Llewellyn King: Journalism is a business of serial judgment under pressure
An example of the nonobjective newspapers that dominated American journalism until ideals of objective rep0rting slowly started to take hold around the turn of the 20th Century in larger cities.
The Linotype machine was very important in newspaper printing until computerization doomed it.
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
The BBC has fallen on its sword. The director general has resigned and so has the head of news over the splicing of tape of President Trump's rambling speech on Jan. 6, 2021, which preceded the sacking of the Capitol by his fanatical followers.
The editor and the technician who did the deed for the esteemed BBC program Panorama haven't been publicly identified.
Agreed, they shouldn't have done what they did. But was there malice?
Journalism is a business of serial judgment. It is replete with mistakes — things that we who practice the craft wish we hadn't done.
I have worked as an editor in film, with tape and on newspapers, and I have seen how the paranoia of politicians can cast a whole news organization as a biased enemy when that wasn't the case.
Before a single sentence or an article appears in a newspaper or a video appears on television, dozens of judgments have been made — not by teams of academics or by ethicists or by juries, but by individuals responding to time pressure and what they judge to be newsworthy.
The unsaid pressure to keep it interesting, to have news worth something, is always there. The reader has to be kept reading or the viewer watching.
After something is published or broadcast, it can be beacon-clear what should have been done or corrected, but in the moment, those defects are opaque.
Let me take you behind the veil.
It is a hot night in 1972. There is a presidential election brewing and among those running for the Democratic nomination is Henry “Scoop" Jackson, the well-known Democratic senator from the state of Washington.
I am working in the composing room of The Washington Post as the editor in charge of liaising between the printers and the editors. The job is sometimes called a stone editor after the “stone’’ — big metal tables that held the pages and where the newspaper was assembled in the days of hot type via Linotype machines.
It was a busy news night, and it was when David Broder was the political reporter without rival. He was industrious and thorough, dedicated and prolific. As the night wore on, Broder would often add new stuff to his story, and it would grow in length.
In desperation when things got tough and deadlines were pressing, we would cut back the size of the photos, which had run in the first edition. The editor on duty would just ask the printers to do this: It was known as “whacking the cut."
In short, the photo would be reduced in size by cutting it down physically. The engraving would be put in a guillotine and some of it would be cut off, whacked.
That night, we had a large photo of Jackson addressing a large crowd.
But as the night wore on and different editions and mini editions, known as replates, were assembled, I ordered the cut whacked and whacked again. The result was that by the time the main edition went to press, the good senator was talking to a much smaller audience — although it did suggest that many more were there but not seen.
Jackson thought that this was a deliberate bias by The Post to suggest that he couldn't draw a large audience, and he called the legendary executive editor Ben Bradlee.
Bradlee asked the national editor, Ben Bagdikian, who was to become an authority on newspaper ethics, what happened. When they came to me, I explained how we trimmed the pictures.
While Bradlee was amused, Bagdikian added it to his concern about newspaper ethics.
Journalism is executed by individuals under pressure, much of it intense. It is a business of multiple judgments made sequentially, often without a lot of contemplation.
I once worked at the BBC in London, and the same pressures were present. I was scriptwriter and editor on the evening news. You made decisions all the time: This frame in, those 20 frames out. An outsider might imagine prejudice and foul intent in the way one clip was used and others were not.
In the news trade, judgments can trip you up, but making judgments is essential. Later the judge is judged, as at the BBC.
On X: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King, based mostly in Rhode Island, is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. He was a long-time publisher and remains an international energy-sector consultant.
Llewellyn King: The biggest sources of stress for air-traffic controllers
Air-traffic-control zones in the southeast corner of New England.
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
If you don't know about the stress that air-traffic controllers are reportedly under, then maybe you are an air-traffic controller.
The fact is that air-traffic controllers love what they do — love it and wouldn't do anything else.
The stress comes with long hours, Federal Aviation Administration bureaucracy and a general lack of recognition, not with moving airplanes safely about the sky.
Of course, I haven't interviewed every controller, but I have talked to a lot of them over the years and have been in many control towers.
Controllers love the essentiality of it. They love aviation in all its forms.
They love the man-and-machine interface, which is at the heart of modern aviation. They love the sense of being part of a great system — the power, the language, the satisfaction.
They love the trust that every pilot puts in them. It is rewarding to be trusted in anything, but more so when the price of failure is known.
Nearly everything that is true of pilots is true of controllers. At its heart, the job is about flight, arguably the greatest achievement of mankind, the fulfillment of millennia of yearning.
There is a saying often attributed to Winston Churchill that was actually said by a pilot and insurance executive in the 1930s: “Aviation in itself is not inherently dangerous. But to an even greater degree than the sea, it is terribly unforgiving of any carelessness, incapacity or neglect."
That is true both of pilots and those at the consoles on the ground, who co-fly with them.
After President Ronald Reagan fired more than 11,000 striking controllers in 1981, some of the saddest people I knew were air-traffic controllers.
They were denied the right to do the work that they loved and suffered immeasurably for that. A few were able to get work overseas, but mostly it was a light that went out and stayed out.
I ran into one former controller, working as a baggage handler. He said he just wanted to be near the action even if he couldn't go into the tower anymore and do his dream job.
My only major criticism of Reagan in this case has always been that he didn't rehire the strikers after he had won, proving that they were wrong in striking illegally and that they weren't above the law.
Reagan was often a compassionate man, but he showed the controllers no compassion. I think that if he had understood the psychological pain he had inflicted, he would have relented.
Controllers have explained to me that if a controller finds the job stressful, then he or she shouldn't be a controller.
About one-third of the candidates for controllers' school, most of whom are trained at the FAA Academy in Oklahoma City, flunk out.
It takes longer to train a controller than a pilot — maybe not to work in the cockpit of a passenger jet, but certainly to fly an aircraft, including jets. It takes at least four years of schooling, simulator and then supervised controlling to qualify to be an FAA controller. Some controllers come from the military.
There is just one movie about air-traffic control, released in 1999, Pushing Tin. It flopped at the box office but has a cult following among pilots and controllers. It is funny and accurate. Pushing tin is controllers' jargon for what they do: push airplanes around the sky.
The fabled stress, in my mind, is the adrenaline factor. It is present in air-traffic control, and it is present in the cockpit of everything that leaves the ground, from single-engine Cessnas to Boeing 777s — and in ATC facilities.
It interests me that pilots rarely mention stress. It is, however, always mentioned by people writing about or talking about air-traffic control. I would venture that the most stress that controllers deal with is the stress imposed on them by the FAA.
I will aver that in the recent and record-long government shutdown, the largest source of stress for controllers was how they were going to put food on the table and pay their bills, not the stress that they feel at the console, pushing tin and keeping flying safe. Now they are stressed about back pay.
Llewellyn King, based in Rhode Island, is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS and an international energy-sector consultant.
Llewellyn King: Can the elephant of AI become capable of policing itself?
Street art in Tel Aviv.
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
For me, the big news isn't the politics of the moment, the deliberations before the Supreme Court or even the news of the battlefront in Ukraine. No, it is a rather modest, careful announcement by Anthropic, the developer of the Claude suite of chatbots.
Anthropic, almost sotto voce, announced it had detected introspection in their models. Introspection.
This means, experts point out, that artificial intelligence is adjusting and examining itself, not thinking. But I don't believe that this should diminish its importance. It is a small step toward what may lead to self-correction in AI, taking away some of the craziness.
There is much that is still speculation — and a great deal more that we don't know about what the neural networks are capable of as they interact.
We don't know, for example, why AI hallucinates (goes illogically crazy). We also don't know why it is obsequious (tries to give answers that please).
I think that the cautious Anthropic announcement is a step in justification of a theory about AI that I have held for some time: AI is capable of self-policing and may develop guidelines for itself.
A bit insane? Most experts have told me that AI isn't capable of thinking. But I think Anthropic's mention that introspection has been detected means that AI is, if not thinking, beginning to apply standards to itself.
I am not a computer scientist and have no significant scientific training. I am a newspaperman who never wanted to see the end of hot type and who was happier typing on a manual machine than on a word processor.
But I have been enthralled by the possibilities of AI, for better or worse, and have attended many conferences and interviewed dozens — yes, dozens — of experts across the world.
My argument is this: AI is trained on what we know, Western Civilization, and it reflects the biases implicit in that. In short, the values and the facts are about white men because they have been the major input into AI so far.
Women get short shrift, and there is little about people of color. Most AI companies work to understand and temper these biases.
While the experiences of white men down through the centuries are what AI knows, there is enough concern about that implicit bias that it creates a challenge in using AI.
But what this body of work that has been fed into AI also reflects is human questioning, doubt and uncertainty.
At another level, it has a lot of standards, strictures, moral codes and opinions on what is right and wrong. These, too, are part of the giant knowledge base that AI calls upon when it is given a prompt.
My argument has been: Why would these not bear down on AI, causing it to struggle with values? The history of all civilizations includes a struggle for values.
We already know it has what is called obsequious bias: For reasons we don't know, it endeavors to please, to angle its advice to what it believes we want to hear. To me, that suggests that something approximating the early stages of awareness is going on and indicates that AI may be wanting to edit itself.
The argument against this is that AI is inanimate and can't think any more than an internal combustion engine can.
I take comfort in what my friend Omar Hatamleh, who has written five books on AI, told me: “AI is exponential and humans think in a linear way. We extrapolate."
My interpretation: We have touched an elephant with one finger and are trying to imagine its size and shape. Good luck with that.
The immediate impact of AI on society is becoming one of curiosity and alarm.
We are curious, naturally, to know how this new tool will shape the future as the Industrial Revolution and then the digital revolution have shaped the present. The alarm is the impact it is beginning to have on jobs, an impact that hasn't yet been quantified or understood.
I have been to five major AI conferences in the past year and have worked on the phones and made several television programs on AI. The consensus: AI will subtract from the present job inventory but will add new jobs. I hope that is true.
Llewellyn King, based in Rhode Island, is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS, and an international energy consultant.
@llewellynking2
Llewellyn King: A reminder of kings and emperors to rise at the White House, to burden the taxpayers for decades
The East Wing of the White House being demolished on Oct. 21, 2025. A huge ballroom paid for by Trump campaign donors and other rich people will replace it. In return for? Thereafter, themass of taxpayers will cover the maintenance costs.
—Photo by Sizzlipedia
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
President Donald Trump is building what will become one of the greatest snow-colored pachyderms in the history of the United States.
Some of the nation's biggest tycoons are going to pay to build this ballroom, which will look like the box that the rest of the White House came in — a statement often made about the Kennedy Center looking like the container that the adjacent Watergate complex came in.
Those favor-seeking tycoons won't be around to maintain the building as it stands mostly empty through the decades. Buildings that stand empty deteriorate rapidly. This piece of megalomania, expressed in stone, concrete and gold leaf, will be a burden to taxpayers.
Its ostensible purpose is for state dinners, where heads of state we as a nation want to flatter are dined. They should be called state ingratiation events.
When the president of the United States gives you a state dinner, you are exalted, whether it is haute cuisine in a gilded neoclassical building that looks like a 19th-Century railroad station or in a tent. The office of the president doesn't need gold leaf and vaulted ceilings to embellish it.
"Location, location, location," say the real-estate agents, and there's the rub. The White House is, by design, inaccessible.
I can say this with authority because for years I had a so-called White House hard pass and could gain entry quite easily. Even with it, my personal belongings and I had to pass through scanners at the visitor gates.
If you don't have a hard pass, you will have a hard time. You need an escort, and that must be arranged. Things lighten up a bit for events such as the Christmas parties. If you want to be there in time to have your picture taken shaking hands with the president, get there extra early.
The White House gates are a nightmare, and sometimes precleared names are lost mysteriously in the computer system. This happened to a reporter who worked for me who was invited to a press picnic held on the South Lawn during the Clinton administration. The poor fellow had to stand outside the gate like an untouchable while the rest of us got through.
Eventually, he got in. President Bill Clinton — who had an extraordinary ability to find a discomforted person in any situation and make them feel good — put his arm around the reporter in no time. When you have had difficulty getting into the White House, you mostly just feel rejected. The Secret Service makes a person waiting to be cleared for entry at the gates feel inferior or implies that they are up to no good.
My wife, Linda Gasparello, a fully accredited White House correspondent at the time, used her influence to get the crooner Vic Damone, who had an appointment, past the implacably suspicious gatekeepers. He was nearly in tears of frustration from the way he was treated.
The envisioned shimmering excess at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue won't lend itself to being used for charity events or non-White House galas. It will be just too difficult to get in.
Washington isn't short on big, fancy spaces. I believe that the biggest (besides armories and hangars) is the ballroom of the Walter E. Washington Convention Center. That room can seat over 2,700 and hold 4,600 for non-dinner events.
The Trump Ballroom would accommodate 1,000, we are told, presumably seated. So, it is too small for one kind of event and possibly too big for other events that might take place at the White House, if the attendees can get through the security barriers.
Washington isn't London or Paris. It isn't overstocked with grandiose ceremonial structures built by kings and emperors for their own aggrandizement. Instead, it has fun spaces that are pressed into service for formal affairs, such as the Spy Museum, the National Building Museum or the Air and Space Museum, in keeping with a nation that prizes its citizens over its leaders.
It seems to me that it is wholly appropriate for the United States to show national humbleness, as befits a country that threw off a king and his grandeur 250 years ago.
I have always thought that the tents put up for state dinners at the White House had a particularly American charm — a modest reproach to the world of dictators and fame-seekers, an unsaid rebuke to ostentation.
On X: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King, based in Rhode Island, is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS, and an international energy-sector consultant.
Llewellyn King: Our dichotomous America
One year after the 2016 election that delivered Donald Trump his first term, American Facebook users on the right and left shared very few common interests.
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
We live in an age of dichotomy in America.
The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.
We have more means of communication, but there is a pandemic of loneliness.
We have unprecedented access to information, but we seem to know less, from civics to the history of the country.
We are beginning to see artificial intelligence displacing white-collar workers in many sectors, but there is a crying shortage of skilled workers, including welders, electricians, pipe fitters and ironworkers.
If your skill involves your hands, you are safe for now.
New data centers, hotels and mixed-use structures, factories and power plants are being delayed because of worker shortages. But the government is expelling undocumented immigrants, hundreds of thousands who have skills.
Thoughts about dichotomy came to me when Adam Clayton Powell III and I were interviewing Hedrick Smith, a journalist in full: a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and editor, an Emmy Award-winning producer/correspondent and a bestselling author.
We were talking with Smith on White House Chronicle, the weekly news and public affairs program on PBS for which I serve as executive producer and co-host.
The two dichotomies that struck me were Smith's explanation of the decline of the middle class as the richest few rise, and how Congress has drifted into operating more like the British Parliament with party-line votes than the body envisaged by The Founders.
Echoing Benjamin Disraeli, the great British prime minister who said in 1845 that Britain had become “two nations," rich and poor, Smith said: “Since 1980, a wedge has been driven. We have become two Americas economically."
On the chronic dysfunction in Congress, Smith said: “When I came to Washington in 1962, to work for The New York Times, budgets got passed routinely. Congress passed 13 appropriations bills for different parts of the government. It happened every year."
This routine congressional action happened because there were compromises, he said, noting, “There were 70 Republicans who voted for Medicare along with 170 Democrats. (There was) compromise on the national highway system, sending a man to the moon in competition with the Russians. Compromise on a whole slew of things was absolutely common."
Smith remembered those days in Washington of order, bipartisanship and division over policy, not party. There were Southern Democrats and Northern Republicans, and Congress divided that way, but not routinely by party line.
He said, “There were Gypsy Moth Republicans who voted with Democratic presidents and Boll Weevil Democrats who voted with Republican presidents."
In fact, Smith said, there wasn't a single party-line vote on any major issue in Congress from 1945 to 1993.
“The Founding Fathers would never have imagined that we would have what the British call ‘party government.' Our system is constructed to require compromise, while we now have a political system that is gelled in bipartisanship."
On the dichotomy between the rich and the poor, Smith said that in the period from World War II up until 1980, the American middle class was experiencing a rise in its standard of living roughly keeping up with what was happening to the rich.
But since 1980, he said, “The upper 1 percent, and even the top 10 percent, have been soaring and the rest of the country has fallen off the cliff."
This dichotomy, according to Smith, has had huge political consequences.
In 2016, he said, Donald Trump ran for president as an advocate of the working class against the establishment Republicans: “He had 15 Republican (contenders) who were pro-business; they were pro-suburban Republicans who were well-educated, well-off. Trump had run on the other side, trying to grab the people who were aggrieved and left out by globalization. But we forget that," he said.
Smith went on to say that Bernie Sanders, the Democratic presidential candidate in 2016, did the same thing: “He was a 70-year-old, white-haired socialist who came from Vermont, with its three electoral votes, but he ran against the establishment candidate, Hillary Clinton ... and he damn near took the nomination away from her."
Smith said that result showed “there was rebellion against the establishment."
That rebellion, in my mind, has resulted in a worsening separation between and within the parties. They aren't making compromises which, as in times past, would offer a way forward.
A final dichotomy: The United States is the richest country the world has ever seen, and the national debt has just reached $38 trillion dollars.
On X: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King, based in Rhode Island, is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS and an international energy-sector consultant.
Llewellyn King: Fear floods America under Trump
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
There is enough fear to go around.
There is fear of the indescribable horror when the ICE men and women, their faces hidden by masks, grab a suspected illegal immigrant. Their grab could come at the person's home or place of work, while picking up a child from school or standing in the hallway of a courthouse.
That person knows fear as never before. That person's life, for practical purposes, may be over: loved ones left behind, hope shredded. He or she may be shipped to a place where they won't be able to survive.
Fear is there because, maybe decades ago, they sought a better life and voted for it with their feet.
There is no time to argue, no time to ask why, no time to say goodbye. No time to prove your innocence or your U.S. citizenship. It is raw fear — the fear that secret police have always used.
There is the fear of those who work in government — once one of the securest jobs in the country — that they will be fired because their legitimate work in another administration is an affront to this one.
This hammer has come down in the Department of Justice, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon. The crime: supposedly being on the wrong side of history.
There is fear in the universities. Once a babel of free, even outrageous speech, they are cowed.
Mighty Harvard, one of the shiniest stars in the education firmament, is dulled, and other universities fear they will be next. Everywhere academics worry that what they say in their classrooms might be reported as inappropriate — their careers ended.
There is fear in the law firms. A new concept is at work: an advocate is somehow guilty because of whom they defended. This violates the whole underpinning of law and advocacy, dating back to Mesopotamia, ancient Greece and Rome, now asunder in the United States.
Media are afraid. Disney, CBS and The Washington Post have bent before the fear of retribution, the fear that other aspects of their business will pay the price for freedom of speech. Journalists fear the First Amendment is abridged and won't protect them.
There is fear, albeit of a lower order, across corporate America as it has become apparent that the government can reach deep down into almost any company, canceling contracts, withholding loan guarantees and, worse, ordering an “investigation." That is a punishment that costs untold dollars and shatters good names, even if no prosecution follows.
Elected officeholders have reason to feel fear. President Trump has suggested that Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson should be in jail. Is his compliant Department of Justice working on that? Fear is unleashed for the elected. Doing your job is no protection.
If you have expressed an opinion that could be judged as subversive, the state could come after you. Suppose you walk in a demonstration, exercising your constitutional right to assemble and petition? Suppose you wrote something on social media, so easily traced with AI, which is now out of step with the times? Satire? Opinion? News? Facts that are out of fashion? If you have posted, be afraid.
If you take a flight these days, the Transportation Security Administration will ask you to look into a camera. Then government has a fresh picture of you in its active system, ready for facial recognition software to identify you. It will ID you if you should be walking in a demonstration or just be near one. Your own picture, so easily captured by modern technology, can convict you.
What is the purpose of that picture? It has no bearing on the flight you are about to take. The same thing is true when you reenter the country from abroad. Smile for Big Brother.
Surveillance is a favored tool of the authoritarian state. I have seen it at work in Cuba, in apartheid South Africa and in the Soviet Union. Successive U.S. administrations have been quick to criticize the increasing use of technology for surveillance in China. No more.
Troops are being ordered into cities where the locals don't want them. They come under the promiscuous use of the Insurrection Act of 1807.
Does America fear insurrection? No, but there is fear of federal troops in our cities.
On X: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS, and an international energy consultant. He’s based in Rhode Island.
Llewellyn King: AI could be apocalyptic for jobs
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
The Big One is coming, and it isn't an earthquake in California or a hurricane in the Atlantic. It is the imminent upending of so many of the world's norms by artificial intelligence, for good and for ill.
Jobs are being swept away by AI not in the distant future, but right now. A recent Stanford University study found that entry-level jobs for workers between 22 and 25 years old have dropped by 13 percent since the widespread adoption of AI.
Another negative impact of AI: The data centers that support AI are replacing farmland at a rapid rate. The world is being overrun with huge concrete boxes, Brutalist in their size and visual impact.
Meta Platforms (of which Facebook is part) plans to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to build several massive AI data centers; the first called Prometheus and the second Hyperion.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a post on his Threads social media platform: “We're building multiple more titan clusters as well. Just one of these covers a significant part of the footprint of Manhattan.”
Data centers are voracious in their consumption of electricity and are blamed for sending power bills soaring across the country.
But AI has had a positive impact on the quality of medicine, improving accuracy, consistency and efficacy, according to the National Institutes of Health.
Predictive medicine is on a roll: Alzheimer's Disease and some cancers, for example, can be predicted accurately. That raises the question: Do you want to know when you will lose your mind or get cancer?
Where AI is without downside is medical “exaptation.” That happens when a drug or therapy developed for one disease is found to be effective with another, opening up a field of possibilities.
AI also offers the chance of shortening clinical trials for new drugs from years to a few months. Side effects and downsides can be mapped instantly.
Life expectancy is predicted to increase substantially because of AI. Omar Hatamleh, an AI expert and author, told me, “A child born today can expect to live to 120.”
Likewise, predictive maintenance with AI is already useful in forecasting the failure of industrial plants, power station components and bridges.
Oh, and productivity will increase across the board where AI and AI agents — the AI tools developed for special purposes — are at work.
The trouble is AI will be doing the work that heretofore people have done.
Pick a field and speculate on the job losses there. This may be fun to do as a parlor game, but it is deeply distressing when you realize that it could happen in the very near future — such as in the next year.
Most are low-skilled white-collar jobs, such as those in call centers, or in medical offices checking insurance claims, or in an accounting firm doing bookkeeping. In short, if you are a paper pusher, you will be pushed out.
Look a little further — maybe 10 years — and Uber, which has invested heavily in autonomous vehicles, will have decided that they are ready for general deployment. Bye-bye Uber driver, hello driverless car.
Taxis and truck drivers might well be the next to get to their career-end destinations quicker than they expected.
By the way, autonomous vehicles ought to have fewer accidents than cars with drivers do, so the insurance industry will take a hit and lots of workers there will get the heave-ho. And collision repairs may be nearly outdated.
These aren't speculation; they are real possibilities in the near future. Yet the political world has been arguing about other things.
As far as I am aware, when the leadership of the U.S. military gathered at the Marine Corp Base Quantico in Virginia on Sept. 30 to get a pep talk on shaving, losing weight and gender superiority, they didn't hear about how AI is transforming war and what measures should be taken. Or whether there will be work for those who leave the military.
The Big One is coming, and the politicians are worrying about yesterday's issues. That is like worrying about your next guest list when an uninvited guest, a tsunami of historic proportions, is coming ashore.
On X: @llewellynking2
Bluesky: @llewellynking.bsky.social
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. He’s based in Rhode Island.
Llewellyn King: Trump policies are threatening U.S. leadership of world science
Entrance to the MIT Museum, in Cambridge Mass. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, founded in 1861, has played a major role in advancing science and engineering.
S5A-0043 photo
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
Pull up the drawbridge, flood the moat and drop the portcullis. That, it would seem, is the science and research policy of the United States circa 2025.
The problem with a siege policy is that eventually the inhabitants in the castle will starve.
Current actions across the board suggest that starvation may become the fate of American global scientific leadership. Leadership which has dazzled the world for more than a century. Leadership that has benefited not just Americans but all of humanity with inventions ranging from communications to transportation, to medicine, to entertainment.
An American president might have gone to the United Nations and said, “As we the people of America have given so much to the world, from disease suppression to the wonder of the Internet, we should expect understanding when we ask of you what is very little.”
This imaginary president might have added, “The United Nations is a body of diverse people, and we are a nation of diverse people.
“We have been a magnet for the talent of the world from the creation of this nation.
“We are also a sharing nation. We have shared with the world financially and technologically. Above all, we have shared our passion for democracy, our respect for the individual and his or her human rights.
“At the center of our ability to be munificent is our scientific muscle.”
This president might also have wanted to dwell on how immigrant talent has melded with native genius to propel and keep America at the zenith of human achievement -- and keep it there for so long, envied, admired and imitated.
He might have mentioned how a surge of immigrants from Hitler’s Germany and elsewhere in Europe gave us movie dominance that has lasted nearly 100 years. He might have highlighted the energy that immigrants bring with them; their striving is a powerful dynamic.
He might have said that striving has shaped the American ethos and was behind Romania-born Nikola Tesla, South Africa-born Elon Musk or India-born and China-born engineers who are propelling the United States leadership in artificial intelligence. The genius behind Nvidia? Taiwan-born Jensen Huang.
I have been reporting on AI for about a decade — well before ChatGPT exploded on the scene on Nov. 30, 2022. All I can tell you is wherever I have gone, from MIT to NASA, engineers from all over the world are all over the science of AI.
The story is simple: Talent will out, and talent will find its way to America.
At least that was the story. Now the Trump administration, with its determination to exclude the foreign-born -- to go after foreign students in U.S. universities and to make employers pay $100,000 for a new H-1B visa -- is to guarantee that talent will go somewhere else, maybe Britain, France, Germany or China and India. Where the talent goes, so goes the future.
So goes America’s dominant scientific leadership.
At a meeting at an AI startup in New York, all the participants were recent immigrants, and we fell to discussing why so much talent came to the United States. The collective answer was freedom, mobility and reverence for research.
That was a year ago. I doubt the answers would be as enthusiastic and volubly pro-American today.
The British Empire was built on technological dominance, from the marine chronometer to the rifled gun barrel to steam technology.
America’s global leadership has been built, along with its wealth, on technology, from Ford’s production line to DuPont’s chemicals.
Technology needs funding, talent and passion (the striving factor). We have led the world with those for decades. Now that is in the balance.
President Trump could make America even greater: beat cancer, go to Mars, and harness AI for human good.
Those would be a great start. To do it, fund research and attract talent. Keep the castle of America open.
On X: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS, and an international enerygy consultant. He’s based in Rhode Island.
Llewellyn King: The agony of statelessness
Stateless children at at the Schauenstein, Germany, displaced-persons camp in about 1946. There were millions of displaced and stateless people in Europe as World War II ended.
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
I have only known one stateless person. You don't get a medal for it or wear a lapel pin.
The stateless are the hapless who live in the shadows, in fear.
They don't know where the next misadventure will come from: It could be deportation, imprisonment or an enslavement of the kind the late Johnny Prokov suffered as a shipboard stowaway for seven years.
His story ended well, but few do.
When I knew Johnny, he was a revered bartender at the National Press Club in Washington. By then, he had American citizenship, was married and lived a normal life.
It hadn't always been that way. He told me that he had come from Dalmatia, when that area was so poor people took their clothes to a specialist who would kill the lice in the seams with a little wooden mallet, which wouldn't damage the cloth.
To escape that extreme poverty, Prokov became a stowaway on a ship.
So began his seven-year odyssey of exploitation and fear of violence. The captains took advantage of the free labor and total servitude of the stowaways.
Eventually, Prokov jumped ship in Mexico. He made his way to the United States, where a life worth living was available.
I don't know the details of how he became a citizen, but he dreamed the American dream — and it came true for him.
An odd legacy of his years at sea was that Prokov had become a brilliant chess player. He would often have as many as a dozen chess games going along the bar in the National Press Club. He always won. He had had time to practice.
The United Nations says there are 4 million stateless people in the world, but that is a massive undercount. Many of those who are stateless are refugees and have no idea if they are entitled to claim citizenship of the countries they are desperate to escape from. Citizenship in Gaza?
Now the Trump administration wants to add to the number of stateless people by denying birthright citizenship to children born of illegal immigrants in the United States.
It wants to deny people — who are in all ways Americans — their constitutional right of citizenship. Their lives will be lived on a lower rung than their friends and contemporaries. They will be denied passports, maybe education, possibly medical care, and the ability to emigrate to any country that otherwise might have received them.
Instead, they will live their lives in the shadows, children of a lesser God, probably destined to have children of their own who might also be deemed noncitizens. They didn't choose the womb that bore them, nor did they sanction the actions of their parents.
The world is awash in refugees fleeing war, crime and violence, and environmental collapse. Those desperate people will seek refuge in countries which can't absorb them and will take strong actions to keep them out, as have the United States and, increasingly, countries in Europe.
There is a point, particularly in Europe, where the culture, including established religion, is threatened by different cultures and clashing religions.
But when it comes to children born in America to mothers who live in America, why mint a new class of stateless people, condemned to a second-class life here, or deport them to some country, such as Rwanda or Uganda, where its own people are already living in abject poverty?
All immigrants can't be accommodated, but the cruelty that now passes for policy is hurtful to those who have worked hard and dared to seek a better life for themselves and their children.
It is bad enough that millions of people are seeking somewhere to live and perchance a better life, due to war or crime or drought or political follies.
To extend the numbers by denying citizenship to the children of parents who live and work here isn't good policy. It is also unconstitutional.
If the Supreme Court rules in favor of the administration, it will add social instability of haunting proportions.
Children are proud of their native lands. What will the new second class be proud of — the home that denied them?
On X: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King, based in Rhode Island, is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS, and an international energy-sector consultant.
Llewellyn King: Amidst immigration crisis, from special relationship to odd couple
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
Through two world wars, it has been the special relationship: the linkage between the United States and Britain. A linkage forged in a common language, a common culture, a common history, and a common aspiration to peace and prosperity.
The relationship, always strong, was especially burnished by the friendship of President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
Now it looks as though the special relationship has morphed into the odd couple.
Britain, it can be argued, went off the rails in 2016 when, by a narrow majority, it voted to pull out of the European Union.
With a negative growth rate, and few prospects of an economic spurt, Britons can now ponder the high price of chauvinism and the vague comfort of untrammeled sovereignty. Americans could ponder that, too, in the decades ahead.
Will tariffs -- which have already driven China, Russia and India into a kind of who-needs-America bloc -- be the United States’ equivalent of Brexit? An economic idea which doesn’t work but has emotional appeal. An idea that is isolating, confining and antagonizing.
A common thread in the national dialogues is immigration.
Britain is swamped. It is dealing with an invasion of migrants that has changed and continues to change the country.
In 2023, according to the U.K.’s Office for National Statistics, 1.326 million migrants moved to Britain; last year, the number was 948,000. There has been a steady flow of migrants over the past 50 years, but it has increased dramatically due to wars around the globe.
Among European countries, Britain, to its cost, has had the best record for assimilating new arrivals. It is a migrant heaven, but that is changing with immigrants being blamed for a rash of domestic problems, from housing shortages to vastly increased crime.
In the 1960s, Britain had very little violent crime and street crime was slight. Now crime of all kinds -- especially using knives -- is rampant, and British cities rival those across America -- although crime seems to be declining in America, while it is rising in Britain.
Britain has a would-be Donald Trump: Nigel Farage, leader of the Reform UK party, which is immigrant-hostile and seeks to return Britain to the country it was before migrants started crossing the English Channel, often in small boats.
Farage has been feted by conservatives in Congress, where he has been railing against the draconian British hate-speech laws, which he sees as woke in overdrive.
Britain has been averaging 30 arrests a day for hate speech and related hate crimes, few of which result in convictions.
Two recent events highlight the severity of these laws. Lucy Connolly, the 42-year-old wife of a conservative local politician, took issue with the practice of housing immigrants in hotels; she said the hotels should be burned down. Connolly was sentenced to 31 months in jail. She has been released, after serving 40 percent of her sentence.
A very successful Irish comedy writer for British television, Graham Linehan, posted attacks on transgender women on X. On Sept. 1, after a flight from Arizona, he was met by five-armed policemen and arrested at London’s Heathrow Airport.
Britain’s hate laws, which are among the most severe in the world, run counter to a long tradition of free speech, dating back to the Magna Carta, in 1215. An attempt to get more social justice has resulted in less justice and abridged the right to speak out. A crisis in a country without a formal constitution.
On Sept. 17, President Trump is due to begin a state visit to Britain. Fireworks are expected. Trump’s British supporters, despite Farage and his hard-right party, are still few and public antipathy is strong.
Trump, for his part, will seek to make his visit a kind of triumphal event, gilded with overnight posts on Truth Social on how Britain should emulate him.
The British press will be ready with vituperative rebukes; hate speech be damned.
It is unlikely that the Labor government, whose membership is as diverse and divided as that of the Democratic Party, will find anything to call hate speech about attacks on Trump. A good dust-up will be enjoyed by all.
Isolated, the odd couple have each other.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island.
Llewellyn King: Will AI launch a shadow government that can catch Trump, et al., trying to cook the books?
Read about a meeting of the minds at a summer workshop at Dartmouth College in 1956 that helped launch artificial intelligence as a discipline and gave it a name.
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
This Time It’s Different is the title of a book by Omar Hatamleh on the impact of artificial intelligence on everything.
By this Hatamleh, who is NASA Goddard Space Flight Center’s chief artificial intelligence officer, means that we shouldn’t look to previous technological revolutions to understand the scope and the totality of the AI revolution. It is, he believes, bigger and more transformative than anything that has yet happened.
He says AI is exponential and human thinking is linear. I think that means we can’t get our minds around it.
Jeffrey Cole, director of the Center For the Digital Future at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, echoes Hatamleh.
Cole believes that AI will be as impactful as the printing press, the internet and COVID-19. He also believes 2027 will be a seminal year: a year in which AI will batter the workforce, particularly white-collar workers.
For journalists, AI presents two challenges: jobs lost to AI writing and editing, and the loss of truth. How can we identify AI-generated misinformation? The New York Times said simply: We can’t.
But I am more optimistic.
I have been reporting on AI since well before ChatGPT launched in November 2022. Eventually, I think AI will be able to control itself, to red flag its own excesses and those who are abusing it with fake information.
I base this rather outlandish conclusion on the idea that AI has a near-human dimension which it gets from absorbing all published human knowledge and that knowledge is full of discipline, morals and strictures. Surely, these are also absorbed in the neural networks.
I have tested this concept on AI savants across the spectrum for several years. They all had the same response: It is a great question.
Besides its trumpeted use in advancing medicine at warp speed, AI could become more useful in providing truth where it has been concealed by political skullduggery or phony research.
Consider the general apprehension that President Trump may order the Bureau of Labor Statistics to cook the books.
Well, aficionados in the world of national security and AI tell me that AI could easily scour all available data on employment, job vacancies and inflation and presto: reliable numbers. The key, USC’s Cole emphasizes, is inputting complete prompts.
In other words, AI could check the data put out by the government. Which leads to the possibility of a kind of AI shadow government, revealing falsehoods and correcting speculation.
If AI poses a huge possibility for misinformation, it also must have within it the ability to verify truth, to set the record straight, to be a gargantuan fact checker.
A truth central for the government, immune to insults, out of the reach of the FBI, ICE or the Justice Department —and, above all, a truth-speaking force that won’t be primaried.
The idea of shadow government isn’t confined to what might be done by AI, but is already taking shape where DOGEing has left missions shattered, people distraught and sometimes an agency unable to perform. So, networks of resolute civil servants inside and outside government are working to preserve data, hide critical discoveries and to keep vital research alive. This kind of shadow activity is taking place at the Agriculture, Commerce, Energy and Defense departments, the National Institutes of Health and those who interface with them in the research community.
In the wider world, job loss to AI, or if you want to be optimistic, job adjustment has already begun. It will accelerate but can be absorbed once we recognize the need to reshape the workforce. Is it time to pick a new career or at least think about it?
The political class, all of it, is out to lunch. Instead of wrangling about social issues, it should be looking to the future, a future which has a new force, much as automation was a force to be accommodated, this revolution can’t be legislated or regulated into submission, but it can be managed and prepared for. Like all great changes, it is redolent with possibility and fear.
Llewellyn King, based in Rhode Island, is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com.
Llewellyn King: Sorry, Trump, solar and wind power will keep growing in U.S.; utilities urgently need them
BlueWave's 5.74 MW DC, 4 MW community solar project in Orrington, Maine. It’s one of the largest such facilities in New England.
—Courtesy: BlueWave
The small wind farm off Block Island.
Vineyard Wind 1 is partly operating.
This commentary was originally published in Forbes.
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
President Trump reiterated his hostility to wind generation when he recently arrived in Scotland for what was ostensibly a private visit. “Stop the windmills,” he said.
But the world isn’t stopping its windmill development and neither is the United States, although it has become more difficult and has put U.S. electric utilities in an awkward position: It is a love that dare not speak its name, one might say.
Utilities love that wind and solar can provide inexpensive electricity, offsetting the high expense of battery storage.
It is believed that Trump’s well-documented animus to wind turbines is rooted in his golf resort in Balmedie, near Aberdeen, Scotland. In 2013, Trump attempted to prevent the construction of a small offshore wind farm — just 11 turbines — roughly 2.2 miles from his Trump International Golf Links, but was ultimately unsuccessful. He argued that the wind farm would spoil views from his golf course and hurt tourism in the area.
Trump seemingly didn’t just take against the local authorities, but against wind in general and offshore wind in particular.
Yet fair winds are blowing in the world for renewables.
Francesco La Camera, director general of the International Renewable Energy Agency, an official United Nations observer, told me that in 2024, an astounding 92 percent of new global generation was from wind and solar, with solar leading wind in new generation. We spoke recently when La Camera was in New York.
My informal survey of U.S. utilities reveals they are pleased with the Trump administration’s efforts to simplify licensing and its push to natural gas, but they are also keen advocates of wind and solar.
Simply, wind is cheap and as battery storage improves, so does its usefulness. Likewise, solar. However, without the tax advantages that were in President Joe Biden’s signature climate bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, the numbers will change, but not enough to rule out renewables, the utilities tell me.
China leads the world in installed wind capacity of 561 gigawatts, followed by the United States with less than half that at 154 GW. The same goes for solar installations: China had 887 GW of solar capacity in 2024 and the United States had 239 GW.
China is also the largest manufacturer of electric vehicles. This gives it market advantage globally and environmental bragging rights, even though it is still building coal-fired plants.
While utilities applaud Trump’s easing of restrictions, which might speed the use of fossil fuels, they aren’t enthusiastic about installing new coal plants or encouraging new coal mines to open. Both, they believe, would become stranded assets.
Utilities and their trade associations have been slow to criticize the administration’s hostility to wind and solar, but they have been publicly cheering gas turbines.
However, gas isn’t an immediate solution to the urgent need for more power: There is a global shortage of gas turbines with waiting lists of five years and longer. So no matter how favorably utilities look on gas, new turbines, unless they are already on hand or have set delivery dates, may not arrive for many years.
Another problem for utilities is those states that have scheduled phasing out fossil fuels in a given number of years. That issue – a clash between federal policy and state law — hasn’t been settled.
In this environment, utilities are either biding their time or cautiously seeking alternatives.
For example, facing a virtual ban on new offshore wind farms, veteran journalist Robert Whitcomb wrote in his New England Diary that the New England utilities are looking to wind power from Canada, delivered by undersea cable. Whitcomb co-wrote (with Wendy Williams) a book, Cape Wind: Money, Celebrity, Energy, Class, Politics and the Battle for Our Energy Future, about offshore wind, published in 2007.
New England is starved of gas as there isn’t enough pipeline capacity to bring in more, so even if gas turbines were readily available, they wouldn’t be an option. New pipelines take financing, licensing in many jurisdictions, and face public hostility.
Emily Fisher, a former general counsel for the Edison Electric Institute, told me, “Five years is just a blink of an eye in utility planning.”
On July 7, Trump signed an executive order which states: “For too long the Federal Government has forced American taxpayers to subsidize expensive and unreliable sources like wind and solar.
“The proliferation of these projects displaces affordable, reliable, dispatchable domestic energy resources, compromises our electric grid, and denigrates the beauty of our Nation’s natural landscape.”
The U.S. Energy Information Administration puts electricity consumption growth at 2 percent nationwide. In parts of the nation, as in some Texas cities, it is 3 percent.
On X: @llewellynking2
Bluesky: @llewellynking.bsky.social
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS, and an international energy-sector consultant. He’s based in Rhode Island
Llewellyn King: A way forward for PBS from genteel poverty
Studios of WGBH-TV, on Guest Street in Boston (with “digital mural" LED screen). The now PBS affiliate, which opened in 1955, is one of the oldest and best endowed public-television stations, and the site of much programing used by PBS.
The station's call letters refer to Great Blue Hill, in Milton, the highest point in the inner Greater Boston area, at 635 feet. The top of the hill served as the original location of WGBH-TV's transmitter facility. The transmitter for WGBH radio, a major NPR affiliate, continues to operate to this day.
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
Over the years, I have often been critical of the Public Broadcasting Service. That in spite of the fact that for 28 years, I have produced and hosted a program, White House Chronicle, which is carried by many PBS stations.
It is an independent program for which I find all the funding and decide its direction, content and staffing.
My argument with PBS — brought to mind by the administration’s canceling of $1.1 billion in funding for it and National Public Radio — is that it is too cautious, that it is consciously or by default lagging rather than leading.
Television needs creativity, change and excitement. Old programs, carefully curated travel, and cooking shows don’t really don’t cut it. News and public-affairs shows are not enough. Cable does them 24/7.
My co-host on White House Chronicle, Adam Clayton Powell III, a savant of public broadcasting, having held executive positions at NPR and PBS, assures us that they aren’t going away, although some stations will fail.
I believe that PBS has often been too careful because of the money, which has been dribbled out by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Some conservatives have been after PBS since its launch.
It is reasonable to look to the British Broadcasting Corp. when discussing PBS because the BBC is the source of so much of the programming that is carried by PBS — although not all the British programming is from the BBC. Two of the most successful imports were from the U.K. — Upstairs, Downstairs, which aired in the 1970s, and, more recently, Downton Abbey — were developed by British commercial television, not by the BBC.
Even so, the BBC is a force that has played a major role in shaping state broadcasters in many countries. At its best, it is formidable in news, in drama and in creativity. It is also said to be left-of-center and woke. Both of these are things PBS is accused of, but I have never found bias in the news products. What I have found is a kind of genteel poverty.
I once asked the head of a major PBS station why it didn’t do more original American drama. “It would cost too much,” was the response in a flash. Yet, there are local theater companies aplenty who would love to craft something for PBS if they were invited.
Sometimes the idea is more important than the money. Get that right, and PBS will have something it can sell around the world. It should be an on-ramp for talent.
Maybe, stirred by its newly induced poverty, PBS can lead the television world into a new business paradigm.
First, of course, take advertising and don’t be coy about it, as Masterpiece Theater is about Viking cruises. Take the advertising.
Second, see what is happening across the television firmament, where more TV is now viewed on YouTube than on TV sets. This happens at a time of the viewer’s choosing. PBS needs to jump on this and create a pay-per-view paradigm so that when it has a big show, as it did with Ken Burns’ Civil War years ago, it can prosper, as well as selling the show around the globe.
PBS is a confederation of stations, each one independent but tethered to PBS in Washington, which provides what is known as the hard feed. These are programs pre-approved for central distribution by PBS. Independent producers aren’t acknowledged on this, nor do they get listed as being PBS programs.
I remember how I had heard that WHUT, Howard University’s television station, was open to new programs. So I took a pilot over to WHUT. One young woman said “yes” and a program was born.
PBS needs to open its doors to new talent, new shows and uses of new technologies. Leading the pack in broadcasting innovation would be the best revenge. New money will follow.
NPR is a different story. Its product is successful. But it needs to be open to new funding, including much better acknowledged corporate funding. If Google or some other cash-laden entity wants to underwrite a day of broadcasting, let it. Don’t give it the editor’s chair, just a seat in accounting.
On X: @llewellynking2
Bluesky: @llewellynking.bsky.social
Subscribe to Llewellyn King's File on Substack
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. He’s based in Rhode Island.
xxx
Llewellyn King: The joy of friendship; a very dark Fourth; ‘customer service’ oxymoron; AI in medicine
Masked people wearing this badge made it a less than Glorious Fourth. It’s our new secret police.
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
I treasure the friends who share their friends. One of those friends, Virginia “Ginny” Hamill, has died.
I met Ginny at The Washington Post in 1969, and we became forever-friends.
Ginny had an admirable ascent from a teleprinter operator to an editor in The Washington Post/Los Angeles Times News Service. She was promoted again to the enviable job as the editor of the news service in London, where she bloomed — and met her future husband, John McCaughey.
Ginny brought wealth into my life — and later to that of my wife, Linda Gasparello — through the introductions to her friends from that London period. They included David Fishlock, science editor of the Financial Times; Roy Hodson, also of the FT; Deborah Waroff, an American journalist; and Guy Hawtin, a rakish newspaperman on his way to the New York Post.
They constituted what I called “The Set.” In London, New York and Washington, we worked at the journalism trade on many projects from newsletters to conferences and broadcasts.
We also partied; it went with the territory.
I once wrote to Ginny and told her how instrumental she had been in all our lives through sharing her friends. I am glad I didn’t wait until obituary time to thank her for her generosity in friend-sharing.
******
I think that for many, myself among them, it was a somber July 4. There are dark clouds crossing America’s sun. There are things aplenty going on that seem at odds with the American ideal, and the America we have known.
To me, the most egregious excess of the present is the way masked agents of the state grab men, women and children and deport them without due process, without observance of a cornerstone of law: habeas corpus. None are given a chance to show their legality, call family or, if they have one, a lawyer.
This war against the defenseless is wanton and cruel.
The advocates of this activity, this snatch-and-deport policy, say, and have said it to me, “What do these people not understand about ‘illegal’?”
I say to these advocates, “What don’t you understand about want, need, fear, family, marriage, children and hope?”
The repression many fled from has reentered their luckless lives: terror at the hands of masked enforcers.
I have always advocated for controlled immigration. But the fact that it has been poorly managed shouldn’t be corrected post facto, often years after the offense of seeking a better life and without the consideration of contributions to society.
Meanwhile, the media remain under attack, the universities are being coerced, and the courts are diminished.
America has always had blots on its history, but it has also stood for justice, for the rule of law, for freedom of the press, freedom of speech. Violations of these values dimmed the Fourth.
America deserves better: Think of the Constitution, one of the all-time great documents of history, a straight-line descendant of the Magna Carta of 1215. That was when the noblemen of England told King John, “Cut it out!”
A few noblemen in Washington wouldn’t go amiss.
I was fortunate on my syndicated television show, White House Chronicle, along with my co-host, Adam Clayton Powell III, to recently interview Harvey Castro, an emergency room doctor. Castro, from a base in Dallas, has seized on artificial intelligence as the next frontier in health care.
He has written several books and given TEDx talks on the future of AI-driven health care. I have talked to several doctors in this field, but never one who sees the application of AI in as many ways from diagnosing ailments through a patient's speech, to having an AI -controlled robot assist a nurse to gently transfer a patient from a gurney to a bed.
A man with infectious ebullience, Castro says his frustration in emergency rooms was that he got there too late: after a heart attack, stroke or seizure. He expects AI to change that through predictive medicine and early treatment.
His work has caught the attention of the government of Singapore, and he is advising them on how to build AI into their medical system.
******
Like everyone else, I spend a lot of time in frustration-agony on the phone when I need to talk to a bank or insurance company and many other firms that have “customer service.” That phrase might loosely be translated as “Get rid of the suckers!”
I don’t know whether the arrival of AI agents will hugely improve customer service, but maybe you can banter with them, get them to deride their masters, even to tell you stuff about the president of the bank.
It might be easier talking to an AI agent than talking to someone with a script in another country before they inevitably, but oh, so nicely, tell you to get lost, as happened to me recently.
You could enjoy a little hallucinatory fun with a virtual comedic friend, before it tells you to have a nice day, and hangs up.
On X: @llewellynking2
Bluesky: @llewellynking.bsky.social
Subscribe to Llewellyn King's File on Substack
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. He’s based in Rhode Island.
Llewellyn King: Low-lying wind turbines could be revolutionary
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
Jimmy Dean, the country musician, actor and entrepreneur, famously said: “I can’t change the direction of the wind, but I can adjust my sails to always reach my destination.”
A new wind turbine from a California startup, Wind Harvest, takes Dean’s maxim to heart and applies it to windpower generation. It goes after untapped, abundant wind.
Wind Harvest is bringing to market a possibly revolutionary but well-tested vertical axis wind turbine (VAWT) that operates on ungathered wind resources near the ground, thriving in turbulence and shifting wind directions.
The founders and investors – many of them recruited through a crowd-funding mechanism — believe that wind near the ground is a great underused resource that can go a long way to helping utilities in the United States and around the world with rising electricity demand.
The Wind Harvest turbines would not be used to replace nor compete with the horizontal axis wind turbines (HAWT), which are the dominant propeller-type turbines seen everywhere. These operate at heights from 200 feet to 500 feet above ground.
Instead, these vertical turbines are at the most 90 feet above the ground and, ideally, can operate beneath large turbines, complementing the tall, horizontal turbines and potentially doubling the output from a wind farm.
The wind disturbance from conventional tall, horizontal turbines is additional wind fuel for vertical turbines sited below.
Studies and modeling from CalTech and other universities predict that the vortices of wind shed by the verticals will draw faster-moving wind from higher altitude into the rotors of the horizontals.
For optimum performance, their machines should be located in pairs just about 3 feet apart and that causes the airflow between the two turbines to accelerate, enhancing electricity production.
Kevin Wolf, CEO and co-founder of Wind Harvest, told me that they used code from the Department of Energy’s Sandia National Laboratory to engineer and evaluate their designs. They believe they have eliminated known weaknesses in vertical turbines and have a durable and easy-to-make design, which they call Wind Harvester 4.0.
This confidence is reflected in the first commercial installation of the Wind Harvest turbines on St. Croix, one of the U.S. Virgin Islands in the Caribbean. Some 100 turbines are being proposed for construction on a peninsula made from dredge spoils. This 5-megawatt project would produce 15,000 megawatt hours of power annually.
All the off-take from this pilot project will go to a local oil refinery for its operations, reducing its propane generation.
Wolf said the Wind Harvester will be modified to withstand Category 5 hurricanes; can be built entirely in the United States of steel and aluminum; and are engineered to last 70-plus years with some refurbishing along the way. Future turbines will avoid dependence on rare earths by using ferrite magnets in the generators.
Recently, there have been various breakthroughs in small wind turbines designed for urban use. But Wind Harvest is squarely aimed at the utility market, at scale. The company has been working solidly to complete the commercialization process and spread VAWTs around the world.
“You don’t have to install them on wind farms, but their highest use should be doubling or more the power yield from those farms with a great wind resource under their tall turbines,” Wolf said.
Horizontal wind turbines, so named because the drive shaft is aligned horizontally to the ground, compared to vertical turbines where the drive shaft and generator are vertically aligned and much closer to the ground, facilitating installation, maintenance and access.
Wolf believes that his engineering team has eliminated the normal concerns associated with VAWTs, like resonance and the problem of the forces of 15 million revolutions per year on the blade-arm connections. The company has been granted two hinge patents and four others. Three more are pending.
Wind turbines have a long history. The famous eggbeater-shaped VAWT was patented by a French engineer, Georges Jean Marie Darrieus, in 1926, but had significant limitations on efficiency and cost-effectiveness. It has always been more of a dream machine than an operational one.
Wind turbines became serious as a concept in the United States as a result of the energy crisis that broke in the fall of 1973. At that time, Sandia began studying windmills and leaned toward vertical designs. But when the National Renewable Energy Laboratory assumed responsibility for renewables, turbine design and engineering moved there; horizontal was the design of choice at the lab.
In pursuing the horizontal turbine, DOE fit in with a world trend that made offshore wind generation possible but not a technology that could use the turbulent wind near the ground.
Now, Wind Harvest believes, the time has come to take advantage of that untouched resource.
Wolf said this can be done without committing to new wind farms. These additions, he said, would have a long-projected life and some other advantages: Birds and bats seem to be more adept at avoiding the three-dimensional, vertical turbines closer to the surface. Agricultural uses can continue between rows of closely spaced VAWTs that can align fields, he added.
Some vertical turbines will use simple, highly durable lattice towers, especially in hurricane-prone areas. But Wolf believes the future will be in wooden, monopole towers that reduce the amount of embodied carbon in their projects.
One way or another, the battle for more electricity to accommodate rising demand is joined close to the ground.
This article was originally published on Forbes.com
On X: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King, based in Rhode Island, is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS, and an international energy-sector consultant.
Llewellyn King: Europeans fear what will happen as Putin asset Trump abandons them
Murderous tyrant and a fan at G20 meeting on June 28, 2019, in Osaka, Japan.
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
Europe is naked and afraid.
That was the message at a recent meeting of the U.K. Section of the Association of European Journalists (AEJ), at which I was an invited speaker.
It preceded a stark warning just over a week later from NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, also speaking in London, who said the danger from Vladimir Putin’s Russia won’t recede even if there is peace in Ukraine.
Rutte said defense spending must increase across Europe and recommended that it should reach 5 percent of GDP. Singling out Britain, he said if the Brits don’t do so, they should learn to speak Russian. He said Russia could overwhelm NATO by 2030.
The British journalists’ session reflected fear of Russia and astonishment at the United States. There was fear that Russia would invade the weaker states and that NATO had been neutered. Fear that the world’s most effective defense alliance, NATO, is no longer operational.
There was astonishment that America had abandoned its longstanding policies of support for Europe and preparedness to keep Russia in check. And there was disillusionment that President Trump would turn away from Ukraine in its war against Russian aggression.
The tone in Europe toward the United States isn’t one simply of anger or sorrow, but anger tinged with sorrow. Europeans see themselves as vulnerable in a way that hasn’t been true since the end of World War II.
They also are shattered by the change in America under Trump; his hostility to Europe, his tariffs and his preparedness to side with Russia. “How can this happen to America?” the British AEJ members asked me.
In many conversations, I found disbelief that America could do this to Europe, and that Trump should lean so far toward Putin. In Europe, where Putin has been an existential threat and where he invaded Ukraine, there is general amazement that Trump seems to crave the approbation of the Russian president.
Speaking to the journalists’ meeting via video from Romania, Edward Lucas, a former senior editor of The Economist, and now a columnist for The Times of London and a senior fellow at the Center for European Policy, said, “Donald Trump has turned the transatlantic relationship on its head. He wants to be friends with Vladimir Putin. We are in a bad mess.”
He said he saw no realistic possibility of a ceasefire in Ukraine in the near future, and he said Trump had made it clear that he was prepared to walk away from trying to bring peace “if it proved too hard.”
Lucas suggested that if European nations continue to back Ukraine after a Russian-dictated peace offer endorsed by America, Trump will punish them. He might do this by withdrawing U.S. assets from Europe, pulling back large numbers of troops from the 80,000 stationed there, and refusing to replace the American supreme commander of Europe.
“Then we will see how defenseless Europe is,” he said.
In Washington, it seems there is little understanding of the true weakness of Europe. No understanding that money alone won’t buy security for Europe.
Europe doesn’t have stand-off capacity, heavy airlift capacity, ultra-sophisticated electronic intelligence or anything approaching a defense infrastructure.
Trump has equated defense simply with money. But in Europe (although 27 of its nations are part of the European Union), there is no cohesive structure in place that could replace the role played by the United States.
Within the EU there are disagreements and there is the spoiler in the case of Hungary. Its pro-Russia ruler, Victor Orban, would like to try to block any concerted European action against Russia. The new right-wing Polish president’s hopes for good relations with Orban are a worry for most EU members.
I have long believed that there are three mutually exclusive views of Europe in the United States.
The first, favored by Trump and his MAGA allies, is that Europe is ripping off America in defense and through non-tariff trade barriers and is awash in expensive socialist systems embracing health, transportation and state nannying.
The second, favored by vacationers, is that Europe is a sort of Disney World for adults, as portrayed on PBS by Rick Steves’s travelogues: Watch the quaint people making wine or drinking beer.
The third is that Europe has been encouraged by successive administrations to accept the U.S. defense umbrella, as that favored America and its concerns, first about Soviet expansion and more recently about expansion under Putin.
Now Europe is alone in defense terms, naked and very afraid -- afraid of Trump’s pivot to Putin.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com, and he’s based in Rhode Island.
Llewellyn King: You must manage rejection
“Pope Makes Love To Lady Mary Wortley Montagu,’’ by William Powell Frith,’’ depicts Lady Mary Wortley Montagu laughingly rejecting poet Alexander Pope's (1688-1744) pleas for courtship.
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
It is school commencement season. So I am taking the liberty of sharing my column of May 10, 2024, which was first published by InsideSources, and later published by newspapers across the country.
As so many commencement addresses haven’t been delivered yet this year, I thought I would share what I would have said to graduates if I had been invited by a college or university to be a speaker.
“The first thing to know is that you are graduating at a propitious time in human history — for example, think of how artificial intelligence is enabling medical breakthroughs.
“A vast world of possibilities awaits you because you are lucky enough to be living in a liberal democracy. It happens to be America, but the same could be true of any of the democratic countries.
“Look at the world, and you will see that the countries with democracy are also prosperous places where individuals can follow their passion. Doubly or triply so in America.
“Despite all the disputes, unfairness and politics, the United States is foremost among places to live and work — where the future is especially tempting. I say this having lived and worked on three continents and traveled to more than 180 countries. Just think of the tens of millions who would live here if they could.
“In a society that is politically and commercially free, as it is in the United States, the limits we encounter are the limits we place on ourselves.
“That is what I want to tell you: Don’t fence yourself in.
“But do work always to keep that freedom, your freedom, especially now.
“Seldom mentioned, but the greatest perverters of careers, stunters of ambition and all-around enfeeblers you will contend with aren’t the government, a foreign power, shortages or market conditions, but how you manage rejection.
“Fear of rejection is, I believe, the great inhibitor. It shapes lives, hinders careers and is ever-present, from young love to scientific creation.
“The creative is always vulnerable to the forces of no, to rejection.
“No matter what you do, at some point you will face rejection — in love, in business, in work or in your own family.
“But if you want to break out of the pack and leave a mark, you must face rejection over and over again.
“Those in the fine and performing arts and writers know rejection; it is an expected but nonetheless painful part of the tradition of their craft. If you plan to be an artist of some sort or a writer, prepare to face the dragon of rejection and fight it all the days of your career.
“All other creative people face rejection. Architects, engineers and scientists face it frequently. Many great entrepreneurial ideas have faced early rejection and near defeat.
“If you want to do something better, differently or disruptively, you will face rejection.
“To deal with this world where so many are ready to say no, you must know who you are. Remember that: Know who you are.
“But you can’t know who you are until you have found out who you are.
“Your view of yourself may change over time, but I adjure you always to judge yourself by your bests, your zeniths. That is who you are. Make past success your default setting in assessing your worth when you go forth to slay the dragons of rejection.
“There are two classes of people you will encounter again and again in your lives. The yes people and the no people.
“Seek out and cherish those who say yes. Anyone can say no. The people who have changed the world, who have made it a better place, are the people who have said, ‘Yes.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘Let’s try.’
“Those are people you need in life, and that is what you should aim to be: a yes person. Think of it historically: Thomas Edison, Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and Steve Jobs were all yes people, undaunted by frequent rejection.
“Try to be open to ideas, to different voices and to contrarian voices. That way, you will not only prosper in what you seek to do, but you will also become someone who, in turn, will help others succeed.
“You enter a world of great opportunities in the arts, sciences and technology but with attendant challenges. The obvious ones are climate, injustice, war and peace.
“Think of yourselves as engineers, working around those who reject you, building for others, and having a lot of fun doing it.
“Avoid being a no person. No is neither a building block for you nor for those who may look to you. Good luck!”
On X: @llewellynking2
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Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS.
Llewellyn King: Trump Regime heavily Uses fear as its most potent Weapon
WARWICK, R.I.
Something new has entered American consciousness: fear of the state.
Not since the Red Scares (the first one followed the Russian Revolution and World War I, and the second followed World War II and the outbreak of the Cold War) has the state taken such an active role in political intervention.
The state under Donald Trump has an especial interest in political speech and action, singling out lawyers and law firms, universities and student activists, and journalists and their employers. It is certain that the undocumented live in fear night and day.
Fear of the state has entered the political process.
Presidents before Trump had their enemies. Nixon was famous for his “list” of mostly journalists. But his political paranoia was always there and it finally brought him down with the Watergate scandal,
Even John Kennedy, who had a soft spot for the Fourth Estate, took umbrage at the New York Herald Tribune and had that newspaper banned for a while from the White House.
Lyndon Johnson played games with and manipulated Congress to reward his allies and punish his enemies. With reporters it was an endless reward-and-punishment game, mostly achieved with information given or withheld.
The Trump administration is relentless in its desire to root out what it sees as state enemies, or those who simply disagree with it. They include the judicial system and all its components: judges, law firms and advocates for those whom it has disapproved of. If an individual lawyer so much as defends an opponent of the administration, that individual will be “investigated” which, in this climate, is a euphemism for persecuted.
If you are investigated, you face the full force of the state and its agencies. If you can find a lawyer of stature to defend you, you will be buried in debt, probably out of work and ruined without the “investigation” turning up any impropriety.
One mighty law firm, Paul, Weiss, faced with losing huge government contracts, bowed to Trump. It was a bad day for judicial independence.
The courts and individual judges are under attack, threatened with impeachment, even as the state seeks to evade their rulings.
Others are under threat and practice law cautiously when contentious matters arise. The price is known: Offend and be punished by loss of government work, by fear of investigation and by public humiliation by derision and accusation.
The boot of the state is poised above the neck of the universities.
If they allow free speech that doesn’t accord with the administration’s definition of that constitutional right, the boot will descend, as it did on Columbia.
Shamefully, to try to salvage $400 million in research funds, Columbia University caved. Speech on that campus is now circumscribed. Worse, the state is likely emboldened by its success.
Linda McMahon, the education secretary, has promised that with or without a Department of Education the administration will go after the universities and what they allow and what they teach, if it is antisemitic, as defined by the state, or if they are practicing diversity, equality and inclusion, a Trump irritant.
One notes that another university, Georgetown, is standing up to the pressure. Bravo!
At the White House, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt has decided to usurp the White House Correspondents’ Association and determine herself who will cover the president in the reporters’ pool -- critical reporting in the Oval Office and on Air Force One.
Traveling with the president is important. That is how a reporter gets to know the chief executive up close and personal. A pool report from a MAGA blogger doesn’t cut it.
Trump has threatened to sue media outlets. If they are small and poor, as most of the new ones are, they can’t withstand the cost of defending themselves.
ABC, which is owned by Disney, caved to Trump even though its employees longed for the case to be settled in court. But corporate interests dictated accommodation with the state.
Accommodate they have and they will. Watch what happens with Trump’s $20 billion lawsuit against CBS’s 60Minutes. The truth is obvious, the result may be a tip of the hat to Trump.
Nowhere is fear more redolent, the state more pernicious and ruthless than in the deportation of immigrants without due process, without charges and without evidence. ICE says you are guilty and you go. Men wearing masks double you over, handcuff you behind your back and take you away, maybe to a prison in El Salvador.
Fear has arrived in America and can be felt in the marbled halls of the giant law firms, in newsrooms and executive offices, all the way to the crying children who see a parent dragged off by men in black, wearing balaclavas, presumably for the purpose of extra intimidation.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS, as well as an international energy-sector consultant and speaker/ His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island.
Llewellyn King: By killing what Stalin and Mao couldn’t, we’re Saying we don’t care about the rest of the world
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
It was a quiet voice in the night in Southern Rhodesia, a radio broadcast. But it let in the world: a world beyond the horizons of my family, and even the demanding British public school-inspired academy I attended.
The broadcast was the BBC Transcription Service. I had to keep the radio on low because it was carried after midnight by the local radio network, which itself was based on the BBC model.
There was only one channel and no television in Southern Rhodesia in the 1950s, so the BBC Transcription Service was very important, especially to me in my teens.
To this day, I recall a scientific program on the frontal lobes of the brain and a dramatization of John Galsworthy’s novel The Man of Property.
I didn’t need to listen to those broadcasts to get information left out by an oppressive government’s censorship. There was none then; it was long before Ian Smith’s premiership. I didn’t have to be afraid of the police at the door because I was listening to the radio.
Behind the Iron Curtain, or in any other oppressed places, say Salazar’s Portugal, listening to the unbridled BBC and its spiritual sister, the Voice of America, required courage as you risked arrest.
But listen they did. First to the BBC in Nazi Germany and its occupied countries, and to VOA, later during World War II and in the countries under Soviet influence or control, and in Mao’s China.
Now this great voice, the Voice of America (so appropriately named in reality and metaphor) has been silenced after 83 years by the Trump administration for no discernible reason. What Stalin and Mao couldn’t silence — with jamming, long prison sentences and ubiquitous policing — President Trump has done with a pen stroke.
What VOA and its services — including Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, Radio Marti and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks — did was to offer high-quality journalism and entertainment uncontaminated by propaganda.
Paradoxically, VOA was free of government messaging because it was financed by the government. An act of law guaranteed that, and its highly professional staff of 900, broadcasting in more than 40 languages, were on guard against propaganda.
Yes, the government paid for it to be free. Consequently, it was practicing a pure broadcasting that might have reached the apex of achievable objectivity.
Commercial broadcasting is not free in that way and is often biased for commercial reasons. Think Fox and MSNBC or the pinnacle from which CNN has fallen.
The BBC, like VOA, is government-funded with a special tax called the “licensing fee.” But because the bulk of its output is domestic, it is constantly berated by politicians, frequently in the House of Commons.
The BBC World Service is financed separately through the UK Foreign Office, but is wholly owned and operated by the BBC, thus keeping the government at arm’s length; another paradox in which pure journalism is taxpayer financed.
I have personal knowledge of both the BBC and VOA. I worked for the BBC television news in London and did occasional radio broadcasts for its overseas service in the early 1960s.
At VOA in Washington, I was sometimes interviewed by Branko Mikasinovich for the Serbian and Russian services. I found the experience as professional and questions as objective as any I have experienced from any news outlet anywhere. (It was also fun.)
For two decades, my weekly news and public affairs television program, White House Chronicle, was carried by VOA globally in English — and at one time was translated into Chinese. It was dropped during the first Trump administration, but VOA started distributing it again in the Biden years. Mostly it deals with the nexus of science and society, such as AI’s anticipated impact on jobs.
I have simply given the program to VOA as a public service and no money has ever changed hands.
Apart from the hard news, VOA gave the world a window into democratic America: our struggles and triumphs, our values, our of freedom, our luxury of choice, and those aspects of American life that make us the nation we are — at best aspiring to be Ronald Reagan’s “shining city upon a hill.”
The Trump administration hasn’t only denied 70 percent of the world that lives under authoritarian rule the opportunity to hear the truth, but they have also robbed America of the second of its two great soft power tools; the first was USAID, the helping agency.
We aren’t only telling the world that we don’t care about it, but we are also retreating from it into inconsequence.
On Twitter: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS.
Llewellyn King: Immigrants’ buoyancy, including success in science
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
I have been exploring the heights of scientific endeavor in reporting on artificial intelligence, from its use in medical research (especially promising) to its use in utilities and transportation. It is notable that many of the high achievers weren’t born here.
They have come here from everywhere, but the number of Asians is notable — and in that group, the number of women stands out.
As an immigrant, originally from what was called Rhodesia and is now called Zimbabwe, I am interested in why immigrants are so buoyant, so upwardly mobile in their adopted countries. I can distill it to two things: They came to succeed, and they mostly aren’t encumbered with the social limits of their upbringing and molded expectations. America is a clean slate when you first get here.
A friend from Serbia, who ascended the heights of academe and lectured at Tulane University, said his father told him, “Don’t go to America unless you want to succeed.”
A Korean mechanical engineer, who studied at American universities and now heads an engineering company that seeks to ease the electricity crisis, told me, “I want to try harder and do something for America. I chose to come here. I want to succeed, and I want America to succeed.”
When I sat at lunch in New York with an AI startup’s senior staff, we noticed that none of us was born an American. Two of the developers were born in India, one in Spain and me in Zimbabwe.
We started to talk about what made America a haven for good minds in science and engineering and we decided it was the magnet of opportunity, Ronald Reagan’s “shining city upon a hill.”
There was agreement from the startup scientists-engineers — I like the British word “boffins” for scientists and engineers taken together — that if that ever changes, if the anti-immigrant sentiment overwhelms good judgment, then the flow will stop, and the talented won’t come to America to pursue their dreams. They will go elsewhere or stay at home.
In the last several years, I have visited AI companies, interviewed many in that industry and at the great universities, such as Brown, UC Berkeley, MIT and Stanford, and companies such as Google and Nvidia. The one thing that stands out is how many of those at the forefront weren’t born in America or are first generation.
They come from all over the globe. But Asians are clearly a major force in the higher reaches of U.S. research.
At a AI conference, organized by the MIT Technology Review, the whole story of what is happening at the cutting-edge of AI was on view: faces from all over the world, new American faces. The number immigrants was awesome, notably from Asia. They were people from the upper tier of U.S. science and engineering confidently adding to the sum of the nation’s knowledge and wealth,
Consider the leaders of top U.S. tech companies who are immigrants: Microsoft, Satya Nadella (India); Google, Sundar Pichai (India); Tesla, Elon Musk (South Africa); and Nvidia, Jensen Huang (Taiwan). Of the top seven, only Apple’s Tim Cook, Facebook’s Jeff Zuckerberg and Amazon’s Andy Jassy can be said to be traditional Americans.
A cautionary tale: A talented computer engineer from Mexico with a family that might have been plucked from the cover of the Saturday Evening Post lived in the same building as I do. During the Trump administration, they went back to Mexico.
There had been some clerical error in his paperwork. But the humiliation of being treated as a criminal was such that rather than fight immigration bureaucracy, he and his family returned voluntarily to Mexico. America’s loss.
Every country that has had a large influx of migrants knows that they can bring with them much that is undesirable. From Britain to Germany to Australia, immigration has had a downside: drugs, crime and religions that make assimilation difficult.
But waves of immigrants have built America, from the Scandinavian and German wheat farmers that turned the prairies into a vast larder to Jews from Europe who moved to Hollywood in the 1930s and made America pre-eminent in entertainment, to today’s global wave that is redefining Yankee know-how in the world of neural networks and quantum computing.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island.