President Donald Trump loves a data center: Last year, the president signed an executive order that “expedites federal permitting, facilitates construction on federal land and makes qualifying projects eligible for financial incentives,” notes The Washington Post. Trump is a huge fan, but much of the rest of his party reflects voters’ fears that data centers will burden residential areas.

Data centers—the huge warehouses needed to store all the specialized hardware that’s required to run AI models—have grown in salience as a political problem in recent months.

Building out and using AI models at scale requires enormous computational demands; data centers, which consume large amounts of energy, are necessary to power these models. A huge data center could create demands that power grids weren’t built for and can’t effectively handle, leading to service outages for residential areas. It’s also possible that costs of improving grids—to serve AI companies—could be passed on to households via rate increases paid by all customers.

That said, if we want more AI applications, and believe them to potentially be transformative, we’re going to need more computing power. And we’re going to need more data centers. (But you can perhaps understand why some people, when met with the “AI might render work as we know it obsolete” line, don’t feel especially accommodating.)

“If I were the mayor of a town or the governor of a state, and I had a chance to get a big plant in an AI plant or a data center, I would absolutely want it because the jobs are enormous, and the money paid, the taxes paid are just enormous,” Trump said last week.

Contrast this with how Republican politicians are talking about them. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced a moratorium on data centers within his state earlier this month, saying his regulators need to determine whether the power grid can handle the new facilities. (Right now, Texas appears to have 335 data centers, second in number only to Virginia.) The Wisconsin gubernatorial race has featured Rep. Tom Tiffany, a Republican, repeatedly arguing that his opponent, Democrat David Crowley, is soft on data centers, and that Tiffany will protect residents of his state from the scourge. In Michigan, Mike Rogers—who is running for Senate as the Republican against Democrat/socialist Abdul El-Sayed—has called for a moratorium on new data center construction (a reversal of how he had been talking about them). In Florida, Rep. Byron Donalds, who won the Republican primary for governor, says he’ll “protect” the state from data centers, also a reversal of how he had formerly approached the issue.

“The Senate GOP campaign arm, in a private memo to top AI companies, warns that toxic views of U.S. data centers are killing the party’s chances of holding a vital seat in Ohio,” reported Axios last week. “In the memo, obtained by Axios, the National Republican Senatorial Committee says Democrats have made data centers a ‘centerpiece’ of their campaign to defeat Sen. Jon Husted (R-Ohio)—and that it’s working. ‘If he loses and data centers get the blame, politicians across the country will take notice—and they will not go near the next one,’ the memo says. ‘This has become a sleeper issue for the entire election cycle.'”

So why are so many Republicans so willing to break with Trump on this issue, when fealty to El Jefe has for so long been table stakes?

“Trump just personally cares about this topic,” an anonymous source familiar with his thinking told The Washington Post. “You just can’t change his mind about it.” But polling data indicates other Republicans are doing a better job of reading the room: Per Pew data back in March, “around one-in-five Americans or more say they aren’t sure of data centers’ impact in each of the five areas we asked about. Others say these facilities have neither a positive nor negative impact in each area or haven’t heard about data centers at all.” Now, voters seem to have heard an awful lot more about them, and made up their minds: An August poll from The Economist/YouGov found that 61 percent of Americans would oppose a data center being built in their community, including 47 percent of Republicans. More than half of Americans disagree with Trump’s perspective on data centers when asked about it.

Scenes from New York: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) just renewed her lapsed membership in the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) after a seven-year hiatus. What could this mean? Is she gearing up for a presidential run? A Senate run? Something more nefarious?

QUICK HITS

• “A Russian barrage of missiles and drones hit a children’s hospital, a school, apartments and warehouses around Kyiv last week, killing at least 16 people. Ukraine, lacking Patriot interceptors, didn’t shoot down any of Russia’s ballistic missiles. Ukraine’s response this week included a drone strike that caused a massive fire at one of Russia’s largest oil refineries, near Nizhny Novgorod, on Wednesday. Meanwhile, in the central Russian region of Tambov, a warehouse belonging to e-commerce giant Wildberries burned,” notes The Wall Street Journal. “The air war between Russia and Ukraine has entered a new phase. With expanded aerial arsenals and inadequate air defenses, both sides are bludgeoning each other in a bare-knuckle fight that is causing a widening swath of destruction and a rising civilian toll.”
• “Hispanics make up about 15% of the U.S. population. The percentage of Hispanic Americans identifying as religiously unaffiliated rose steadily from 18% in 2013 to 23% in 2025,” reports Axios, per Public Religion Research Institute data. “Among Catholic Latinos, the declines were historic. An Axios review of Pew Research Center data found that the share of Latino adults identifying as Catholic plummeted from 67% in 2010 to 43% in 2022.”
• Tim Carney has a great thread calling into question government-produced walkability indices. He has better ideas for how we could measure this:

This, btw, would be revolutionary: Make a walkability index. Then empirically measure if people are walking more in the "more walkable" places. https://t.co/CQ1cDW9eHL

— Tim Carney (@TPCarney) August 26, 2026

• Yayoi Kusama, the pop artist who was obsessed with both polka dots and depicting the phallus (as a means of overcoming earlier traumas), died earlier this week. I loved Kusama, who was helped along by Donald Judd, king of minimalism.
• Imagine using Italian-made AI for your antifa group. They’re not sending them their best!

Breaking: The US State Dept has connected Portland's Rose City Antifa to a foreign tech company that provides infrastructure to violent far-left extremist organizations.

The Oregon-based terror group has been using Italy-based A/I Collective to disseminate target information,…

— Katie Daviscourt (@KatieDaviscourt) August 26, 2026

The post Data Center Savior appeared first on Reason.com.

The AI arms race heats up: “The U.S. is preparing to ‌tell dozens of countries they must pick sides in the artificial intelligence race with China, warning they will be excluded from a U.S.-led AI coalition if they also sign up for Beijing’s competing framework,” reports Reuters. “Washington last year launched the Pax Silica initiative aimed at securing supply chains for AI models, semiconductors and critical minerals, amid a fierce technology rivalry with ​Beijing….By pressing ​countries to choose sides the U.S. hopes to starve China of resources in a race to make the most sophisticated AI, which could be used for military or economic dominance.”

At the same time, the Trump administration appears to be set to financially benefit from the growth and sophistication of Chinese AI models. World Liberty Financial, a Trump family–backed crypto firm, offers tokens that are then used by WorldClaw, which Reuters calls “a Hong Kong–based venture offering artificial-intelligence models developed by Chinese companies.” According to Reuters, “43 of the 90 models available through WorldClaw’s website, or nearly half, were developed by Alibaba, Baidu, Z.ai and other Chinese technology companies the Trump administration says pose risks to national security and intellectual property.”

Chinese AI products are rapidly gaining popularity in the U.S.: Mozilla’s chief technology officer “switched to Chinese AI startup Moonshot’s Kimi K3 for many of his day-to-day activities within days of the new, powerful model’s launch more than a week ago,” reports the Associated Press. “Earlier, he had been using another high-performing Chinese model, Z.ai’s GLM-5.2, for routine tasks such as managing his calendar, documents and email….U.S. companies like cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase said they’re switching to Chinese AI models to help trim costs.” Some of the value-add from Chinese models is that they’re often open-weight or open-source, not closed.

“AI systems exist along a spectrum,” explains John Villasenor at Brookings. “On one end are closed models, such as the various tiers of Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Users can submit queries to these models and get responses, but the detailed inner workings of the models and how they were trained are proprietary. At the other end of the spectrum are open-source models, in which information about the training data, the code used to generate weights from the training data, and the resulting weights are publicly disclosed. In between these two endpoints are ‘open-weight’ models in which the weights that ‘determine how the model interprets input data and generates outputs‘ are public, but the methods that were used to generate those weights are not.” Globally, China is establishing dominance as a provider of both open-weight and open-source models, which some companies prefer as they’re a lot cheaper to run, with more customization, control, and data privacy available.

“If American AI is dominated by a small handful of closed model providers, the result will be an overconcentration of power,” warns Villasenor. “That raises many concerns, including the risk of regulatory capture and a set of resulting policies that impede new market entrants.”

Starving China of resources is one path, I guess, but beating China at their own game would be another possibly worth choosing.

Dose of sanity: Finally, someone says what much of the left needs to hear surrounding jobs, pay, and inequality! “If men disproportionately hold dirty or dangerous jobs, paying them more may widen the earnings gap between men and women even when no woman is formally excluded (of course, one could also frame this as widening the longevity gap in women’s favor),” writes the eminently reasonable Kelsey Piper for The Argument. “Differences in opportunity, choice, and achievement can accumulate into durable disparities between groups defined by immutable characteristics like sex. But—while such a disparity might be a warning sign to investigate further for injustice—we have to keep in mind that our objective is to identify and redress injustice, not difference itself. Sometimes unequal outcomes are evidence of sexism and will vanish in a better world. Sometimes they are the mechanism by which society persuades people to haul away our garbage.”

Scenes from Texas: I was back in Texas with my family last week and shocked by the amount of Talarico Fever (in an admittedly blue city).

Democratic state Rep. James Talarico, who is running for Senate against the state’s attorney general, Ken Paxton, believes “it’s time to start flipping tables”—referencing Jesus flipping the tables of merchants outside the temple—and reclaim talk of Jesus and the gospel from the right.

Democratic strategists, per a long Washington Post piece on the matter, seem to believe the Talarico playbook will win over ultra-religious Bible Belt voters. I am less sure. Talarico drew plenty of scorn back in March for an appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast in which he claimed that the story of the Annunciation—when the angel Gabriel came to Mary and told her she would bear a child, to be called Jesus—lays the foundation for Christians to accept abortion as morally permissible. “To me, that is an affirmation in one of our most central stories that creation has to be done with consent. You cannot force someone to create,” Talarico told Rogan. He further elaborated that Christian opposition to abortion is not rooted in Scripture. “All I’m asking is that for Christians who are pro-choice and who respect the bodily autonomy of women, that we be given the space to make our theological argument, because I think there is a lot of biblical evidence to support that opinion,” he added.

I don’t think this is theologically sound in the slightest, but more to the point: I don’t think most Christian voters—like evangelicals and Catholics, both groups strongly represented all over Texas—will find his logic persuasive. (Talarico also said that “God is nonbinary” during a debate over trans youth inclusion in single-gender sports. My point being: I’m not sure most Texas evangelicals will appreciate his theology. “It is blasphemous,” one Republican told the Post.)

QUICK HITS

• Are people tiring of the pursuit of artificial perfection, in the form of botox, fillers, and veneers? asks Amanda Mull at Bloomberg. Some people “have moved on to some kind of artfully messy style or are asking their cosmetic injectors to let a few wrinkles remain. Ultimately, though, it’s probably too optimistic to regard this potential shift as the coming triumph of more realistic beauty standards or domestic ideals. If big white veneers are too popular, those with means can move on to even more expensive cosmetic dentists, armed with the latest techniques and materials to ensure their perfect new teeth look like the kind that might actually have grown out of their jaw. To avoid a too-puffy face full of filler, they can opt for a new injectable like Sculptra, which subtly stimulates your body’s own collagen production over time. Perfection, after all, isn’t some set point in the distance. It moves when you do.”
• Semi-related: Rep. Nancy Mace (R–S.C.) has new ink, and I kind of love it, though it’s admittedly a little comical. She’s going for the Liz Wolfe look!
• “Democrats have a habit of enacting abortion laws that are extreme by any reasonable definition, and then feigning shock if you care to point this out,” writes Emma Camp for The Wall Street Journal. “This week Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey signed an expansive new law that effectively eliminates the state’s restrictions on postviability abortion. Under current law, abortion is unlawful after 24 weeks unless the mother’s life or health is at risk or the unborn child has been diagnosed with a fatal birth defect. The new law, which takes effect in November, allows abortion at any time, for any reason, subject only to the ‘professional judgment’ of a physician that it is necessary….Democrats want it both ways—to pass laws with the explicit intent of allowing elective abortion at any point in pregnancy, and to deny that these laws could possibly have that effect.”

The post Open-Weight appeared first on Reason.com.

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems may outperform doctors at diagnosing patients. In a recent series of experiments led by researchers at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School, a preview of the OpenAI large language model (LLM) known as o1 bested human physicians in multiple tests of clinical and diagnostic reasoning.

“We tested the AI model against virtually every benchmark, and it eclipsed both prior models and our physician baselines,” said Harvard Medical School professor Arjun K. Manrai, one of the study’s senior authors. Using case studies, the researchers had o1—an older model since usurped by o3—generate a list of possible diagnoses. It included the right diagnosis 78 percent of the time, while physicians were successful about 30 percent of the time.

In another test, o1 was given five “clinical vignettes” drawn from real cases and asked about next steps. Two physicians judged its responses. The average score for o1 was 89 percent, compared to 34 percent for human doctors given the same test.

The researchers also looked at o1’s abilities to diagnose emergency room cases, where clinical data might be lacking. “Overall, o1 outperformed both [an earlier LLM] and two expert attending physicians, as assessed by two other attending physicians who both were blinded to the source of the differential diagnosis,” notes the study, which was published on April 30 in Science. The LLM especially outperformed human doctors when it came to diagnosis at the initial, triage stage, identifying “the exact or very close diagnosis….in 67.1% of cases,” while the two human doctors did so in only 55.3 percent and 50 percent of cases, respectively.

These results track with other recent research. AI-assisted mammograms could be better at detecting breast cancer, per a Swedish study published by The Lancet in January.

Using abdominal C.T. scans from patients who were eventually diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, an AI model developed by the Mayo Clinic detected this deadly disease an average of 475 days and up to three years earlier than clinicians did. “Attaining such early detection would substantially augment the probability of cure and improved survival,” researchers led by the Mayo Clinic’s Sovanlal Mukherjee noted in the medical journal Gut.

Robo-docs are not likely to take over healthcare anytime soon. And “humans should be the ultimate baseline,” as Peter Brodeur, one of the authors of the Harvard study, put it in a press release. But experiments like these suggest that AI models could competently assist in a variety of diagnostic and medical management contexts, and perhaps even produce better patient outcomes—if we let them.

Nevada now bans AI systems from saying anything that “implicitly indicates” they are “capable of providing professional mental or behavioral health care” and from providing any service “that would constitute the practice of professional mental or behavioral health care.” An Illinois law passed last year says AI cannot provide therapy services and therapists cannot use AI to “make independent therapeutic decisions” or “detect emotions or mental states.” Several states—including Ohio, California, Minnesota, and Kentucky—are considering similar laws. (At the same time, some state bills would mandate that AI chatbots be capable of detecting and responding to mental health issues.)

Measures like these could hamper AI’s potential to diagnose diseases with more accuracy than human doctors alone can.

The post AI Is Already Beating Human Doctors in Medical Tests appeared first on Reason.com.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) recently imposed a ban on new foreign-made robotic devices, drawn so broadly as to even include robot vacuums. It’s an especially devastating blow, since one of the most prominent robot vacuum manufacturers has already been the victim of overzealous regulators.

“Today, the Federal Communications Commission updated its Covered List to include two new categories of devices,” the agency announced last week, including “‘advanced robotic devices’ (defined as mobile robots, such as humanoids and quadrupeds).”

The Secure and Trusted Communications Networks Act of 2019 directed the FCC to “publish and maintain a list” of “communications equipment or services from a company that poses a national security risk to U.S. communications networks.”

Items on the list are “prohibited from getting FCC equipment authorization,” effectively preventing their sale or use in the U.S.

The new ban goes much further than just humanoid robots: A National Security Determination cited in the announcement includes any automated software-controlled devices weighing more than 4.4 pounds that are “capable of locomotion, obstacle avoidance, navigation, or movement on the ground.”

The ban won’t apply to any devices already on the market, and it allows the government to grant exemptions “after finding that such device or class of devices do not pose such unacceptable risks.” But it still seems remarkably arbitrary, especially when it’s sold as a means of protecting national security.

“The FCC isn’t actually targeting companies with poor security. It’s targeting basically every robovac company, regardless of their security practices—because basically every robovac is manufactured outside the US,” Sean Hollister writes at The Verge.

In fact, “the government isn’t asking these companies any questions about security—not one—to get the waiver that lets them through,” Hollister adds. “The FCC only wants to know where they’re designed and made and assembled and tested and influenced, and get a specific commitment to start manufacturing them in the US instead. Even then, it appears the FCC will simply preference US companies without any new commitments to security or US manufacturing.”

Earlier this year, the FCC banned all foreign-made wireless routers, and it’s currently considering a proposal to ban foreign-made drones, even those it had previously approved.

But this new ban is worse, especially considering how it will hurt a company that has already endured its share of abuse from government regulators.

Amazon announced in 2022 that it would acquire iRobot, the Massachusetts-based company that makes the Roomba robot vacuum. While it was once a pioneer in the space, iRobot had fallen behind its competitors: The New York Times‘ Wirecutter no longer recommends Roomba products, noting they “have not performed well in our testing in recent years.”

An acquisition by a company with pockets as deep as Amazon’s could have been a much-needed lifeline, allowing iRobot to invest in research and development.

Instead, busybody regulators in both the U.S. and Europe opposed the merger on antitrust grounds.

In a letter to then-Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) and five other lawmakers said the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) “should use its authority to oppose the Amazon–iRobot transaction”—which, they warned, “could harm consumers and reduce competition and innovation in the home robotics market.”

The European Commission, the European Union’s governing body, also objected, fearing that “because Amazon’s online marketplace is a particularly important channel,” it “may have the ability and the incentive to foreclose iRobot’s rivals.”

Amazon abandoned the deal rather than try to placate regulators on both sides of the Atlantic. As a result, iRobot laid off one-third of its workforce and soon faced bankruptcy. It also reported in a bankruptcy filing that tariffs on goods from Vietnam, where it made most of its products, added $23 million to its costs in 2025.

In December, the company announced it would instead be acquired by China-based company Shenzhen Picea Robotics, its primary contract manufacturer. At the time, iRobot owed Picea nearly $100 million.

Considering, as Reuters reported last week, that “the FCC is expected to exempt many non-Chinese suppliers from the restrictions,” this means iRobot will have borne the brunt of two successive presidential administrations’ regulatory actions.

The post FCC Bans Foreign-Made Robots, Including Roombas appeared first on Reason.com.

Democrats have a union problem. They have tied their political fortunes to unions, public and private, in ways that exacerbate intraparty conflict while stymieing both progressive and moderate goals. That’s not just a problem for the party. Democratic deference to unions creates economic hurdles for much of the country—almost everyone who isn’t in a union, and even some people who are—because today’s unions function as roadblocks to the future.

To understand the party’s problem, consider that the two most powerful words in Democratic politics in 2026 are abundance and affordability. Both represent rival party factions.

The abundance faction is a predominantly young, educated, and urban cohort of policy wonks, journalists, and activists who generally believe that the Democratic Party has overemphasized identity politics while moving too far to the left on economics, particularly when it comes to urban governance and housing policy. They tend to favor technological progress and measurable gains in efficiency. One of the movement’s core insights is that Democrats, who essentially have uniparty control of America’s biggest, most important cities, need to deliver better governance and a better standard of living for their constituents—and that to do this they must embrace deregulation, private business, market mechanisms, and high-quality policy analysis.

That starts with housing, which has been overregulated to the point of strangulation, resulting in shortages that have dramatically increased home prices in and around the country’s most desirable cities. The core issue is one of supply and demand, and Democratic politicians have often chosen to restrict supply and subsidize demand. In the abundance view, what those cities need (and what Democrats need to deliver) is more housing, primarily via market mechanisms that allow developers to build. More supply will ease demand and lower prices.

From this insight—that markets are an efficient and necessary way to deliver more goods at lower prices—an entire theory of policy flowered. What if market mechanisms are a good way to deliver all sorts of goods beyond housing? What if markets depend on developers, entrepreneurs, and businesspeople who are often quite wealthy? What if building new things, and even new labor-saving technologies, was the path to widely shared prosperity? What if there was an entire policy agenda devoted to delivering these goods via these processes? Perhaps you could call it an abundance agenda.

The abundance advocates are not libertarians. They tend to favor some form of social welfare spending. They sometimes say they want government to be good at doing and building things, like high-speed rail. But even this is a welcome acknowledgment that, in general, government is not great at doing things. Much of the movement amounts to the reinvention of Adam Smith from observational data, the primary observation being that Democratic Party governance has been a disaster. Better late than never.

On the opposite side of the party are the affordability mongers. Yes, abundance types will sometimes use the word too, but affordability has been more associated with politicians like Zohran Mamdani, the young member of the Democratic Socialists of America who is also now the mayor of New York City. Mamdani’s social media–savvy mayoral campaign helped boost affordability into political buzzword status.

Affordability is partly a response by the party’s left flank to the abundance movement’s market-friendly critique, and sometimes it comes with a grudging acknowledgement that the construction of new homes might require actually letting developers build some homes. But mostly it’s a rhetorical dodge, a marketing gimmick that allows the socialist-curious and their fellow travelers—the Bernie Sanders/Elizabeth Warren axis—to disavow responsibility for the party’s many policy mistakes while pushing further interventions into the economy.

Abundance is how you get a one-bedroom apartment that costs less than an aircraft carrier within walking distance of a cute matcha shop. Affordability is how you get subsidized daycare and city-run grocery stores.

While these two factions are at odds, they share a key premise, which is that modern life is too expensive for ordinary people, especially in American cities. One reason life is so expensive is an obstacle that neither side is well-equipped to deal with: labor unions. Democrats say they want abundance and affordability for America, but deferring to union demands will mean they can’t deliver either.

Driverless Cars, Deadhead Ubers, and Expensive Groceries

Public sector labor unions are key drivers of bloated spending, low performance, and all-around inefficiency in state and local governments. Private sector labor unions have repeatedly attempted to block labor-saving technologies, create legal requirements that slow new construction, and push tax policies that would undermine innovation and entrepreneurship, specifically in the tech sector.

For the affordability faction, which favors big-government solutions and top-down control, unions are an affirmative good, a source of both high-paying working-class jobs and partisan political muscle. For the abundance faction, labor is a longstanding part of the Democratic coalition, an interest group to be criticized occasionally but ideally kept inside the tent. Some abundance-aligned writers have taken a more aggressive line against union-driven economic sclerosis, but few high-profile Democratic politicians have been willing to cross organized labor in significant ways, especially in deep-blue urban districts and states.

The party’s capture by labor interests is particularly visible in debates about the role of robots and automation in the economy. Take Massachusetts, where in 2023 there were more than 134,000 car crashes, an average of more than 367 a day. Many of these are minor accidents, but some are serious, and some—too many—result in fatalities.

In 2022, more than 430 people died from traffic accidents in Massachusetts. Bay State traffic fatalities have dropped somewhat since, but vehicle accidents still kill hundreds of people in the state every year. Many fatal accidents probably would not have happened were it not for a driver under the influence of drugs or alcohol. Most years, roughly a quarter to a third of the state’s auto fatalities involve an alcohol-impaired driver.

Driving has obvious public benefits for both personal transportation and shipping. It is also a risky activity. The danger comes primarily from poor human judgment: impairment, distraction, or inability to think and act quickly in an emergency situation.

Until recently, there was no way to eliminate human judgment from the act of driving. Only human beings, imperfect as we are, could operate a vehicle.

That is no longer true. Waymo, an autonomous vehicle company owned by Google’s parent company, Alphabet, operates self-driving cars that are increasingly capable of navigating streets on their own. The company began limited operations in the San Francisco area in 2021; it now runs fleets of taxis in at least 10 cities, with further expansions planned. Other companies, such as Tesla, are also building self-driving cars, with varying degrees of success.

The technology isn’t perfect, but it’s rapidly advancing. The clearest sign of its success is in the safety data—Waymos are far, far safer on every major safety metric than human-driven vehicles. The more that people substitute robot cars for human-operated cars, the safer our roads will be.

But after Waymo began mapping Boston’s streets in preparation for a service launch in the city, the local Teamsters union helped form a coalition to stop it. Saying they had concerns about autonomous vehicle safety, the Teamsters supported a city ordinance that would subject self-driving cars to expansive bureaucratic oversight. Waymo says the ordinance would effectively prohibit the company from operating in the city, calling it an “unprecedented ban on a technology.” Given that the group the Teamsters joined was named Labor United Against Waymo, it’s reasonable to assume that a de facto ban was, in fact, the goal.

“Driverless cars and trucks pose a serious threat to public safety, our communities, and the livelihoods of the countless dedicated men and women across the Commonwealth who work as professional drivers,” Tom Mari, President of Teamsters Local 25, said in October 2025. Given Waymo’s extensive and well-documented safety track record, it is hard to take the group’s safety concerns seriously. They were worried about preserving jobs. And to preserve those jobs, they were willing to oppose a new technology that is demonstrably safer than human drivers.

They’re not the only ones. In California’s gubernatorial primary, both former state Attorney General Xavier Becerra, widely viewed as a more moderate (for California) party stalwart, and Tom Steyer, a left-wing billionaire backed by the party’s progressive wing, supported union positions opposing automated trucking.

“AI shouldn’t put California truckers out of work to pad Big Tech’s profits,” Steyer posted on X. “As governor, I’ll reverse the DMV’s autonomous trucking rules and keep human drivers on the road.” Similarly, Becerra posted that “when it comes to automation, jobs and safety come first. Trucks still need drivers.”

In March, a top official for the California Federation of Labor Unions, an affiliate of the AFL-CIO, posted gleefully about her expectation that Becerra would support “our position on Autonomous Vehicles” and that she appreciated “the near unanimity of Dem candidates in this issue.” Here was a union leader publicly celebrating that Democrats were practically united in supporting labor’s crusade against new technology. This, she wrote, was “progress.” Considering the promise and potential of autonomous trucking, one might reasonably argue it was the opposite.

Waymo does not yet operate an autonomous long-haul trucking fleet. But already there are demonstrations and pilot programs, like one in Texas, that show promise in making semitrucks fully self-driving. Large trucks are involved in a disproportionate share of auto fatalities, and autonomous versions of those trucks would almost certainly be safer than the human drivers Steyer wants to keep on the road. Yes, autonomous vehicles can make mistakes. But they cannot fall asleep, drive drowsy, become distracted, or operate a vehicle under the influence of drugs or alcohol.

Autonomous trucks wouldn’t just be safer. They would be cheaper and more efficient, and they would help lower the cost of consumer goods, especially groceries.

Even—especially—the safest human drivers need to sleep. But an autonomous truck could operate for 24 hours a day without needing to stop for food or rest, cutting transit times dramatically. Autonomous trucks are also expected to be more fuel efficient, reducing not only the cost but the environmental impact of shipping. They could also help solve staffing problems. The American Trucking Associations claims the industry is short 60,000–80,000 drivers. There are reasons to be wary about taking that number at face value. But it’s clearly true that fewer drivers (human or bot) mean more expensive transportation costs, which can be passed on to consumers. By 2035, self-driving trucks could generate $9 billion in consumer savings annually, under an optimistic scenario, according to a 2026 report conducted by the consultancy Steer and commissioned by the autonomous trucking company Aurora.

Self-driving trucks would also threaten the employment of many unionized truck drivers; a self-driving truck running a 24-hour shift might replace as many as three union jobs. That’s why the Teamsters Union, which represents truckers, wants mandates that require a human driver even in trucks that are nominally driving themselves. Steyer’s opposition to self-driving trucks amounts to a one-way transfer from ordinary consumers to organized labor in the form of higher prices—and a net loss for everyone in an automobile, in terms of road safety.

This pattern appears everywhere: Unions oppose robots that would otherwise deliver broad-based cost and efficiency gains to the general public.

The United Food and Commercial Workers union, which represents grocery checkers, opposes automated self-checkout systems. Those systems help prevent retail theft, and they lower grocery costs; the union’s demand is effectively to make grocery prices higher.

A fall 2024 strike by dockworkers in the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) was nominally about wage disputes but was really about automation. The strike increased costs for retailers and threatened the larger economy, with J.P. Morgan estimating a likely impact of $3.8 billion to $4.5 billion per day. But despite the economic impact, then-President Joe Biden supported the union, reportedly producing research supporting the Longshoremen in negotiations and inviting shipping industry representatives to a meeting so that the White House could make the case for the union’s side.

More than anything else, the union wanted a total ban on automation. “The ILA is steadfastly against any form of automation—full or semi—that replaces jobs or historical work functions,” the union wrote in an unsigned October 2024 statement. They had been offered a 50 percent pay increase, but that wasn’t enough. “We will not accept the loss of work and livelihood for our members due to automation. Our position is clear: the preservation of jobs and historical work functions is non-negotiable.”

Even for a union communication, this was unusually blunt. But the preservation of jobs and historical work functions—which is to say, prohibitions on cost- and labor-saving technology—is a primary goal for many unions. If it had been up to a horse-and-buggy union, Americans would still be traveling by horse and buggy.

Instead of horses and buggies, today’s unions merely insist on expensive Ubers that are burdened by artificial, legally enforced scarcity.

In Seattle, the city’s ride-share union, which represents drivers of Uber and Lyft, pushed for a mandatory minimum wage for ride-share drivers. After the law went into effect, Seattle became the most expensive city in the country to hail an Uber, with the price of some trips increasing by 50 percent or more. As demand for ride-sharing suddenly dropped, unionized drivers ended up spending more time driving without a passenger, which is known as deadheading. In response, the union called for “a pause in onboarding new drivers until a reduction in unnecessary deadheading miles is achieved,” along with “rules to maintain a balanced market where increases to driver supply don’t continue outpacing trip growth.”

The union’s initial minimum wage advocacy hurt its own members. Rather than admit that the wage law backfired, the union chose to back restrictions on new drivers—pulling up the ladder for new workers while making ride-sharing both less affordable and less abundant for everyone.

Closed Shop

Unions often make it hard to operate nearly any kind of business, small or large. Achilles Heel, a well-regarded bar in Brooklyn, closed three days after its employees announced they had formed a union, citing financial problems, according to The New York Times. Similarly, Barboncino, a pizza shop in the borough, closed after its workers voted to unionize, citing “rising costs and diminished sales.”

Unions make it more expensive and more difficult to run small businesses with low margins. They also make it difficult to own and operate large businesses.

In California, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) proposed a one-time wealth tax on billionaires in the state. Union-friendly groups estimate that it would generate about $100 billion in revenue over five years, though some policy experts say this likely dramatically overstates the effect. The tax “has the potential to completely destroy California’s economy,” warned the University of California, Berkeley, economist Enrico Moretti.

Residents will have the opportunity to vote on the tax later this year. If it passes, it will go into effect retroactively for the year 2025. Some billionaires have already exited the state, though not all explicitly cite the tax as the reason. Critics have warned that because the tax would hit paper wealth, such as ownership of a company that has not yet experienced a liquidity event, it could effectively force some founders to sell their companies, all but taking their businesses away from them.

California construction unions, meanwhile, have long used environmental laws—particularly 1970’s California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA)—to slow or stop construction, a practice known as “greenmailing.” The goal of these campaigns isn’t to protect the environment. It’s to force costly delays and legal fees on developers in hopes of pressuring them into hiring union labor. Environmental concerns get deployed as a legally actionable, potentially expensive pretext for more nakedly self-interested union demands.

This ruse was taken nearly to the point of self-parody in May, when a union representing state attorneys and administrative law judges threatened a CEQA suit in response to a return-to-office demand. Perhaps the union actually cared about the environmental impact of their commutes; more likely, they just didn’t want to go back to working at the office.

Fighting unions in drawn-out court proceedings is costly. But so is acceding to their demands. Unionized projects are more expensive to build; a 2021 RAND study found that project labor agreements, which specify (typically pro-union) hiring rules, add about 15 percent to the cost of affordable housing projects. The added expense is by design: Unions demand higher wages for the same work, which means union demands make affordable housing less affordable.

Blue State Blues

California, New York, and Massachusetts are longtime bastions of Democratic Party governance, especially in their major metro areas. They are also among the most expensive places to live in the United States, with significantly higher housing, transportation, and energy costs than red states in the Sun Belt. These are the states that need abundance, or even just something like real affordability, the most.

Yet prominent Democratic politicians in those states have been borderline obsequious to unions. In New York City, Mamdani is arguably the most pro-union New York mayor in decades, the sort of person who specifically talks about fighting inequality with “union density,” which, as New Labor Forum notes, is a term more typically associated with union organizers. In 2024, Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey gave a speech at the Massachusetts Building Trades Unions’ annual convention, where she called herself “the proud daughter of union members” and announced the creation of a Labor Advisory Council, essentially giving unions a direct voice in state governance. A press release from her office noted that it’s the state’s first labor council in more than 50 years. In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 1228, which increased the minimum wage to $20 an hour for fast-food chains with more than 60 locations. The bill was heavily backed by unions, and Newsom held the signing ceremony at the Los Angeles offices of SEIU Local 721.

Some prominent abundance advocates have argued that Democrats need to break with unions on some issues. The writer Matt Yglesias has argued that unions would in some cases actually benefit from abundance, and thus union enthusiasts should support an abundance agenda. The Argument, a publication that often takes abundance-aligned positions, has chided blue-state politicians and activists for rejecting or slow-walking robot taxis; it also recently published an extensive piece by Nicholas Bagley and Robert Gordon on how public sector unions prioritize jobs above all else, rejecting merit and performance reviews and dragging down public services in the process. The core problem, they wrote, “is that public sector unions generally fight to minimize differences among employees, including both standouts at the top and weak links at the bottom.” Their recommendation is in the title: Democrats should fire bad teachers and bad cops.

The same dynamic often plays out with private sector unions. While it’s encouraging to have writers and intellectuals making the case for better policy, in practice, prominent Democratic politicians rarely stand up to union demands.

The party’s most recent president, Biden, declared himself “the most pro-union president” in history. At one point he proposed what amounted to a $400 billion SEIU slush fund as part of an infrastructure bill. The proposal, which did not pass, would have funded home health workers; in order for states to get the money, they would have had to allow the federal government to dictate wages and let home health workers unionize.

Some moderate Democrats, such as Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger, have broken with unions on key issues, such as collective bargaining laws. But most rising Democratic stars, especially those hailing from deep blue territories, appear deferential.

Newsom looks to be gearing up for a presidential run. Mamdani is the great young hope for the Democratic Party’s progressives and socialists. Both have pushed policies intended to streamline the construction of new housing. These are concessions to the abundance crowd. At the margins, they might even have a positive impact on the housing market.

Yet it’s hard to imagine a Democratic Party that is willing to push back meaningfully against union demands—demands that almost always value union jobs over technologies that save time, money, and lives. Unions aren’t interested in affordability, and the only abundance they want is in the form of union jobs for a select few. Until Democrats learn this, they won’t achieve either goal.

The post Labor Unions Hate Robots—and It's Stopping Democrats From Delivering on Affordability appeared first on Reason.com.

Does the U.S. government have enough ammunition for all its wars and potential wars? Ask two different Pentagon officials and get two different answers.

In May 2026, acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao told Congress that “we’re doing a pause” on sales to Taiwan “in order to make sure we have the munitions we need” for the Iran war. A few days later, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth backpedaled. “Hung Cao is fantastic, but I would not couple the two in any way at all,” he told reporters. “And I feel good about not only where we are, but where we are in future production rates as well.” It was the latest in a series of statements from Hegseth and other Trump administration officials complaining that the media were exaggerating munitions shortages.

The lady doth protest too much. Warning lights have been blinking for years about the United States’ ability to prepare for future conflicts while also supporting proxy wars in Europe and the Middle East. The direct war with Iran burned through U.S. magazines at an even faster pace.

“The U.S. has stockpile requirements that reflect contingency plan requirements. Of course, it accepts some risk when it needs to,” explains Josh Paul, previously the State Department official in charge of weapons sales. In other words, the question of how much ammunition is enough is a question of acceptable danger.

The current shortages are especially dire when it comes to air defense ammunition. That introduces a kind of danger that the U.S. and its partners simply aren’t used to. After generations of U.S. aerial dominance, the economics of war are exposing American troops—and First World societies—to being bombed from above.

The main round of U.S.-Iranian fighting ended in April 2026 with 14 Americans dead and 409 wounded. There are signs that the situation would have gotten dramatically worse if it had continued. Just before the ceasefire, Iran was achieving an increasing hit rate with smaller barrages because the U.S. and its partners had used up so much of their air defense ammunition. Israel was rationing its high-end missile interceptors, whose numbers had fallen to “double digits,” a U.S. source told Drop Site.

Future U.S. wars may look “more like Ukraine,” with heavy bombing on both sides, says Justin Logan, director of defense and foreign policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. “The Americans like to insulate ourselves and our friends from adversaries’ ability to retaliate, but that’s extremely costly.”

Shortages are already being felt in Ukraine itself. After a June 2026 air raid by Russia killed 22 people, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy pleaded with European allies to speed up deliveries of the American-made Patriot air defense system, adding that the issue was “no longer about financing.” There just wasn’t enough inventory to go around. The Ukrainian government proposed “borrowing” Patriot ammunition from Germany, emptying German warehouses in exchange for an IOU.

Meanwhile, Taiwan is waiting for the Trump administration to approve a $14 billion arms sale that Congress has already signed off on. Part of the holdup seems to be political; President Donald Trump told Fox News the delay was “a very good negotiating chip for us” against China and a way to get both sides to “cool down.” But shortages are another part of the calculation, as Cao admitted. Reuters reports that the deal, whose contents have not been publicly reported, “largely consists” of Patriot ammunition and other air defense weapons.

“Everybody wants to adopt the American way of war, but nobody can afford it, including the Americans,” Logan says. “The ability to sustain political support drops like a lead balloon when we can’t intercept retaliation.”

How Drones and Cheap Missiles Ended America’s Free Pass From Enemy Fire

For most of the last century, the United States has gotten used to fighting one-sided air wars. Before the recent Middle Eastern conflicts, U.S. troops were last killed by hostile aircraft during the Korean War in 1953. In recent years, the feeling grew that the U.S. military could simply bomb other countries with no real cost. The public took little notice as the Obama, Biden, and Trump administrations waged “light footprint” air campaigns around the world.

“It works for a time, when you have this enormous asymmetry, but adversaries of all kinds learn to adapt,” says Kelly Grieco, a fellow at the Stimson Center. “There were warning signs long before this war.”

One important change was the drone revolution. Advances in electronics allowed small countries to get in on the game by the dawn of the 21st century. Israel became a leader in drone technology, which Turkey purchased and Iran stole. Chinese hobby drones hit the civilian market in the early 2010s, making this type of warfare even cheaper. The Islamic State group obtained a small “air force” by strapping grenades to photography drones.

When the U.S. fought the Islamic State in 2014’s Battle of Mosul, a U.S. Army colonel told Grieco that it was the first time that he “ever had to look to the sky and be concerned about the enemy.”

Meanwhile, Iran took lessons from Iraq, which had invaded Iran in 1980 and in turn suffered a U.S. invasion in 2003. The Iranian government concluded that it couldn’t build a competitive air force—but it could produce overwhelming numbers of ground-based missiles domestically.

The final turning point for the old model of war may have come during a conflict most Americans haven’t heard of: the 2020 war between Azerbaijan and Armenia. Azerbaijani forces debuted the use of Israeli “kamikaze drones,” which fly themselves into a target and explode, alongside conventional Turkish drones. Two years later, when Russia invaded Ukraine, the Ukrainian army invested in those same Turkish drones, while the Russian military imported Iranian experts and designs to mass-produce the Shahed 136 kamikaze drone.

As the war in Ukraine dragged on, each side adopted the Islamic State tactic of using hobby drones to drop grenades on individual soldiers. When radio jamming made drone attacks harder, the armies then equipped their drones with spools of fiber-optic cable. Battlefields have become littered with miles of discarded wires. Beyond the front lines, Russia and Ukraine have been using long-range drones to bomb each other’s infrastructure and drone fighters to shoot down (or stab down) those drone bombers.

The United States and its Middle East partners were used to a higher level of protection than Russia or Ukraine found possible to achieve. Israel’s Iron Dome, an air defense system for short-range rockets and artillery, had a reported 90 percent interception rate in small wars from 2011 to 2023. The oil-rich Arab monarchies were even more casualty-averse. When Yemeni rebels drone-bombed Saudi Arabia in 2019 and the United Arab Emirates in 2022, both air raids caused a national crisis.

This year’s war with Iran unleashed the first sustained air attack those countries faced from someone more sophisticated than ragtag guerrillas. They tried to maintain the previous level of insulation at a massive cost. Ukrainian military advisers told the The Times of London they were “astonished” to see Arab militaries firing off eight Patriot interceptors to shoot down a single Iranian drone. Israel used up 80 percent of its entire stockpile of high-end Arrow interceptors in 16 days, according to a study by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in Britain. On top of that, the U.S. military fired more interceptors in Israel’s defense than the Israeli army itself did, according to The Washington Post.

The Israeli and U.S. militaries also burned through their offensive weapons, according to RUSI. Hegseth warned Japan that the U.S. no longer had enough Tomahawk cruise missiles to spare, the Financial Times reported. When it runs low on these “standoff munitions,” which allow U.S. aircraft to fire from a distance, the U.S. has “to fight closer in, and when you fight closer in, there’s greater risk,” Grieco says.

Part of the U.S. problem with Iran seems to have been the assumption of a quick victory. Trump said both publicly and privately that he expected Iran to fold within days. At the beginning of the war, the U.S. military touted its ability to proactively suppress Iranian missile fire in the immediate term by blowing up launcher trucks or caving in underground base entrances. But the launchers were simple to replace—they’re just normal trucks with some extra hydraulics, after all—and caved-in base entrances could be dug out.

The worst-case near-future scenario for the U.S. military, a war with China in the Pacific, would combine all of these issues with several new ones. U.S. allies Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan are all high-tech economies within range of Chinese and North Korean missiles. China has much more formidable air defenses than Iran, making missile suppression almost impossible. And because Taiwan is an island that is easy to isolate, all of its defense weapons would have to be imported before a crisis starts.

In January 2023, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) ran a war game simulating a Pacific war caused by a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. The simulation found that the U.S. military would run out of Long Range Anti-Ship Missiles (LRASM) within days and Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missiles (JASSMs) within two to three weeks. The center concluded that the U.S. could defeat an invasion of Taiwan, but at a cost of hundreds of aircraft—and more human casualties in a month than Americans had suffered over the past generation of wars combined.

Why the Pentagon Can’t Just Build Its Way Out of the Ammo Crisis

After three years of European and Middle Eastern fighting, the munitions situation is now significantly worse. The U.S. military used up about 25 percent of its JASSMs in the Iran war, according to the RUSI study. A separate CSIS study from May 2026 found that rebuilding those missiles could take until mid-2027; it would take another two years to bring various air defense magazines back to prewar levels, and it would be the 2030s before Washington could replace all the Tomahawk cruise missiles used in the war.

The Pentagon wants to pour gargantuan amounts of money into doing so. The military budget request for fiscal year 2027, a historic $1.5 trillion, includes $52 billion for high-priority munitions—nearly a fivefold increase over the previous year—and another $100 billion to build up the industrial base. On top of the annual military budget, the Trump administration also planned to ask Congress for $200 billion for supplemental Iran war funding, though the administration later shrunk that request and folded much of it into the annual military budget, The Washington Post reports.

A closer look at the budget request shows how unbalanced the math of air defense is. The latest model of Patriot interceptor, the PAC-3, will cost approximately $4 million per unit. (Remember, Arab armies were firing up to eight of them against a single drone.) While the cost of the Shahed 136 is not public knowledge, an Iranian source told the American economics magazine Phenomenal World that each drone costs 6 billion rials, which came out to $4,000 on the most up-to-date exchange rate.

Even more important than the dollar price are the resources and time each weapon takes. Adjusting for the local cost of parts and labor, Phenomenal World calculated that the real equivalent price of a Shahed 136 would be around $7,000 per drone, still much lower than the interceptor used to shoot it down. While a single Shahed factory in Russia can make 5,500 drones per month, the total production of PAC-3s is currently less than 1,000 per year. In the two-year journey of a PAC-3 from order to delivery, new workers must be trained in specialized skills and vetted for security clearances; manufacturer Lockheed Martin has to source parts from more than 400 companies.

The PAC-3 is often competing with other weapons for the same components—and these components compete with other industries and other countries for raw materials. In April 2025, the Chinese government imposed strict export controls on rare earth minerals and permanent magnets, sending the Pentagon on a frantic and expensive quest to identify new sources, according to the CSIS.

Investments can increase production. The United States and its allies have been fairly successful at pumping out more 155mm artillery shells, one of the chief concerns two years ago. But the process of expanding production itself takes years. Lockheed Martin is planning to increase its annual production of the PAC-3s to around 2,000 by fiscal year 2030.

The long time for these investments to pay off is a structural barrier. “The challenge has always been the private sector’s willingness to reinvest profits in production,” says Paul, the former State Department official. “For instance, if you’re a publicly traded company, would you rather have a full 10-year book, or spend a chunk of your own capital to build a new production facility, reducing your book to 5 years, for a system that may be outdated in 10 years?” 

Despite these problems, the United States is still the world’s largest supplier of arms. Its share of the global market has actually grown since 2016, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute in Sweden. When journalists ask her whether the United States has sufficient munitions, Grieco always responds, “Sufficient munitions to do what? Because no country other than maybe China has the kind of depth that we do in munitions.”

Ultimately, the issue with munitions is less a shortage of supply and more an excess of demand. The United States wants to be involved in conflicts around the world while retaining the ability to start new ones, such as the Iran war. At the same time, societies like ours “are built on assuming away the prospect of punishment” in war, Logan says.

That’s not sustainable anymore, thanks to advances in missile and drone technology. “Warfare is about larger numbers of smaller, cheaper, plentiful things that strongly favor the defense,” Grieco explains. Ironically, the abundance of offensive weapons means that the defender can punish the attacker more easily.

Rather than trying to fight this trend, the United States can stop putting itself in the position of an attacker. Washington’s chief stated foreign policy goals outside the Middle East are repelling an invasion of Ukraine and deterring an invasion of Taiwan. If the U.S. can resist the temptation to launch more wars, then the technological changes “ought to be good news,” Grieco argues. “We should be leveraging this defensive potential.”

The post America Spent a Fortune Shooting Down Cheap Drones. Now the Missile Stores Are Bare. appeared first on Reason.com.

Imagine you start an asteroid mining company. It’s tough at first. You know that profits are uncertain and, if they do ever materialize, it will be in five years at the earliest, maybe even ten. It takes a long time to find investors willing to trust you because several similar ventures with almost identical business models have already gone bust and the investment horizon is far too long for many. Nevertheless, you persevere, and you manage to convince a few investors.

You hire astronomers to identify asteroids with valuable metals such as platinum. You send unmanned probes to several near-Earth asteroids to collect samples. The first few turn out to be of little value. The costs are too high and outweigh any potential profits.

Then comes the breakthrough: You find a suitable asteroid, and you succeed in bringing platinum group metals all the way back to Earth. But then a group of countries files a lawsuit against you. They are all signatories to the so-called Moon Agreement of 1979, formally known as the “Agreement Governing the Activities of States in the Moon and other Celestial Bodies,” which came into effect in 1984. The treaty applies not only to the moon, but to all celestial bodies, including asteroids.

Some of these countries are now demanding that you hand over a significant share of your profits to people who have never had anything to do with asteroid mining—many of whom couldn’t even say exactly what an asteroid is, let alone launch rockets into orbit. They invoke Article IV, Paragraph 1, and Article XI, Paragraphs 1 and 3, of the Moon Agreement, which state: “The exploration and use of the Moon shall be the province of all mankind and shall be carried out for the benefit and in the interest of all countries, irrespective of their degree of economic and scientific development. Due regard shall be paid to the interests of present and future generations as well as to the need to promote higher standards of living and conditions of economic and social progress and development in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations.” So much for Article IV. 

Article XI states: “The Moon and its natural resources are the common heritage of mankind. Neither the surface nor the subsurface of the Moon, nor any part thereof or natural resources in place, shall become property of any State, international intergovernmental or non-governmental organization, national organization or non-governmental entity or of any natural person.”

The Moon Agreement, since signed by 22 countries and ratified by 18, was developed to work in the same way as seabed law, and a delegate from Sri Lanka explained in simple terms what the intention was: “If you touch the nodules [valuable mineral deposits on the seabed] at the bottom of the sea, you touch my property. If you take them away, you take away my property.” 

The plaintiffs now demand their “rightful share” of your profits, arguing that the platinum belongs not to you, but to all of humanity—and especially to developing countries, many of which are not yet engaged in space exploration. Should the plaintiffs win, neither you nor any other company would ever be able to attract investors again. Asteroid mining would be dead and buried after this very first attempt.

Mars Without Property Rights

Suffice it to say: Investors can remain confident, as a lawsuit based on a treaty signed by only a small number of countries is unlikely to succeed. But consider a second thought experiment: 

It is the year 2075. The first settlements on Mars have been successfully established, housing several thousand people and many more robots. The settlers are busy building underground houses and domed communities, a hospital, and other facilities. But there is a problem: Unlike on Earth, there is no private property ownership on Mars. The settlers have repeatedly attempted to establish private property rights and even create a digital land registry, but legal experts keep putting a stop to their efforts. This time, the problem is not the 1984 Moon Agreement, but the 1967 Outer Space Treaty (OST), Article II of which states: “Outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.”

And Article I of the treaty states that the use of outer space “shall be carried out for the benefit and in the interest of all countries, irrespective of their degree of economic or scientific development, and shall be the province of all mankind.”

In this case, the argument that the Moon Agreement has limited signatories cannot be made, as 117 countries are parties to the Outer Space Treaty—including all major spacefaring nations, such as the United States, China, and Russia—and another 22 are signatories. 

The plaintiffs assert that Article II of the Treaty prohibits not only the national appropriation of celestial bodies, but also any form of private property ownership. They further contend that Article I should be interpreted as mandating the equitable sharing of proceeds from resource extraction among all nations—an interpretation that has sometimes been put forward in the real world.

For now, let us assume their interpretation is correct. There are no property rights: Nations cannot own land (which they could potentially lease), nor can private entities, since any form of appropriation by states or private individuals is prohibited. Could such a society exist, let alone be economically successful? Of course not. 

Most successful countries permit the private ownership of land. Where this right does not exist, it is at least possible to buy usage rights from the state for 50–99 years, which can also be resold—as in Vietnam and China, for example, or (regarding the 99 years) in Singapore. North Korea is the only country where even that is not possible. Property ownership on Mars would therefore be most comparable to that in North Korea, a country plagued by widespread poverty where people go hungry after every poor harvest. Do you believe a settlement on Mars could be successful if its economic model mirrored that of North Korea

The Legal Debate Over Private Ownership in Space

The decisive factor in determining whether private property rights apply is Article II of the OST. Legal scholars have put forward differing viewpoints over its interpretation. The primary area of contention revolves around the “prohibition of appropriation” and whether this applies only to the states expressly mentioned in the treaty or also to private individuals and companies not mentioned in Article II.

In Outer Space: Problems of Law and Policy, Glenn H. Reynolds and Robert P. Merges contend that: “Being prevented from claiming sovereignty and exclusive property rights located in the space environment for themselves, it will be argued that States are also prohibited from granting quasi-sovereign and exclusive property rights over such areas and resources to those natural and juridical persons which are subject to national jurisdiction and which are created through international agreements.”

Those who argue that appropriation by private individuals is prohibited, also assert that private ownership would infringe upon the freedoms of access, exploration, and use guaranteed to all states in Article I. If private property rights existed, argues space law expert Marcus Schladebach, this would impinge upon the freedoms granted to all states, and the legal status of outer space as a “global commons” beyond territorial sovereignty would be jeopardized. If national appropriation is prohibited, Schladebach maintains, then private appropriation must be prohibited all the more. 

In contrast, other legal scholars argue the exact opposite: National sovereignty stops where outer space begins, which means that national appropriation of the moon, other planets, and asteroids is forbidden—but not the private ownership of celestial bodies. This interpretation rests on the legal doctrine expressio unius est exclusio alterius: the explicit mention of one thing implies the exclusion of others. If, for example, a statute or treaty expressly mentions one or more things of a class, it is only reasonable to conclude that others of the same class remain unrestricted by that statute or treaty. This principle serves to interpret legal norms and supports the assumption that things not mentioned were excluded by deliberate choice, not inadvertence.

Other legal scholars, however, argue that while it is not forbidden for private individuals or companies to claim property, it is a crime for a nation to recognize such a claim publicly. This interpretation, however, confuses the terms “recognize” and “confer,” as the legal scholars Alan Wasser and Douglas Jobes explain: “‘To recognize’ means to ‘acknowledge the existence, validity, or legality of’ or ‘accepts, acquiesces to, decides not to contest.’ In contrast, ‘to confer’ means to ‘grant (a title, degree, benefit, or right).'”

They go on: “If a nation claims the right to confer, give, or grant title to lunar land, it could be violating the ban on national appropriation. But if a settlement is established and the settlers claim private ownership of land around their settlement, and a dozen of Earth’s nations recognize the settlers’ claim, it is not reasonable to say that all dozen nations are trying to appropriate the land and thus are violating the Outer Space Treaty.”

Still others argue based on various provisions of the Outer Space Treaty, which, for example, hold states liable if a rocket launched by a private company from their territory crashes in another country. Furthermore, they claim, states are obligated to authorize and supervise the activities of private companies located within their territories. From this, they conclude that, even if not explicitly stated, the Outer Space Treaty prohibits private appropriation. 

Wasser and Jobes rightly object to this: “But the treaty clearly does not contain any language explicitly saying that states may not authorize their citizens to do anything that they themselves cannot do, contrary to what some authors appear to assume. The treaty does not say that what is prohibited to states is therefore prohibited to private entities, nor that what is prohibited to the regulator is therefore always prohibited to the regulated. A baseball coach gives ‘authorization and continuing supervision’ to his players. Does the fact that the coach is not allowed to run onto the field to catch a fly ball mean the players he supervises cannot either?”

The wording of Article I of the Outer Space Treaty states that outer space is “the province of all mankind” and that celestial bodies should be “free for exploration and use by all States without discrimination of any kind on basis of equality” and “there shall be free access to all areas of celestial bodies.” Critics argue that this turns space into a public good whose owner is everybody and nobody. 

The only relatively undisputed point is that the OST is ambiguous in several areas, particularly concerning private property ownership and the role of private companies. This ambiguity stems from the priorities of the United States and the Soviet Union at the time of the OST’s drafting. Their primary focus was on preventing an arms race in space and the deployment of weapons of mass destruction there. The concept of private space companies, including business models that would allow private companies to engage in asteroid mining, was a distant prospect in 1967. Consequently, the issue of private ownership was secondary for both nations. However, the Soviet Union would have preferred to prohibit private companies in space during the treaty negotiations, a proposal the United States rejected. So, they did what national governments sometimes do in joint international declarations or treaties: The language was kept vague and omitted contentious issues, which is what leads to the difficulties interpreting it today.

How Nations Are Writing Their Own Rules

Many years later, some countries felt the need to clarify the issues that had remained ambiguous at the time. We have seen that—unlike Article II of the Outer Space Treaty—Article 11, paragraph 3 of the Moon Agreement explicitly prohibits private ownership in outer space. 

The Moon Agreement, which not only explicitly prohibits private property but, according to some interpretations, even demands an egalitarian distribution of the profits generated by private users, breathes the spirit of socialism. “At its heart,” says space analyst and consultant Rand Simberg, “the Moon Treaty was redistributionist in nature, taking from those who were willing to take risk and invest capital in developing new resources and giving to those who did not.”

Most countries refused to sign it, albeit for different reasons. This raises the question: If the Moon Agreement merely precisely regulated exactly what the Outer Space Treaty intended—that is, if the Moon Agreement simply served as a concretization of the Outer Space Treaty—then why did 121 of the 139 states that signed the Outer Space Treaty refuse to sign the Moon Agreement? Oddly enough, this question is rarely asked.

What can be done when a treaty, in this case the OST, is open to so many different interpretations? First, it could be renegotiated. For example, in 1999, Ezra Reinstein argued: “What is needed is an amendment to the Outer Space Treaty, one that both clarifies and expands property rights in space.” First, Reinstein insists, it must be clarified in the amendment that the formulation, “‘for the benefit…of all countries’ is a moral exhortation and not a loophole through which the United Nations can dispossess a private party of his site.” The fact that Reinstein considered these clarifications important enough to include in an amendment once again underscores the vagueness and legal uncertainty of the Outer Space Treaty. 

However, this is just one potential avenue and probably not a likely one. In recent years, the U.S. has adopted a different strategy, one that is certainly a step in the right direction: If a treaty is subject to varied interpretations by different countries, it increasingly becomes the responsibility of national legislators to interpret the treaty. And this is what has happened in recent years, especially in the United States, where Sen. Ted Cruz (R–Texas) and then-Sen. Marco Rubio (R–Fla.) championed a Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2015. This gave all U.S. citizens and companies the right “to possess, own, transport, use, and sell [any] asteroid resource or space resource obtained in accordance with applicable law, including the international obligations of the United States.”

In April 2020, President Donald Trump went a step further than Obama by signing an “Executive Order on Encouraging International Support for the Recovery and Use of Space Resources,” explicitly rejecting the notion of space as a “global commons.” The Moon Agreement, which the U.S. had never signed anyway, was also explicitly dismissed.

This executive order was followed just one month later by NASA announcing the Artemis Accords, officially called “Principles for Cooperation in the Civil Exploration and Use of the Moon, Mars, Comets and Asteroids for Peaceful Purposes.” One key element of the Accords is the introduction of what are referred to as “safety zones”—geographically defined areas around a station or activity on the moon or another celestial body. These zones are not intended to contradict territorial appropriation, but rather to serve the practical implementation of the principle of peaceful use and to prevent potential conflicts arising from activities that are too close to one another. Section 10 of the Accords explicitly states: “The Signatories affirm that the extraction of space resources does not inherently constitute national appropriation under Article II of the Outer Space Treaty, and that contracts and other legal instruments relating to space resources should be consistent with that Treaty.”

The Accords were initially signed by eight nations: the United States, Australia, Canada, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, the United Arab Emirates, and the United Kingdom. Since then, the number of signatories has expanded to 67. Russia and China, however, have rejected the accords and criticized their interpretation of the Outer Space Treaty. China, in particular, is concerned that the United States may be using the Artemis Accords to assert sovereignty over lunar resources.

While the Artemis Accords were a step forward, the language suggesting that space mining does “not inherently” violate Article II—which prohibits “national appropriation”—has again created ambiguity, as space law scholars Michael Byers and Aaron Boley point out in their book Who Owns Outer Space?: “Is Space mining sometimes ‘national appropriation’ and sometimes not? Was Space mining originally not ‘national appropriation,’ but capable of becoming understood as ‘national appropriation’ as understandings and interests change? Can a term such as ‘national appropriation,’ which has no ‘ordinary meaning’ because it is not used outside the Outer Space Treaty, ‘inherently’ mean anything?”

Designing a Space Economy That Actually Works 

What should the goal be? Without full private ownership, there will be no colonization of Mars, and the economic exploitation of asteroids and the moon will also be difficult. And who should own land on Mars or the moon first? Various people, including the American Dennis Hope, have made a business out of selling land on the moon without being able to clearly explain why they consider themselves entitled to do so. Space law expert Virgiliu Pop has written an entire book with the delightfully evocative title Unreal Estate: The Men Who Sold the Moon, in which he establishes that from the 1890s to the present day, numerous individuals have claimed ownership of the moon or other celestial bodies—and found plenty of buyers for their properties. It should be clear, he writes, “that claims to extraterrestrial real estate unsubstantiated by physical acts of possession are not valid means of acquiring ownership….A mere claim is not tantamount with ownership—or, in plain language, claiming does not mean owning.”

But apparently, the desire to claim ownership of property in space is so strong for some that it overrides their reason. At the same time, it’s also good news to see so much interest in plots on the moon. Six million customers are said to have bought from Hope. These transactions offer hope that there will be sufficient interest when plots of land do actually become available on the moon or Mars, although they will be much more expensive than Hope’s offerings. 

So, who should have the right to acquire property in space? My answer: those who have the financial means to get there, develop, and use the land. For instance, if SpaceX succeeds in reaching Mars and starts to build permanent settlements on the red planet, then the ownership of land should go to SpaceX first. Not of the entire planet, of course, but of a practicable area, for example the size of Singapore. The surface area of Mars is 200,000 times that of Singapore, so SpaceX would initially only own 0.0005 percent of Mars. That would be enough to develop multiple settlements, but not so many that others would no longer have a chance.

SpaceX could fund its flight and development costs by listing the land on Mars in a real estate investment trust (REIT). The price would then be determined by the market. Most people would buy shares not to live there themselves, but in the hope of value appreciation. As an incentive for people to settle on and develop Mars, colonists could be offered stocks at a preferential price as a “golden hello” once they reach Mars and spend at least five years there.

When the Chinese reach Mars, they may assert their claim to plots of land on the planet according to the idea outlined above, and this would probably remain the property of the Chinese state. But it is likely that they would adopt the customary practice in China of selling hereditary building rights for a period of 50–70 years. 

However, we would need to tread carefully: If the Chinese were the first to reach Mars, it is possible they would declare the entire planet as belonging to China. This would constitute a clear violation of Article II of the Outer Space Treaty, but according to Article XVI, the treaty can be terminated with one year’s notice. The potential response from the United States in such a scenario raises concerns—would it lead to war? Or sanctions? Therefore, it would be prudent to negotiate a new space treaty before it is clear who wins the new space race. Moreover, competition for premium real estate on Mars, such as in areas with anticipated water sources or suitable lava caves for settlement, would likely ensue. It could be similar on the moon.

As far as asteroids are concerned, at least in the case of smaller celestial bodies, ownership could be granted to those capable of mining and extracting resources such as water and platinum. The best option would probably be to list the entire asteroid on the stock exchange as a REIT, which would fund mining operations and enable shareholders to receive dividends from the extraction of raw materials. Even before a single dollar was earned, or a single penny in dividends could be paid out, this would allow a market for trading in such stocks to develop. 

While this is all just a thought experiment, it illustrates the direction things would need to go in. Whether these ideas are realistic or if different concepts will prevail is something no one can know today.

Why the Case for Space Socialism Doesn’t Work

One thing, however, is absolutely clear: As long as there is no legal certainty for investors, they will not invest. To return to the starting point: Who will invest in asteroid mining if, as some envision, they are expected to share the profits with others who have taken no risk themselves but simply want to profit as free riders?

The best-selling authors Kelly and Zach Weinersmith cite the Moon Agreement as a model in their book A City on Mars: “The Moon Agreement would have set up the solar system as a particularly communal form of res communis, known in international law as ‘common heritage of mankind’ or just ‘CHM’…a commons collectively owned by all of humanity. If the Moon were under a CHM framework and you wanted to use Moon water, you would have to compensate all of humanity by some means.” 

They envision something like a large international planning authority to regulate how the proceeds are distributed: “An international regime to oversee exploitation…a big entity established by states that were parties to the Moon Agreement looking over things, and in particular making sure developing nations got a fair cut.” This international regime would regulate both “where people are allowed to set up shop and what they’re allowed to do with the local resources once they get there. It wouldn’t be dynamic, it wouldn’t be like a science fiction novel, and frankly it would be very slow and bureaucratic and boring.” In this vision, there would be no room for private companies, no room for the formation of fair prices in the market, no room for entrepreneurial ingenuity. It is space socialism, doomed from the start. 

On Earth, only capitalism has worked, but for a few decades, socialist systems without private property were also able to survive, albeit at the cost of widespread poverty, authoritarian rule, and famine. In space, where the challenges are immensely greater and living conditions infinitely harsher, socialism would be doomed from the outset. 

The question of whether establishing private property rights on celestial bodies will be possible, and whether Martians will opt for a capitalist or socialist system, is essentially the same as asking whether colonization is possible at all. Even if Martian settlers were initially prohibited from establishing property ownership and introducing a capitalist system, they would inevitably have to do so sooner rather than later anyway, because they simply couldn’t exist on the red planet otherwise. I’m sure the Martian settlers won’t care all that much about a space treaty signed over 100 years ago and would establish private property rights. And how would Earth’s governments respond? Would they wage war against the Martian settlers, or kill them with sanctions?

This article is adapted from New Space Capitalism: The Entrepreneurial Path to the Stars by permission of Skyhorse.

The post Why You Can't Settle Mars or Colonize the Moon Without Real Property Rights appeared first on Reason.com.

Public backlash to data centers is growing. About 70 percent of Americans would not want a new data center built near their homes, according to a new poll from Heatmap News. A majority, 55 percent, said they would “strongly oppose” it.

The same poll asked respondents why they thought electricity prices were rising, and 53 percent—up from 28 percent last August—blamed “the construction of new data centers.” Fear over data centers’ energy use, and to a lesser extent water use, is driving a broad backlash to their buildout.

While it’s simply untrue that any big data center anywhere is consuming a dangerous amount of local drinking water (or that the total sum of AI infrastructure is consuming much at all), there is some legitimate debate as to whether these facilities are driving up utility bills. In a recent review of state-level data on electricity prices, the Institute for Energy Research found “a slightly positive but still statistically insignificant relationship between data centers and fast price increases.” Often, new data centers are built at the same time as new power plants—so prices for nearby consumers can even fall. But in some cases, prices have gone up: PJM Interconnection, the country’s largest grid operator, has put some of the blame for a 76 percent price hike in the first quarter of 2026 on “issues associated with data center load.”

Whether the phenomenon is more widespread remains murky. Regardless, lawmakers across the country have seized on the public’s fears and are proposing sweeping new restrictions on these facilities.

At the federal level, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) has sponsored a bill imposing a total “moratorium” on data center construction nationwide. Last week, New York lawmakers passed their own year-long moratorium. Other states are considering other ways to tighten restrictions—North Carolina, for example, which is advancing a bill that would impose new regulations and reviews on data center construction.

While elected officials say these measures are necessary to stop rising electricity costs, they’re likely to result in less overall economic activity and fewer jobs. The costs associated with new data centers—which can bring thousands of jobs and millions of dollars in revenue to nearby communities—could be better kept under control simply by making it easier for power companies to meet demand.

That’s the approach that lawmakers in Ohio and New Hampshire have taken. Each state has implemented a policy framework called “consumer-regulated energy” (CRE) to allow the owners of data centers (and other major industrial facilities) to buy their power from third-party providers instead of the centralized grid.

Not only does that keep any given facility’s energy needs isolated from the rest of the grid—which, according to a Cato Institute report, means that big data centers can be built and powered at “zero cost to taxpayers and ratepayers”—it also speeds up their construction tremendously. When data centers can source their power from a third party, they bypass much of the decade’s worth of infrastructure buildout that’s necessary to connect to the grid.

A CRE-adjacent framework could soon be implemented nationwide. Earlier this year, Sen. Tom Cotton (R–Ark.) introduced the DATA Act, which would exempt off-grid data centers from federal regulations, making the entire process faster and cheaper.

If data center construction is increasing electricity bills, the best solution isn’t a knee-jerk ban on the industry. It’s common-sense reforms that make it possible for everyone, and every data center, to get the power they need.

The post The Best Way To Keep Data Centers From Driving Up Electricity Costs appeared first on Reason.com.

Robby Soave and Christian Britschgi discuss the brewing Texas showdown between Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico. Then, they break down Rep. Nancy Mace’s (R–S.C.) proposal to give boomers a property tax break and Pope Leo XIV’s latest encyclical on artificial intelligence. Finally, they wrap up with some lighter debates over The Legend of Zelda, Nicolas Cage movies, retro-futurism, Jill Biden’s latest remarks, and whether President Donald Trump’s political influence will ever fade.

0:00—Heretics and hypocrites in Texas

14:30—Talarico takes back his former wokeness

19:10—If you can’t take it, don’t dish it

32:25—Coal mines are cool?

34:00—Mace’s boomer luxury communism

39:20—The pope’s views on AI

47:40—Why does anyone play video games?

58:59—Nicolas Cage is a good actor

1:05:57—Retro-futurism

1:10:26—Jill Biden’s latest remarks

1:18:36—Will Trump’s influence ever fade?

The post James Talarico vs. Ken Paxton, the Pope on AI, and Caves appeared first on Reason.com.

Stewart Brand has spent decades shaping how we think about technology, the environment, and the future. He first came to prominence in the 1960s as co-creator of the Whole Earth Catalog, the counterculture bible that helped inspire personal computing, the hacker ethic, and the modern environmentalist movement. Since then, he’s launched the Long Now Foundation, championed nuclear power and de-extinction, and pushed us to think in 10,000-year time spans.

In his new book, Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One, Brand argues that the real work of civilization isn’t flashy invention but the long, patient care of complex systems. In March, he spoke with Nick Gillespie about what that means—and whether his vision of planetary stewardship conflicts with libertarian values of individualism, creative destruction, and decentralized power.

Reason: Your new book argues that maintenance is the hidden foundation of everything. What do we miss when we focus on innovation, creative destruction, and disruption and forget about checking that everything is tied down the right way on a daily basis?

Brand: I don’t think they’re opposed. A lot of innovation comes out of maintenance. People who figure out how to improve a thing are often the ones who are stuck with keeping it going and realizing how difficult that is. “Gee, we could make it easier this way or that way. Or what if we just throw this stupid thing away and get something better?” Which is all part of the process of keeping something going.

We often think of maintenance in terms of preventive maintenance. Repair is such a big hassle when something breaks. It’s a trauma to you and to the system that the thing is part of. We spend some of our time doing the very unrewarding thing of changing the oil and brushing your teeth so that your teeth don’t fall out and your car doesn’t blow up. But really maintenance is the whole complete process of keeping the thing going. For example, right now, I’m writing on the history of agriculture, because if you’re an animal, you’ve got to keep it fed. We are animals and we have to keep ourselves fed. The process of doing that has been one innovation after another.

You write about how interchangeable parts made it easier for people to fix things rather than throw the whole thing away, and how necessity was the mother of invention—living miles away from your neighbor, you had to figure out how to fix things yourself. Do you feel that, as a society, we still have that ethos, or have the machines we use to live and prosper become mysterious to us?

The Model T was designed to be maintained and tailored any old which way. Henry Ford grew up on a farm in the Midwest. He knew that farmers and ranchers were very good at fixing their own stuff, so he counted on that. The Model T stayed the Model T, and millions of them were made and used, and got old, went in the junkyards, and then got completely pillaged in the junkyards for the parts—because 20 years later, a part from a really old Model T would fit in your brand new Model T.

I’m glad you brought up the bit about interchangeable parts, because it’s probably the most anti-libertarian, anti–Reason magazine section of the book, in that it was government people who for 40 years in the War Department, the Ordnance Department specifically, spent millions of dollars, which now would be a lot more than that, trying to get manufacturers in the U.S. capable of making interchangeable parts. It turns out you have to get down to about a 50th of a millimeter accuracy in order for that to actually work. They did it. And that’s why America wound up taking the lead in the manufacturing part of the Industrial Revolution.

We led the way, a thing called the “American system.” It turned out that the way to get really good interchangeable parts was to basically automate the machine tools that made them.

Ford never allowed anybody to use a file on the assembly line, because as soon as you took a part and filed it to fit better, that would suddenly stop the assembly line. With guns, if your gun failed and you’re military and you’re in the field and you need to fix it, you’ve got to find a gunsmith, which is not going to be anywhere near the battlefield, and they’ll file a part to get it put in there or they’ll make it from scratch. Once they’re interchangeable, like the AK-47, any piece of any AK-47 will substitute just fine and they’re very roughly designed and built.

I see that process in the 19th century as being what led to [the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency]. The researchers I counted on call it military enterprise.

In the book, you write about how the AK-47 was created by the Soviet Union and is the weapon of choice for armies and insurgents around the world because it is relatively simple, easily fixed, and there are lots of parts for it. You compare that to the M16, developed in America, which was rolled out en masse in Vietnam and was terrible for that. It has twice as many parts as the AK-47. It’s more subject to corrosion and rust and gunk getting in there. It seems like we’re always going between simpler products that might be more limited vs. something more sophisticated. Is there a sweet spot somewhere in between?

I don’t think so. I think you wind up being rewarded by going in both directions. AK-47s were cheap and M16s are not cheap. AK-47s operate in the mud. They operate in the sand. They operate in humidity. You can pick one up out of the mud and fire it, and as you fire, the mud flies out. [An] M16 basically has to be surgically cleaned to function. When it functions, it’s absolutely fantastic—at 500 meters you can put high-velocity small rounds through a helmet.

There’s always a place in not just the market, but a range of situations and mindsets, for things that are cheap, fast, and just barely in control, and things that are exquisitely attuned to perfection if they’re in relatively perfect circumstances. Exploring both of those, as a good direction to explore the whole field of design, is always worth doing.

Your work on, among other things, the campaign to have NASA release a photograph of the whole Earth helped inspire the first Earth Day. You helped create the environmentalist mindset. When you say they went too far, that carries a lot of weight.

Greenpeace were anti-technology. Romantics in general are anti-technology. John Henry is always going to get the song. The steam drill never does. But the steam drill is actually a better way to do that kind of work.

The French Revolution—where the idea of interchangeable parts for guns, or muskets then, was actually started—the French Revolution said, “Don’t do that, because these nice gunmakers will be out of work.” They actually shut down the guy named [Honoré] Blanc who was building interchangeable parts for muskets. France went, in the course of a generation, from having the best muskets in Europe to having the worst muskets in Europe. There was no taking account of “Was this beneficial for the customer?”—in that case, soldiers. And that keeps happening.

The anti-technology romantic is almost always: 1) wrong, and, 2) mistaken in his arguments. The way to critique a new anything—AI now—is to embrace it and experiment with it, make mistakes with it, see if you can break it, red-team it, do all these things to sharpen it. And if in the course of that you decide, “You know what, this is a blind alley and we need to back out of it,” the critique from people who have done that is a valid critique.

People are just imagining problems. You can always imagine more problems than you can imagine more ways of things actually going right.

What do you think is the strongest critique of AI as it’s being rolled out now? What are the things that we should be testing it on to see if it’s something that we’re not really going to embrace?

I don’t think of that. But I do know a lot of the people who are going to think of that, and I trust them to investigate the ways it could go wrong.

They’d be able to head off some of them. They won’t be able to head off all of them. Some of them will go probably pretty calamitous, and then we negotiate. The use of AI in weapons is clearly going to be played out very quickly, because the militaries always grab new technologies and turn them into weapons, and rightfully so from their standpoint. It could be a thing like the use of gas that gets tabooed after a while. The use of nuclear weapons, even tactical ones—that’s been tabooed for quite a while.

Everything has to do with a threat. And the massive amount of testing that went on in the ’50s and ’60s was negotiating with threat. But once you had mutual assured destruction with the second strike capability, that actually put a stop to it. That was, in a way, why it was developed. Some problems turn out to be nonexistent. Some problems turn out to be easy to recognize and solve, and some problems are really hard to solve and it takes a while. We’ll go through all of that with AIs.

In the late ’60s, there was more political violence than there is now and it was undergirded by people who actually believed that political violence was the answer. The country seemed to be coming apart. There was no consensus about things. We seem to be back in something like that, where there’s a lot of polarization, demonization, and political violence. Is the political system robust enough to keep things in check or is it just not working anymore? How do we create a consensual government system where we get most of the benefits with fewer of the harsh costs?

This is actually an interesting time to be alive right now, because all of that is up for proof, up for grabs. There’s a lot of grabbing going on. The system was designed to be ungrabbable, but it’s been grabbed. How far down that path of having been grabbed does it go before it becomes stuck there? That’s what we’re in the process of finding out.

There’s lots of reasons to find its way back to some kind of balance. It’ll be different than before. The systems will be different than before. We may have different political parties with different names, but the basic apparatus in the towns, to a large degree in the states, is pretty intact. We’ll find a way to find a new center of balance.

The Whole Earth Catalog‘s statement of purpose says, “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.” The first issue came out in 1968. We’re coming up on 60 years. Do you think we’ve gotten pretty good at it?

The big test will be climate. We’ve certainly gotten better at a whole lot of godlike powers—god with a small g. These are great god things, not the Almighty.

We haven’t really attempted anything in terms of maintenance of the planet at planet scale, at planet pace. With climate change, we’re dealing with a big, deep, slow process. There’s no instant cures, although some are better than others. Geoengineering is one that we’ll come to just because the cost of continually rising temperatures and rising oceans will make it seem like this is the low-cost way to buy enough time to really convert all of our energy systems to basically noncombustion. That will be a different planet, a different society, different global civilization, because it’s not economic. There’s a global economy, but there’s no such thing as a planetary economy. The things that matter at planet scale are not measurable in dollars and cents.

The great thing of the advance of science is that we have lots and lots of capabilities of sensing that something is going wrong and what exactly is going wrong in that thing. In terms of maintenance, the ability to do that kind of sensing is crucial. They call it predictive maintenance. Before the thing breaks, you have indications that would like to break, and that’s when you try to head it off. Often, you can’t. So far, we’ve not fully succeeded in doing that with climate. We’ve gone a long way, much farther into solar than I would ever have thought. We were pushing solar 60 years ago in the Whole Earth Catalog in a big way. Among our crowd, we thought, “This is obvious,” but it took a while for it to become cheap and easy.

If you’re a farmer and you have 100 acres of your farming, you can get a certain amount of food out of it. Even with precision farming, it’s going to be just a certain amount. If you let some company put a whole bunch of solar collectors on your 100 acres and you lease it to them, you get 10x to 100x the money and none of the hassle. The cheap, abundant source of energy is increasingly becoming the sun. And there’s quite a lot of sunlight. There’ll be even more in orbit as these guys are trying to figure out how to start having major data centers in space.

Do you feel like the world is growing up a bit about nuclear energy? You rankled a lot of people in the environmentalist movement when you claimed that nuclear power makes obvious sense if you want to reduce various kinds of emissions and minimize impact on the planet. Do you feel that message is about to be fully accepted around the world?

The opposition got outlived. Basically, they were not able to convince younger and younger generations to buy into what turned out to be a false fear. And then very wealthy young people want to do AI or want to do crypto or whatever; that takes a lot of energy. They look directly at the advantages of nuclear power. They’re not looking at it through the history of nuclear weapons, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Three Mile Island and all that. They’re looking at “Can this be made safe?” Yes, totally. “Is it something that can really scale?” Yes. So nuclear scaling up and solar continuing to scale up look like they’re both going to happen.

What are you doing to maintain your legacy? How does one go about maintaining their legacy while they’re still around to do it?

I tried to write a memoir at one point, and as soon as I wrote a line of it, I hated it. I was just bored with myself. But I didn’t have to because some guys came along and wanted to make a film about me and this documentary called We Are As Gods was made, and it’s good. John Markoff came along and wanted to write a biography, and he did, and it’s good. All of the Whole Earthwork we did over 30-plus years is now online at wholeearth.info. My legacy has gone ahead and somehow established itself. It’s not something I’m concerned about. I’m one of the really very lucky people in that respect.

After The Population Bomb author Paul Ehrlich died, you wrote, “I’ll speak up for Paul. He was wrong about discounting the ‘demographic transition’ in human population, but he co-authored (with Peter Raven) one of the most cited papers in biology, on co-evolution.” Given his large role in stressing people about overpopulation and his influence among governments in reducing births, how do you assess his overall contribution to science and society?

Remember, it was Dave Brower at Sierra Club who asked Paul to write that book and to write it not as science but as a polemic. Overpopulation was an environmentalist obsession before Paul lit the fuse on his book. (These were the same self-named “ecologists” who couldn’t tell a trophic level from a Tyrannosaurus.)

Peter Raven is a botanist (whose Wikipedia bio says, “Raven is possibly best known for his work ‘Butterflies and Plants: A Study in Coevolution,’ published in the journal Evolution in 1964, which he coauthored with Paul R. Ehrlich”). Paul was a zoologist, a lepidopterist focused on checkerspot butterfly populations. He noticed that supposedly identical butterflies dined on completely different plants in different regions. Over coffee, he and Raven complained to each other that zoologists treated plants as just so much edible plastic, whereas in evolutionary reality, plants pay just as much active attention to animals as animals do to them. Naming that attention “coevolution” was a thunderclap in evolution theory, because it forced biologists to notice that most of evolution is in fact coevolution—living things devote most of their adaptation to dealing with other living things, who are busy adapting right back at them.

It’s a profound idea that reframes everything. That’s why I named a magazine for it—CoEvolution Quarterly. For me, it far outweighs Paul’s exaggerations about human population numbers.

In a sense, I’m attempting something similar with “maintenance.” It’s not just a persistent nuisance. It’s so essential that it’s what most living things have to spend most of their time and attention on tending to.

This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity, as well as augmented by questions answered over email.

The post Stewart Brand on Fixing Stuff, Modern Environmentalism, and the Nuclear Future appeared first on Reason.com.