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Slouching Towards Bethlehem

The American Conservative
May 26, 2020
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Reading The Rites of Spring, Modris Eksteins’ brilliant account of how the First World War destroyed European civilization, led Rod Dreher to ponder the meaning of 40 million unemployed Americans. Eksteins depicted how the Europeans failed to imagine the civilizational catastrophe that was upon them. Dreher, writing in The American Conservative, wonders if anyone can truly grasp the significance of the coronavirus pandemic.

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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.

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