Twice before, Western civilization has collapsed utterly, triggering half a millennium of darkness. At Blade of Perseus, Victor Davis Hanson wonders whether our current iteration, which delivered “constitutional government, rationalism, liberty, freedom of expression, self-critique, and free markets,” is due for its own catastrophic fall. “Salad-bowl tribalism replacing assimilation” is among the issues gripping Hanson, as is that “fertility has dived well below 2.0 in almost every Western country.”

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.


