“As incompetent as it is authoritarian”

Compounding problems of increasing social isolation, disintegrating family life and declining fertility is a new threat: the fusion of AI with sex dolls to create at-once ultra-realistic and emotionally empty “AI companions” intended to substitute for real human intimacy. It’s a formula that can – and already does – kill, warn Tim Rosenberger and Vilda Westh Blanc in City Journal. Not surprisingly, teen-agers are most vulnerable to the allure of quick and seemingly consequence-free gratification. In fact, warn the authors, it can be a path straight to suicide.

While looking down on Americans never seems to get old, Ben Shapiro in Jewish World Review demolishes that mindset with a survey of stunning successes that only America could have delivered. In a matter of days, “Americans have watched astronauts push farther into space than any human beings in history, while U.S. forces execute military operations so precise and technologically overwhelming that they look like something written for a Hollywood script.” The crazy part is that such feats are so routine “we barely stop to appreciate it.”