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My concern with AI companies’ current attempts to mitigate misalignment is that these efforts may only hide it, by rewarding and selecting the AIs that cheat without getting caught. We should certainly continue research toward better monitoring of AIs' actions, their chains of thought, and the activity inside their networks. But as capabilities grow, those defenses may prove inadequate, just as the world's imperfect cybersecurity has against the AI attackers that outperformed human teams this year. Patching each new misaligned behavior and strengthening our monitors is useful in the short term, but the whack-a-mole game is likely to fail as the AIs' ability to optimize and collaborate approaches and surpasses ours. At some point we may not notice the cheating anymore. ~Yoshua Bengio  

I was in college during the dawning of molecular cloning. By 1981, I was using recombinant DNA in my PhD research, and within a few months of starting my postdoc in 1982, I was engineering clones. In my career, I’ve made libraries of recombinant DNA molecules in bacteria and engineered dozens of transgenic fruit flies. The current fears over unregulated AI reminded me immediately of the fears raised about recombinant DNA technology in the 1970s. “ In two urgent letters in   1973   and   1974 , scientists first called for “prudence” — the same word used this month by Anthropic’s Dario Amodei in his 3,800-word plea for regulation of A.I. Then   they called   for a moratorium on all recombinant DNA work until it could be done safely. “ Work stopped until scientists gathered at Asilomar aiming to come up with regulations to end the moratorium. Organizers warned the group, which included scientists from other countries including the Soviet Union, that if they couldn’...

Kissinger and Nixon went to Peking like barbarians approaching the Manchu emperors. They set a pattern of deference bordering on obsequiousness which has run through Western approaches to China ever since. ~William F. Buckley, Jr. As William Faulkner wrote, the past isn’t dead, it isn’t even past.

The war raised the price of gasoline; the president said it would last a few weeks; it has lasted seven months and,  per YouGov , a majority of Americans now expect it to outlast the year. Even  Fox News  found  71 percent of voters — including 43 percent of Republicans — concluding he has no plan to end it . Seventy-eight percent, in CNN’s poll, say he is not doing enough to end it. The president’s own resolution of this difficulty, offered earlier this month, was to pledge that the war will end “immediately after” the election, which is the closest an American president has come to putting a bomb on layaway. ~Mike Brock

When American historians tell the story of 2025, it will be about the rise of our off-brand fascism.   When world historians tell the story of 2025, it will be about the passing of technological, and hence economic, and hence political leadership from the U.S. to China, in the span of eight months.   ~Bill McKibben

A manuscript under review in a refereed journal and a new book together provided new evidence that at least two children of Thomas Jefferson’s slave Sally Hemmings were fathered by Jefferson. “After a covert and exhaustive 15-year effort led by the Smithsonian Institution, a team of geneticists, genealogists, historians, and anthropologists believe it has found proof that Jefferson fathered at least two of Hemings’s six children. On Tuesday, Richard Kurin, a Smithsonian cultural anthropologist, who led the multidisciplinary research effort, will publish a   book   detailing the team’s findings. A scientific paper is currently under review for publication in   Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences   ( PNAS ). The researchers, who agreed to speak with me about their results before publication, relied on the latest genetic techniques to reassemble Jefferson’s genome from the Founder’s hair. They then matched that sequence with DNA from descendants of two of He...