Category: Mike Magee

Amodei Believes “AI-Enabled Autocracy” Could Be Imminent

Feb 13, 2026

By MIKE MAGEE

Last month, Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, did it again – scaring the bejesus out of societal leaders worldwide with warnings that their grip on security and governance of human populations is dangerously close to AI extinction.

Amodei’s opening paragraph in his article titled “The Adolescence of Technology” wastes no time getting the reader’s attention. He writes, “There is a scene in the movie version of Carl Sagan’s book Contact where the main character, an astronomer who has detected the first radio signal from an alien civilization, is being considered for the role of humanity’s representative to meet the aliens. The international panel interviewing her asks, ‘If you could ask [the aliens] just one question, what would it be?’ Her reply is: ‘I’d ask them, How did you do it? How did you evolve, how did you survive this technological adolescence without destroying yourself?’”

Now, I should be clear. I was already nervous. As a Medical Historian, preparing for a major lecture on the birth of Immunology this Spring, I’ve been researching the field. What am I looking for? The same thing I always find missing when exploring the frontiers of scientific progress – historical context. In most cases, facts and figures abound, but their impact on the complex web of human relations over the years is often missing.

Amodei is attempting to provide that context in real time. Real times include headlines like this one from the New York Times: “ICE Already Know Who Protesters Are “ from AI powered facial recognition technology . But Amodei’s concerns are more fundamental. The challenge for him is the speed of change with generative AI which he clearly states is alarming. As he says, “Because AI is now writing much of the code at Anthropic, it is already substantially accelerating the rate of our progress in building the next generation of AI systems. This feedback loop is gathering steam month by month, and may be only 1–2 years away from a point where the current generation of AI autonomously builds the next.”

Clearly with Musk’s recent DOGE foray in mind, Amodei lays out a pretty plausible modern day vulnerability. He says, “It is somewhat awkward to say this as the CEO of an AI company, but I think the next tier of risk is actually AI companies themselves. AI companies control large datacenters, train frontier models, have the greatest expertise on how to use those models, and in some cases have daily contact with and the possibility of influence over tens or hundreds of millions of users.”

Getting a bit more specific without outright naming Musk-controlled Grok and X, Amodei leaves little doubt who he’s referring to when he says, “Some AI companies have shown a disturbing negligence towards the sexualization of children in today’s models, which makes me doubt that they’ll show either the inclination or the ability to address autonomy risks in future models.”

At one point during the ICE offenses last month, a legal observer in Portland, Maine, filming an ICE agent, was approached by the agent who had just filmed her car and was now filming her face. Asking why he was doing that, the ICE agent replied, “Cuz we have a nice little database and now you’re considered a domestic terrorist. So have fun with that.”

The activities of the past month, and the unprovoked murders of two innocent US citizens make Amodei’s final warning prescient. He says, “Current autocracies are limited in how repressive they can be by the need to have humans carry out their orders, and humans often have limits in how inhumane they are willing to be. But AI-enabled autocracies would not have such limits.”

Mike Magee MD is a Medical Historian and regular contributor to THCB. He is the author of CODE BLUE: Inside America’s Medical Industrial Complex. (Grove/2020)

Indiana – It is the best of times, and the worst of times

Jan 26, 2026

By MIKE MAGEE

“Hoosiers receive heroes’ welcome in return to Bloomington” screamed last week’s ESPN headline, as IU claimed top spot in college football nationwide. It’s been awhile since sports elevated that state’s mood.

In his classic review of the famous movie, “The Hoosiers,” Roger Ebert writes, “This is a movie about a tiny Indiana high school that sends a team all the way to the state basketball finals in the days when schools of all sizes played in the same tournaments and a David could slay a Goliath. That’s still the case in Indiana.”

That final sentence came to mind last month, as the Midwestern state with a population of around 7 million (17th in the nation) punched above its political weight and landed headlines like this one on December 11, 2025 in The Hill – “Indiana Senate rejects new House map, defying Trump.”

Some facts were clear: Twenty-one Indiana state senators had joined all 10 Democratic state senators to defeat a proposed redistricting map that would have assured a gain of 2 additional House of Representative seats for Republicans in the 2026 mid-term elections. But most political pundits misread why they did it, and ignored a crucial economic report from 10 months earlier that informed their actions. More on that in a moment.

First a bit of history. A century ago, Eli Lilly Jr. (grandson of the founder of the famous pharmaceutical giant Lilly & Co.) cut a deal with the University of Toronto to be the sole supplier of their life-saving drug – insulin. Headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana, they were ideally positioned because the state’s three economic pillars were manufacturing, agriculture, and health sciences.

To secure adequate supply of insulin was both a scientific and logistic challenge of historic proportions. Eli Jr.’s focus on line manufacturing helped. Raw material demands required the design of a refrigerated railway support system dead ending at Lilly manufacturing sites. This was made necessary since purifying 8 ounces of insulin required two and a half tons of beef or pork pancreas readily available from state farms. Sourcing the raw materials locally was not a problem. At the time, 86% of the state’s lands were controlled by 195,786 farming families committed to farming (including livestock management and slaughter houses).

Fast forward a century and the state remains heavily dependent on its tripartite pillars – manufacturing, agriculture and health sciences. That was the message broadcast with great political effect on April 15, 2025 in a first ever economic forecast update from Muncie, Indiana, the home of Ball State University and its’ well-respected Center for Business and Economic Research led by Michael J. Hicks, PhD. For over 50 years CBER has published “data-rich, nonpartisan research relevant to communities and businesses throughout Indiana.” Their reputation is built on one word – trust.

Father Christmas Reminds Us We Can Do Better Than This

Dec 23, 2025

By MIKE MAGEE

The Ghost of Christmas Past, in the form of Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, has returned this season to torture one RFK Jr who refuses to fully share life saving vaccines with children. In the encounter, the ghostly Koop reviews a time 37 years ago when citizens came together to celebrate separating scientific fact from fiction with life-saving effects.

Beginning in 1988, the United States, along with the rest of the world, had formally acknowledged and celebrated World AIDS Day on December 1st each year – that is until 2025. At President’s Trump’s direction the State Department, and with HHS support, turned their back on an inconvenient truth – the Republican early record on HIV/AIDS. Let’s channel the truth-telling Surgeon General from Christmas past and remember this telling story.

On June 5, 1981, the CDC reported 6 cases of Pneumocystis carinii associated with a strange immune deficiency disorder in California men. Drs. Michael Gottlieb and Joel Weismann, infectious disease experts who delivered care routinely for members of the gay population in Los Angeles, had alerted the CDC. Inside the organization, there was a debate on how best to report this new illness in gay men.

The vehicle that the CDC chose was a weekly report called the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report or MMWR. So as not to offend, the decision was made to post the new finding, not on page 1, but on page 2, with no mention of homosexuality in the title. Almost no one noticed.

On April 13, 1982, nine months after the initial alert, Senator Henry Waxman held the first Congressional hearings on the growing epidemic. The CDC testified that tens of thousands were likely already infected. On September 24, 1982, the condition would for the first time carry the label, AIDS – acquired immune deficiency syndrome.

The new Surgeon General, C. Everett Koop’s focus at the time, along with the vast majority of public health leaders across the nation, was not on a new emerging infectious disease, but rather on the nation’s chronic disease burden, especially cardiovascular disease and cancer being fed by the post-war explosion of tobacco use. He had already surmised that the power of his position lie in communications and advocacy.

One month after his swearing in, he appeared on a panel to release a typically boring Surgeon General update report on tobacco. He was not intended to have a big role. When Koop rose to deliver what all thought would be brief, inconsequential remarks, he wasted no time disintegrating the lobbyist organization, the Tobacco Institute. For print journalists in the audience, he was clear, concise and quotable. For broadcast journalists, he was a dream come true – tall, erect with his Mennonite beard, in a dark suit with bow tie, exuding a combination of extreme confidence and legitimacy mixed with “don’t mess with me” swagger.

As Koop would later say, after that, “I began to be quoted as an authority. And the press from that time on was all on my side… I made snowballs and they threw ‘em.” The other thing that Koop noticed early was that the Reagan Administration didn’t shut him down. That was surprising since Koop’s major supporter in a year long confirmation battle (the AMA opposed his appointment) was NC arch-conservative Senator Jesse Helms.

Add to Jesse’s wrath, R.J. Reynold’s CEO, Edward Horrigan, complained directly to Reagan about Koop’s “increasingly shrill preachments. Cigarette consumption in the US was in free fall. By 1987, 40 states would have laws banning smoking in public places; 33 states had bans in public transportation; and 17 already had eliminated workplace smoking.

Still Reagan didn’t shut him down. Now everyone from public schools to medical groups to women’s associations to civic enterprises wanted him. And beginning in late 1982, he arrived in full regalia, in a magnificent Public Health Service, Vice-Admiral’s uniform with ribbons and epaulettes. And his aide, also in uniform, always carried with him a bag of buttons for distribution which read, “The Surgeon General personally asked me to quit smoking.”

But in the most pressing public health challenge of the day, HIV/AIDS, the department was AWOL. Koop was actively sidelined by top Administration officials. Not surprisingly, the situation deteriorated rapidly. Everyone was feeling the heat, including the CDC, who removed funding for AIDS education after being accused of promoting sodomy by conservatives.

Slaying The Dragon

Dec 5, 2025

By MIKE MAGEE

The date was June 9, 1954. This was over a year after Wisconsin Republican Senator Joseph R. McCarthy had assumed the chairmanship of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. The history shows that he had “rocketed to public attention in 1950 with his allegations that hundreds of Communists had infiltrated the State Department and other federal agencies.” Clearly a psychopath, he escaped control of moderating voices, biting off ever larger targets, including now the U.S. Army.

“Judge, jury, prosecutor, castigator, and press agent, all in one”, was how Harvard law dean Ervin Griswold described him. In 1954, McCarthy accused the army of “lax security at its top-secret army facilities” which he claimed were infiltrated by communists. The army responded by hiring veteran Boston lawyer Joseph Welch to defend itself.

As documentarians reported, “Mothers who never watched TV during the day were glued to watching the Army-McCarthy hearings.” McCarthy’s right-hand chief council that day was lawyer Roy Marcus Cohn. Pragmatic, ruthless, and evil to the core, Cohn’s career was launched by McCarthy, and his tainted touch destroyed lives and weakened the U.S. government for three more decades, straight up to the moment of his death from HIV/AIDS in 1986.

His style and tactics are widely felt today to be the strategic scaffolding of our Executive Branch’s attempted takeover of the US government. Not surprisingly, a direct assault on the control functions, values, and traditions of the US Military are a leading wedge in these attacks. They have literally exploded in the past week with revelations that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth himself gave the go-ahead on a “kill them all” order that ultimately engulfed two survivors of a rocket attack on an alleged drug-transporting speed boat.

In a 5-minute summation of the televised events of June 9, 1954, you (along with our leaders) are able to witness the historic takedown of McCarthy by Welch (with Cohn as witness) – the “slaying of the dragon” that finally destroyed McCarthy once and for all.

Cohn had reached an agreement with Welch that McCarthy would avoid attacking one particular Army service man as a communist if Welch remained civil. But Welch had laid a trap, and purposefully needled McCarthy into loosing his temper, and on camera, violating the agreement and “attacking the good lad,” who an outraged Welch tearfully defended in his historic and well-prepared retort.

As historian Thomas Doherty recalls, “It was as if the entire country had been waiting for somebody to finally say this line, ‘Have you no sense of decency.’” As Welch pounced on his victim, Cohn winces as his dragon is slain. To which Jelani Cobb adds, “At the end of it, all the illusions, the comfortable illusions that McCarthy had cultivated about himself, had effectively been dispelled.”

As Congress grapples with a situation that has veered dangerously out of control, we can only hope that this time “history will repeat.” Courage must be resourced from within. As Martin Luther King famously reminded: “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

Mike Magee MD is a Medical Historian and regular contributor to THCB. He is the author of CODE BLUE: Inside America’s Medical Industrial Complex. (Grove/2020)

Giving Thanks – Ken Burns “THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION”

Nov 26, 2025

By MIKE MAGEE

Give thanks for our America, blemishes and all. Ken Burns says as much, making it clear, we are a mess of contradictions, and that is (in part) what makes us a uniquely American.

Consider that in a single week, we have had to endure Trump’s “Things happen” as he defended the Saudi crown prince ordering the Khashoggi killing, while also rejoice in his smack-down THE HILL headlined, “The Epstein files are a turning point in the Trump presidency, but it’s not over yet.” Perhaps Marjorie Taylor Greene said it best for all of us, “I refuse to be a ‘battered wife’ hoping it all goes away and gets better.”

In the shadow of an autocratic assault unparalleled in our modern history, Americans are searching for a silver lining. Is it helpful to our Democracy to be stress tested and our Constitutional weaknesses revealed so that we might take corrective actions in the future? Should we accept some blame for supporting a culture rich in celebrity idolatry, and one tolerant of unsustainable levels of inequity? Hasn’t unbridled capitalism diminished solidarity and good government in equal measure?

It is heartening to see many of our public servants, several of whom are first generation immigrants, display their competence, professionalism and courage in support of these United States. Our citizens want to believe that they, rather than their DOJ inquisitors, represent us.

It’s encouraging that compassion, understanding, and partnership remain embedded in the caring citizens who say NO to kings, challenged mass ICE invaders, and (with the Catholic Church) lent a powerful voice to immigrants across our land.

In times like these, I rely heavily on a book my son, Mike, published with the University of Alabama Press in 2004, titled, “Emancipating Pragmatism: Emerson, Jazz, and Experimental Writing”. The book derived from his PhD dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania, and extensively delved into the writings of both Ralph Waldo Ellison, author of “The Invisible Man”, and his namesake, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

So what did he say in his book that was so compelling that I turn to it today, on the eve of another Thanksgiving Celebration?

The Nobel Prize’s Amazing Track Record in Immunology

Oct 27, 2025

By MIKE MAGEE

With the announcement of the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine last week, the American Association of Immunologists (AAI) took an understandable victory lap, stating: “This Nobel Prize demonstrates how immunology is central to medicine and human health. The ability to harness, modulate, or restrain immune responses holds promise across a vast range of diseases — from autoimmune conditions to cancer, allergies, infectious disease, and beyond.”

This year’s award went to Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Dr. Shimon Sakaguchi, and it couldn’t have come at a better time as our nation’s scientific community and their governmental, academic and corporate science leaders push back against vaccine skeptic RFK Jr.

As the AAI proudly exclaims, “Since 1901, Nobel Prizes have been awarded to 27 AAI members for their innovation and achievements in immunology and related disciplines.” Make that 28 with the addition of Dr. Sakaguchi, a Distinguished Fellow of AAI.

The field of Immunology and the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine have grown side by side over the past century.

Immunity has Latin roots from the word immunitas which in Roman times was offered to denote exemption from the burden of taxation to worthy citizens by their Emperor. Protection from disease is a bit more complicated than that and offers our White Blood Cells (WBCs) a starring role. These cells are produced in the bone marrow, then bivouacked to the fetal thymus for instruction on how to attack only invaders, but spare our own healthy cells.

WBC’s are organized in specialized divisions. WBC neutrophils engulf bacterial, fungi, and fungi as immediate first responders. Monocyte macrophages are an additional first line of defense, literally gobbling and digesting bacteria and damaged cells through a process called “phagocytosis.” B-cells produce specific proteins called antibodies, designed to learn and remember specific invaders chemical make-up or “antigen.” They can ID offenders quickly and neutralize target bacteria, toxins, and viruses. And T-cells are specially designed to go after viruses hidden within the human cells themselves.

The first ever Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine went to German scientist, Emil von Behring, eleven years after he demonstrated “passive immunity.” He was able to isolate poisons or toxins derived from tetanus and diphtheria microorganisms, inject them into lab animals, and subsequently prove that the animals were now “protected” from tetanus and diphtheria infection. These antitoxins, liberally employed in New York City, where diphtheria was the major killer of infants, quickly ended that sad epidemic.

The body’s inner defense system began to reveal its mysteries in the early 1900s. Brussel scientist Jules Bordet, while studying the bacteria Anthrax, was able to not only identified protein antibodies in response to anthrax infection, but also a series of companion proteins. This cascade of proteins linked to the antibodies enhanced their bacterial killing power. In 1919 Bordet received his Nobel Prize for the discovery of a series of “complement” proteins, which when activated help antibodies “drill holes” through bacterial cell walls and destroy them.

Victories against certain pathogens were hard fought. In the case of poliovirus, which had a predilection to invade motor neurons, especially in children, and cause paralysis, it required a remarkable collaboration between government, academic medical researchers and local community based doctors and nurses to ultimately succeed. The effort involved simultaneous testing in children of two very different vaccines.

Current vaccine skeptics like RFK Jr. argue against historic facts.

Teledoc Medication Abortions Under Attack

Oct 2, 2025

By MIKE MAGEE

For those prepared to take a deep breath and relax in the aftermath of the MAGA induced assault on the First Amendment that whipsawed Disney leadership last week as they abandoned and then rescued Jimmy Kimmel, be advised reproductive health access is at the top of the list when it comes to MAGA campaigns to “restrict liberties.”

Consider the ongoing campaign to federally restrict telemedicine enabled medication abortion.

A few facts:

Medication abortion is a process that involves taking two medications (mifepristone and misoprostol) at specific intervals over one to three days. It is approved for use up to the first 70 days of a pregnancy and costs on average about $500.
As defined by Yale Medicine, “Mifepristone is a medication that blocks progesterone activity in a female’s body. Progesterone is a critical hormone for supporting an early pregnancy. The second medication, misoprostol, causes contractions and expels the pregnancy tissue. It typically takes 12 to 24 hours to pass the tissue.”
The overall number of abortions have risen since the Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade. There were 1.1 million US abortions in 2023, that is 88,000 per month compared to 80,000 the year before.
Medication abortions account for 2/3 of all abortions in the US. At least 1 in 4 of these last year involved telemedicine provision by mail order including to citizens from states with highly restrictive abortion laws.
Success rate in terminating pregnancy is 99.6%. Major complications occur in .4% of cases and mortality is nearly non-existent.
Anti-abortion advocates are currently focused on obstructing legal access to abortion pills.

Immediately following the Dobbs decision, 12 states banned abortion and 4 states imposed a 6-week gestational limit on access to abortion. Nine of these states now explicitly ban telehealth enabled medication abortion. Countering these measures, eight states where abortion remains legal have passed “shield laws” that protect health professionals from prosecution by other states for engaging in telehealth support of patients seeking self-care within states where abortion is illegal. By latest count, 1 in 7 telehealth assisted medication abortions involved practitioners from shield states.

President Trump’s campaign pledge to reinstate the dormant 1873 Comstock Act to cripple telehealth efforts in support of medication abortion has gone nowhere. In a similar vein, flawed science studies engineered by anti-abortion advocates attempting to challenge FDA clearances for safety and self management of the drugs involved have been exposed as unscientific, deceptive and biased. Multiple state suits, for and against imposing additional FDA hurdles to access in the absence of demonstrable medical benefit or risk mitigation are piling up in the courts. And Louisiana recently took a different tact, reclassifying misoprostol a “controlled substance” and inviting provider countersuits.

As Cornell legal experts remind us, the freedom of expression and the right to freedom of speech may be exercised “in direct (words) or a symbolic (actions) way.” When first written, and adopted as the first of the original 10 entries in the Bill of Rights in 1791, the First Amendment said: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Nowadays, the provision applies to the entire federal government and is reinforced by the Due Process Claus of the 14th Amendment which protects citizens from state government interference as well.

For better or worse, the actions leading up to the Dobbs decision were led, funded, organized and executed primarily by religious groups, primarily Roman Catholics and Evangelical Christians, joining ranks on the issue five decades ago. Those very religions legitimacy and independence has long been protected by the First Amendment.

A simple listing of the opening salvo of our Bill of Rights reveals a complex tangle of protections that define not only our primary rights as citizens, but also our power and legitimacy as a healthy representative democracy.

What’s included? According to legal experts, our 1st Amendment “protects the right to freedom of religion and freedom of expression from government interference. It prohibits any laws that establish a national religion, impede the free exercise of religion, abridge the freedom of speech, infringe upon the freedom of the press, interfere with the right to peaceably assemble, or prohibit people from petitioning for a governmental redress of grievances.”

Religious leaders remain deeply divided. Opposing reproductive choice while protecting the religious freedom assured by the very same 1st Amendment is a difficult needle to thread. Consider the comment of Baltimore Archbishop William Lori, Chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Pro-Life Activities, on June 24, 2022, the day of the Dobbs decision: “I recognize there are people on both sides of the question in the Catholic Church. What we are finding though is that when people become more aware of what the church is doing to assist women in difficult pregnancies … hearts and minds begin to change.”

Well, not exactly. A March, 2025 Pew Survey of Catholics nationwide revealed that 6 in 10 Catholics believe that abortion should be legal in all or most cases.

It is ironic that, in attempting to usurp women’s rights to their own reproductive freedoms, that some religious leaders continue to attack the country’s foundational 1st Amendment that has assured the continued existence of their sponsoring organizations.

Mike Magee MD is a Medical Historian and regular contributor to THCB. He is the author of CODE BLUE: Inside America’s Medical Industrial Complex.

Where “Little Flowers” Bloom – Two by Two

Aug 8, 2025

By MIKE MAGEE

What are the chances that citizens of New York, the largest city in the nation, would vote in a majority to oppose a formerly corrupt politician with a party machine behind him, and instead favor a little known candidate – the son of immigrant parents with “swarthy skin and belligerent independence,” from a suspect minority and religious heritage, who actively mixed music and politics, who seemed to come out of nowhere but be everywhere at once, and was ultra focused on “efficiency and honesty in municipal government?”

And what if that had occurred not once, but twice in the last century?

Certainly by now, the name Zohran Mamdani is already ringing in your ears. More on him in a moment. But let’s first travel back a century to introduce another candidate for mayor whose life and career presaged the modern day version.

His name was Fiorello La Guardia, and his remains were laid to rest on September 21, 1947 in Woodland Cemetery, a short distance from his home at 5020 Woodbridge Avenue in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. He died at age 64 from pancreatic cancer.

“The Little Flower” (a nickname that derived from his first name Fiore – Italian for flower) described his stature (5 foot 2 inches) but not necessarily his personality. The New York Times obituary described him “as much a part (of New York) as any of its public buildings” and “a little firebrand.”

By any measure, he was one of New York’s own, earning the morning of his death in 1947 the Fire Department’s 5-5-5-5 signal, a traditional bell code used to honor firefighters who have died in the line of duty.

An Italian immigrant, his father was raised a Catholic in Foggia, Italy, and his mother (from Trieste on the Italian/Croatian border) was Jewish. Fiorello was born on the East Side of Manhattan on December 11, 1882, two years after his parents’ marriage in Italy. His father was a skilled musician and became the bandmaster for the U.S. Army. As a result, Fiorello was raised on multiple Army bases, and graduated from high school in Prescott, Arizona, a stone’s throw from Fort Whipple. Along the way, the father taught the son to play the banjo, cornet, and trumpet, and taught his sister, Gemma, to play violin, mandolin, and piano.

Skilled in languages (Yiddish, German, French, Italian), by the age of 20 Fiorello was employed by the US Consulate in Europe, and on return to the U.S. served as an interpreter on Ellis Island. Within a few years, he managed a Law Degree from NYU in 1910, and in 1914, at age 32 ran for U.S. Congress as a Republican, losing to the Tammany Hall’s Democratic candidate. Two years later, he won the seat even though Republicans initially supported another candidate. By 2018, he was re-elected but this time with Democratic support and declaring himself a “socialist.”

By 1933, Tammany Hall and its leader, NYC Mayor Jimmy Walker, were out, clearing the way for Fiorello. He ran with the support of a complex coalition of German American Republicans, Democratic reformers, Socialists, middle-class Jews, and Italians who in the past had aligned with Tammany Hall.

He came into the Mayor’s office in 1934 good to go. He had promised work relief for the unemployed, merit-based civil service, efficiency over corruption, and a focus on infrastructure including expanded housing, transportation and parks. Robert Moses was the head of his Parks department, a post he held until 1960. His vocal support during the election for FDR paid off handsomely. Fully 20% of the entire national Civil Works Administration (CPA) budget was allocated by FDR to New York City. In return, he delivered his Labor Party’s (which he helped organize) support to FDR in his Presidential elections in 1936, 1940 and 1944.

One of his main achievements was the maintenance of the Office of Price Administration which placed limits on pricing of food, rents, and other necessities. By the time he stepped down on December 31, 1945, “Tammany Hall had been reduced to a shadow.”

Eight decades later, an independent minded, gifted politician, also occasionally self-defined a “socialist” bucked his own political establishment and soundly defeated the modern version of a Democratic Tammany candidate, Andrew Cuomo, surprising many, but not all political pundits. His name is Zohran Mamdani.

China Goes “Democratic” on Artificial General Intelligence

Jul 25, 2025

By MIKE MAGEE

Last week, following a visit to the White House, Jensen Huang instigated a wholesale reversal of policy from Trump who was blocking Nvidia sales of its H20 chip to China. What did Jensen say?

We can only guess of course. But he likely shared the results of a proprietary report from noted AI researchers at Digital Science that suggested an immediate policy course correction was critical. Beyond the fact that over 50% of all AI researchers are currently based in China, their study documented that “In 2000, China-based scholars produced just 671 AI papers, but in 2024 their 23,695 AI-related publications topped the combined output of the United States (6378), the United Kingdom (2747), and the European Union (10,055).”

David Hook, CEO of Digital Science was declarative in the opening of the report, stating “U.S. influence in AI research is declining, with China now dominating.”

China now supports about 30,000 AI researchers compared to only 10,000 in the US. And that number is shrinking thanks to US tariff and visa shenanigans, and overt attacks by the administration on our premier academic institutions.

Economics professors David Autor (MIT) and Gordon Hanson (Harvard), known for “their research into how globalization, and especially the rise of China, reshaped the American labor market,” famously described the elements of “China Shock 1.0.” in 2013. It was “a singular process—China’s late-1970s transition from Maoist central planning to a market economy, which rapidly moved the country’s labor and capital from collective rural farms to capitalist urban factories.”

As a result, a quarter of all US manufacturing jobs disappeared between 1999 and 2007. Today China’s manufacturing work force tops 100 million, dwarfing the US manufacturing job count of 13 million. Those numbers peaked a decade ago when China’s supply of low cost labor peaked. But these days China is clearly looking forward while this administration and its advisers are being left behind in the rear view mirror.

Welcome to “China Shock 2.0” wrote Autor and Hanson in a recent New York Times editorial. But this time, their leaders are focusing on “key technologies of the 21st century…(and it) will last for as long as China has the resources, patience and discipline to compete fiercely.”

The highly respected Australian Strategic Policy Institute, funded by their Defense Department, has been tracking the volume of published innovative technology research in the US and China for over a quarter century. They see this as a measure of experts opinion where the greatest innovations are originating. In 2007, we led China in the prior four years in 60 of 64 “frontier technologies.”

Two decades later, the table has flipped, with China well ahead of the US in 57 of 64 categories measured.

Watching Where and How You’re Walking

Jul 18, 2025

By MIKE MAGEE

In a speech to the American Philosophical Society in January, 1946, J. Robert Oppenheimer said, “We have made a thing …that has altered abruptly and profoundly the nature of the world…We have raised again the question of whether science is good for man, of whether it is good to learn about the world, to try to understand it, to try to control it, to help give to the world of men increased insight, increased power.”

Eight decades later, those words reverberate, and we once again are at a seminal crossroads. This past week, Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, was everywhere, a remarkably skilled communicator celebrating the fact that his company was now the first publicly traded company to exceed a $4 trillion valuation.

As he explained, “We’ve essentially created a new industry for the first time in three hundred years. the last time there was an industry like this, it was a power generation industry…Now we have a new industry that generates intelligence…you can use it to discover new drugs, to accelerate diagnosis of disease…everybody’s jobs will be different going forward.”

Jensen, as I observed him perform on that morning show, seemed just a bit overwhelmed, awed, and perhaps even slightly frightened by the pace of recent change. “We reinvented computing for the first time since the 60’s, since IBM introduced the modern computer architecture… its able to accelerate applications from computer graphics to physics simulations for science to digital biology to artificial intelligence. . . . in the last year, the technology has advanced incredibly fast. . . AI is now able to reason, it’s able to think… Before it was able to understand, it was able to generate content, but now it can reason, it can do research, it can learn about the latest information before it answers a question.”

Of course, this is hardly the first time technology has triggered flashing ethical warning lights. I recently summarized the case of Facial Recognition Technology (FRT). The US has the largest number of closed circuit cameras at 15.28 per capita, in the world. On average, every American is caught on a closed circuit camera 238 times a week, but experts say that’s nothing compared to where our “surveillance” society will be in a few years.

The field of FRT is on fire.

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