OUR PICKSWhy California Is Swinging Right on Crime | Ransomware Is ‘More Brutal’ Than Ever in 2024 | How Game Theory Can Make AI More Reliable, and more
· Why California Is Swinging Right on Crime
Viral videos and their outraging, perception-changing, galvanizing effects may have propelled both outraged skepticism of tough-on-crime tactics and the backlash to it
· How Washington Missed the Boat on AI Regulation
The U.S. Congress missed an opportunity. Instead, it published a road map that fails to address the key challenges posed by new technologies
· Ransomware Is ‘More Brutal’ Than Ever in 2024
As the fight against ransomware slogs on, security experts warn of a potential escalation to “real-world violence.” But recent police crackdowns are successfully disrupting the cybercriminal ecosystem
· How Game Theory Can Make AI More Reliable
Researchers are drawing on ideas from game theory to improve large language models and make them more correct, efficient, and consistent
· Hackers Impersonating As Fake Toll Payment Processor Across The U.S.
Hackers have been actively impersonating fake toll payment processors across the U.S.
· The Race to Get Ahead One of the Deadliest Natural Disasters
Japan’s early-warning system shows a few extra seconds can save scores of lives
Why California Is Swinging Right on Crime (Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic)
That hard pivot to the politics of law and order describes not only California’s governor, but the Golden State as a whole. Voters and the politicians who represent them, mostly Democrats, embraced progressive attitudes and rhetoric toward criminal-justice reform for at least a decade. By the summer of 2020, the University of Southern California politics professor Dan Schnur told the Financial Times, “it appeared we were witnessing a seminal shift in public thinking on these issues.” But just two years later, he continued, “more traditional approaches to public safety” were resurgent.
San Francisco recalled its progressive district attorney, Chesa Boudin, in 2022. That city’s progressive mayor, London Breed, now says, “Compassion is killing people. And we have to push forth some tough love.” Los Angeles’s progressive mayor, Karen Bass, keeps trying to hire more cops. Many Californians favor harsher penalties for what are now misdemeanors.
Why did the politics of crime change so rapidly? Rising crime surely played a major part. Still, crime does not approach the rate that afflicted California during the 1980s and ’90s, when law-and-order concerns last dominated its politics. And there is intense new concern about crime even in Orange County, Ventura County, and the Central Coast, where it has increased less than elsewhere and most residents are neither unsafe nor governed by overreaching progressives. I doubt the pendulum would be swinging as far or as fast but for changes in the tenor of crime that Californians have seen, most often via video. In fact, viral videos and their outraging, perception-changing, galvanizing effects may have propelled both outraged skepticism of tough-on-crime tactics and the backlash to it.
How Washington Missed the Boat on AI Regulation (Bhaskar Chakravorti, Foreign Policy)
“The longer we wait, the bigger the gap becomes.” With those wise words, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer drew attention to an urgent need: closing the gulf between the pace of innovation and the pace of policy development regarding artificial intelligence in the United States. (Cont.)
