Trump’s Speech Crackdown Makes a Quantum Leap
Plus: Job-stealing AI, Space Force gets offensive, papal foreign policy, the ‘holier-than-thou’ effect, a novel climate argument, and more!
Note: Next Friday we’ll unveil a new, crisper format for the Earthling and will outline some accompanying changes in the overall NZN content flow. And next Thursday (May 1—save the date!) at 8 pm US Eastern Time I’ll do a Zoom call with paid subscribers to talk about the fate of humankind and anything else I’m asked about (including those Earthling/NZN changes). Also, Managing Editor Connor Echols will be there to humbly accept your praise for the cool new look of his weekend show NonZero World, available on our YouTube channel as well as our podcast feed (though, tbh, creative genius Nikita Petrov of Psychopolitica deserves some credit for that look, too.) The Zoom link is at the bottom of this issue, below the paywall.
–RW
—The US Space Force, which until recently had focused on intelligence gathering and defensive efforts, released a “space warfighting” playbook that lays out plans to achieve “space superiority” by developing offensive weapons that would target enemy satellites. In 2019, when the Space Force was first created, one prominent critic warned that “unconstrained space weapons development will lead to a competition that makes space more dangerous, costly and unpredictable to use.”
—A number of struggling actors have sold their likeness to AI marketing companies to make a quick buck, and some are already regretting the decision, according to AFP. One actor reported seeing his digital clone in propaganda videos supporting a coup leader in Burkina Faso, while another was shocked to find his doppelganger claiming to be a visitor from the future and warning of disasters to come. (See below for more on the unsettling side of AI.)
—Nearly all the world’s nations, with the notable exception of the United States, agreed on a treaty aimed at better coordinating a global response to pandemics and other health crises. The accord, slated for formal adoption next month, creates a program to share data about pathogens and earmarks roughly 20 percent of emergency vaccines and medicines for the World Health Organization. The WHO would distribute them to countries in need.
—Research compiled by the Guardian suggests that most people underestimate how much their fellow Earthlings care about fighting climate change. One international study found that most participants believed they were more likely than their peers to make personal sacrifices for the planet. Such beliefs may reflect undue cynicism about this particular issue but may just reflect the well-documented “holier-than-thou” bias, which leads people to overrate their virtuousness compared to others.
—The low cost of Chinese-made goods is, increasingly, due not to cheap labor but to the rapidly growing use of robots in China’s factories, according to a report in the New York Times. Meanwhile, comments by Tesla owner and Trump ally Elon Musk suggest that Trump’s tariffs on China may be hobbling parts of America’s robotics industry. Musk said China’s decision to stop exports of certain magnets—a decision made in retaliation for the tariffs—will slow Tesla’s development of humanoid robots.
—Voting is underway to incorporate a new town called Starbase along the southern coast of Texas where Elon Musk’s SpaceX builds and launches its rockets. The vote, almost certain to pass, would create a municipality slightly bigger than New York’s Central Park that will be "populated almost exclusively by employees of SpaceX and their relatives," the New York Times reports. Tesla’s security manager is running for mayor. Other potentially influential citizens include Musk, who owns a ranch-style house with a big fenced-in yard.
As NZN readers know, cognitive empathy—the art of understanding how others see the world—is in short supply these days. That’s one reason why we’re such big fans of Global Dispatches, a newsletter and podcast outlet led by veteran foreign policy journalist Mark Leon Goldberg.
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Click here to unlock all of this content—and support an organization that really cares about cognitive empathy and international governance. A 50 percent discount might just be waiting for you on the other side.
Note: This is, strictly speaking, a paid ad. But if you doubt the authenticity of our support for Mark and his work, you can check out any of his dozens of appearances on our podcast platform, which go all the way back to 2007, when the platform was known as bloggingheads.tv.
Before becoming head of the National Institutes of Health, Jay Bhattacharya promised senators that, if confirmed, he would foster “a culture of respect for free speech in science” at the agency. This week we learned that there’s a critical distinction between “free speech in science” and “the free speech of scientists.” Bhattacharya’s NIH issued a little-noted directive that carries President Trump’s war on legitimate political expression into new territory.
The directive bars recipients of NIH grants from engaging in any “discriminatory prohibited boycott.” That term may sound vague and potentially broad, but it turns out to have clear and narrow application. The directive defines such boycotts like this: “refusing to deal, cutting commercial relations, or otherwise limiting commercial relations specifically with Israeli companies or with companies doing business in or with Israel or authorized by, licensed by, or organized under the laws of Israel to do business.”
This quiet policy change—which the journalist Lee Fang noticed and flagged—marks the latest chapter in what the Trump administration calls its war on antisemitism and others call a war on critics of Israel. In recent months, the White House has revoked the visas of more than 1,800 foreign students who participated in some form of protest about the war in Gaza. Trump has also threatened to withhold billions of dollars in research funding from universities unless they follow his policy diktats (such as his demand that Harvard put an immediate stop to “disruptions and deplatforming”—except in the case of groups that Trump demands be disrupted and deplatformed, namely: “the Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee, Harvard Graduate Students 4 Palestine, Law Students 4 Palestine, Students for Justice in Palestine” plus one group—the National Lawyers Guild—whose name doesn’t include the word “Palestine” but whose members presumably made the mistake of mentioning it).
So far Trump’s most direct attacks on critics of Israel have focused on migrants, and his attempts to stifle US citizens have been more oblique, as when he demands that Harvard withdraw support and recognition from pro-Palestinian campus groups and “discipline and render ineligible” their members. The new NIH anti-boycott rule represents the administration’s most direct attack yet on the right of citizens to express criticism of Israel. The Supreme Court has repeatedly said that participation in a boycott is a form of political expression protected by the First Amendment. Yet any of the more than 300,000 scientists who annually receive NIH funding have reason to worry about financial punishment by the federal government if they try to exercise that freedom in a way that Donald Trump and Jay Bhattacharya have now deemed unacceptable.
Being punished for boycotting Israel or supporting such boycotts isn’t, by itself, a new thing in America. Pro-Israel lobbyists and activists (including conservative evangelical Christians) have succeeded in getting a majority of US states to pass anti-BDS laws—laws that punish support for the movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israeli organizations. In these cases, as in the NIH case, the lever is government funding; if you want money from the state—by doing work on contract for a state university, say—you have to pledge in writing not to support BDS.
In some states, courts have struck down anti-BDS laws on First Amendment grounds. But in each of those cases, lawmakers amended the statutes in order to keep them on the books. The ultimate fate of state anti-BDS laws remains uncertain. In any event, the conflict with the First Amendment would seem to be clearer when the federal government—the authority that the Bill of Rights was explicitly designed to constrain—is the authority that’s stifling political expression.
The Israel-Palestine issue is deeply divisive. A recent poll found that 53 percent of Americans hold an unfavorable view of Israel (up from 42 percent the year before the Gaza War), while 45 percent hold a favorable view. Some students targeted by Trump have expressed extreme anti-Israel views and/or used language (like “From the river to the sea”) that many Jews consider antisemitic even if users of the offending phrases typically say they don’t mean them that way.
But what’s striking is the Trump administration’s consistent failure to even try to document antisemitism (as contrasted with anti-Zionism or harsh criticism of Israel or various other things) on the part of the alleged antisemites. So far as anyone can tell, the grave sin committed by Rumeysa Ozturk, the Turkish graduate student (and Fulbright scholar) who was creepily apprehended by plain-clothes federal agents who didn’t clearly identify themselves, was to co-author an op-ed echoing the International Court of Justice’s finding that the Gaza War “plausibly” constitutes genocide. Meanwhile, a recent poll found that 30 percent of Jewish Americans consider the war on Gaza genocide (without the “plausibly” qualifier). Presumably antisemitism doesn’t lie behind that judgment.
During the Covid pandemic, Jay Bhattacharya expressed unpopular views about the appropriate policy response, and there’s no doubt that powerful people in the public health establishment and in media and big tech tried to marginalize such views. There’s also no doubt that his views, in retrospect, deserved more mainstream attention than they got. Whether, as he claims, the US government violated his free speech rights is a more complicated question, but in any event his belief that it did renders his current suppression of political expression ironic, to say the least.
How to explain it? Maybe, in the psychological cauldron of Covid-19, Bhattacharya came to feel that Fauci-ism and a woke progressive politics that includes antagonism toward Israel had melded into a single threat to intellectual diversity. Or maybe he thinks the new policy, though regrettable, is a small price to pay in order to stay in the good graces of the White House and so achieve his greater goals.
President Trump, by expanding his war on speech from foreign students to American scientists, has placed the First Amendment squarely in his sights. It’s a troubling sign of the times that the person pulling the trigger could, only a week ago, credibly claim to be a defender of free speech.
How much money could you make if you created AI-powered software that rendered every human worker jobless? This question is on the minds of the founders of Mechanize Inc., a brand new company that this week announced its goal of enabling the “full automation of all work.”
“The market potential here is absurdly large,” the founders wrote. “Workers in the US are paid around $18 trillion per year in aggregate. For the entire world, the number is over three times greater, around $60 trillion per year.”
The birth of Mechanize has generated heated debate for reasons that go beyond its audacious mission. One of its founders, Tamay Besiroglu, had also co-founded the nonprofit research institute Epoch AI in 2022 to help policymakers track AI progress and anticipate its future direction. So some people in the “AI Safety” community—which focuses on dangers ranging from AI-empowered terrorists to rogue AI agents to planetary AI takeover to massive and sudden job loss—had taken Besiroglu to be one of their own. Hence their surprise when he left Epoch with two other of its employees to start a company that seems devoted to hastening massive job loss.
What’s more, critics say that Epoch had gathered data which could be used to help create digital environments in which to train AIs for specific tasks—and, more broadly, that Epoch may have served as a non-profit launch pad for Besiroglu’s new for-profit venture. “First of all, traitors,” tweeted Holly Elmore, executive director of the advocacy group PauseAI. “Second, were their donors in effect funding them to gain the clout to turn around and profit off of making AI more dangerous? … This is frankly a much more stark and overt example of corruption in AI Safety than I was expecting to see.”
Meanwhile, new data from a different AI research institute—METR—underscores how fast large language models are catching up with humans in some kinds of job performance. An initial METR study, reported in NZN last month, had found that AI progress—as measured by the time it would take a human to do tasks the latest AIs can do—was advancing exponentially; the “length” of tasks, at least in the realm of computer coding, was doubling every seven months. Now METR has added OpenAI’s two latest models—o3 and o4-mini—to its graph and finds that the progress curve is steepening even faster than was thought. The length of coding tasks AIs can perform seems to be doubling every four months, not every seven months. Who knows what next month will bring?
Pope Francis’s passing this week inspired a brief moment of unity among world leaders. India’s prime minister said he was “deeply pained” by the news, and Pakistan’s prime minister called the death an “irreparable loss.” Russian President Vladimir Putin lauded the late pontiff for his efforts to develop intra-Christian dialogue, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky praised the pope’s ability to “ease suffering through prayer” and “foster unity.”
The stream of statements is a reminder of how effectively the pontificate, despite all of the Catholic Church’s controversies, has managed to retain its moral authority over the past two millennia. But it would be a mistake to chalk this up to symbolic power alone. Much of the Vatican’s influence springs from a more terrestrial source: a crack corps of diplomat-priests whom the Holy See dispatches around the world to mediate conflicts, facilitate the distribution of humanitarian aid, and promote religious freedom.
These emissaries’ greatest strength, in NZN terms, is cognitive empathy. In addition to studying economics and international relations, Vatican diplomats receive extensive mediation training that emphasizes finding non-zero-sum solutions through deep dialogue with the affected parties. This focus on perspective-taking is religiously inspired, but it’s also practical. With more than a billion Catholics spread throughout the world—often living on both sides of a given conflict—the Holy See has a strong incentive to maintain neutrality and deescalate wars. In recent decades, papal envoys have used these skills to help end conflicts and defuse political crises in more than a dozen countries.
In one case, this focus on cognitive empathy may have helped save the world. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Pope John XXIII, who spent most of his pastoral career as a Vatican diplomat, corresponded directly with President John F. Kennedy and indirectly with Soviet Premier Nikita Khruschev. In an effort to create space to help both sides back down from the brink, the pope made a public petition for peace in the name of humanity, a statement that Pravda printed in full. Two days after this message went out, appearing in newspapers across the world, Kennedy and Khruschev agreed to a mutual withdrawal of missiles, thus ending the crisis. Khruschev later called the pope’s statement “the only gleam of hope” in that dark moment.
As Catholicism has spread across the globe, the Holy See’s emphasis on diplomacy and neutrality has grown. Pope Francis—the first non-European pontiff since the 8th century—took particular interest in resolving disputes between the West and its adversaries. Early in his papacy, at the urging of cardinals in Havana and Boston, he pushed for reconciliation between Cuba and the United States, helping pave the way for a normalization agreement that was finalized in the Vatican in late 2014.
Despite subsequent setbacks in Cuba-US relations, the pontiff carried his desire for reconciliation forward by seeking to normalize the Holy See’s relations with Russia and China, aided by long-time Vatican diplomats like Cardinal Pietro Parolin and Archbishop Paul Gallagher. Pope Francis faced sharp criticism for these efforts, particularly following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But each has borne at least some fruit: The Holy See’s improved ties with Moscow allowed it to mediate prisoner swaps between Russia and Ukraine, and outreach to Beijing allowed the Vatican to gain a greater share of control over a church that in China has long operated under heavy restrictions imposed by the Chinese Communist Party.
The late Pope Francis viewed empathy, whether cognitive or emotional, as a uniquely powerful force. He often spoke of creating a “culture of encounter” in which people draw closer to each other through deep listening and mutual compassion—a theory that he applied to the world’s leaders and downtrodden alike. Starting in the early days of the war in Gaza, he held nightly calls with the only Catholic parish there. “Despite everything on his shoulders in this world, he cared about us in Gaza,” recalled a Gazan Catholic this week. “It feels like we have lost our father.”
For more than a century, states have clamored for access to oil in order to secure their economic and military strength. While some countries have resorted to war to guarantee this access, most have been content to do so through trade.
But, as a new analysis from the climate change think tank Ember notes, this laid back approach is coming under increasing pressure amid trade wars and military conflicts in key shipping lanes, like the Red Sea. Under particular threat are 52 countries—including economic powerhouses like Japan and Germany—whose fossil fuel imports account for more than half of their domestic energy use. For Ember, the solution is simple: Fossil-fuel importers should cut back on oil and embrace “electrotech,” including renewable energy, heat pumps for residential buildings, and electric cars.
The key advantage of this approach, Ember argues, is that solar and wind energy plants require just one round of imports every 30 years (and even that need disappears if states can manufacture the components domestically), while the operation of oil and gas facilities entails constant exposure to global markets. The authors could have also added that a shift to electric vehicles provides a certain degree of flexibility in how states secure energy for transport; while internal combustion engines only run on gas, electric cars can use electricity from any source, be it green energy, nuclear power, or even fossil fuels when necessary.
“Fossil-importing nations are like frogs in boiling water, failing to detect the gradually increasing danger,” argued Kingsmill Bond, a market analyst and co-author of the Ember report. “Electrotech offers the fastest escape route from this escalating threat.”