The lure of convenience: Why a national digital ID system is a really, really bad idea

We live in an age of convenience. Anything that makes our complicated lives less complicated and less difficult to navigate seems like a boon. And in the digital age—which allows us access to so much information anywhere, anytime—the lure of convenient access is very strong.

On the surface it seems sensible, for instance, to make it possible to log in to just one account for all our government services and interactions instead of having to use separate apps or an account for each service or department. And this would make sense if not for the immense dangers of concentrating such information and therefore making it an irresistible target for hackers. It's also worth considering who might be among those hackers, for example, unfriendly nations and their militaries.

But that is what the British government is proposing for the British public through the government's digital governance initiatives. You probably don't need a long litany of data breaches including those involving governments to confirm your fears. But this article describes recent ones in Britain in the context of the government's determination to roll out a national digital ID system.

Infrastructure failure in America: Will we find a fix before the unimaginable happens?

Recent events in America's air transport system suggest that the system is becoming more prone to dangerous failures. Those failures include a January 29 mid-air collision between an Army helicopter and a passenger jet Washington, D.C.’s Ronald Reagan National Airport; a harrowing near miss between a landing passenger aircraft and an unauthorized business jet crossing the runway; a plane taxiing to the gate in Denver when an engine caught fire leading to the evacuation of all passengers, all of whom survived; and a blackout of air traffic controllers' screens for 60 to 90 seconds at Newark Liberty International Airport.

The Associated Press compiled a list of recent incidents which can be found here.

No doubt problems have been brewing for some time in our air transport system. While most of the focus is on the air traffic control system, the aging system run by the Federal Aviation Administration, it is probably important to look at America's overall aviation infrastructure which this year received a grade of D+ in the "2025 Report Card from America's Infrastructure" from the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE).

"Better" AI has more "hallucinations"

Imagine you are a doctor with a patient whose hallucinations keep increasing. Of course, you might try to figure out how to stabilize the patient if possible so the hallucinations stop increasing in number. And you might be furiously trying to figure out the cause of these hallucinations so that you might reduce or eliminate them. One thing you almost certainly would NOT do is suggest that other people rely on your patient as a source of information.

And yet, that is precisely what developers of a "better" version of artificial intelligence (AI) are telling us to do. According to the linked article, "On one test, the hallucination rates of newer A.I. systems were as high as 79 percent." Contemplate that for a minute when you ask AI for help in answering a question.

Executives in the industry now admit that AI hallucinations—that is, information provided by AI tools that is just made up—will always be part of AI. The reason: AI tools use mathematical probabilities to construct responses. They cannot and will not ever have access to lived human experience and the judgement that results from that experience.

As the linked piece explains:

Another issue is that reasoning models are designed to spend time “thinking” through complex problems before settling on an answer. As they try to tackle a problem step by step, they run the risk of hallucinating at each step. The errors can compound as they spend more time thinking.

Climate change and the Overton Window

Joseph Overton worked at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a Michigan-based conservative think tank before his untimely death in 2003. Overton observed that there is a narrow range of political ideas that are broadly accepted by the public as normal discourse including ideas they disagree with. Beyond that range of ideas politicians and others get labeled extremist which makes it harder to maneuver as most of the public has prejudged such people. This became known as the Overton Window.

Overton proposed that this window moves over time—women's suffrage, the end of prohibition, and gay marriage all suggest dramatic changes are possible. But the forces that wish to limit public discourse to a narrow range are so powerful that the seeming changes in the Overton window on certain subjects can often obscure a stubborn intransigence.

Climate change went from an obscure scientific phenomenon to being recognized as a central threat to civilization. Despite a broad scientific consensus and worldwide treaties such as the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Accord, little actual progress has been made in addressing climate change. It is moving faster than ever.

In this context, two recent contrasting stories on climate change show how wide the Overton Window can appear to be without actually challenging anything fundamental in the current system.

Yet another week off - no post this week

Your humble blogger is unexpectedly indisposed again this week and has been unable to write. It is my fervent hope that I will be back a week from today on Sunday, May 4.

Taking a two-week break - no post this week or next

I am taking a break this week and next and plan to post again on Sunday, April 27.

Second- and third-order effects: Immigration, bird flu and climate

It's usually easy to predict first-order effects. Those are effects that follow directly from our actions. For example, the Trump administration's well-publicized campaign to find and deport persons not legally in the United States has had the predictable effects of causing some to leave on their own, others to hide and those who might have crossed the southern border into the United States not to, at least for now, if the large drop in border crossing and arrests is any indication.

But the second-order effects, that is, those that follow from the first-order ones, are often harder to detect and receive far less coverage. For example, Florida, which passed new draconian legislation in 2023 and began its own statewide crackdown on undocumented immigrants, began to see the second-order effects within a year. Agricultural workers were more difficult to find. Farmers could still sign them up for temporary work visas, but the federal system is difficult and costly to navigate. (To get a sense of how complex and demanding that system is, read more about it here.) The hotel, restaurant and construction industries are struggling to find people for the jobs they have open. One report estimated that economic activity in Florida has suffered a $12 billion hit due to the crackdown.

Now come the third-order effects. With the ongoing labor shortage, Florida is considering relaxing child labor laws to make more children available for jobs previously held by immigrants. In all likelihood, the state wouldn't even be considering this change had it not chased away so many immigrant laborers in the first place.

America First: Can it be squared with proposed 'annexation' of Greenland, Canada and the Panama Canal?

The "America First" slogan often used by candidate Donald Trump in his first and second presidential campaigns might sound on its surface to indicate disengagement from global affairs and a focus on domestic priorities. So, it may seem puzzling that President Donald Trump is talking about annexing Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark, a NATO ally; Canada, a sovereign country and a NATO ally; and retaking the Panama Canal.

If, however, you see Trump's pronouncement within the context of global economic and military competition in what he perceives is a zero-sum world (a win by one side must be a loss by another), then this kind of rhetoric begins to make sense. Such a view actually implicitly presumes that resources available to global society are finite or, at the very least, worryingly scarce and therefore must be produced domestically for security reasons or extracted willingly or unwillingly from other countries.

Trouble is, there is a very long list of important minerals that the United States must get either partially or wholly from other countries in order to maintain the smooth functioning of its modern technical economy. In addition, America, which had previously been a breadbasket to the world, is now a net importer of food—though this is on a value basis, not necessarily on a tonnage or calorie basis.

DOGE and (mis)understanding AI

The general narrative in the media regarding artificial intelligence (AI) is binary. AI is either the greatest human invention ever, so powerful it will catapult us into an age of abundance for all and solve our environmental problems as well OR it is the most momentous human invention ever which is so dangerous that it could wipe out human civilization (and therefore must be tightly controlled or abandoned altogether). The trouble with binary narratives is that they fail to incorporate hundreds or even thousands of pieces of information that lead to much more nuanced narratives that might help us understand AI.

Henry Farrell is a professor of international affairs at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies who recently published an article (along with three co-authors) entitled "Large AI models are cultural and social technologies." The article appeared in Science magazine earlier this month. So what could a professor of international affairs possibly have to say about AI? Well, it turns out quite a lot. And, in a related article, Farrell shows how our societal understanding of AI sheds light on the activities of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) that seeks to tear out and discard large portions of the U.S. federal government. More on that later.

First, it's worth understanding what AI really is and Farrell provides a surprisingly succinct explanation of the variant that is most in the news today, Large Language Models:

Scented dangers: Who regulates scented products?

The internet and airwaves are full of advertisements offering to make you, your home, your car and your workplace smell better. It all seems innocuous because our sense of smell is always turned on, and we seem to be fine as we breath in scents from household cleaners, body soap, shampoo, cologne, scented candles and air fresheners. But that perception is belied by invisible dangers from these products.

The headline for a piece summarizing a recent study regarding particulate pollution from indoor scented products says it all: "Scented products cause indoor air pollution on par with car exhaust." According the study, scented products are "a significant source of nanosized particles small enough to get deep into your lungs, posing a potential risk to respiratory health."

That's bad enough. But who actually regulates what goes into these products, many of which contain chemically manufactured scents? Here's what the U. S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) says on its website: "[I]f a product such as a shower gel is intended only to cleanse the body, or a perfume or cologne is intended only to make a person smell good, it’s a cosmetic. The law doesn’t require cosmetics to have FDA approval before they go on the market."