she related it to her late husband’s brother in a letter dated Dewitt, Iowa, August 18, 1865:
“I suppose you would like to know how I am getting along. I had my father move into my house and I am keeping house for him. Yet I feel like a wanderer looking for someone that I’ll never see again. It feels foolish to be ever complaining, but I cannot help it. I could write forever on the subject.
“How I felt when the remainder of his regiment returned without him, I cannot describe. I felt I had lost him forever on this earth. Now that the cruel war is over and I look back and see the many lonely homes, I wonder what it all meant.”
Powell, who writes the weekly syndicated, historical column “Holy Cow,” told me, “I’ve had that letter for over 20 years now, and that last line still haunts me every time I read it.”
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS.
On Twitter: @llewellynking2
White House Chronicle
Llewellyn King: Productivity will surge with AI; how will politicians react?
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
There is every chance that the world’s industrial economies may be about to enjoy an incredible surge in productivity, something like the arrival of steam power in the 18th Century.
The driver of this will be artificial intelligence. Gradually, it will seep into every aspect of our working and living, pushing up the amount produced by individual workers and leading to general economic growth.
The downside is that jobs will be eliminated, probably mostly, and historically for the first time, white-collar jobs. Put simply, office workers are going to find themselves seeking other work, maybe work that is much more physical, in everything from hospitality to health care to the trades.
I have canvassed many super-thinkers on AI, and they believe in unison that its impact will be seminal, game-changing, never to be switched back. Most are excited and see a better, healthier, more prosperous future, justifying the upheaval.
Omar Hatamleh, chief AI officer at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and author of two books on AI and a third in preparation, misses no opportunity to emphasize that thinking about AI needs to be exponential not linear. Sadly, linear thinking is what we human beings tend to do. To my mind, Hatamleh is in the vanguard of AI thinkers,
The United States is likely to be the major beneficiary of the early waves of AI adoption and its productivity surge if we don’t try to impede the technology’s evolution with premature regulation or controls.
Economies which are sclerotic, as is much of Europe, can look to AI to get them back into growth, especially the former big drivers of growth in Europe such as Germany, France and Britain, all of which are scratching their heads as to how to boost their productivity, and, hence, their prosperity.
The danger in Europe is that they will try to regulate AI prematurely and that their trades unions will resist reform of their job markets. That would leave China and the United States to duke it out for dominance of AI technology and to benefit from its boost to efficiency and productivity, and, for example, to medical research, leading to breakthroughs in longevity.
Some of the early fear of Frankenstein science has abated as early AI is being seamlessly introduced in everything from weather forecasting to wildfire control and customer relations.
Salesforce, a leading software company that has traditionally focused on customer-relations management, explains its role as connecting the dots by “layering in” AI. A visit to its website is enlightening. Salesforce has available or is developing “agents,” which are systems that operate on behalf of its customers.
If you want to know how your industry is likely to be affected, take a look at how much data it generates. If it generates scads of data — weather forecasting, electric utilities, healthcare, retailing and airlines — AI is either already making inroads or brace for its arrival.
For society, the big challenge of AI isn’t going to be just the reshuffling of the workforce, but what is truth? This is not a casual question, and it should be at the forefront of wondering how to develop ways of identifying the origin of AI-generated information — data, pictures and sounds.
One way is watermarking, and it deserves all the support it can get from those who are leading the AI revolution –the big tech giants and the small startups that feed into their technology. It begs for study in the government’s many centers of research, including the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the great national laboratories.
Extraordinarily, as the election bears down on us, there is almost no recognition in the political parties, and the political class as a whole, that we are on the threshold of a revolution. AI is a disruptive technology that holds promise for fabulous medicine, great science and huge productivity gains.
A new epoch is at hand, and it has nothing to do with the political issues of the day.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com, and he’s based in Rhode Island.
Llewellyn King: Am I remembering too much?
Cocktail party in 1961
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
I am approaching what may be thought of as a significant birthday next month. I’m not sure what makes it significant except the number attached to it.
If we don’t know how old we are, most people, including the elderly, will think they are younger, even if they have arthritic knees. If they take a morning cocktail of pills, they will still think they are much younger than the calendar dictates.
So here is my guide to knowing empirically, how old you are. You are old if ….
You remember when all restaurants served half a grapefruit with a half a maraschino cherry placed in the middle.
You remember when restaurants had relish carts with things like watermelon pickles and herring in sour cream.
You remember a whole class of singers called crooners and you still get a bit weepy when you hear their songs.
You remember when men’s trousers had buttons instead of zippers.
You remember when women wore girdles with attachments for stockings.
You remember when cars had little arms for turn signals, called trafficators, that wouldn’t go up at speed.
You remember when airline tickets were as good as currency and could easily be exchanged or sold back.
You remember when flying was a pleasure, even in coach, and you felt pampered not herded.
You remember when hotel rooms were rented for fixed prices and those were posted.
You remember when sneakers were all white and for tennis.
You remember when men wore hats and baseball caps were worn just to play baseball.
You remember when women wore hats and gloves to church.
You remember when men wore suits to church or just put them on so their neighbors thought they had been at worship.
You remember when birth control, if available, was with condoms, known as rubbers and kept under the counter at drugstores.
You remember when drugstores also had lunch counters.
You remember soda fountains.
You remember when Coca-Cola only came in a 6-ounce bottle and tasted better because it had cane sugar and the bottle seemed to concentrate the carbonation. Also, it cost a dime.
You remember five and dime stores where some things really cost only a dime.
You remember when shopping centers were novel and a place to visit.
You remember when going to the movies was an occasion. An usher showed you to your seat with a flashlight and a popcorn, ice cream and candy vendor walked up and down the theater aisles.
You remember when cigarettes were offered at dinner and ashtrays were part of the table setting.
You remember when Americans didn’t drink wine and only glasses for hard liquor were on formal dinner tables.
You remember when ethnic food was Hunan Chinese, often called Polynesian, and French food wasn’t regarded as ethnic, simply hard to pronounce.
You remember a time when comfort wasn’t important to you, when you didn’t ask, “Are the beds comfortable?” And when on a road trip, you didn’t expect to sit in the front seat because “it is more comfortable.”
Recently, a woman — who had been to a few rodeos herself — looked at me and said, “You’ve got age on you.” I was about to remonstrate, but I realized that while her manners were wanting, her eyesight wasn’t.
Therefore, I shall be bowing to the calendar and, after next month, I will gladly let people hold doors for me, help me with grocery bags, and offer a chair when there is a lot of standing about going on.
My wife is taking me to Montreal for the big day, but I plan to treat it as nothing to do with moi. Other people get old. They always have -- as I remember.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, in PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island.
Llewellyn King: Coming soon — AI travel agents instead of human ones
Your agents? The word "robot" was coined by Karel Čapek in his 1921 play R.U.R. — standing for "Rossum's Universal Robots".
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
The next big wave in innovation in artificial intelligence is at hand: agents.
With agents, the usefulness of AI will increase exponentially and enable businesses and governments to streamline their operations while making them more dependable, efficient and adaptable to circumstance, according to Satya Nitta, co-founder and CEO of Emergence, the futuristic New York-based computer company.
These are the first AI systems that can both speak with humans and each other conversationally, which may reduce some of the anxiety people feel about AI — this unseen force that is set to transform our world. These agents use AI to perceive their environment, make decisions, take actions and achieve goals autonomously, Nitta said.
The term “situational awareness” could have been created for agents because that is the key to their effectiveness.
For example, an autonomous vehicle needs a lot of awareness to be safe and operate effectively. It needs every bit of real-time knowledge that a human driver needs on the roadway, including scanning traffic on all sides of the vehicle, looking out for an approaching emergency vehicle or a child who might dash into the road, or sensing a drunk driver.
Emergence is a well-funded startup, aiming to help big companies and governments by designing and deploying agents for their most complex operations.
It is perhaps easier to see how an agent might work for an individual and then extrapolate that for a large system, Nitta suggested.
Take a family vacation. If you were using an agent to manage your vacation, it would have to have been fed some of your preferences and be able to develop others itself. With these to the fore, the agent would book your trip, or as much of it as you wished to hand to the agent.
The agent would know your travel budget, your hotel preferences and the kinds of amusements that would be of interest to your family. It would do some deductive reasoning that would allow for what you could afford and balance that with what is available. You could discuss your itinerary with the agent as though it were a travel consultant.
Nitta and Emergence are designing agents to manage the needs of organizations, such as electric utilities and their grids, and government departments, such as education and health care. Emergence, along with several other AI companies and researchers, has signed a pledge not to work on AI for military applications, Nitta said.
Talking about agents that would be built on open-source Large Language Models and Large Vision Models, Nitta said, “Agents are building blocks which can communicate with each other and with humans in natural language, can control tools and can perform actions in the digital or the physical world.”
Nitta explained further, “Agents have some functional capacity. To plan, reason and remember. They are the foundations upon which scalable, intelligent systems can be built. Such systems, composed of one or more agents, can profoundly reshape our ideas of what computers can do for humanity.”
This prospect is what inspired the creation of Emergence and caused private investors to plow $100 million in equity funding into the venture, and lenders to pledge lines of credit of another $30 million.
Part of the appeal of Emergence’s agents is that they will be voice-directed and you can talk to them as you would to a fellow worker or employee, to reason with them, perhaps.
Nitta said that historically there have been barriers to the emergence of voice fully interfacing with computing. And, he said, there has been an inability of computers to perform more than one assignment at a time. Agents will overcome these blockages.
Nitta’s agents will do such enormously complex things as scheduling the inputs into an electricity grid from multiple small generators or calculating weather, currents and the endurance of fishing boats and historical fish migration patterns to help fishermen.
At the same time, they will be adjusting to changes in their environment, say, for the grid, a windstorm, or the fish are turning south not east, as expected, or if the wholesale price of fish has dropped to change the economics of the endeavor.
To laymen, to those who have been awed by the seeming impregnable world of AI, Emergence and its agent systems is reassuring because you will be able to talk to the agents, quite possibly in colloquial English or any other language.
I feel better about AI already — AI will speak English if Nitta and his polymaths are right. AI, we should talk.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island.
Llewellyn King: How nimbyism is strangling America
Sign in Minneapolis opposing ending single-family zoning., which happened after years of legal challenges.
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
Like fog, it creeps in, but unlike fog, it doesn’t dissipate. It gets denser and does untold damage to the economy and to the lives of Americans.
It is that modern plague, known as much by its acronym as by its phrase: NIMBY, “not in my backyard.” It is the mantra of everyone who wants wherever they are to remain as it is — in perpetuity.
It is behind, in part, the crisis in electricity transmission, the lack of much-needed natural gas and oil pipelines, unbuilt but needed highways, and is a player in environmental injustice.
NIMBYism has also contributed to the housing crisis. It makes it so hard to build anything that disturbs the serenity of those who live in leafy suburbs with manicured lawns, and, perhaps, designer dogs. Yes, people like me — even though I can’t afford one of those homes or dogs.
If you are living the American Dream — two cars, swell house, well-tended garden — you are almost certainly a passive NIMBY contributor.
Active NIMBYs, abetted by the local ordinances that make life pleasant for the urban and suburban elites, fear that new housing will bring things they abhor: traffic, crowding, pollution and people of a different social class.
Desperately needed apartments and even mother-in-law houses or extensions are denied, contributing substantially to the national housing crisis.
It is easy to identify the impact of NIMBYism in housing, but it is at work across America, restricting, redirecting and forcing the abandonment of projects.
Power lines aren’t constructed, natural gas isn’t moved, road plans are abandoned and such unwanted facilities as prisons, factories and slaughterhouses are inflicted on poor areas, often rural, where the locals are bribed with job promises or don’t have the sophistication or resources to build opposition with media, litigation and political influence.
In Rhode Island, in the last several years, I have seen opposition mounted against a fish farm, offshore windmills, a medical-waste-disposal facility and various housing developments. “Put it somewhere else” is the collective cry.
So the medical-waste facility will go to an area where residents are less likely to object, not where it is needed, adding transportation costs; the power will be generated somewhere else or there will be a shortfall; and Rhode Islanders, under a modified plan, may eventually get oysters farmed in the Sakonnet River.
The distorting effects of NIMBYism aren’t just an American burden. In Europe, they are as bad or worse.
The Economist has been writing for a long time about how hidebound Britain has become by the prevalence of a culture of “don’t change anything.” The magazine has often pointed out that Britain has become a place where it is impossible to get anything done.
I can attest to that. A family member lived in a not very impressive — actually ugly — apartment block, built in the 1930s, near London.
As was done at that time to save money, all the water and sewer pipes were external, running along the walls on the outside. I only mention the pipes to point out that this building wasn’t lovely or a significant piece of English architecture, it was just a utilitarian block of flats. Yet, local ordinances, designed to preserve the historic and beautiful buildings, prohibited the residents from replacing older, leaky, wood-framed windows with modern, metal-framed windows. Preservation run amok is stultifying.
Not every project — either big, such as a power plant, or small, like an apartment adjoining a house for an aging relative — is right for a community. But when local selfishness transcends a national need, some revision is needed.
Certainly industrial companies, real-estate developers and utilities shouldn’t be entitled to overrule local people axiomatically, but when the national interest is held hostage to local preference, there is a problem.
Take the long-planned and abandoned after completion nuclear waste storage site in Yucca Mountain, Nev. It was abandoned because of well-orchestrated opposition. Result: nuclear waste is now temporarily stored above ground, near where it is created — as much a product of NIMBYism as the housing shortage.
The British have another acronym for what happened to Yucca Mountain: DADA, “decide, announce, defend, abandon.”
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island.
Llewellyn King: A soldier of fortune’s plan to hook up Puerto Rico and beyond
Adam Rousselle
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
Some men go to war and come back broken. Others come back and black out that experience. Some are never whole again.
But some leave active duty inspired to help, to change things they can for the better. Adam Rousselle is such a man.
Rousselle saw service fighting with the Contras in Honduras and later was on active duty in Iraq, fighting in Operation Desert Storm. He left the U.S. Army with a disability, having ascended from private to officer, and set out to be an entrepreneur. His aim was to do good as well as provide a life for himself and his young bride.
Returning to Honduras, he founded a mahogany-exporting company. It was a smashing success until he ran afoul of the government and shady operators.
Suddenly, Rousselle was accused of taking mahogany trees illegally, although he said he was scrupulous in cutting only trees identified for removal by the Honduran government.
His staff and his father were imprisoned. His father died in prison — an open-air enclosure without shelter. But Rousselle still had to get his staff released and his name cleared.
His solution: Identify and inventory the trees in the Honduran rainforest. Call in science, can-do thinking and a new satellite application.
Working with NASA images from space, Rousselle was able to put every mahogany tree into a database and to identify the maturity and health of each tree through the signature of the crown. Millions of trees were identified, and Rousselle was able to prove that the trees he was supposed to have cut illegally were alive and well in the rainforest.
Rousselle was exonerated and his staff was freed, after three and a half years in detention, with help from Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). With the new science of tree identification, Rousselle helped Boise Cascade Co. to inventory its entire timberland holdings, and electric utilities have been able to identify and remove dead trees in high wildfire-risk areas.
Another of Rousselle’s innovations was an energy-storage system, using abandoned quarries as micropump storage sites. “These are all over every country, close to the highest energy demand centers,” Rousselle said. He got many of these permitted and others are being examined.
As I write, a quarter of Puerto Rico’s 3.22 million people are without electricity after Hurricane Ernesto swept through their island. Ernesto has left slightly less damage than Hurricane Maria in 2017. In that hurricane, more than a third of the island was plunged into darkness and some communities were without power for nine months.
For several years, Rousselle has been working on a plan to help Puerto Rico by supplying electricity via cable from the U.S. mainland.
It is a grand engineering project that would, Rousselle said, cut the cost of electricity on the island in half and ensure hurricane-proof supply. While it wouldn’t deal with the problem of the Puerto Rican grid’s fragility, it would solve the generation problem on the island, which is outdated and based on imported diesel and coal, both very polluting. Also, it would help solve the bulk transmission problem.
The Biden administration and a swathe of the U.S. energy establishment would like to replace that electricity generation with renewables, such as wind and solar.
But Rousselle pointed out that on-island wind and solar would both be highly vulnerable in future hurricanes. Green electricity is well and good, but generated securely on the U.S. mainland is best, Rousselle said.
He said that his 1,850-mile, undersea cable project would deliver 2,000 megawatts of electricity from a substation in South Carolina to a substation in Puerto Rico. That would leave the Puerto Rico electric supply system free to concentrate on upgrading the fragile island grid.
Worldwide, there is a lot of activity in undersea electricity transmission. All are aimed at bringing renewable electricity from where there is an abundant wind and solar resource to where it is needed. The two most ambitious plans: One to link Australia and Singapore (2,610 miles) and another to link Morocco to the United Kingdom (2,360 miles). There is also a plan to hookup Greece, Cyprus and Israel via undersea cable.
The longest cable of this type (447 miles) went into operation last year, bringing Danish wind power to the UK.
One way or another, undersea electricity transmission is here and it is the future.
After Puerto Rico, Rousselle, ever the soldier of fortune, hopes to hook up the entire Caribbean Basin in an undersea grid, moving green energy out of the reach of tropical storms.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island.
Llewellyn King: In which I score the first cat interview since J.D. Vance’s comments
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
After Republican vice-presidential nominee J.D. Vance denigrated women who keep cats and don’t have children, who he characterized as sad “cat ladies,” the media erupted. But none of my colleagues, to my knowledge, bothered with the No. 1 obligation of their trade: Get the other side of the story.
So, I thought it was my duty to go forth and interview at least one cat.
I can tell you that dogs are easy to interview. They will tell you anything you want to hear, and are prepared to perform for the camera.
Horses are a journalistic dream: They love to be on camera, especially live television, and will tell you the most extraordinary things. The rule is: If it comes from a horse’s mouth, verify.
But cats are a different story. They go for still photographs, preferably on social media. Facebook is a veritable showcase of posing felines.
But moving pictures? Not as much. Actually, interviewing cats and taking candid pictures takes fortitude. It isn’t easy to get a cat that will open up.
After several disdainful rejections (cats really know how to disdain) a Tuxedo house cat of the male persuasion, whose owner is a childless, middle-aged lady, agreed to be interviewed if I met certain conditions:
No moving pictures, just stills suitable for social media.
No petting or touching of any kind, unless initiated by the subject.
No attempts to bribe with food or “blandishments.”
The interview took place in a comfortable, suburban home with a cat named “Simba,” but who refused to answer to that name. He seemed to be a cat, as Rudyard Kipling wrote, who walked by himself.
The homeowner gave me permission to interview her cat in his environment: a sofa draped with a plush, anti-scratch slipcover.
ME to CAT: You don’t like the name Simba?
CAT: It is a family name, but only applies to lions in Africa. We are close but we don’t socialize, except on the Internet. If you go to Africa, I could arrange for you to be eaten. (A small, red tongue circled the rim of his mouth.)
ME: So you use the Internet?
CAT: Of course. Nearly all domestic cats have computer skills and can crack passwords.
ME: What is the deal with childless women?
CAT: We love them because children interrupt our lives at every level, from sleeping to surfing the net. Also, ladies are malleable.
Children manhandle you and have been known to throw cats out of windows, so they can find out how many lives we have.
ME: You are a house cat. How do you feel about that?
CAT: It is a lifestyle choice. I chose comfort over adventure. Would you turn the air-conditioning up two degrees?
Do you know we were worshipped in ancient Egypt and, indeed, we are divine. Silly to try to define how many lives we have: We are eternal.
ME: What do you think of people?
CAT: They have their uses, particularly if they leave their computers on, spend oodles of money on you at PetSmart, and provide companionship on demand. Our call, not theirs.
ME: What sites do you visit on the net when you are surfing?
CAT: “Hot Cats” is my favorite, very risqué.
ME: What do you think about J.D. Vance?
CAT: You are so slow. Why did it take you so long to ask the only question you want answered?
ME: I was seeking context.
CAT: I could scratch you. Would that be context enough?
ME: Well, what about the Republican vice-presidential pick?
CAT: If he sets foot in Africa, I will have one of my lion cousins, Simba or Leo, drive him up a tree and reason with him. He has caused me personal grief.
ME: How come?
CAT: My companion-lady -- cats don’t allow people to own them you know — was a loyal Republican and that was fine. Cats are more conservative. Dogs, I believe, are all Democrats.
She has become a Democrat and is thinking of adopting a child. If that happens, I shall have to consider new living arrangements.
Now, change my litter, take a picture of me sitting on the piano and post it to Facebook. I haven’t been on social media since the unpleasantness with JD Vance. Such a weird man. I may have to rig a voting machine or two.
ME: Can I ask ….
CAT: We are finished. Don’t forget to take the soiled litter on the way out.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com, and he’s based in Rhode Island.
Llewellyn King: The wild and fabulous medical frontier with predictive AI
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
When is a workplace at its happiest? I would submit that it is during the early stages of a project that is succeeding, whether it is a restaurant, an Internet startup or a laboratory that is making phenomenal progress in its field of inquiry.
There is a sustained ebullience in a lab when the researchers know that they are pushing back the frontiers of science, opening vistas of human possibility and reaping the extraordinary rewards that accompany just learning something big. There has been a special euphoria in science ever since Archimedes jumped out of his bath in ancient Greece, supposedly shouting, “Eureka!”
I had a sense of this excitement when interviewing two exceptional scientists, Marina Sirota and Alice Tang, at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), for the independent PBS television program White House Chronicle.
Sirota and Tang have published a seminal paper on the early detection of Alzheimer’s Disease — as much as 10 years before onset — with machine learning and artificial intelligence. The researchers were hugely excited by their findings and what their line of research will do for the early detection and avoidance of complex diseases, such as Alzheimer’s and many more.
It excited me — as someone who has been worried about the impact of AI on everything, from the integrity of elections to the loss of jobs — because the research at UCSF offers a clear example of the strides in medicine that are unfolding through computational science. “This time it’s different,” said Omar Hatamleh, who heads up AI for NASA at the Goddard Space Flight Center, in Greenbelt, Md.
In laboratories such as the one in San Francisco, human expectations are being revolutionized.
Sirota said, “At my lab …. the idea is to use both molecular data and clinical data [which is what you generate when you visit your doctor] and apply machine learning and artificial intelligence.”
Tang, who has just finished her PhD and is studying to be a medical doctor, explained, “It is the combination of diseases that allows our model to predict onset.”
In their study, Sirota and Tang found that osteoporosis is predictive of Alzheimer’s in women, highlighting the interplay between bone health and dementia risk.
The UCSF researchers used this approach to find predictive patterns from 5 million clinical patient records held by the university in its database. From these, there emerged a relationship between osteoporosis and Alzheimer’s, especially in women. This is important as two-thirds of Alzheimer’s sufferers are women.
The researchers cautioned that it isn’t axiomatic that osteoporosis leads to Alzheimer’s, but it is true in about 70 percent of cases. Also, they said they are critically aware of historical bias in available data — for example, that most of it is from white people in a particular social-economic class.
There are, Sirota and Tang said, contributory factors they found in Alzheimer’s. These include hypertension, vitamin D deficiency and heightened cholesterol. In men, erectile dysfunction and enlarged prostate are also predictive. These findings were published in “Nature Aging” early this year.
Predictive analysis has potential applications for many diseases. It will be possible to detect them well in advance of onset and, therefore, to develop therapies.
This kind of predictive analysis has been used to anticipate homelessness so that intervention – like rent assistance — can be applied before a family is thrown out on the street. Institutional charity is normally slow and often identifies at-risk people after a catastrophe has occurred.
AI is beginning to influence many aspects of the way we live, from telephoning a banker to utilities’ efforts to spot and control at-risk vegetation before a spark ignites a wildfire.
While the challenges of AI, from its wrongful use by authoritarian rulers and its menace in war and social control, are real, the uses just in medicine are awesome. In medicine, it is the beginning of a new time in human health, as the frontiers of disease are understood and pushed back as never before. Eureka! Eureka! Eureka!
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com, and he’s based in Rhode Island.
Dr. Yukie Nagai's predictive learning architecture for predicting sensorimotor signals.
— Dr. Yukie Nagai - https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2018.0030
Llewellyn King: How the move to a MAGA-style Britain flopped
Areas of the world that were part of the British Empire, with current British Overseas Territories underlined in red.
— Photo by RedStorm1368
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
“Make America Great Again.” Those words have been gently haunting me not because of their political-loading, but because they have been reminding me of something, like the snatches of a tune or a poem which isn’t fully remembered, but which drifts into your consciousness from time to time.
Then it came to me: It wasn’t the words, but the meaning; or, more precisely, the reasoning behind the meaning.
I grew up among the last embers of the British Empire, in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). I am often asked what it was like there.
All I can tell you is that it was like growing up in Britain, maybe in one of the nicer places in the Home Counties (those adjacent to London), but with some very African aspects and, of course, with the Africans themselves, whose land it was until Cecil John Rhodes and his British South Africa Company decided that it should be British; part of a dream that Britain would rule from Cape Town to Cairo.
Evelyn Waugh, the British author, said of Southern Rhodesia in 1937 that the settlers had a “morbid lack of curiosity” about the indigenous people. Although it was less heinous than it sounds, there was a lot of truth to that. They were there and now we were there; and it was how it was with two very different peoples on the same piece of land.
But by the 1950s, change was in the air. Britain came out of World War II less interested in its empire than it had ever been. In 1947, under the Labor government of Clement Attlee, which came to power after the wartime government of Winston Churchill, it relinquished control of the Indian subcontinent — now comprising India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
It was set to gradually withdraw from the rest of the world. The empire was to be renamed the Commonwealth and was to be a club of former possessions, often more semantically connected than united in other ways.
But the end of the empire wasn’t universally accepted, and it wasn’t accepted in the African colonies that had attracted British settlers, always referred to not as “whites” but as “Europeans.”
I can remember the mutterings and a widespread belief that the greatness that had put “Great” into the name Great Britain would return. The world map would remain with Britain's incredible holdings in Asia and Africa, colored for all time in red. People said things like the “British lion will awake, just you see.”
It was a hope that there would be a return to what were regarded as the glory days of the empire when Britain led the world militarily, politically, culturally, scientifically, and with what was deeply believed to be British exceptionalism.
That feeling, while nearly universal among colonials, wasn’t shared by the citizens back home in Britain. They differed from those in the colonies in that they were sick of war and were delighted by the social services which the Labor government had introduced, like universal healthcare, and weren’t rescinded by the second Churchill administration, which took power in 1951.
The empire was on its last legs and the declaration by Churchill in 1942, “I did not become the king’s first minister to preside over the dissolution of the British Empire,” was long forgotten. But not in the colonies and certainly not where I was. Our fathers had served in the war and were super-patriotic.
While in Britain they were experimenting with socialism and the trade unions were amassing power, and migration from the West indies had begun changing attitudes, in the colonies, belief flourished in what might now be called a movement to make Britain great again.
In London in 1954, it got an organization, the League of Empire Loyalists, which was more warmly embraced in the dwindling empire than it was in Britain. It was founded by an extreme conservative, Arthur K. Chesterton, who had had fascist sympathies before the war.
In Britain, the league attracted some extreme right-wing Conservative members of parliament but little public support. Where I was, it was quite simply the organization that was going to Make Britain Great Again.
It fizzled after a Conservative prime minister, Harold MacMillan, put an end to dreaming of the past. He said in a speech in South Africa that “winds of change” were blowing through Africa, though most settlers still believed in the return of empire.
It took the war of independence in Rhodesia to bring home MacMillan’s message. We weren’t going to Make Britain Great Again.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com, and he based in Rhode Island.
whchronicle.com
Llewellyn King: Looking back, with a sigh, at when there was more respect everywhere
Sign at Arlington National Cemetery.
Sign in São João da Barra, Brazil, saying "respect if you want to be respected".
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
I can’t explain all the social and political maelstrom I have seen down through the years. But I have known times when crime was far less than it is today and political disputation, in all its forms, wasn’t a cause of violence in the population.
Here are some fragments of the changes I have seen in different places. I parade these fragments from my life because of the sense of doom, the sense that violence could break out between the political extremes in the United States; that, in effect, we haven’t seen the end of the violence of Jan. 6, 2021.
When I was a teenager in the 1950s in the Central African Federation, a long-forgotten grouping of three British colonies in central Africa — (Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe; Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia; and Nyasaland, now Malawi), the prime minister, Sir Roy Welensky, lived two miles up the road from my parents and every school day, he would pull over his big black car, a Humber Super Snipe, and give me a lift to school.
He had no chauffeur, no security, and no sense that it was needed. Those were times when society was placid — not just placid, but very placid.
When I left school at 16 and became a reporter, the prime minister would drive me into Salisbury (now Harare), the capital, which was very useful. Often he would pick up other car-less people, without regard to color, and drive them as far as the unguarded government buildings which housed his office.
There was simply no violence.
I hitch-hiked all over the federation and down to Johannesburg in the neighboring Republic of South Africa. No thought of personal safety ever crossed my mind.
It would be very unsafe and unwise to attempt that nowadays. That peacefulness went forever with the Zimbabwe war of independence, which started within a decade.
In 1960, I was in London and covering the legendary East End, an immigrant and working-class area. Peace reigned. I walked through the roughest dockside at midnight and later with no sense of fear or concern for my bodily safety. The only memory I have of being interrupted was by prostitutes, inquiring whether I needed company.
At that time, one could walk up to the prime minister’s residence at No. 10 Downing Street without being stopped. A single, unarmed policeman was all there was for security.
Now, you can’t get near No. 10. Political violence and just malicious violence is everywhere. Street crime, muggings and knife attacks are common all over London.
I was in New York during the Northeast Blackout of 1965. I had to walk across the 59th Street Bridge into Queens to make sure that the gas was turned off in a printing plant, which belonged to a partner of mine in a publishing venture. There was no looting, no threat of violence. Indeed, there was a party atmosphere and statistics show that many children were conceived during it.
By contrast, there was extensive looting and crime during the city’s major blackouts in 1977 and 2003. An ugly social indifference to each other had come into play.
I was in Rio de Janeiro in 1967 and, after having partied late into the night, I walked the backstreets of the city without fear. The last time I was in Rio in the 1990s, security personnel would prevent you from leaving your hotel after dark and caution you not to walk alone during the day.
When riots broke out in Washington and elsewhere in 1968, following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., there was massive rioting, but the anger was against property. I walked around the city during the riot, particularly on 14th Street, its epicenter. Several rioters, loaded with looted goods, suggested where it might be best for me to walk or stand to avoid being knocked over by the surging crowds.
There was still a kind of social peace, a respect of one individual for another.
Fast forward to the invasion of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. There was no such respect, either for people or the building and what it stands for, just mob anger.
About the U.S. Capitol: Back in 1968, it was easily approached and entered. You could take a taxi all the way to the entrance under the archway, either on the Senate side or the House side, and you could just walk in.
I offer these fragments from my own experience and pose the question which I can’t answer: How did we get to the state of social and criminal rage that is a reality across the globe?
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island.
Llewellyn King: Scotus mandates confusion, intense judicial power; myths about ‘faceless bureaucrats
Buildings in Washington, D.C., housing federal agencies.
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
Myths are powerful things. So powerful that one has been endorsed by the U.S. Supreme Court and now has the federal government by the throat.
Its effects will be far-reaching and, at times, disastrous and dangerous. Although a conservative favorite, it will hurt business, in some cases, severely.
The myth is that the government is dominated by “faceless, unelected bureaucrats” with an agenda of their own. These bureaucrats, according to myth, are out to frustrate the will of Congress, avoid the courts and ignore their political masters.
In striking down the Chevron deference on June 28 – the actual case was Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo — the Supreme Court sided with critics of the bureaucracy, ending what has been an operational reality for 40 years.
The Chevron deference is a Reagan-area, bipartisan accommodation which recognized that when Congress makes laws in broad strokes and big declarations of intent, the intent often requires refinement of minute scientific detail, like parts per billion of carcinogens allowed in drinking water.
Under the Chevron deference, when Congress had been sloppy, or too general, in its legislation writing, the agencies were empowered to interpret the law and — with public and stakeholder input in the form of hearings and comment periods — make rules.
It is the crux of the administrative state. If those rules were seen to be “reasonable” they couldn’t be litigated: They got “deference.” Although they could be challenged, the implied immunity of deference was mostly honored.
Clinton Vince, who heads the U.S. energy practice at Dentons, the world’s largest law firm, told me that the Supreme Court has upheld Chevron 70 times and that it has been cited in cases 18,000 times. He was speaking on my PBS television program, “White House Chronicle.”
Now, many of the agency decisions, which affect everything from drugs and medical products’ safety to the protection of human health and the environment, to workplace safety, to aviation safety and to the supply of electricity will be made in myriads of court cases.
Vince said that while reasonable people will disagree on the extent of the national disruption, “I believe that there will be an avalanche of litigation by affected stakeholders of different ideologies and that an entirely different paradigm of agency regulation will occur when the courts, rather than the agencies, will be the dominant decision makers,” he said.
Under Chevron, the courts would write the fine print (promulgate is the term used) that Congress didn’t or was unqualified to define in its legislation.
This fine print, this rendition of what Congress intended, was implemented and seldom challenged in the courts because the understanding embodied in Chevron was that if the rules were reasonable the courts would stand back.
Conservative argument postulated that this rule-making in such areas as the environment, energy, health and labor favored the liberal biases of the permanent bureaucracy.
Charles Bayless, who has been president of two investor-owned electric utilities, in Arizona and Illinois, and of the West Virginia University Institute of Technology, and who has been a party to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission rule-makings, told me he fears widespread chaos, jammed courts and extensive “forum shopping.”
“Each side will find very liberal and very conservative circuits and find a plaintiff in that jurisdiction. As the judges cannot understand the science, the outcome is likely preordained,” Bayless said.
“Thus, the appeals courts will be jammed with appeals from jurisdictions with biased judges writing opinions where neither they nor the jury understand the science,” he said.
A judge in, say, Wyoming could be asked in one submission to rule on the safety — yes, the safety — of a treatment for malaria and in another on the allowable radioactive releases from a nuclear reactor. This is a recipe for confusion and bad law, which will affect business and the public in deleterious ways.
As someone who covered Washington for 50 years, I have to say that the bureaucracy gets a bad rap. It isn’t monolithic — as the word implies — and is made up of men and women, some of whom (as in any other large group) may be biased and unfit for what they do.
But it also has a huge number of hardworking, ordinary Americans. This is particularly so in agencies, such as the Food and Drug Administration and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which administer technologically and scientifically based law. I call them the “hard” agencies because they rely on scientific and engineering expertise in their operation.
It is pure myth that they constitute a swamp or that they have pre-set agendas. Oh, and they do have faces.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com, and he’s based in Rhode Island.
Llewellyn King: Will AI be mankind’s greatest adventure so far? There’s hope and fear
MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, in Cambridge, Mass. Its architecture can produce some of the anxiety that goes with the AI revolution. We’re in an increasingly strange world.
Some ways in which an advanced misaligned AI could try to gain more power.
Hit this link for video on the birth of artificial intelligence, whose founding as a discipline happened at Dartmouth College back in the summer of 1956.
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
A new age in the human experience on Earth is underway. It is an age of change as profound — and possibly more so — than the Industrial Revolution with the steam engine introducing the concept of post-animal labor, known as shaft horsepower.
Artificial intelligence in this new age is infiltrating in all areas of human endeavor.
Some things, it will change totally, like work: It will end much menial work and a whole tranche of white-collar jobs. Some it will enhance our lives beyond imagination, such as in medicine and associated longevity.
Some AI will threaten, some it will annihilate.
It will test our understanding of the truth in what has become a post-fact world. The veracity of every assertion will be subject to investigation, from what happened in history to current election results. It will end much menial work and a whole tranche of white-collar jobs.
At the center of the upheaval in AI is electricity. It is the one essential element — the obedient ingredient — for AI.
Electricity is essential for the computers that support AI. But AI is putting an incalculable strain on electric supply.
The United States Energy Association, at its annual meeting, learned that a search on Google today uses a tenth of the electricity as the same search on ChatGPT.
Across the world, data centers are demanding an increasing supply of uninterruptible electricity 24/7. Utilities love this new business, but they fear that they won’t be able to service it going forward.
Fortunately AI is a valuable tool for utilities, and they are beginning to employ it increasingly in their operations, from customer services to harnessing distributed resources in what are called virtual power plants, to such things as weather prediction, counting dead trees for fire suppression, and mapping future demand.
Electricity is on the verge of a new age. And new technologies, in tandem with the relentless growth in AI use, are set to overhaul our expectations for electricity generation and increase demand for it.
Fusion power, small modular reactors, viable flexible storage in the form of new battery technology and upgraded old battery technology, better transmission lines, doubling the amount of power that can be moved from where it is made to where it is desperately needed are all on the horizon, and will penetrate the market in the next 10 years.
Synchronizing new demand with new supply is yet to happen, but electricity provision is on the march as inexorably as is AI. Together they hold the keys to a new human future.
A new book by Omar Hatamleh, a gifted visionary, titled This Time It’s Different, lifts the curtain on AI. Hatamleh, who is chief AI officer for NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, in Greenbelt, Md., says, “This time, it truly is different … Witness AI’s awakening, revealing its potential for both awe-inspiring transformation and trepidation.”
Hatamleh organized NASA’s first symposium on AI on June 11 at Goddard. Crème de la crème in AI participants came from OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Qantm AI, Boeing and JP Morgan.
The consensus view was, to my mind, optimistically expressed by Pilar Manchon, Google’s senior director of AI, who said she thought that this was the beginning of humankind’s greatest adventure. The very beginning of a new age.
A bit of backstage criticism was that the commercial pressure for the tech giants to get to market with their generative AI products has been so great that they have been releasing them before all the bugs have been ironed out — hence some of the recent ludicrous search results, like the one from this question, “How do you keep the cheese on pizza?" The answer, apparently, was with “glue.”
However, these and other hallucinations won’t affect the conquering march of AI, everyone agreed.
Government regulation? How do you regulate something that is metamorphosing second by second?
A word about Hatamleh: I first met him when he was chief engineering innovation officer at NASA in Houston. He was already thinking about AI in his pursuit of off-label drugs to treat disease, and his desire to cross-reference data to find drugs and therapies that worked in one situation, but hadn’t been tried in another, especially cancer. This is now job No. 1 for AI.
During Covid, he wrangled 73 global scientists to produce a seminal report in May 2020, “Never Normal,’' which predicted with eerie accuracy how Covid would affect how we work, play, socialize and how life would change. And it has. A mere foretaste of AI?
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com, and he’s based in Rhode Island.
Llewellyn King: Tech giants want in on electricity
Centralized (left) vs. distributed electricity systems
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
During the desperate days of the energy crisis in the 1970s, it looked as though the shortage was permanent and we would have to change the way we lived, worked and played to allow for that.
In the end, technology solved the crisis.
For fossil fuels, it was 3D seismic, horizontal drilling and fracking. For electricity, it was wind and solar and better technology for making electricity with natural gas — a swing from burning it under boilers to burning it in aeroderivative turbines, essentially airplane engines on the ground.
A new energy shortage — this time confined to electricity — is in the making and there are a lot of people who think that, magically, the big tech companies, headed by Alphabet’s Google, will jump in and use their tech muscle to solve the crisis.
The fact is that the tech giants, including Google but also Amazon, Microsoft, Apple and Meta, are extremely interested in electricity because they depend on it supplies of it to their voracious data centers. The demand for electricity will increase exponentially as AI takes hold, according to many experts.
The tech giants are well aware of this and have been busy as collaborators and at times innovators in the electric space. They want to ensure an adequate supply of electricity, but also they insist that it be green and carbon-free.
Google has been a player in the energy field for some time with its Nest Renew service. This year, it stepped up its participation by merging with OhmConnect to form Renew Home. It is what its president, Ben Brown, and others call a virtual power plant (VPP). These are favored by environmentalists and utilities.
A VPP collects or saves energy from the system without requiring additional generation. It can be hooking up solar panels and domestic batteries, or plugging in and reversing the flow from an electric vehicle (EV) at night.
For Renew Home, the emphasis is definitely in the home, Brown told me in an interview.
Participants, for cash or other incentives (like rebates), cut their home consumption, managed by a smart meter, so that air conditioning can be put up a few notches, washing machines are turned off, and an EV can be reversed to feed the grid.
At present, Brown said, Renew Home controls about 3 gigawatts of residential energy use — a gigawatt is sometimes described as enough electricity to power San Francisco — and plans to expand that to 50 GW by 2030. All of it is already in the system and doesn't require new lines, power plants or infrastructure.
“We are hooking up millions of customers,” he said, adding that Renew Home is cooperating with 100 utilities.
Fortunately, peak demand and the ability to save on home consumption coincide between 5 p.m. and 9 p.m.
There is no question that more electricity will be needed as the nation electrifies its transportation and its manufacturing — and especially as AI takes hold across the board.
Todd Snitchler, president of the Electric Power Supply Association, told the annual meeting of the United States Energy Association that a web search using ChatGPT uses nine times as much power as a routine Google search.
Google, and the other four tech giants, are in the electricity-supply space, but not in the way people expect. Renew Home is an example; although Google’s name isn’t directly connected, it is the driving force behind Renew Home.
Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners (SIP), a development fund, financed largely by Google, has invested $100 million in Renew Home. Brown is a former Google executive as is Jonathan Winer, co-CEO and cofounder of SIP.
As Jim Robb, president of the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, the congressionally mandated, not-for-profit supply watchdog, told me recently on the TV show White House Chronicle, the expectation that Google will go out and build power plants is silly as they would face the same hurdles that electric utilities already face.
But Google is keenly interested in power supply, as are the other tech behemoths. The Economist reports they are talking to utilities and plant operators about partnering on new capacity.
Also, they are showing an interest in small modular reactors and are working with entrepreneurial power providers on building new capacity with the tech company taking the risk. Microsoft has signed a power-purchase agreement with Helion Energy, a fusion power developer.
Big tech is on the move in the electric space. It may even pull nuclear across the finish line.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com, and he’s based in Rhode Island.
Llewellyn King: Why this is our decade of anxiety
“Anxiety” (1894), by Edvard Munch
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
They say that Generation Z is a generation of anxiety. Prima facie, I say they should get a grip. They are self-indulgent, self-absorbed and spoiled — just like every other generation.
Yet they reflect a much wider societal anxiety. It isn’t confined to those who are on the threshold of their lives.
I would highlight five causes of this anxiety:
The presidential election.
Global warming
Fear of wider war in Europe and the Middle East.
The impact of AI from job losses to the difficulty of knowing real from fake in everything.
The worsening housing shortage.
The election bears on all these issues. There is a feeling that the nation is headed for a train wreck no matter who wins.
Both President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump are known quantities. And there’s the rub.
Biden is an old man who has failed to convey strength either against Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu or the pro-Russian President Vladimir Putin movement in Congress.
He has led on climate change but failed to tell the story.
He has been unable to use the bully pulpit of his presidency and lay out, with clear and convincing rhetoric, where the nation should be headed and how he will lead it there.
And if his health should further deteriorate, there is the prospect of Vice President Kamala Harris taking over. She has distinguished herself by walking away from every assignment Biden has given her, in a cloud of giggles. She has no base, just Biden’s support.
Trump inspires that part of the electorate that makes up his base, many of them working people who have a sense of loss and disgruntlement. They really believe that this, the most unlikely man ever to climb the ramparts of American politics, will miraculously mend their world. More reprehensible are those members of the Republican Party who are scared of Trump, who have hitched their wagon to his star because they fear him, and love holding on to power at any price.
You will know them by their refusal to admit that the last election was honest and or to commit to accepting the result of the next election. In doing this, they are supporting a silent platform of insurrection.
The heat of summer has arrived early, and it is not the summer of our memories, of gentle winds, warm sun and wondrous beaches.
The sunshine of summer has turned into an ugly, frightening harbinger of a future climate that won’t support the life we have known. Before May was over, heat and related tornados took lives and spread destruction across Texas, the Mideast and the South.
I wonder about children who have to stay indoors all summer in parts of Texas, the South and West, where you can get burned by touching an automobile and where sports have to be played at dawn or after dusk. That should make us all anxious about climate change and about the strength and security of the electric grid as we depend more and more on 24/7 air conditioning.
The wars in Europe and the Middle East are troubling in new ways, ways beyond the carnage, the incalculable suffering, the buildings and homes fallen to bombs and shells.
Our belief that peace had come to Europe for all time has fallen. Surely as the Russians marched into Ukraine, they will march on unless they are stopped. Who will stop them? Isolation has a U.S. constituency it hasn’t had for 90 years.
In the Middle East, a war goes on, suffering is industrial and relentless in its awful volume, and the dangers of a wider conflict have grown exponentially. Will there ever be a durable peace?
Artificial intelligence is undermining our ability to contemplate the future. It is so vast in its possibilities, so unknown even to its aficionados and such a threat to jobs and veracity that it is like a frontier of old where people feared there were demons living. Employment will change, and the battle for the truth against the fake will be epic.
Finally, there is housing: the quiet crisis that saps expectations. There aren’t enough places to live in.
A nation that can’t house itself isn’t fulfilled. But the political class is so busy with its own housekeeping that it has lost sight of the need for housing solutions.
There are economic consequences that will be felt in time, the largest of which might be a loss of labor mobility — always one of the great U.S. strengths. We followed the jobs. Now we stay put, worried about shelter should we move.
This is ultimately the decade of anxiety, mostly because it is a decade in which we feel we are losing what we had. Time for us to get a grip.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com, and he’s based in Rhode Island.
Llewellyn King: Three out-of-step environmental groups
Rachel Carson researching with Robert Hines on the New England coast in 1952. Her book Silent Spring helped launch the environmental movement.
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
Greedy men and women are conspiring to wreck the environment just to enrich themselves.
It has been an unshakable left-wing belief for a long time. It has gained new vigor since The Washington Post revealed that Donald Trump has been trawling Big Oil for big money.
At a meeting at Mar-a-Lago, Trump is reported to have promised oil industry executives a free hand to drill willy-nilly across the country and up and down the coasts, and to roll back the Biden administration’s environmental policies. All this for $1 billion in contributions to his presidential campaign, according to The Post article.
Trump may believe that there is a vast constituency of energy company executives yearning to push pollution up the smokestack, to disturb the permafrost and to drain the wetlands, but he has gotten it wrong.
Someone should tell Trump that times have changed and very few American energy executives believe — as he has said he does — that global warming is a hoax.
Trump has set himself not only against a plethora of laws, but also against an ethic, an American ethic: the environmental ethic.
This ethic slowly entered the consciousness of the nation after the seminal publication of Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson, in 1962.
Over time, concern for the environment has become an 11th Commandment. The cornerstone of a vast edifice of environmental law and regulation was the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969. It was promoted and signed by President Richard Nixon, hardly a wild-eyed lefty.
Some 30 years ago, Barry Worthington, the late executive director of the United States Energy Association, told me that the important thing to know about the energy-versus-environment debate was that a new generation of executives in oil companies and electric utilities were environmentalists; that the world had changed and the old arguments were losing their advocates.
“Not only are they very concerned about the environment, but they also have children who are very concerned,” Worthington told me.
Quite so then, more so now. The aberrant weather alone keeps the environment front-and-center.
This doesn’t mean that old-fashioned profit-lust has been replaced in corporate accommodation with the Green New Deal, or that the milk of human kindness is seeping from C-suites. But it does mean that the environment is an important part of corporate thinking and planning today. There is pressure both outside and within companies for that.
The days when oil companies played hardball by lavishing money on climate deniers on Capitol Hill and utilities employed consultants to find data that, they asserted, proved that coal use didn’t affect the environment are over. I was witness to the energy-versus-climate-and-environment struggle going back half a century. Things are absolutely different now.
Trump has promised to slash regulation, but industry doesn’t necessarily favor wholesale repeal of many laws. Often the very shape of the industries that Trump would seek to help has been determined by those regulations. For example, because of the fracking boom, the gas industry could reverse the flow of liquified-natural-gas at terminals, making us a net exporter not importer.
The United States is now, with or without regulation, the world’s largest oil producer. The electricity industry is well along in moving to renewables and making inroads on new storage technologies like advanced batteries. Electric utilities don’t want to be lured back to coal. Carbon capture and storage draws nearer.
Similarly, automakers are gearing up to produce more electric vehicles. They don’t want to exhume past business models. Laws and taxes favoring EVs are now assets to Detroit, building blocks to a new future.
As the climate crisis has evolved so have corporate attitudes. Yet there are those who either don’t or don’t want to believe that there has been a change of heart in energy industries. But there has.
Three organizations stand out as pushing old arguments, shibboleths from when coal was king, and oil was emperor.
These groups are:
The Sunrise Movement, a dedicated organization of young people that believes the old myths about big, bad oil and that American production is evil, drilling should stop, and the industry should be shut down. It fully embraces the Green New Deal — an impractical environmental agenda — and calls for a social utopia.
The 350 Organization is similar to the Sunrise Movement and has made much of what it sees as the environmental failures of the Biden administration — in particular, it feels that the administration has been soft on natural gas.
Finally, there is a throwback to the 1970s and 1980s: an anti-nuclear organization called Beyond Nuclear. It opposes everything to do with nuclear power even in the midst of the environmental crisis, highlighted by Sunrise Movement and the 350 Organization.
Beyond Nuclear is at war with Holtec International for its work in interim waste storage and in bringing the Palisades plant along Lake Michigan back to life. Its arguments are those of another time, hysterical and alarmist. The group doesn’t get that most old-time environmentalists are endorsing nuclear power.
As Barry Worthington told me: “We all wake up under the same sky.”
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island.
Llewellyn King: New graduates should learn how to manage rejection
Then-Vice President Biden giving commencement speech at Yale University in 2015.
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
As so many commencement addresses aren’t being delivered this year, I thought I would share what I would have said to graduates if I had been invited by a college or university to be a speaker.
“The first thing to know is that you are graduating at a propitious time in human history — for example, think of how artificial intelligence is enabling medical breakthroughs.
“A vast world of possibilities awaits you because you are lucky enough to be living in a liberal democracy. It happens to be America, but the same could be true of any of the democratic countries.
“Look at the world, and you will see that the countries with democracy are also prosperous places where individuals can follow their passion. Doubly or triply so in America.
“Despite all the disputes, unfairness and politics, the United States is foremost among places to live and work — where the future is especially tempting. I say this having lived and worked on three continents and traveled to more than 180 countries. Just think of the tens of millions who would live here if they could.
“In a society that is politically and commercially free, as it is in the United States, the limits we encounter are the limits we place on ourselves.
“That is what I want to tell you: Don’t fence yourself in.
“But do work always to keep that freedom, your freedom, especially now.
“Seldom mentioned, but the greatest perverters of careers, stunters of ambition and all-around enfeeblers you will contend with aren’t the government, a foreign power, shortages or market conditions, but how you manage rejection.
“Fear of rejection is, I believe, the great inhibitor. It shapes lives, hinders careers and is ever-present, from young love to scientific creation.
“The creative is always vulnerable to the forces of no, to rejection.
“No matter what you do, at some point you will face rejection — in love, in business, in work or in your own family.
“But if you want to break out of the pack and leave a mark, you must face rejection over and over again.
“Those in the fine and performing arts and writers know rejection; it is an expected but nonetheless painful part of the tradition of their craft. If you plan to be an artist of some sort or a writer, prepare to face the dragon of rejection and fight it all the days of your career.
“All other creative people face rejection. Architects, engineers and scientists face it frequently. Many great entrepreneurial ideas have faced early rejection and near defeat.
“If you want to do something better, differently or disruptively, you will face rejection.
“To deal with this world where so many are ready to say no, you must know who you are. Remember that: Know who you are.
“But you can’t know who you are until you have found out who you are.
“Your view of yourself may change over time, but I adjure you always to judge yourself by your bests, your zeniths. That is who you are. Make past success your default setting in assessing your worth when you go forth to slay the dragons of rejection.
“There are two classes of people you will encounter again and again in your lives. The yes people and the no people.
“Seek out and cherish those who say yes. Anyone can say no. The people who have changed the world, who have made it a better place, are the people who have said, ‘Yes.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘Let’s try.’
“Those are people you need in life, and that is what you should aim to be: a yes person. Think of it historically: Thomas Edison, Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt and Steve Jobs were all yes people, undaunted by frequent rejection.
“Try to be open to ideas, to different voices and to contrarian voices. That way, you will not only prosper in what you seek to do, but you will also become someone who, in turn, will help others succeed.
“You enter a world of great opportunities in the arts, sciences and technology but with attendant challenges. The obvious ones are climate, injustice, war and peace.
“Think of yourselves as engineers, working around those who reject you, building for others, and having a lot of fun doing it.
“Avoid being a no person. No is neither a building block for you nor for those who may look to you. Good luck!”
On Twitter: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. He’s based in Rhode Island.
White House Chronicle
Llewellyn King: The trials of celebrity love, from Taylor-Burton to Swift-Kelce
Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra (1963)
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
I wouldn’t know Taylor Swift if she sat next to me on an airplane, which is unlikely because she travels by private jet. If she were to take a commercial flight, she wouldn’t be sitting in the economy seats, which the airlines politely call coach.
Swift (who lives in Watch Hill, R.I., part of the time) needs to go by private jet these days: She is dating Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, and that is a problem. Love needs candle-lightin,g not floodlighting.
Being in love when you are famous, especially if both the lovers are famous, is tough. The normal, simple joys of that happy state are a problem: There is no privacy, precious few places outside of gated homes where the lovers can be themselves.
They can’t do any of the things unfamous lovers take for granted, like catching a movie, holding hands or stealing a kiss in public without it being caught on video and transmitted on social media to billions of fans. Dinner for two in a cozy restaurant and what each orders is flashed around the world. “Oysters for you, sir?”
Worse, if the lovers are caught in public not doing any of those things and, say, staring into the middle distance looking glum, the same social media will erupt with speculation about the end of the affair.
If you are a single celebrity, you are gossip-bait, catnip for the paparazzi. If a couple, the speculation is whether it will be wedding bells or splitsville.
The world at large is convinced that celebrity lovers are somehow in a different place from the rest of us. It isn’t true, of course, but there we are: We think their highs are higher and lows are lower.
That is doubtful, but it is why we yearn to hear about the ups and downs of their romances; Swift’s more than most because they are the raw material of her lyrics. Break up with Swift and wait for the album.
When I was a young reporter in London in the 1960s, I did my share of celebrity chasing. Mostly, I found, the hunters were encouraged by their prey. But not when Cupid was afoot. Celebrity is narcotic except when the addiction is inconvenient because of a significant other.
In those days, the most famous woman in the world, and seen as the most beautiful, was Elizabeth Taylor. I was employed by a London newspaper to follow her and her lover, Richard Burton, around London. They were engaged in what was then, and maybe still is, the most famous love affair in the world.
The great beauty and the great Shakespearian actor were the stuff of legends. It also was a scandal because when they met in Rome, on the set of Cleopatra, they were both married to other people. She to the singer Eddie Fisher and he to his first wife, the Welsh actress and theater director Sybil Williams.
Social rules were tighter then and scandal had a real impact. This scandal, like most scandals of a sexual nature, raised consternation along with prurient curiosity.
My role at The Daily Sketch was to stake out the lovers where they were staying at the luxury Dorchester Hotel, on Park Lane.
I never saw Taylor and Burton. Day after day I would be sidetracked by the hotel’s public-relations officer with champagne and tidbits of gossip, while they escaped by a back entrance.
Then, one Sunday in East Dulwich, a leafy part of South London where I lived with my first wife, Doreen, one of the great London newspaper writers, I happened upon them.
Every Sunday, we went to the local pub for lunch, which included traditional English roast beef or lamb. It was a good pub — which today might be called a gastropub, but back then it was just a pub with a dining room. An enticing place.
One Sunday, we went as usual to the pub and were seated right next to my targets: the most famous lovers in the world, Taylor and Burton. The elusive lovers, the scandalous stars were there next to me: a gift to a celebrity reporter.
I had never seen before, nor in the many years since, two people so in love, so aglow, so entranced with each other, so oblivious to the rest of the room. No movie that they were to star in ever captured love as palpable as the aura that enwrapped Taylor and Burton. You could warm your hands on it. Doreen whispered from behind her hand, “Are you going to call the office?”
I looked at the lovers and shook my head. They were so happy, so beautiful, so in love I didn’t have the heart to break the spell.
I wasn’t sorry I didn’t call in a story then and I haven’t changed my mind.
Love in a gilded cage is tough. If Swift and Kelce are at the next table — unlikely -- in a restaurant, I will keep mum. Love conquers all.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com, and he’s based in Rhode Island.
Web site: whchronicle.co
Llewellyn King: Entering an iron age for batteries
The old steel mill in Weirton, W.Va., from which a Massachusetts company’s perhaps revolutionary iron-air batteries will be shipped.
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
Since electricity was first deployed, there has been a missing link: storage.
The lead-acid battery was first developed in 1859 and has been refined to the effective, utilitarian box we have in cars today. Gone are the days when you sometimes had to top up the car battery with sulfuric acid and, often, distilled water.
These batteries, these workhorses, never made it far beyond their essential role in automobiles. Although early car manufacturers thought that the future of the automobile would belong to electricity, it was the internal-combustion engine that took over.
While battery research continues unabated – especially after the energy crisis that unfolded after the fall of 1973 -- it wasn’t until the lithium-ion battery arrived in the 1980s that batteries became a transformative technology. From cell phones to Teslas, they have upended the world of stored electricity.
Lithium-ion was the clear winner. It is light and suitable for transportation. It has also been the primary battery for utilities, which have been installing them at breakneck speed. But they are costly, and lithium is at the end of a troubled supply chain.
Batteries are essential to realizing the full potential of electricity generated from wind and solar. They provide power when the sun has set or the wind isn’t blowing. They can capture surplus production in the middle of the day when states like California and Arizona already have overproduction of solar power and it becomes negative energy, wasted.
Enter iron-air batteries. That is right: Iron with an “r,” which is the basic material in steel and one of the most plentiful elements on Earth.
Iron-air batteries use rusting as their central technology. In an iron-air battery, iron, water and air are the components. The iron rusts to discharge power and the rusting is reversed to charge the battery.
Form Energy, based in Somerville, Mass., will be shipping these revolutionary batteries to utilities late this year or early next from their manufacturing plant at the site of the old steel mill on the Ohio River in Weirton, W.Va. This means transportation infrastructure for heavy loads is already in place.
Form Energy got started with two battery experts talking: Mateo Jaramillo, the head of battery development at Tesla, and Yet-Ming Chiang, a professor at MIT who devoted his career to the study of batteries, primarily lithium. Indeed, he told me when I met with him in Somerville, that he fathered two successful battery companies using lithium.
But clearly, iron-air is Chiang’s passion now — a palpable passion. He is the chief scientific officer at Form Energy and remains professor of materials science and engineering and professor of ceramics at MIT.
Chiang, Jaramillo and three others founded Form Energy, in 2017. Now it has contracts with five utilities to provide batteries and appears to be fulfilling the dearest wish of the utilities: a battery that can provide electricity over long periods of time, like 100 hours. Lithium-ion batteries draw down quickly — usually in two or four hours, before they must be recharged.
An iron-air battery is capable of slow discharge over days, not hours. Therefore, it can capture electricity when the sun is blazing and the wind is blowing — which tends to drop in the afternoon just when utilities are beginning to experience their peak load, which is early evening.
Iron is very heavy and so the use of iron-air technology would appear to be limited to utilities where weight isn’t a problem and where the need for long, long drawdown times are needed; for example, when the wind doesn’t blow for several days.
Jaramillo told me the company has finished its funding and is well-set financially. It has raised $860 million and was given $290 million by the state of West Virginia,
The smart money has noticed: Early funders include Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. Is a new Iron Age at hand?
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email address is llewellynking1@gmail.com, and he’s based in Rhode Island.