This week's featured article is "The Fragile Generation" by Lenore Skenazy and Jonathan Haidt, originally published in the December 2017 print issue.
This audio was generated using AI trained on the voice of Katherine Mangu-Ward.
Music credits: "Deep in Thought" by CTRL and "Sunsettling" by Man with Roses
The post <I>The Best of Reason</I>: The Fragile Generation appeared first on Reason.com.
The Los Angeles Press Club on Thursday announced the finalists for the 66th Annual Southern California Journalism Awards, recognizing the best work in print, online, and broadcast media published in 2023.
Reason, which is headquartered in L.A., is a finalist for 14 awards.
A sincere thanks to the judges who read and watched our submissions, as well as to the Reason readers, subscribers, and supporters, without whom we would not be able to produce impactful journalism.
Senior Editor Elizabeth Nolan Brown is a finalist for best technology reporting across all media platforms—print, radio, podcast, TV, and online—for her November 2023 print piece, "Do Social Media Algorithms Polarize Us? Maybe Not," in which she challenged what has become the traditional wisdom around the root of online toxicity:
For years, politicians have been proposing new regulations based on simple technological "solutions" to issues that stem from much more complex phenomena. But making Meta change its algorithms or shifting what people see in their Twitter feeds can't overcome deeper issues in American politics—including parties animated more by hate and fear of the other side than ideas of their own. This new set of studies should serve as a reminder that expecting tech companies to somehow fix our dysfunctional political culture won't work.
Science Reporter Ronald Bailey is a finalist for best medical/health reporting in print or online for "Take Nutrition Studies With a Grain of Salt," also from the November 2023 issue, where he meticulously dissected why the epidemiology of food and drink is, well, "a mess":
This doesn't mean you can eat an entire pizza, a quart of ice cream, and six beers tonight without some negative health effects. (Sorry.) It means nutritional epidemiology is a very uncertain guide for how to live your life and it certainly isn't fit for setting public policy.
In short, take nutrition research with a grain of salt. And don't worry: Even though the World Health Organization (WHO) says "too much salt can kill you," the Daily Mail noted in 2021 that "it's not as bad for health as you think."
Managing Editor Jason Russell is a finalist in print/online sports commentary for his August/September 2023 cover story, "Get Your Politics Out of My Pickleball," which explored the emerging fault lines as the government gets involved in America's weirdest, fastest-growing sport:
Pickleball will always have haters—and if its growth continues, local governments will still face public pressure to build more courts. Some critics think the sport is a fad, but strong growth continues for the time being, even as the COVID-19 pandemic ends and other activities compete for time and attention. There's no need to force nonplayers to support it with their tax dollars, especially when entrepreneurs seem eager to provide courts. If pickleball does end up as an odd footnote in sporting history, ideally it won't be taxpayers who are on the hook for converting courts to new uses.
Reporter C.J. Ciaramella is a finalist in magazine investigative reporting for his October 2023 cover story, "'I Knew They Were Scumbags,'" a nauseating piece on federal prison guards who confessed to rape—and got away with it:
Berman's daughter, Carleane, was one of at least a dozen women who were abused by corrupt correctional officers at FCC Coleman, a federal prison complex in Florida. In December, a Senate investigation revealed that those correctional officers had admitted in sworn interviews with internal affairs investigators that they had repeatedly raped women under their control.
Yet thanks to a little known Supreme Court precedent and a culture of corrupt self-protection inside the prison system, none of those guards were ever prosecuted—precisely because of the manner in which they confessed.
Senior Editor Jacob Sullum is a finalist in magazine commentary for "Biden's 'Marijuana Reform' Leaves Prohibition Untouched," from the January 2023 issue, in which he disputed the notion that President Joe Biden has fundamentally changed America's response to cannabis:
By himself, Biden does not have the authority to resolve the untenable conflict between state and federal marijuana laws. But despite his avowed transformation from an anti-drug zealot into a criminal justice reformer, he has stubbornly opposed efforts to repeal federal pot prohibition.
That position is contrary to the preferences expressed by more than two-thirds of Americans, including four-fifths of Democrats and half of Republicans. The most Biden is willing to offer them is his rhetorical support for decriminalizing cannabis consumption—a policy that was on the cutting edge of marijuana reform in the 1970s.
Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward is a finalist for best magazine columnist for "Is Chaos the Natural State of Congress?" from the December 2023 issue, "Don't Just Hire 'Better Cops.' Punish the Bad Ones," from the April 2023 issue, and (a personal favorite) "Bodies Against the State," from the February 2023 issue:
Governments do unconscionable things every day; it is in their nature. But not all transgressions are equal. In the wake of the Iran team's silent anthem protest, an Iranian journalist asked U.S. men's soccer captain Tyler Adams how he could play for a country that discriminates against black people like him. What makes the U.S. different, he replied, is that "we're continuing to make progress every day."
The most perfect and enduring image of a person weaponizing his body against the state was taken after the brutal suppression of protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989. The unknown Chinese man standing in front of a tank didn't have to hold a sign for the entire world to know exactly what the problem was.
Reporter Christian Britschgi is a finalist for best long-form magazine feature on business/government for "The Town Without Zoning," from the August/September 2023 issue, in which he reported on the fight over whether Caroline, New York, should impose its first-ever zoning code:
Whatever the outcome, the zoning debate raging in Caroline is revealing. It shows how even in a small community without major enterprises or serious growth pressures, planners can't adequately capture and account for everything people might want to do with their land.
There's a gap between what zoners can do and what they imagine they can design. That knowledge problem hasn't stopped cities far larger and more complex than Caroline from trying to scientifically sort themselves with zoning. They've developed quite large and complex problems as a result.
Associate Editor Billy Binion (hi, it's me) is a finalist for best activism journalism online for the web feature "They Fell Behind on Their Property Taxes. So the Government Sold Their Homes—and Kept the Profits," which explored an underreported form of legalized larceny: governments across the U.S. seizing people's homes over modest tax debts, selling the properties, and keeping the surplus equity.
Geraldine Tyler is a 94-year-old woman spending the twilight of her life in retirement, as 94-year-olds typically do. But there isn't much that's typical about it.
Tyler has spent the last several years fighting the government from an assisted living facility after falling $2,300 behind on her property taxes. No one disputes that she owed a debt. What is in dispute is if the government acted constitutionally when, to collect that debt, it seized her home, sold it, and kept the profit.
If that sounds like robbery, it's because, in some sense, it is. But it's currently legal in at least 12 states across the country, so long as the government is doing the robbing.
Senior Producer Austin Bragg, Director of Special Projects Meredith Bragg, Producer John Carter, and freelancer extraordinaire Andrew Heaton are finalists for best humor/satire writing across all broadcast mediums—TV, film, radio, or podcast—for the hilarious "Everything is political: board games," which "exposes" how Republicans and Democrats interpret everyone's favorite games from their partisan perspectives. (Spoiler: Everyone's going to lose.)
The Bragg brothers are nominated again in that same category—best humor/satire writing—along with Remy for "Look What You Made Me Do (Taylor Swift Parody)," in which lawmakers find culprits for the recent uptick in thefts—the victims.
Deputy Managing Editor of Video and Podcasts Natalie Dowzicky and Video Editor Regan Taylor are finalists in best commentary/analysis of TV across all media platforms for "What really happened at Waco," which explored a Netflix documentary on how the seeds of political polarization that roil our culture today were planted at Waco.
Editor at Large Matt Welch, Producer Justin Zuckerman, Motion Graphic Designer Adani Samat, and freelancer Paul Detrick are finalists in best activism journalism across any broadcast media for "The monumental free speech case the media ignored," which made the case that the legal odyssey and criminal prosecutions associated with Backpage were a direct assault on the First Amendment—despite receiving scant national attention from journalists and free speech advocates.
Associate Editor Liz Wolfe, Senior Producer Zach Weissmueller, Video Editor Danielle Thompson, Video Art Director Isaac Reese, and Producer Justin Zuckerman are finalists in best solutions journalism in any broadcast media for "Why homelessness is worse in California than Texas," which investigated why homelessness is almost five times as bad in the Golden State—and what can be done about it.
Finally, Senior Producer Zach Weissmueller, Video Editor Danielle Thompson, Video Art Director Isaac Reese, and Audio Engineer Ian Keyser are finalists in best documentary short for "The Supreme Court case that could upend the Clean Water Act," which did a deep dive into a Supreme Court case concerning a small-town Idaho couple that challenged how the Environmental Protection Agency defines a "wetland"—and what that means for property rights.
Winners will be announced on Sunday, June 23 at the Millennium Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. Subscribe to Reason here, watch our video journalism here, and find our podcasts here.
The post <em>Reason</em> Is a Finalist for 14 Southern California Journalism Awards appeared first on Reason.com.
In the June 2024 issue, we explore the ways that artificial intelligence is shaping our economy and culture. The stories and art are about AI—and occasionally by AI. (Throughout the issue, we have rendered all text generated by AI-powered tools in blue.) To read the rest of the issue, go here.
Vernor Vinge was the bard of artificial intelligence, a novelist and mathematician who devoted his career to imagining the nearly unimaginable aftermath of the moment when technology outpaces human capability. He died in March, as we were putting together Reason's first-ever AI issue, right on the cusp of finding out which of his fanciful guesses would turn out to be right.
In 2007, Reason interviewed Vinge about the Singularity—the now slightly out-of-favor term he popularized for that greater-than-human intelligence event horizon. By that time the author of A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky had, for years, been pinning the date of the Singularity somewhere between 2005 and 2030. To Reason, he offered a softer prediction: If the rapid doubling of processing power known as Moore's law "continues for a decade or two," that "makes it plausible that very interesting A.I. developments might occur before 2030."
That prophecy, at least, has already come true.
Innovation in AI is happening so quickly that the landscape changed dramatically even from the time Reason conceived this issue to the time you are reading it. As a consequence, this particular first draft of history is likely to become rapidly, laughably outdated. (You can read some selections from our archives on the topic.) As we worked on this issue, new large language models (LLMs) and chatbots cropped up every month, image generation went from producing amusing curiosities with the wrong number of fingers to creating stunningly realistic video from text prompts, and the ability to outsource everything from coding tasks to travel bookings went from a hypothetical to a reality. And those were just the free or cheap tools available to amateurs and journalists.
Throughout the issue, we have rendered all text generated by AI-powered tools in blue. Why? Because when we asked ChatGPT to tell us the color of artificial intelligence, that's what it picked:
The color that best encapsulates the idea of artificial intelligence in general is a vibrant shade of blue. Blue is often associated with intelligence, trust, and reliability, making it an ideal color to represent the concept of AI. It also symbolizes the vast potential and endless possibilities that AI brings to the world of technology.
Yet the very notion that any kind of bright line can be drawn between human- and machine-generated content is almost certainly already obsolete.
Reason has a podcast read by a version of my voice that is generated entirely artificially. Our producers use dozens of AI tools to tweak, tidy, and improve our video. A few images generated using AI have appeared in previous issues—though they run rampant in this issue, with captions indicating how they were made. I suspect one of our web developers is just three AIs in a trenchcoat. In this regard, Reason is utterly typical in how fast we have incorporated AI into our daily business.
The best we can offer is a view from our spot, nestled in the crook of an exponential curve. Vinge and others like him long believed themselves to be at such an inflection point. In his 1993 lecture "The Coming Technological Singularity: How To Survive in the Post-Human Era," Vinge said: "When I began writing science fiction in the middle '60s, it seemed very easy to find ideas that took decades to percolate into the cultural consciousness; now the lead time seems more like 18 months." That lead time is now measured in minutes, so he may have been onto something. This issue is an attempt to capture this moment when the possibilities of AI are blooming all around us—and before regulators have had a chance to screw it up.
"Except for their power to blow up the world," Vinge mused in 2007, "I think governments would have a very hard time blocking the Singularity. The possibility of governments perverting the Singularity is somewhat more plausible to me."
They are certainly trying. As Greg Lukianoff of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression testified at a February congressional hearing about AI regulation: "Yes, we may have some fears about the proliferation of AI. But what those of us who care about civil liberties fear more is a government monopoly on advanced AI. Or, more likely, regulatory capture and a government-empowered oligopoly that privileges a handful of existing players….Far from reining in the government's misuse of AI to censor, we will have created the framework not only to censor but also to dominate and distort the production of knowledge itself."
Those new pathways for knowledge production and other unexpected outcomes are the most exciting prospects for AI, and the ones Vinge toyed with for decades. What's most interesting is not what AI will do to us, or for us; it's what AI will do that we can barely imagine.
As the physicist and engineer Stephen Wolfram says, "One of the features [AI] has is you can't predict everything about what it will do. And sometimes it will do things that aren't things we thought we wanted. The alternative is to tie it down to the point where it will only do the things we want it to do and it will only do things we can predict it will do. And that will mean it can't do very much."
Even as we worry about the impact of AI on art, sex, education, health care, labor, science, movies, and war, it is Vinge's imaginative, nonjudgmental vision that should inspire us.
"I think that if the Singularity can happen, it will," Vinge told Reason in 2007. "There are lots of very bad things that could happen in this century. The Technological Singularity may be the most likely of the noncatastrophes."
By Claude 3 Opus
AI (Artificial Intelligence): The simulation of human intelligence processes by machines, especially computer systems, including learning, reasoning, and self-correction.
Gen AI (Generative AI): A subset of AI that creates new content, such as text, images, audio, and video, based on patterns learned from training data.
Prompt: In the context of AI, a prompt is a piece of text, an image, or other input data provided to an AI system to guide its output or response.
LLM (Large Language Model): A type of AI model trained on vast amounts of text data, capable of understanding and generating human-like text based on the input it receives.
Neural Net (Neural Network): A computing system inspired by the biological neural networks in the human brain, consisting of interconnected nodes that process and transmit information, enabling the system to learn and make decisions.
GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer): A type of large language model developed by OpenAI, trained on a diverse range of internet text to generate human-like text, answer questions, and perform various language tasks.
Hallucination: In AI, hallucination refers to an AI system generating output that is not grounded in reality or its training data, often resulting in nonsensical or factually incorrect statements.
Compute: Short for computational resources, such as processing power and memory, required to run AI models and perform complex calculations.
Turing Test: A test proposed by Alan Turing to determine whether a machine can exhibit intelligent behavior indistinguishable from that of a human, where a human evaluator engages in a conversation with both a human and a machine and tries to distinguish between them based on their responses.
Machine Learning: A subset of AI that focuses on the development of algorithms and statistical models that enable computer systems to improve their performance on a specific task through experience and data, without being explicitly programmed.
CLAUDE 3 OPUS is a subscription-supported large language model developed by Anthropic, an AI startup.
The post We Can't Imagine the Future of AI appeared first on Reason.com.
This week's featured article is "In the AI Economy, There Will Be Zero Percent Unemployment" by Andrew Mayne.
This audio was generated using AI trained on the voice of Katherine Mangu-Ward.
Music credits: "Deep in Thought" by CTRL and "Sunsettling" by Man with Roses
The post <I>The Best of Reason</I>: In the AI Economy, There Will Be Zero Percent Unemployment appeared first on Reason.com.
© Joanna Andreasson
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The post We're Rolling Out Reason Plus! appeared first on Reason.com.
This week's featured article is "The Real Student Loan Crisis Isn't From Undergraduate Degrees" by Emma Camp.
This audio was generated using AI trained on the voice of Katherine Mangu-Ward.
Music credits: "Deep in Thought" by CTRL and "Sunsettling" by Man with Roses
The post <I>The Best of Reason</I>: The Real Student Loan Crisis Isn't From Undergraduate Degrees appeared first on Reason.com.
© Joanna Andreasson
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