After the financial crash of 2008, Europe’s leftist parties had an opportunity to channel the anti-establishment fervour of ordinary voters and move from the fringes to the mainstream. For a time, the tide throughout Europe appeared to be shifting to the left. However, earlier this month, after the socialist government of Tsipras was swept aside in the Greek general election, it now appears that the European left is in deep crisis. Yascha Mounk, writing in the Atlantic, suggests that a chain of recent electoral defeats for the left means that the heralded resurgence of socialist parties has peaked – a lesson which the Americans would do well to take into account.
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.
