Surveillance

Jack Smith’s plot against the republic

Six hundred and thirty-nine thousand. Thanks to the indefatigable Chuck Grassley, we now know that that’s the number of individuals whose names Special Counsel Jack Smith hoovered up for Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice when Joe Biden occupied 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. (“Occupied 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,” it may almost go without saying, seems more accurate than saying “when Biden was president.”)  Senator Grassley has been terrier-like in pursuing evidence of wrongdoing by people like Jack Smith, Merrick Garland and their many confrères in the deep state, which is to say, the Democrat State. Grassley had earlier shown that nearly 5,000 GOP donor checks, mostly for piddly amounts, had been collected as “evidence” by Garland’s minions.

Jack Smith

Will robots simply bore us to extinction?

A few years ago, when ChatGPT and Claude were beginning to take off, some tech leaders seemed to develop a curious interest in oceanography. Consider, for instance, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s suggestion in 2023 that AI ought to be compared to a “tidal wave”; or Mustafa Suleyman’s book on AI, The Coming Wave (2024), in which the DeepMind cofounder talks urgently about an “impending deluge” (while repeatedly warning us that the “wave is coming,” and, even more alarmingly, “the coming wave really is coming.”) It didn’t take long for the analogy to spread. The IMF’s Kristalina Georgieva would liken the technology to a “tsunami hitting the labor market.

Robots