From Recovery to Revitalization | Why America Must Map the Moon | Deep Space Meets “Deep State,” and more

In our strange new political universe of alternative facts turned dystopian reality, once-fringe notions have built-in fan bases in today’s Capitol. And in the House of Representatives, party leaders tapped Grusch’s allies to lead their chamber’s investigation.
On one level, it’s fitting that today’s conspiracy-laced Congress—where anti-vaxxers berate scientists, Election 2020 remains disputed, and January 6 rioters are praised as victims—is now tasked with tackling arguably the nation’s most long-standing conspiracy. But many senators fear their House counterpart’s melding of “deep state” with deep space will only sow more confusion into an electorate hungry for answers, which hearings about unidentified aircraft in recent years have failed to satisfactorily answer.

What Should Regulation of Generative AI Look Like?  (Nico Turner Lee, et al., Brookings)
We are living in a time of unprecedented advancements in generative artificial intelligence (AI), which are AI systems that can generate a wide range of content, such as text or images. The release of ChatGPT, a chatbot powered by OpenAI’s GPT-3 large language model (LLM), in November 2022 ushered generative AI into the public consciousness, and other companies like Google and Microsoft have been equally busy creating new opportunities to leverage the technology. In the meantime, these continuing advancements and applications of generative AI have raised important questions about how the technology will affect the labor market, how its use of training data implicates intellectual property rights, and what shape government regulation of this industry should take. Last week, a congressional hearing with key industry leaders suggested an openness to AI regulation—something that legislators have already considered to reign in some of the potential negative consequences of generative AI and AI more broadly. Considering these developments, scholars across the Center for Technology Innovation (CTI) weighed in around the halls on what the regulation of generative AI should look like.

US: China Upgraded Cuban Spy Operations in 2019  (VOA News)
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Monday that China conducted an upgrade of its intelligence collection facilities in Cuba in 2019.
Blinken told reporters that when the Biden administration took office in January 2021, it was briefed on a “number of sensitive efforts by Beijing around the world” to expand China’s overseas operations for collecting intelligence.
He said the administration of former President Donald Trump was aware of the issue and that the Biden administration concluded Washington was not making enough progress on the matter.
Since that time, Blinken said, the United States has been implementing a new strategy that has been yielding results.

The Threat from Trump’s Supporters Has Evolved  (Juliette Kayyem, The Atlantic)
Donald Trump’s arraignment today at a federal courthouse in Miami will mark a new phase in the incitement campaigns that Trump has waged for most of his political career. Since his indictment on charges related to the unlawful retention and storage of classified documents at his Florida resort, Trump and his allies have attacked the prosecutor, his wife, the Justice Department, President Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton, among others. The language they are using is filled with words of war, elevating concerns among terrorism experts and security planners that Trump’s supporters pose the same threat of violence that they did before the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol.
Yet although the threat has not disappeared, it has evolved. Highly organized violence like the January 6 riot now appears less likely. The urgent question is what dangerous individuals might do on their own and whether authorities are prepared to stop them.

A Clear Indication That Climate Change Is Burning Up California  (Caroline Mimbs Nyce, The Atlantic)
In the past six years, California has logged three of its five deadliest fires on record, and eight of its 10 biggest. More than 100 people have died, tens of thousands have been displaced, and millions more have been subjected to smoky air, the health consequences of which we don’t fully understand.
We know that climate change supercharges these fires thanks to the drier environments it creates, but by how much is tricky to say. Fire science is a complicated thing: A blaze might arise from a lightning strike, a hot car on tall summer grass, snapped power lines. But a paper published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences delivers a fuller sense of the relationship between human-caused warming and California’s wildfires. It finds that climate change is responsible for almost all of the increase in scorched acreage during the state’s summer fires over the past 50 years. And its authors predict that the increase in burned area will only continue in the decades to come. The arrival of this study is a timely reminder just days after East Coasters endured a toxic haze that originated in Canada: Wildfire is an international problem, and it’s likely to get worse as time goes on.

Up for Grabs: Why America Must Map the Moon  (Roy Mathews, National Interests)
When Lewis and Clark began their journey across the United States to the Pacific Ocean, they carried maps, a compass, and used the stars to navigate. Now, humans have a chance to settle among the stars, with several prototype Moon settlements being tested and the cost of space launches continuing to fall. However, just like Lewis and Clark, engineers will need to accurately map and survey the Moon in order to make human settlement a possibility. Technology that can replicate our Global-Positioning System (GPS) on the Moon will be the fastest way to map the surface of the Moon and lay the groundwork for future settlement. This would allow space crews to determine their precise location on the surface of the Moon, and easily navigate around the celestial body. But most importantly, it would put the United States in the driver’s seat to use the Moon’s resources and explore other celestial bodies.