News Vérité

U.S. Secretary of Defense/War Pete Hegseth has stepped into it again — and by “it” I mean the mud of overzealousness — when he announced that a former Army officer will be executed by firing squad, and televised! This announcement follows by only a week or so the botched execution of Christa Pike, a convicted murderer in Tennessee, whose ordeal became front-page news. In Hegseth’s case, the person to be executed — and firing squads don’t fail — is Nidal Malik Hasan, who admitted to killing 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009. Justice will be served for all the world to see, right, Pete? The secretary may be cleaning house at the Pentagon, and that may be long overdue, but this is way out of bounds, if you ask me. There’s no way I think the public should be able to witness an execution, which brings up another question: Which media outlet would actually livestream it? Would YouTube even allow it? That leaves us with some far-right (a term I hate) organization with the ability to air something over the internet. Or the government? PBS seems unlikely, but the DOD/DOW website could carry it. I say, again as

The U.S. is deploying an anti-ship missile system to Japan’s westernmost island, only 68 miles from Taiwan. As part of Keen Sword, the largest joint US-Japanese biennial military exercise, the U.S. Marines will deploy the system to the island of Yonaguni. The Navy-Marine Expeditionary Ship Interdiction System, or NMESIS, has a range of 115 miles and can intercept Chinese vessels off the coast of Taiwan. Chinese officials, aware of the development, are cautioning that it may step up coast guard and naval activity in the area in response. In the two face-to-face meetings they’ve conducted this year, the issue of Taiwan has been presented to President Trump as a “hands off” proposition by China’s Xi Jinping. In response, Trump has put on hold an arms shipment to Taiwan, leaving in doubt his commitment to the island democracy. The Okinawa Defense Bureau first disclosed the NMESIS deployment on October 1, and said it will also include a Marine Air Defense Integrated System, or Maidas.

For centuries, the vision of a work-free society has hovered between philosophical romance and political fantasy. From ancient mythic gardens of effortless sustenance to the nineteenth-century utopian socialists, thinkers have dreamed of a world where human beings are finally unshackled from daily toil. Today, the rapid ascendance of artificial intelligence and advanced robotics has pulled that dream out of speculative literature and planted it squarely into mainstream economic discourse. Yet whether AI will build a genuine post-work utopia depends far less on algorithmic ingenuity than on how human institutions govern the transition. While artificial intelligence holds the raw technical potential to automate complex labor and generate unprecedented material abundance, translating computational power into widespread human liberation requires surmounting steep economic, ecological, political, and psychological hurdles. In his 2019 book Human Compatible and subsequent lectures, computer scientist Stuart Russell posed the foundational question that the technology sector must confront: “What if you succeed?” If the AI research community achieves its ultimate objective—systems capable of performing all human cognitive and physical tasks at superhuman speed and negligible cost—the consequences will reverberate far beyond computer science. Technology may supply the engine of abundance, but human governance will decide whether that engine powers universal