Officialdom is using the coronavirus to find fresh pretexts to expand its authority. Matthew B. Crawford, writing in Unherd, observes how political and aesthetic preferences have become moralized in safety talk. As some teenaged mountain bikers in California discovered, bureaucrats now claim a bullet-proof halo of public-spiritedness to sweep aside whole domains of human activity.

Keeping the AI Apocalypse at Bay
Writing in City Journal, Judge Glock examines legal efforts to control AI and dismisses the current fixation on suing for specific harms, such as bad advice. “The idea that we should treat Big Tech, including AI companies, like we treated Big Tobacco, is exactly the wrong idea,” he observes. A better approach is to assess product liability based on which parties can perform the task at the cheapest cost, as is the case with the regulation of medical equipment. This “has the benefit of putting the onus on companies themselves to game out dangerous scenarios and prevent them,” he advises. For more on AI, see this C2C article.


