The Bot Onslaught Continues
Plus: Constitutional crisis fears, US-China conflict fears, Musk-Bezos competition, military spending jumps, North Korea comes clean, and more!
Welcome to the new, revamped Earthling! Before I explain what’s changed about it, here’s what stays constant: The Earthling will still be the weekend edition of the NonZero Newsletter, and will still feature a mixture of the week’s news and analysis. What it won’t feature is the old Earthling’s mixture of journalistic genres; we won’t have a few short, snack-sized items, followed by a longish main course, followed by some side orders. Henceforth, anything long enough to be a main course, or even a substantial side dish, will come out in a separate mailing, earlier in the week, and the Earthling itself will be all snacks—but lots and lots of them. (If you don’t believe me, scroll down.) We hope you’ll find them tasty yet nutritious, but whatever your reaction we hope you’ll share it in the comments section below. Meanwhile, we promise that the increase in early-week mailings won’t become a deluge anytime soon; we plan to achieve the status of globally hegemonic media empire gradually, so that workers in the MSM will have time to plan orderly career transitions.
—Bob
—A study conducted under unusually realistic conditions found that AIs are much better than humans at changing people’s minds. Researchers from the University of Zurich surreptitiously deployed chatbots on the Reddit forum “changemyview,” where people engage in debates and then report whether their views have been changed. Preliminary results found that the bots were three to six times more successful at persuasion than humans—but the researchers failed to persuade Reddit that their deception was justified in the name of science, and they were banned from the site.
—The South China Morning Post reports that a Chinese company has launched an autonomous sea vessel that can reach speeds “similar to a destroyer or a US Navy torpedo” and can rapidly dive 60 meters below the ocean surface. Lest anyone be concerned about arms-race implications, the SCMP notes that the vessel, dubbed “Blue Whale,” is "designated for civilian use"—though, as it happens, the Blue Whale is capable of launching “research rockets” and has some of the “stealth capabilities of a nuclear submarine.”
—Pittsburgh-based Aurora Innovation launched America’s first fully driverless truck delivery route, the company said. On Sunday an Aurora semi covered the 240 miles between Dallas and Houston without a “safety driver,” and the truck has now logged more than 1,200 miles along that route with an empty driver’s seat. Texas is one of only a handful of states that permit self-driving vehicles with no human occupants.
—Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that roughly a third of the company’s computer code is now being written by AI and that he expects that share to increase. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai recently reported similar numbers for Google. This reliance on AI code could lead to new security vulnerabilities; one recent study found that LLMs often hallucinate references to non-existent code libraries, and hackers can then create a real library with the same name and fill it with malicious code.
—A $67 million fighter jet fell off a US aircraft carrier and sank, apparently as the carrier was making a sharp turn in response to Houthi missile fire. On the same day, bombs from another US jet hit a migrant detention center in northern Yemen, killing at least 68 civilians, according to aid workers and Houthi spokespeople. The Trump administration has now struck more than 800 targets in Yemen without achieving its goal of stopping Houthi attacks on commercial ships in the Red Sea—attacks the Houthis say they will end if Israel ends its war on Gaza.
—Trump’s trade war with China could increase the risk of a real war, argues Joshua Keating of Vox. Like the American oil embargo that helped push Japan to attack Pearl Harbor, US efforts to isolate China economically—and cut off its access to advanced microchips and other technology—are felt on the receiving end as a graver and more provocative threat to security than Washington may realize. One China expert told Keating that full economic decoupling could so dull the incentive of the rivals to “work out issues together” that “the only thing to prevent the US and China from going to war [would be fear of] war itself.”
—The Senate voted to confirm David Perdue, a former senator from Georgia, as the US ambassador to China. Perdue has argued—in his confirmation hearing and in a recent essay—that China, as part of its plan to “convert the world to Marxism,” is waging “a new kind of war” against America that includes cyber attacks and fentanyl precursors and the infiltration of US schools and indeed “every facet of human endeavor.” A former US ambassador to Beijing told Politico that Perdue may want to strike a softer tone: "He’s more likely to break through the more he shows his respect for China and encourages China to show respect for the United States."
—North Korea confirmed for the first time its deployment of troops in Russia’s Kursk region and announced plans to build a memorial for soldiers who died there. The government statement, which seemed designed in part to justify the sacrifice to a domestic audience, depicted Ukraine as a threat to both North Korea and Russia and trumpeted the budding “alliance” between Pyongyang and Moscow as a source of future security. According to a report by Stimson Center analyst Rachel Minyoung Lee, awareness of the troop deployment had been growing in North Korea even though the government hadn’t acknowledged it.
—As the Trump administration considers cutting the State Department budget in half, congressional Republicans announced a plan to increase military spending in 2025 by $150 billion. The measure, which is expected to pass as part of a budget reconciliation package, would for the first time push America’s single-year defense outlays above $1 trillion. Meanwhile, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute found that global military spending grew last year to $2.7 trillion, marking a 9.4 percent increase in real terms over 2023—the largest single-year jump since the Cold War.
—Why can America supply Ukraine with complex cutting-edge weaponry but not with the simpler drones that have proved so valuable in fending off Russian troops? The answer, according to Anatol Lieven of the Quincy Institute, is that American weapons manufacturers would rather make expensive weapons systems of dubious utility than cheap but effective ones. “It makes much more sense for Raytheon and all the retired generals who either are working for Raytheon or are going to work for Raytheon to produce F-35s and aircraft carriers, which are very profitable [but] very vulnerable,” he told NZN editor-in-chief Robert Wright. (Watch Bob’s full conversation with Anatol here.)
—Fifty-four percent of Americans say the United States is in a constitutional crisis, according to a new poll from YouGov and the Economist. A similar survey from Elon University found that 67 percent of Americans are very or somewhat concerned about a constitutional crisis, which the poll described as “a situation in which the executive branch and the courts strongly disagree over their constitutional powers and neither side backs down.” In both polls, Democrats were significantly more concerned than Republicans.
—The left needs to stop sneering at Republican calls to increase birth rates and formulate a “better answer to the right’s pronatalism,” argues Elliot Haspel in the New Republic. Declining birth rates could undermine progressive aims by hollowing out America’s tax base, straining the social safety net, and forcing workers to postpone retirement, Haspel says. His proposed approach to breaking down economic barriers to raising children would involve paid family leave, affordable childcare options, and perhaps even direct payments to new parents.
—Despite reports that foreign tourists have been steering clear of America in response to the Trump administration’s immigration policies, travel to the United States remains steady, according to the New York Times. While there was a year-over-year decrease in international arrivals at US airports in March, that was mainly due to the mismatch between the Christian and secular calendars; Easter break, during which Europeans flock to the US, took place in April this year instead of March.
—Amazon launched the first 27 of its Project Kuiper satellites. Amazon founder and executive chairman Jeff Bezos plans to eventually send more than 3,200 of them into low Earth orbit, where they will compete to provide internet access with the 8,000 Starlink satellites operated by Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Meanwhile, Slate Auto—an electric vehicle startup backed by Bezos—announced a $25,000 pickup that could be a low-cost competitor to the Cybertruck, the flagship truck of Musk’s embattled EV maker, Tesla.
—Impending restrictions on US chip exports to dozens of countries would hurt American chipmakers like Nvidia while doing little to hinder the access of US adversaries to AI, according to a Wall Street Journal piece. The new rules, first proposed by the Biden administration, would constrict exports to a long list of “Tier 2” countries, partly to keep these countries from becoming conduits through which chips could travel to such adversaries as China. But the efficacy of this strategy is dubious, and meanwhile some Tier 2 countries could become lucrative markets for Nvidia competitors in Europe and East Asia, including China’s Huawei, according to the WSJ analysis.
By NZN staff
Graphics and banners by Clark McGillis
I like the all bite size format and am not ashamed to admit it or to write about it in a comment.
The bite size is fine (which the Economist does brilliantly), but maybe it should have more items. I didn't think there was anything wrong with the previous format.