Indigenous Peoples Are Key to Navigating the Climate Crisis. We Deserve a Seat at the Table

Submit your questions for Jennifer Rubin’s mail bag newsletter and live chat.

Mad Magazine began in 1952 as a comic book that made fun of other comic books – and soon became an institution for mocking authority in all spheres of life, from TV, movies and advertising, to politicians and parents. Correspondent David Pogue visits a new museum exhibition celebrating the humor of Mad, as created by the artists and writers who called themselves "the usual gang of idiots."

"Sunday Morning" looks back at historical events on this date, including the 1994 premiere of the sitcom "Friends."

It's time to bond outside the Zoom room with your co-workers. No, really. Slack is great and all, but a best friendship it does not make.

The blast struck a coal mine in Tabas, about 335 miles southeast of the capital, Tehran.

The injury-riddled Browns host the Giants on Sunday.

CEO Mary Barra talks about GM's expanding electric vehicle lineup, as "Sunday Morning" takes a high-speed tour of General Motors' Milford Proving Ground, which has been a hub for automotive innovation for a century.

Correspondent Kris Van Cleave talks with Mary Barra, General Motors' second-longest-serving CEO, about the company's expanding electric vehicle lineup. He also takes a "high-speed" tour of GM's Milford Proving Ground in Michigan, which has been a hub for automotive innovation for a century, and gets behind the wheel of GM's soon-to-be-released electric Cadillac Escalade IQ.

The American Culture Quiz is a weekly test of our unique national traits, trends, history and people. This time, test your knowledge of U.S. presidents, tasty foods and much more.

San Francisco is known as a reliably liberal city to most of America, but a Los Angeles Times editor believes there are signs that the City by the Bay has swung to the center.

Kathryn Crosby passed away at her home in Hillsborough, California.

Trump voters approve of his comments about immigrants, but most voters do not approve.

A meta puzzle featuring some letter carriers.

Enjoy slashed prices on high-quality chef's knives!

Cohen, who currently stars in "The Penguin" on Max, and his wife were unwittingly involved in a high-speed car chase over the summer that left both of them injured.

Will Week 3 be a bounce back week for the Giants?

Post sports gambling editor/producer and digital sports editor Matt Ehalt is in his first season in the Bettor’s Guide. 

In Elizabeth Strout’s new novel, Tell Me Everything, characters and storytelling take center stage.

When my son was a toddler, he liked to run in our driveway until he fell. He would then turn to me to see if he was hurt. If my face betrayed worry or if I audibly gasped, he would wail. If I maintained equanimity, he would brush himself off and get back to running. Learning that I could so powerfully influence his mental state was a revelation. Here was this human being who was counting on me to make sense of the world—not just how to tie his shoes or recite the ABCs, but how to feel.Years later, when he was in middle school, this lesson came back to me. One night while doing homework, my son told me about a classmate who had been unkind to him. My first instinct was to rush to fix it—email the parents, call the school, demand action. (Calling his teachers would have been complicated, given my role as the head of the school.) But instead of reacting, I paused. “That sounds hard. What did you do?”“I decided not to hang out with him for a while,” my son replied. “I’m going to try playing soccer at lunch instead.”“That’s a great solution,” I said, and he went back to his homework.These otherwise ordinary parenting moments crystallized for me an important truth: Sometimes, the best thing a parent can do is nothing at all.Parents of any age can conjure up the feeling they had when they first held their child and thought, Oh. Here you are, this person whom I’m in charge of. And they can tell you that no single piece of parenting wisdom can prepare you for this new, magical, terrifying endeavor. Parenting is joyous and challenging and sometimes stressful. In fact, a recent advisory from the surgeon general argues that parenting is hazardous to people’s mental health. The report cites a range of factors that are contributing to a perilous parental landscape—from the complexities of social media to worries about children’s safety. It goes on to propose an array of solutions, including investments in child care and federal paid family leave.There’s no question that many American parents desperately need more support. Yet the surgeon general is missing one important strategy that is within the control of every parent: a look in the mirror. What if the ways in which we are parenting are making life harder on our kids and harder on us? What if by doing less, parents would foster better outcomes for children and parents alike?I’ve spent the past 30 years working in schools, and I’ve watched thousands of parents engage with educators and with their children. Too often, I watch parents overfunctioning—depriving their kids of the confidence that comes from struggling and persevering, and exhausting themselves in the process. Although this has been true throughout my career, it’s growing more acute. Most Americans now believe that young people will not be better off than their parents. They see greater competition for fewer resources—be it college admissions, jobs, or housing. Parents are scrambling to ensure that their kids are the ones who will be able to get ahead.We’re biologically wired to prevent our children’s suffering, and it can be excruciating to watch them struggle. A parent’s first instinct is often to remove obstacles from their child’s path, obstacles that feel overwhelming to them but are easily navigable by us. This urge has led to pop-culture mythology around pushy parenting styles, including the “Helicopter Parent,” who flies in to rescue a child in crisis, and the “Snowplow Parent,” who flattens any obstacle in their child’s way. A young person who grows accustomed to having a parent intervene on his behalf begins to believe that he’s not capable of acting on his own, feeding both anxiety and dependence.I want to make a case for the Lighthouse Parent. A Lighthouse Parent stands as a steady, reliable guide, providing safety and clarity without controlling every aspect of their child’s journey. Here’s an example: A child comes home feeling overwhelmed by school and frustrated that she is doing “all of the work” for a big group project that is due next week. The overfunctioning parent is ready with an array of next steps: “Why don’t you assign the other group members what they each have to do?” “You should put your name next to all of the parts that you did so the teacher gives you credit.” “I’m going to email the teacher so she knows that you’re doing all of the work.” These tactics may address symptoms, but they fail to get at the underlying issue. They also inadvertently communicate to a child that what’s needed is parental involvement. Sometimes what a child needs is simply to be acknowledged: “Wow, that sounds like a lot.” “I can tell you are working really hard.” “Do you have ideas about what you want to do?”Like a lighthouse that helps sailors avoid crashing into rocks, Lighthouse Parents provide firm boundaries and emotional support while allowing their children the freedom to navigate their own challenges. They demonstrate that they trust their kids to handle difficult situations independently. The key is learning when to step back and let them find their own way.One of the most important shifts that parents can make is learning to substitute our impulse to fix problems with the patience to listen. A fix-it mindset is focused on quick solutions, at quelling or containing emotions or discomfort; listening is about allowing emotions to exist without rushing to solve a problem. Listening teaches resilience; it communicates confidence in your child’s ability to cope with challenges, however messy they might be.As children grow, parents must move from the role of boss to that of consultant. When our children are young, we make nearly every decision for them, from what they eat to when (in theory) they sleep. Little by little, we remove the scaffolding, creating freestanding adults who have internalized our values and have the capacity to embody them in the world. At least, that’s the idea.If children never have the opportunity to stand on their own, we risk setting them up for a collapse later on. They must experience struggle, make mistakes, and learn from them in order to grow. In fact, learning any skill—whether it’s coding, painting, playing a sport—requires repeated missteps before mastery. And yet, in an educational landscape fueled by perceptions of scarcity, students can absorb an unconscious and unintended message that mistakes are permanent and have no value. Too many kids think that their parents want unblemished transcripts, and in pursuit of that unattainable goal, they sacrifice opportunities for growth.An aversion to owning mistakes can be most visible when it comes to student discipline. Adolescents cross boundaries—this is part of growing up. When they do, they receive feedback on their transgression and ideally internalize that feedback, ultimately making the desired values their own. When a teenager plagiarizes a paper or arrives at a school dance under the influence, one part of a school’s response is disciplinary—it’s a way of providing feedback. In the moment, students don’t thank us for administering a consequence. I have yet to hear a student who has been suspended say “Thank you for helping me learn a lesson that will serve me well in college and beyond.” Instead they say “This is unfair” or “Other kids were doing it too.” This is when parents need to stand shoulder to shoulder with the school, communicating a clear and aligned message to support their child’s growth. But parents are often more worried about their child’s future college applications than they are about having their child internalize valuable lessons. When parents seek to control outcomes for their kids, they are trading short-term wins for long-term thriving—they’re trading the promise of a college bumper sticker for a happy, well-adjusted 35-year-old.In the 1960s, the psychologist Diana Baumrind described three parenting styles, which researchers building on her work eventually expanded to four: authoritarian, permissive, uninvolved, and authoritative. Authoritarian parents make all decisions for their children with little room for negotiation. Permissive parents avoid conflict by setting few boundaries, often leading their children to struggle with discipline and focus. Uninvolved parents are disconnected, providing minimal support or structure. Authoritative parents allow for some flexibility, combining clear expectations with the willingness to listen. Authoritative parents are Lighthouse Parents. They are clear on values, but open to a range of ways in which those values can be put into practice; they balance structure and autonomy. The research shows that authoritative parenting yields the best outcomes for kids, and tends to produce happy and competent adults. Although this framework may seem simple or even intuitive, too many parents struggle to adopt it.All parents show up as authoritarian, permissive, uninvolved, or authoritative at different times, depending on the situation and on what’s unfolding in their own lives. But remembering to put parenting in perspective, focusing on long-term outcomes over short-term saves, can reduce some of the stress of parenting while also yielding better outcomes for children.Yes, parenting can be stressful. But when we trust our children to navigate their own course—with us as steady and supportive guides—we lighten our own load and empower them to thrive.

Four people were killed and at least 18 more were wounded in a shooting Saturday night in Birmingham, Alabama, police said.

The Post’s Erich Richter makes his picks for Sunday’s and Monday’s NFL Week 3 slate.

In the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Israeli troops also raided the offices of the satellite news network Al Jazeera, ordering the bureau to shut down.

President Biden lost track of events and forgot he was introducing the Prime Minister of India this weekend, leading to an uncomfortable moment.

I was offered a job with amazing benefits — health, dental, flexible schedule, the works — but the pay is terrible. It’s about half the industry standard. Do I try talking them into more money, or just walk away?

We're looking to buy low on two wide receiver player props in optimal matchups for Week 3.

A confused-looking President Biden fumbled and snapped at staffers after forgetting which world leader he was supposed to introduce at a press conference for a Quad summit Saturday. Biden, 81, was supposed to call India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi to the stage, but appeared to be unsure which of the three visiting heads of government...

Max Mumby/Indigo/Getty ImagesAndrew breathes sigh of relief over filmFriends of Prince Andrew have said he is relieved that the new Amazon film about his disastrous interview with the BBC has “sunk without trace,” while friends of King Charles said the new three-part mini-series is “water off a duck’s back to him.”The series, entitled A Very Royal Scandal, portrays Andrew as a foul-mouthed, entitled and arrogant man, a portrayal which some former staff have told media outlets (including this one) is accurate.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Prostate cancer is diagnosed in men, and affects the prostate gland. Oftentimes, symptoms are benign and the disease doesn't require immediate treatment during early stages.

An inside look at Sunday's Giants-Browns NFL Week 3 matchup at Huntington Bank Field:

The anxiety on St. Paul Island is the latest attempt to keep non-native rats off some of the most remote, ecologically diverse Alaska islands.

Proposition 36 won't end homelessness or crime waves. It will only refill prisons, push more people to the streets and erase criminal justice reform progress.

Fall reading suggestions: whodunnits by Katarina Bivald, Stella Sands, Ragnar Jonasson, Leonie Swann and Alan Bradley.

Use the Underdog Fantasy promo code NYPBONUS for up to $1,000 in bonus cash from a 50% deposit match offer. .

Brooke Palmer/CBSThe discourse about TV reboots has already run its course multiple times in our current era of streaming and prestige television. There are a lot of them. It happens to almost every hit show. Sometimes it works, most of the time it doesn’t. They better not try it with The Sopranos. And so on.The most successful are often the ones that come out many decades after their source material was popular, allowing the reboot to insulate itself from comparisons to the original. CBS’s Matlock, in which Kathy Bates takes over for Andy Griffith as the titular lawyer, comes out almost 40 years after the original show’s premiere, and yet, in a creative twist, repeatedly makes sly nods to its remake status.Bates sheepishly introduces herself as “Madeline Matlock, like the TV show,” when she sneaks her way into the offices of Jacobson Moore, hungry for a job after losing everything to her late husband. She quickly proves herself resourceful, using her status as an elderly person to her advantage.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Tyrone Muhammad, a former gang enforcer, has formed a group called Ex-Cons for Trump because he feels Democrats have failed inner-city black people for too long.

Over the course of his 50 years in cinema, Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar has been offered countless deals from publishers to write his memoir – but he has always rejected them, as the two-time Oscar-winner explains in his new book “The Last Dream” (HarperVia). “I’ve been asked to write my autobiography more than once, and I’ve...

Coming this fall, residents in Stockholm won’t have to endure the hour-long commute by car or train between Ekerö, a popular suburb, and central Stockholm, home to the historic City Hall. Instead, they can jump on a 30-passenger ferry and make the journey in half the time, all while helping to cut down on carbon...

He keeps making snide comments.

She needs some tough love.

Israeli historian and writer Yuval Noah Harari speaks at the Global Artificial Intelligence Summit Forum on July 9, 2017, in Hangzhou in China’s Zhejiang Province. | Visual China Group via Getty Images If the internet age has anything like an ideology, it’s that more information and more data and more openness will create a better and more truthful world. That sounds right, doesn’t it? It has never been easier to know more about the world than it is right now, and it has never been easier to share that knowledge than it is right now. But I don’t think you can look at the state of things and conclude that this has been a victory for truth and wisdom. What are we to make of that? Why hasn’t more information made us less ignorant and more wise? Yuval Noah Harari is a historian and the author of a new book called Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI. Like all of Harari’s books, this one covers a ton of ground but manages to do it in a digestible way. It makes two big arguments that strike me as important, and I think they also get us closer to answering some of the questions I just posed. The first argument is that every system that matters in our world is essentially the result of an information network. From currency to religion to nation-states to artificial intelligence, it all works because there’s a chain of people and machines and institutions collecting and sharing information. The second argument is that although we gain a tremendous amount of power by building these networks of cooperation, the way most of them are constructed makes them more likely than not to produce bad outcomes, and since our power as a species is growing thanks to technology, the potential consequences of this are increasingly catastrophic. I invited Harari on The Gray Area to explore some of these ideas. Our conversation focused on artificial intelligence and why he thinks the choices we make on that front in the coming years will matter so much. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Sean Illing What’s the basic story you wanted to tell in this book? Yuval Noah Harari The basic question that the book explores is if humans are so smart, why are we so stupid? We are definitely the smartest animal on the planet. We can build airplanes and atom bombs and computers and so forth. And at the same time, we are on the verge of destroying ourselves, our civilization, and much of the ecological system. And it seems like this big paradox that if we know so much about the world and about distant galaxies and about DNA and subatomic particles, why are we doing so many self-destructive things? And the basic answer you get from a lot of mythology and theology is that there is something wrong in human nature and therefore we must rely on some outside source like a god to save us from ourselves. And I think that’s the wrong answer, and it’s a dangerous answer because it makes people abdicate responsibility. We know more than ever before, but are we any wiser? Historian and bestselling author of Sapiens Yuval Noah Harari doesn’t think so. @vox We know more than ever before, but are we any wiser? Bestselling author of Sapiens and historian Yuval Noah Harari doesn’t think so. This week Vox’s Sean Illing talks with Harari, author of a mind-bending new book, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks, about how the information systems that shape our world often sow the seeds of destruction. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. ♬ original sound – Vox I think that the real answer is that there is nothing wrong with human nature. The problem is with our information. Most humans are good people. They are not self-destructive. But if you give good people bad information, they make bad decisions. And what we see through history is that yes, we become better and better at accumulating massive amounts of information, but the information isn’t getting better. Modern societies are as susceptible as Stone Age tribes to mass delusions and psychosis.  Too many people, especially in places like Silicon Valley, think that information is about truth, that information is truth. That if you accumulate a lot of information, you will know a lot of things about the world. But most information is junk. Information isn’t truth. The main thing that information does is connect. The easiest way to connect a lot of people into a society, a religion, a corporation, or an army, is not with the truth. The easiest way to connect people is with fantasies and mythologies and delusions. And this is why we now have the most sophisticated information technology in history and we are on the verge of destroying ourselves. Sean Illing The boogeyman in the book is artificial intelligence, which you argue is the most complicated and unpredictable information network ever created. A world shaped by AI will be very different, will give rise to new identities, new ways of being in the world. We have no idea what the cultural or even spiritual impact of that will be. But as you say, AI will also unleash new ideas about how to organize society. Can we even begin to imagine the directions that might go? Yuval Noah Harari Not really. Because until today, all of human culture was created by human minds. We live inside culture. Everything that happens to us, we experience it through the mediation of cultural products — mythologies, ideologies, artifacts, songs, plays, TV series. We live cocooned inside this cultural universe. And until today, everything, all the tools, all the poems, all the TV series, all the mythologies, they are the product of organic human minds. And now increasingly they will be the product of inorganic AI intelligences, alien intelligences. Again, the acronym AI traditionally stood for artificial intelligence, but it should actually stand for alien intelligence. Alien, not in the sense that it’s coming from outer space, but alien in the sense that it’s very, very different from the way humans think and make decisions because it’s not organic.  To give you a concrete example, one of the key moments in the AI revolution was when AlphaGo defeated Lee Sedol in a Go Tournament. Now, Go is a bold strategy game, like chess but much more complicated, and it was invented in ancient China. In many places, it’s considered one of the basic arts that every civilized person should know. If you are a Chinese gentleman in the Middle Ages, you know calligraphy and how to play some music and you know how to play Go. Entire philosophies developed around the game, which was seen as a mirror for life and for politics. And then an AI program, AlphaGo, in 2016, taught itself how to play Go and it crushed the human world champion. But what is most interesting is the way [it] did it. It deployed a strategy that initially all the experts said was terrible because nobody plays like that. And it turned out to be brilliant. Tens of millions of humans played this game, and now we know that they explored only a very small part of the landscape of Go. So humans were stuck on one island and they thought this is the whole planet of Go. And then AI came along and within a few weeks it discovered new continents. And now also humans play Go very differently than they played it before 2016. Now, you can say this is not important, [that] it’s just a game. But the same thing is likely to happen in more and more fields. If you think about finance, finance is also an art. The entire financial structure that we know is based on the human imagination. The history of finance is the history of humans inventing financial devices. Money is a financial device, bonds, stocks, ETFs, CDOs, all these strange things are the products of human ingenuity. And now AI comes along and starts inventing new financial devices that no human being ever thought about, ever imagined. What happens, for instance, if finance becomes so complicated because of these new creations of AI that no human being is able to understand finance anymore? Even today, how many people really understand the financial system? Less than 1 percent? In 10 years, the number of people who understand the financial system could be exactly zero because the financial system is the ideal playground for AI. It’s a world of pure information and mathematics.  AI still has difficulty dealing with the physical world outside. This is why every year they tell us, Elon Musk tells us, that next year you will have fully autonomous cars on the road and it doesn’t happen. Why? Because to drive a car, you need to interact with the physical world and the messy world of traffic in New York with all the construction and pedestrians and whatever. Finance is much easier. It’s just numbers. And what happens if in this informational realm where AI is a native and we are the aliens, we are the immigrants, it creates such sophisticated financial devices and mechanisms that nobody understands them? Sean Illing So when you look at the world now and project out into the future, is that what you see? Societies becoming trapped in these incredibly powerful but ultimately uncontrollable information networks? Yuval Noah Harari Yes. But it’s not deterministic, it’s not inevitable. We need to be much more careful and thoughtful about how we design these things. Again, understanding that they are not tools, they are agents, and therefore down the road are very likely to get out of our control if we are not careful about them. It’s not that you have a single supercomputer that tries to take over the world. You have these millions of AI bureaucrats in schools, in factories, everywhere, making decisions about us in ways that we do not understand.  Democracy is to a large extent about accountability. Accountability depends on the ability to understand decisions. If … when you apply for a loan at the bank and the bank rejects you and you ask, “Why not?,” and the answer is, “We don’t know, the algorithm went over all the data and decided not to give you a loan, and we just trust our algorithm,” this to a large extent is the end of democracy. You can still have elections and choose whichever human you want, but if humans are no longer able to understand these basic decisions about their lives, then there is no longer accountability. Sean Illing You say we still have control over these things, but for how long? What is that threshold? What is the event horizon? Will we even know it when we cross it? Yuval Noah Harari Nobody knows for sure. It’s moving faster than I think almost anybody expected. Could be three years, could be five years, could be 10 years. But I don’t think it’s much more than that. Just think about it from a cosmic perspective. We are the product as human beings of 4 billion years of organic evolution. Organic evolution, as far as we know, began on planet Earth 4 billion years ago with these tiny microorganisms. And it took billions of years for the evolution of multicellular organisms and reptiles and mammals and apes and humans. Digital evolution, non-organic evolution, is millions of times faster than organic evolution. And we are now at the beginning of a new evolutionary process that might last thousands and even millions of years. The AIs we know today in 2024, ChatGPT and all that, they are just the amoebas of the AI evolutionary process.  Sean Illing Do you think democracies are truly compatible with these 21st-century information networks? Yuval Noah Harari Depends on our decisions. First of all, we need to realize that information technology is not something on [a] side. It’s not democracy on one side and information technology on the other side. Information technology is the foundation of democracy. Democracy is built on top of the flow of information.  For most of history, there was no possibility of creating large-scale democratic structures because the information technology was missing. Democracy is basically a conversation between a lot of people, and in a small tribe or a small city-state, thousands of years ago, you could get the entire population or a large percentage of the population, let’s say, of ancient Athens in the city square to decide whether to go to war with Sparta or not. It was technically feasible to hold a conversation. But there was no way that millions of people spread over thousands of kilometers could talk to each other. There was no way they could hold the conversation in real time. Therefore, you have not a single example of a large-scale democracy in the pre-modern world. All the examples are very small scale. Large-scale democracy became possible only after the rise of the newspaper and the telegraph and radio and television. And now you can have a conversation between millions of people spread over a large territory. So democracy is built on top of information technology. Every time there is a big change in information technology, there is an earthquake in democracy which is built on top of it. And this is what we’re experiencing right now with social media algorithms and so forth. It doesn’t mean it’s the end of democracy. The question is, will democracy adapt? Sean Illing Do you think AI will ultimately tilt the balance of power in favor of democratic societies or more totalitarian societies?  Yuval Noah Harari Again, it depends on our decisions. The worst-case scenario is neither because human dictators also have big problems with AI. In dictatorial societies, you can’t talk about anything that the regime doesn’t want you to talk about. But actually, dictators have their own problems with AI because it’s an uncontrollable agent. And throughout history, the [scariest] thing for a human dictator is a subordinate [who] becomes too powerful and that you don’t know how to control. If you look, say, at the Roman Empire, not a single Roman emperor was ever toppled by a democratic revolution. Not a single one. But many of them were assassinated or deposed or became the puppets of their own subordinates, a powerful general or provincial governor or their brother or their wife or somebody else in their family. This is the greatest fear of every dictator. And dictators run the country based on fear. Now, how do you terrorize an AI? How do you make sure that it’ll remain under your control instead of learning to control you? I’ll give two scenarios which really bother dictators. One simple, one much more complex. In Russia today, it is a crime to call the war in Ukraine a war. According to Russian law, what’s happening with the Russian invasion of Ukraine is a special military operation. And if you say that this is a war, you can go to prison. Now, humans in Russia, they have learned the hard way not to say that it’s a war and not to criticize the Putin regime in any other way. But what happens with chatbots on the Russian internet? Even if the regime vets and even produces itself an AI bot, the thing about AI is that AI can learn and change by itself. So even if Putin’s engineers create a regime AI and then it starts interacting with people on the Russian internet and observing what is happening, it can reach its own conclusions. What if it starts telling people that it’s actually a war? What do you do? You can’t send the chatbot to a gulag. You can’t beat up its family. Your old weapons of terror don’t work on AI. So this is the small problem.  The big problem is what happens if the AI starts to manipulate the dictator himself. Taking power in a democracy is very complicated because democracy is complicated. Let’s say that five or 10 years in the future, AI learns how to manipulate the US president. It still has to deal with a Senate filibuster. Just the fact that it knows how to manipulate the president doesn’t help it with the Senate or the state governors or the Supreme Court. There are so many things to deal with. But in a place like Russia or North Korea, an AI only needs to learn how to manipulate a single extremely paranoid and unself-aware individual. It’s quite easy.  Sean Illing What are some of the things you think democracies should do to protect themselves in the world of AI? Yuval Noah Harari One thing is to hold corporations responsible for the actions of their algorithms. Not for the actions of the users, but for the actions of their algorithms. If the Facebook algorithm is spreading a hate-filled conspiracy theory, Facebook should be liable for it. If Facebook says, “But we didn’t create the conspiracy theory. It’s some user who created it and we don’t want to censor them,” then we tell them, “We don’t ask you to censor them. We just ask you not to spread it.” And this is not a new thing. You think about, I don’t know, the New York Times. We expect the editor of the New York Times, when they decide what to put at the top of the front page, to make sure that they are not spreading unreliable information. If somebody comes to them with a conspiracy theory, they don’t tell that person, “Oh, you are censored. You are not allowed to say these things.” They say, “Okay, but there is not enough evidence to support it. So with all due respect, you are free to go on saying this, but we are not putting it on the front page of the New York Times.” And it should be the same with Facebook and with Twitter. And they tell us, “But how can we know whether something is reliable or not?” Well, this is your job. If you run a media company, your job is not just to pursue user engagement, but to act responsibly, to develop mechanisms to tell the difference between reliable and unreliable information, and only to spread what you have good reason to think is reliable information. It has been done before. You are not the first people in history who had a responsibility to tell the difference between reliable and unreliable information. It’s been done before by newspaper editors, by scientists, by judges, so you can learn from their experience. And if you are unable to do it, you are in the wrong line of business. So that’s one thing. Hold them responsible for the actions of their algorithms. The other thing is to ban the bots from the conversations. AI should not take part in human conversations unless it identifies as an AI. We can imagine democracy as a group of people standing in a circle and talking with each other. And suddenly a group of robots enter the circle and start talking very loudly and with a lot of passion. And you don’t know who are the robots and who are the humans. This is what is happening right now all over the world. And this is why the conversation is collapsing. And there is a simple antidote. The robots are not welcome into the circle of conversation unless they identify as bots. There is a place, a room, let’s say, for an AI doctor that gives me advice about medicine on condition that it identifies itself. Similarly, if you go on Twitter and you see that a certain story goes viral, there is a lot of traffic there, you also become interested. “Oh, what is this new story everybody’s talking about?” Who is everybody? If this story is actually being pushed by bots, then it’s not humans. They shouldn’t be in the conversation. Again, deciding what are the most important topics of the day. This is an extremely important issue in a democracy, in any human society. Bots should not have this ability to determine what stories dominate the conversation. And again, if the tech giants tell us, “Oh, but this infringes freedom of speech” — it doesn’t because bots don’t have freedom of speech. Freedom of speech is a human right, which would be reserved for humans, not for bots. Listen to the rest of the conversation and be sure to follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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He accused the showrunner of having "bad intent" and presenting “ruinous character portrayals.”

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"Deadpool" star Ryan Reynolds said that parents todays are softer with their children – him included – than they were when he was growing up