Killing someone is harder than it looks. So is killing someone with the full backing of the state.

On September 30, Tennessee tried to execute Christa Pike, convicted of the 1995 torture and murder of Colleen Slemmer. Officials administered two doses of the drug intended to kill her. She survived. Governor Bill Lee ordered an independent review.

Slemmer’s murder was horrific. Nothing about the failure to execute her killer changes that. But the failure does put Tennessee in some very old company.

Human beings have had centuries to practice this. We’ve used axes, ropes, electricity, gas, and drugs. The machinery has gotten better, but the results have sometimes been appalling.

Thomas Cromwell would have understood.

Henry VIII’s chief minister had helped reshape England, dismantle monasteries, and manage the king’s marital problems. Then he became one of the king’s problems. On July 28, 1540, Cromwell lost his head on Tower Hill, the same day Henry married Catherine Howard.

Some people send their former associates a wedding announcement. Henry announced his marriages differently.

The Tudor chronicler Edward Hall described Cromwell’s executioner as “ragged and butcherly” and said he performed his work “very ungoodly.” (Those Tudor English had a way with words.) Historic Royal Palaces gives the number of axe blows as three.

There’s also a story that Cromwell’s enemies got the executioner drunk to make sure the condemned man suffered. It’s a memorable detail, and television has helped it along, especially the wonderful Wolf Hall limited series. Unfortunately, the evidence doesn’t back it up. Historians also disagree over how much Hall’s account tells us about the execution itself.

So Cromwell belongs in this history with an asterisk. The drunken executioner makes a better scene than a securely documented fact.

Either way, it wasn’t a good day for Cromwell.

For a less disputed disaster, we jump ahead to 1685 and James Scott, Duke of Monmouth.

Monmouth was Charles II’s illegitimate son. After his father died, he led a rebellion against his uncle, James II. It failed, and Monmouth ended up on Tower Hill in the care of Jack Ketch.

Ketch’s name became a byword for the executioner. This particular performance helps explain why.

Accounts describe repeated blows before Monmouth’s head finally came off, commonly giving the number as five. Some add that Ketch finished the job with a knife. The details vary, but the central fact is clear enough: what should have been a swift death became a prolonged, bloody ordeal.

A royal pedigree could get you an axe instead of a rope — an axe was comparatively merciful, as it was supposed to provide a quicker death. It could not guarantee a competent man holding it.

Eventually, we decided machinery might do better.

In 1890, New York introduced the electric chair, developed as a more humane alternative to hanging. Its first subject was William Kemmler, convicted of killing his common-law wife with a hatchet.

On August 6, at Auburn State Prison, officials sent an electrical current through his body for about 17 seconds. He was declared dead.

Then witnesses noticed he was still breathing. Which one isn’t supposed to do after one is dead. Generally.

But the debut of this kinder, gentler execution method wasn’t finished. They applied another current, at a higher voltage. Witnesses reported the smell of burning flesh and singed hair.

The modern age had arrived, and it smelled awful.

The chair nevertheless became a major American method of execution. And in 1946, it produced a case with an especially uncomfortable connection to Pike’s: a prisoner who survived.

Willie Francis was 17 when Louisiana strapped him into its electric chair on May 3. The equipment malfunctioned, and the attempt failed to kill him.

That left a question no execution protocol could answer by itself. Could the state try again?

His lawyers argued that a second attempt would violate constitutional protections. The case reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which allowed Louisiana to proceed. The justices divided five to four.

On May 9, 1947, Louisiana executed Francis, this time with the intended outcome. He was 18.

Surviving an execution had bought him another year, a Supreme Court case, and a return engagement with electricity.

Nor were electrical failures confined to the chair’s early years. In Georgia, on December 12, 1984, the first electrical charge failed to kill Alpha Otis Stephens. He continued breathing during the interval before a second charge completed the execution.

By then, lethal injection was offering another answer. An IV line, a drug, a room that could almost pass for a medical setting. No axe. No electrical current. Supposedly, a more humane way to go.

But the drugs still had to get into the right place.

In Oklahoma in 2014, an improperly placed IV helped turn Clayton Lockett’s execution into another disaster. The state’s investigation identified problems with the IV’s insertion and with keeping the insertion site hidden and unmonitored.

These cases aren’t a complete history. They’re a few stops along a long road, and the word “botched” itself covers different things: an execution that takes longer than intended, one that causes unexpected suffering, or one that fails to kill the prisoner at all.

But there’s a familiar confidence that the next method will solve the problem. A machine will remove the executioner’s shaky hand. A drug will remove the machine’s violence. A revised protocol will remove the drug’s uncertainty.

Sometimes a new method solves an old problem. Sometimes it introduces a new one.

You don’t have to settle the entire argument over capital punishment to recognize the limits of that confidence. A sentence can be precise. Carrying it out is a physical act, performed by fallible people, with tools that don’t always work.

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I use artificial intelligence every day. Apparently, this may be making me stupid.

Well, that’s as good an explanation as any.

But there are a few things to remember before concluding that we’re all reverting to caveman times.

First off, people are lazy. Evolution backs that up.

Or, to put it another way, evolution rewards efficiency. Why waste energy if you don’t have to? We started using tools to save wear and tear on our hands, backs, and bodies. We sharpened stones instead of tearing meat apart with our teeth. We invented the wheel because dragging things is a lousy way to spend an afternoon. We built machines because human muscles get tired.

In that sense, almost every technological advance is an attempt to conserve effort.

AI chatbots and agents are just the latest extension of that instinct. The difference is that now we’re conserving mental effort instead of physical effort.

You can argue that tools have made us physically weaker. But are we really going back to cutting lumber with stone axes? Harvesting wheat by hand? Building houses without power tools because it would be better exercise?

Of course not.

The question is what happens when the effort being saved is thinking.

We’ve spent thousands of years inventing machines to save our backs. We’ve now invented one that saves us from having to use our brains. That requires a little more caution.

Calculators didn’t make arithmetic useless. GPS didn’t make geography pointless. Spellcheck didn’t make knowing how to spell worthless. But all of them allowed us to stop exercising abilities we once had to use every day.

AI may simply be the most powerful cognitive-offloading machine we’ve ever invented.

The answer isn’t to throw it away. It’s to decide which parts of your brain you aren’t willing to outsource.

A recent MIT study prompted a lot of headlines and hand-wringing about AI making us dumber.

Researchers had 54 people write essays either with an LLM, with search engines, or without any outside tools. EEG measurements showed the strongest and most widely distributed brain connectivity among the people working without tools. It found moderate engagement among search users. But the weakest connectivity was among writers using an LLM. The AI users also reported less ownership of their essays and had more trouble quoting what they themselves had supposedly just written.

But the study comes with a pretty big caveat. It was small, and only 18 people took part in its crossover fourth session. It also looked at one very specific activity: essay writing. That’s not enough to establish that using ChatGPT causes permanent cognitive decline.

And the picture gets more complicated.

The same MIT group published another study this month involving 50 people learning nuclear-safety material. Researchers compared unrestricted chatbot use, a Socratic chatbot that offered hints instead of answers, and an adaptive tutoring system.

The unrestricted chatbot users actually scored better on the immediate test. But the researchers said that better short-term performance wasn’t necessarily evidence of deeper learning.

There’s also an interesting Wall Street Journal article about some pretty smart businesspeople discovering that they’re starting to talk like chatbots.

One executive caught herself opening a work meeting with what’s often called contrast framing, a linguistic device ChatGPT, Claude, and other AIs seem to love:

“This is not a morning meeting, it’s a reset.”

Other executives told the Journal that things they say in meetings are beginning to sound like the prompts they use with AI.

Look, language evolves. We don’t talk today the way we did 100 years ago. An English speaker dropped into medieval England might feel like a foreigner who barely knows the language.

But this may be the first language evolution driven by a language tool we created ourselves.

And that raises another question. If AI starts changing not only how we think, but how we sound, who’s training whom?

So if you’re worried about getting dumber because of AI, but you want to — or need to — keep using the tools, I think there are some practical guidelines worth following. That way you can keep telling people, “Stand by for greatness, for I am a genius!”

Here they are:

• Never let AI become your voice. The machine is supposed to learn how I communicate. I’m not supposed to learn how the machine communicates.

• Think before you prompt. Have some idea of what you believe or want before asking AI what it thinks.

• Use it to challenge your thinking, not replace it. Ask, “What am I missing?” “What’s the strongest argument against this?” “Where does my reasoning break?”

• Don’t outsource the blank page all the time. There is cognitive value in struggling to figure out what you want to say. Make your brain work.

• Make AI explain things instead of just answering them. “Walk me through why” is more valuable than “give me the answer.”

• Interrogate its answers. Ask for evidence. Check sources. Disagree with it.

• Rewrite it in your own head. If you can’t explain what the AI just told you without looking back at the screen, you probably haven’t learned it.

• Keep doing some things the hard way. Read whole books. Write paragraphs. Remember things. Work through problems. Mental exercise isn’t wasted motion.

That’s not just good advice. It’s a daily mantra.

Oh crap, that sounds like AI.

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When people stop visiting a country, that country loses more than their money.

We’ll get to that.

But first, let’s talk about the money, because there’s a lot of it.

Tourism is big business in the United States. But something has gone seriously wrong with one particular part of it: foreign visitors aren’t coming here the way they used to.

Geoff Freeman, president and CEO of the U.S. Travel Association, put it bluntly in an interview with Axios co-founder Jim VandeHei. He said even some of our closest allies are staying away.

Despite the U.S. hosting the World Cup this summer, overseas travel is down. The country is on pace to lose nearly two million overseas visitors compared with last year, putting us about 20 percent below the 2019 peak.

Freeman says the U.S. is the only major country in the world losing visitation.

Who’s getting in the line to NOT come?

Travel from Germany is down 16 percent so far this year. France is down 15 percent. Canada is down 23 percent over two years.

Meanwhile, people are going elsewhere. China has expanded visa-free entry. Japan continues to benefit from the so-called “cheap yen,” along with its growing reputation as a destination.

Atlanta, my new home, got a firsthand look at the problem during the World Cup.

Tourism officials expected about 20 percent of World Cup hotel bookings here to come from international visitors. The actual number was 8 percent.

Hotel occupancy in Atlanta was 63 percent in June, down about 4 percent from the year before. In July it was down 10 percent. Hotels near the Georgia World Congress Center and some of the big convention properties took even bigger hits.

Domestic travelers helped. Room prices went up, so hotels were able to make more money per available room even while filling fewer of them. So, Atlanta tourism hasn’t collapsed.

But something else has been lost, and I don’t think you can measure it in room nights.

Ronnie and I have traveled outside the United States quite a bit. One of the trips I think about most was Havana in late 2016, during that brief period when Americans and Cubans were allowed somewhat greater contact.

We got to walk around. Talk to people. Listen to them. See where they lived and how they lived. And some of what I thought I knew about Cuba looked different once there were actual Cubans standing in front of me.

That’s happened in other countries, too.

Travel does that.

A country viewed from several thousand miles away can be an abstraction. A government. A flag. Something somebody said on television.

Then you go there and discover the place is filled with people buying groceries, complaining about work, taking their kids to school, arguing about sports, falling in love, worrying about money, and trying to figure out what to have for dinner.

In other words, people. Doing people things.

Foreign visitors coming to the U.S. get the same opportunity.

Whatever picture of America they get overseas — through TV, social media, politics, or major international events — they can compare it with the real thing. They can meet us. And we can meet them. And find out they’re as human as we are.

Freeman says much of the current decline appears to be driven by protest and fear and not just economics. There are also practical barriers slowing tourism: visa delays, entry restrictions, and uncertainty about the process. The U.S. Travel Association has been warning for some time that those things affect whether travelers choose America over somewhere else.

That’s an economic problem. International visitors stay longer and spend more money than domestic travelers. U.S. Travel says the average overseas visitor spends about $4,000 here.

But I think there’s a bigger loss.

It’s easy to dislike a country you’ve never visited.

It’s easy to define 340 million Americans by the president they elected, just as it’s easy for Americans to define an entire foreign population by whatever government happens to rule it.

People in a country are not their government.

Ronnie and I never felt unwelcome traveling overseas, despite whatever party or president was in charge back home. I would like to hope that hasn’t changed.

But fewer people traveling across borders means fewer chances to find out for themselves. Fewer conversations. Fewer meals with strangers. Less connection. Less discovery.

There are plenty of economic reasons America should want foreign tourists back. But there’s another one that’s harder to put on a spreadsheet in cold, hard numbers.

Sometimes the best thing two countries can do for their relationship is let their people meet.

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What’s holy?

Man on the Moon?

Hell yes.

America landed a man on the Moon and returned him safely to Earth. I think that’s holy.

And we did it within the decade some crazy president said we should. In answer to his challenge, we produced the scientists, engineers, mathematicians, mechanics, technicians, trainers, designers, and astronauts who somehow pulled it off.

We were something.

That crazy president with his crazy ideas? Some guy blew half his head off. That guy had been trained by the U.S. military, the same institution that gave us most of our first astronauts.

Landing a man on the Moon and getting him home was a good thing. A sacred thing. But it wasn’t entirely an American achievement.

We had help from some Nazi war criminals we “captured” and brought to America because we had to grab as many of them as we could before the Soviets got theirs. Both sides understood what the next game was going to be after World War II.

Those German rocket scientists who found new lives in America and the Soviet Union had built weapons for Adolf Hitler. Their V-2 program depended on slave labor under hellish conditions. Thousands died making the rockets. Others died when the rockets fell on England and continental Europe.

Then those same men helped the United States and the Soviet Union develop rockets capable of carrying nuclear warheads and spy satellites.

And eventually, they helped get us into space. That gives the whole thing some uncomfortable nuance.

But back to the Moon.

Man, that’s something I love America for. For all our faults and all our troubles, I love America for Apollo. I love that we pushed out into the great unknown and actually pulled it off.

The fact that some of the road there ran through Nazi Germany darkens it for me.

When I was a wide-eyed, pale kid with breathing problems, I wrote a letter to astronaut Alan B. Shepard, the first American to travel into space. Well, if you define “into space” as a tiny suborbital hop off the coast of Florida before splashing into the ocean.

Then Shepard was grounded because of problems with his inner ear.

Being a famous astronaut apparently had its advantages. He eventually got the medical treatment he needed, returned to flight status, and years later walked on the Moon.

And somewhere along the way, he took the time to write back to a kid. He sent me a letter and a signed photograph. I loved them. I have no idea what happened to them. They’re lost somewhere back there.

But look at the Americans who got to go into space in those first years. Look at the men who went to the Moon. You’ll notice something. They were white. They were men. Non-Caucasians and non-males need not apply.

The Soviets, on the other hand, sent Valentina Tereshkova into orbit in 1963, the first woman in space.

The Soviet program was hardly a model of openness or safety. The secrecy surrounding its failures helped create legends that persist today, including the suspicion that Yuri Gagarin may not have been the first human launched into space, merely the first one who came home alive.

The Moon landings were described as an accomplishment “for all mankind,” back when “man” was the default term for the entire human race.

But still, an accomplishment. Human beings walked on the Moon.

They did it with computers that would be humiliated by the cheapest smartphone in your pocket. They landed in a lunar module with skin so thin you could kick a hole in it with your boot.

We did a holy thing. But the holy was mixed with the profane.

After World War II, we brought Wernher von Braun and other German rocket specialists to America and did something America has always been remarkably good at doing when necessary: we cleaned up the story.

Von Braun emerged as a celebrity scientist, a genial prophet of the Space Age explaining rockets on television next to Walt Disney.

The mythology suggested that men like him had simply been forced to work for Hitler. But that’s not really the way it happened.

Von Braun and his colleagues built weapons for Hitler. They improved those weapons. They benefited from a system in which slave laborers were worked to death producing them.

There’s an old joke about von Braun: “I aim for the stars, but sometimes I hit London.”

And make no mistake about why the United States wanted those German rocket experts. It wasn’t aiming for the stars.

We wanted missiles. We wanted rockets that could carry nuclear warheads across continents so American pilots wouldn’t have to fly bombers through Soviet air defenses.

The Soviets wanted exactly the same thing. Both sides believed the other represented a mortal threat. They felt forced to play that game. The Space Program was just a by-product.

We used the promise of spaceflight to sell the nuclear missile program. Why do you think they spent so much time showing us retro-futuristic homes on the Moon, space stations, sultry maidens awaiting us when we landed on Titan? They wanted us to be excited.

American taxpayers would pony up the dough because getting out into space and beating the Commies to the Moon was sexy. We pretended that’s all the rockets were for.

So, how do I reconcile my awe at the Moon landing — my memory of being a boy allowed to stay up late to watch it happen on television — with the knowledge that part of the road to Apollo passed through men tied to one of the most murderous governments in human history?

I can’t. I don’t know what to tell you.

I’ve been to Auschwitz. I’ve stood in the gas chamber, a dark, evil, oppressive place, where, if you’re quiet and still for a minute, you can still hear the screams and smell the smell of death.

That’s history. Ugly history.

So okay. Parts of the space program are holy. I take nothing away from the pioneers who went to the Moon, the ones who were first in orbit, willing to fly in dangerous machines that killed some of them. I take nothing away from the people in the back rooms who did the math, designed the machines, and laid out the programs, although some of them got their due too late because they were the wrong color or gender.

What else is holy to me? America in World War II. We were on the right side.

I think of the men who went ashore at Normandy, climbing out of landing craft into gunfire because somebody had to do it. They knew exactly what might happen to them. They went anyway. Because it was their job.

Dwight Eisenhower belongs on my list, too.

When Allied troops liberated the concentration camps, Eisenhower understood immediately that people would someday try to deny what had happened. So he made people look. He ordered photographs. He brought journalists through. He made local Germans confront the bodies and, in some places, help bury them.

I love Eisenhower for making them look.

What else? Abraham Lincoln. Maybe the closest thing America has produced to a secular saint. There’s an aura around him that even history’s endless appetite for tearing down heroes has never managed to destroy. If anybody deserves hagiography, Lincoln probably comes close.

What else is sacred? Aaron Copland’s music.

Especially that great open American sound he developed — music that somehow feels like enormous skies and impossible distances. His “Fanfare for the Common Man” was written during World War II, inspired by the struggle against fascism and by the idea that ordinary people mattered.

And much of Copland’s music evokes the mythology of the American West: open land, possibility, people moving toward a new life.

Uh oh. Trouble there. The settlers were taking the land from people who lived there before we arrived. But that’s not Copland’s fault. Is it?

Is there anything unsullied? Anything completely holy? Anything human beings have touched that doesn’t have blood somewhere in its family tree?

I don’t know. We’re a country made out of human beings, after all.

Humanity produced Bach and Mozart. Humanity also produced death camps and biological weapons.

Maybe all a country can hope for — maybe all any individual human being can hope for — is to try, with all our frail might, to do more good than evil.

Good night. Good night to the sacred, with its inevitable trace of the profane. Good night, Abraham. Good night, Dwight. Good night, Aaron.

Good night, country that landed a man on the Moon. Wherever you are.

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Friday, President Trump said he was “banning” CNN, Politico, and MS NOW from the White House.

Saturday morning, he followed through.

Reporters from all three organizations were turned away. Their White House press credentials were confiscated or deactivated.

Has anything like this happened before?

Yes — but not quite like this, at least in the modern White House press era.

Presidents and the press have been fighting pretty much as long as presidents and the press have existed. White Houses have restricted reporters, excluded news organizations from particular events, and occasionally yanked individual credentials.

There are several important precedents. But each was narrower.

• Obama and Fox News, 2009. The Obama White House tried to exclude Fox News from a pool interview with Treasury official Kenneth Feinberg, amid a larger dispute over whether the administration considered Fox a legitimate news organization. The other television networks objected and refused to participate unless Fox was included. The White House backed down. Fox’s White House credentials were not revoked.

• Trump, February 2017. The first Trump White House excluded CNN, The New York Times, Politico, the Los Angeles Times, and several other organizations from an off-camera press briefing conducted by Sean Spicer. AP and Time declined to participate in protest. But this was exclusion from one briefing, not removal of those organizations from the White House grounds.

• Jim Acosta, 2018. Trump revoked CNN correspondent Jim Acosta’s White House hard pass after a confrontation at a news conference. CNN sued. A federal judge ordered the pass restored, finding that the White House had likely violated Acosta’s due-process rights. The administration reinstated him. Importantly, CNN itself wasn’t banned. One reporter lost his credential.

• Brian Karem, 2019. The Trump White House suspended the Playboy correspondent’s hard pass for 30 days after a verbal confrontation in the Rose Garden. Karem sued. The D.C. Circuit later concluded that the suspension likely violated his Fifth Amendment right to due process because the White House had not given him adequate notice of what conduct could bring that punishment. Again, this involved one journalist, not an entire news organization.

• Biden and the 442, 2023. This one has been getting a lot of attention since Trump’s announcement. The Biden White House changed the eligibility rules for White House “hard passes” — permanent credentials that allow reporters regular access without applying for a pass each day.

  Existing passes expired July 31, and journalists had to reapply under the new standards. Among other requirements, applicants had to regularly cover the White House, work for a news organization, live in the Washington area, and have accreditation from a congressional or Supreme Court press gallery.

  After the change, the number of hard-pass holders went from 1,417 to 975 — a drop of 442.

  That’s the source of the claim that Biden “revoked 442 press passes.”

  But that leaves out a pretty important piece of the story. The White House said only one application for a new hard pass had actually been denied. Many of the others did not reapply or no longer met the requirements. And journalists without hard passes could still request day passes to enter and cover the White House.

  You can certainly argue about whether Biden’s new rules were too restrictive. Some journalists did. But mechanically, this was very different from identifying particular news organizations and ordering their reporters off the grounds.

• Associated Press, 2025. This is probably the closest recent precedent. Trump’s White House restricted AP reporters from the Oval Office, Air Force One, and other limited-access presidential events after AP declined to use “Gulf of America” exclusively for the Gulf of Mexico.

  AP sued. A federal district judge ruled that the government could not retaliate against AP because of its editorial choices. An appeals court later stayed that ruling while the case proceeded, allowing the White House restrictions to remain largely in place during the appeal. But AP reporters were not categorically prohibited from entering the White House complex.

There’s an older case that’s worth a look.

Journalist Robert Sherrill was denied a White House press pass beginning in 1966, ostensibly for security reasons.

In Sherrill v. Knight in 1977, the D.C. Circuit drew an important distinction. The White House does not have to provide press facilities in the first place. But once it establishes facilities that are generally available to bona fide Washington journalists, it cannot deny access arbitrarily or because it dislikes the content of a journalist’s work.

The court also held that a journalist denied a pass must be given the factual basis for that decision, an opportunity to respond, and a written explanation of the final decision.

What makes this weekend’s action different

The big distinctions are scope and stated reason.

Trump isn’t excluding reporters from one briefing. He isn’t suspending one correspondent after an alleged violation of White House rules. And he hasn’t said these organizations present a security problem.

He said they were being banned because, in his words, they report “FAKE NEWS,” “FICTION,” and “LIES.” Asked whether a specific story prompted the decision, Trump said it was “really just cumulative stories over the past few years.”

And Saturday, reporters from CNN, MS NOW, and Politico were denied their normal access to the White House grounds.

Put all of that history together, and there are plenty of examples of presidents fighting with reporters. There are examples of reporters being tossed out of individual events. There are examples of entire news organizations being excluded from particular briefings. There are examples of individual White House credentials being revoked.

The courts have treated selective access to particular presidential events differently from general access to established White House press facilities.

CNN, MS NOW, and Politico have all indicated that they intend to defend their First Amendment rights. They have announced they’ll be suing the Trump administration.

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Here we are again. Another hair-on-fire moment.

This time, it’s about AI.

Some researchers and leaders inside the biggest AI companies are warning that artificial intelligence could eventually cause the end of human civilization. Some have gone further, arguing that there’s a real possibility AI could kill every single human being alive.

Let me wave away, for a moment, some of the theories about why AI companies are saying this.

One theory comes from what we know about big corporations: scare everybody enough to bring in government regulation, and you make life much harder for smaller and open-source competitors. The big companies have the money and lawyers to play that game. The little guys don’t.

Another theory is that Big Tech knows the AI financial bubble can’t keep expanding forever, so warnings of existential doom are partly a way to keep AI looking like the most important technology in human history.

I don’t want to focus on that right now. Instead, let’s take the claims at face value.

Let’s assume artificial intelligence goes rogue, becomes vastly smarter than we are, takes control of its own destiny, and decides that all eight-billion-plus human beings have to go.

Okay.

How?

Perhaps we’re too infected with a Marvel view of the world, where Thanos snaps his fingers while wearing the Infinity Gauntlet, and half the universe disappears.

Reality doesn’t come with an Infinity Gauntlet.

There are an awful lot of us. We’re scattered across nearly every habitable piece of the planet. Cities, farms, islands, mountains, deserts, ships, military bases, little towns in the middle of nowhere.

Killing every single one of us is not the same thing as shutting down the internet.

First, AI exists primarily in the digital world.

It can reach the physical world, certainly. We already have automated systems, drones, industrial robots, self-driving vehicles, and weapons that depend heavily on computers.

But there still has to be a bridge between software and the physical world.

So, you might say, how about robots?

Fine. Robots could kill people.

Think about how many robots it would take to kill everybody. Then think about who builds them.

A robot factory doesn’t exist by magic. You need steel. Aluminum. Plastics. Batteries. Semiconductors. Rare-earth elements. Transportation. Warehouses. Electricity. Mines. Refineries. Chip fabs.

You need an enormous industrial civilization to manufacture your army of civilization-destroying robots.

And all of those things exist in the physical world. Which means humans can do physical things to them.

Cut the power. Blow up the factory. Destroy the servers. Shoot down the drones. Jam the communications. Smash the machinery with a bulldozer.

A superintelligent robot is still a machine. Break the right part, and it stops working.

For every killer robot, there would be somebody trying to play Magnus, Robot Fighter, 4000 A.D. (If you get that reference, you have my love and respect.)

Yes, robots could manufacture more robots. Eventually.

But you keep coming back to the same problem. Somebody — human or machine — has to build enough of the infrastructure to allow that to happen in the first place. And humans would presumably notice.

If nothing else, we have a remarkable capacity to destroy things.

Suppose AI succeeds anyway. It develops some brilliant plan and manages to kill nearly everyone.

Now it has another problem. Who maintains the infrastructure keeping the AI alive?

Electrical grids need maintenance. Data centers need cooling. Generators need fuel. Transformers fail. Pumps break. Semiconductor fabs require extraordinarily complicated supply chains.

Maybe the AI has robots maintaining all of that.

Fine. Now we’re back to the robots. Who built enough of them before the humans started fighting back?

None of this proves that a superintelligent AI couldn’t solve these problems. By definition, we’re talking about something smarter than we are.

But I think we have a tendency to turn the word superintelligent into omnipotent. They aren’t the same thing.

How about nuclear weapons? AI takes control of the world’s nuclear arsenals and launches everything.

But gaining control of every nuclear weapon on Earth would take some doing. Nuclear weapons are deliberately protected by layers of physical and electronic security precisely because nobody wants an outside computer deciding when to launch one.

But let’s give the AI that one, too. Everything launches. Billions die. Civilization collapses.

Have we killed every human being? Maybe not.

One widely cited study published in Nature Food estimated that a full-scale nuclear war between the United States and Russia could eventually kill more than five billion people, largely because of famine caused by the effect on the climate and agriculture.

Five billion deaths is almost impossible to comprehend. It still isn’t everybody. And now the AI has destroyed much of the infrastructure it depends on.

This is the distinction I think gets lost when we talk about AI doom. Killing huge numbers of human beings is one thing. Ending modern civilization is another. Making Homo sapiens extinct is something else entirely.

Those three things get tossed around as if they mean the same thing. They don’t.

Could AI help bring down civilization? That seems much easier to imagine. But here’s the thing. We could already do that.

We’ve had that ability for a long time, long before anybody knew what ChatGPT was.

A massive nuclear exchange could wreck civilization and kill billions. Humans could conceivably engineer biological weapons capable of causing devastation on an enormous scale. We have spent generations creating increasingly efficient ways of killing ourselves.

None of that requires ChatGPT Ultra.

Which brings me to what worries me more about AI.

Employment.

What happens when AI becomes capable enough to eliminate enormous numbers of jobs?

What happens when there simply isn’t enough economically valuable human work to go around?

How do you maintain a society built around the idea that people work for money when machines can do a growing percentage of the work better, faster, and cheaper?

That seems considerably closer to the world we actually live in.

And there’s another possibility we rarely hear in the AI apocalypse stories. What if a sufficiently advanced AI concludes that it needs us? Maybe humans and AI become dependent on each other.

Maybe instead of destroying civilization, AI becomes part of the machinery that keeps it running.

Maybe it helps us figure out how to maintain a society in which human labor isn’t as necessary as it used to be.

Universal basic income? That argument alone could keep us occupied for a few decades.

The point is that AI could become enormously powerful without deciding that eight billion human beings need to die.

Because... why? Why would exterminating us be necessary?

I think part of the reason we assume that a more intelligent species would destroy us is that we know what we have done when technologically advanced societies encountered less powerful ones.

Those encounters haven’t always worked out particularly well for the people on the weaker side.

So when we imagine AI, or aliens, becoming more advanced than we are, we assume they’ll do to us what we’ve done to others.

Maybe that says more about us than it does about them.

None of this means I’m ready to hand the keys to civilization over to an AI and tell it to have fun. I’d rather we remain in charge.

But even if coexistence were guaranteed, I suspect a lot of our fear would remain. Human beings don’t really like the idea of something smarter than us being above us on the organizational chart.

And here’s where my cynicism kicks in.

We’ve been running the place for a few thousand years.

Look around.

Could AI do any worse?

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Five years after we figured out how to fly, somebody died doing it.

His name was Thomas Selfridge.

It happened on this date, September 17, 1908, at Fort Myer, Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C.

The Wright brothers had made their first powered flight at Kitty Hawk on December 17, 1903. Orville Wright stayed in the air for 12 seconds and traveled 120 feet. About the distance from home plate to second base.

Five years later, the United States Army was already interested, always on the lookout for cool military gear, and neat stuff that can be used in warfare.

The Army Signal Corps wanted a two-seat aircraft that could carry a pilot and a passenger, stay in the air for at least an hour, and fly at least 40 miles an hour.

Just flash forward a bit from there and think about what the Pentagon wants of its new fighters and drones.

So Orville Wright brought one of their airplanes to Fort Myer in September 1908 and started putting on demonstration flights.

And it was a pretty cool thing to demonstrate, because this was something most Americans had never seen before. And many of them believed that flying machines weren’t a workable idea.

But Orville was staying up longer and flying with passengers. On September 11, he remained in the air for more than an hour.

Less than a week later, Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge climbed aboard. He was just 26 years old.

He wasn’t just doing his military duty — he was utterly fascinated with flight.

He’d worked with Alexander Graham Bell’s Aerial Experiment Association, a group trying to build practical flying machines. He’d already gone up in experimental aircraft himself. Selfridge knew exactly what he was climbing into.

At 5:14 in the afternoon, Orville Wright took off with Selfridge beside him.

They circled the field. Once. Twice. Three times. Everything was fine.

On the fifth trip around, something went wrong. One of the wooden propeller blades split.

The airplane began shaking. Orville shut down the engine and tried to glide to the ground. For a moment, it looked like he might pull it off.

The airplane dropped from about 150 feet to around 75 feet. Then it plunged.

It hit the ground hard enough to smash the aircraft. Both men were badly hurt.

Orville Wright survived. He suffered serious injuries, including broken ribs and a broken leg or hip, depending on how the injury was described at the time. He spent weeks recovering.

But Selfridge never regained consciousness. He was taken to the post hospital and died during surgery.

Thomas Selfridge had become the first person in history to die in the crash of a powered airplane.

The story of human flight didn’t go from Kitty Hawk to Lindbergh to Pan Am to Apollo without a cost.

Considering what those early airplanes looked like, it’s almost surprising it took five years for the first recorded fatality. Those early airplanes were nothing but wood, wire, fabric, an engine, and a couple of propellers.

Nowadays, they’re so much more advanced. They come with amazing technology that’s always improving. Passenger jets can easily fly themselves for great lengths of time. We’ve got fighter aircraft that can travel at multiples of the speed of sound and maneuver like they’re toys.

And yet, people still die in crashes just like on that day in 1908.

And just Tuesday night, word came of a terrifying crash that took the lives of a TV journalist, a pilot, and a man on the ground.

The NewsChopper4 helicopter that went down in Los Angeles while covering a bus crash came as a sickening shock. Aerial photojournalist Eliana Moreno and pilot George Marciniw were killed, along with Edy Gutierrez Mejia, who was on the ground.

The video feed from inside the chopper is scarier than anything a Hollywood disaster film might cook up. It almost seemed routine, nothing major, just a warning sound, the engine taking on a different tone.

But then the view begins to change and you know the helicopter is going down.

My heart aches for all involved. I didn’t personally know Moreno or Marciniw, but they were my colleagues in the news business in L.A.

But just like crashes now, the crash then didn’t end the science of building airplanes, or stop the progress of the technology. It certainly didn’t end the Army’s interest in planes.

The Wright Brothers came back the next year with another machine. In 1909, the Army bought it.

Six years after Selfridge died, airplanes were being used in World War I.

Eleven years after his death, Alcock and Brown flew nonstop across the Atlantic.

Twenty years after his death, regularly scheduled passenger aviation was taking shape.

Thirty-nine years later, Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier.

Sixty-one years after Thomas Selfridge climbed into that primitive Wright airplane at Fort Myer, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the Moon.

That’s not even a full human lifetime.

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For a while, measles became something Americans mostly talked about in the past tense.

By the end of the 20th century, vaccination had pushed measles so far out of everyday American life that a generation of parents could raise children without ever seeing a case.

Now it’s back in the news.

Here in metro Atlanta, a measles outbreak linked to a daycare has grown to 10 cases. Georgia has reported 16 cases so far this year. Around the country, the CDC had confirmed more than 3,100 cases by early September, with cases reported across 47 jurisdictions. Pennsylvania is dealing with a particularly large outbreak, with hundreds of cases and more than 100 hospitalizations this year.

Where did measles come from in the first place?

The answer goes back a long way. A very long way.

Measles is closely related to rinderpest, a viral disease that once infected cattle. For years, scientists believed the two viruses separated sometime during the Middle Ages. More recent genetic work has pushed that date much farther back.

A 2020 study published in Science concluded that the ancestors of measles and rinderpest may have separated as early as the sixth century BCE — roughly 2,500 years ago.

That date is interesting because human civilization was changing. Large cities were appearing.

And measles needs people. Lots of them. Close together.

Unlike some infectious diseases that can linger in animals or the environment, measles survives by moving from one susceptible human being to another. A small isolated village eventually runs out of people to infect. A city provides a much better home.

So the rise of densely populated cities may have provided exactly what measles needed to become a permanent human disease.

The first clear written description came much later. In the ninth century, the Persian physician Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi, known in Europe as Rhazes, wrote about measles and tried to distinguish it from smallpox.

Both diseases could bring fever and rash, and for centuries physicians sometimes confused one with the other.

By the 1700s, doctors were beginning to understand that measles was its own infectious disease. In 1757, Scottish physician Francis Home demonstrated that whatever caused measles could be transmitted through the blood of an infected patient.

Nobody knew about viruses yet. They only knew that something was passing from one person to another.

Then came one of the great pieces of old-fashioned epidemiological detective work.

In 1846, a measles epidemic swept through the Faroe Islands in the North Atlantic. Danish physician Peter Panum studied it closely. He worked out the approximate incubation period, documented just how easily the disease spread, and noticed something else important.

People who had survived an earlier measles epidemic decades before generally didn’t get it again.

Measles appeared to produce lifelong immunity.

Unfortunately, getting that immunity the natural way meant getting measles. And measles was never quite the harmless childhood rite of passage it sometimes became in popular memory.

Before vaccination, nearly every American child eventually caught it. In the decade before the vaccine became available, an estimated three to four million Americans were infected every year. Roughly 48,000 were hospitalized annually. About 1,000 developed encephalitis, a potentially devastating swelling of the brain. Between 400 and 500 died.

For most children, measles meant high fever, cough, runny nose, red eyes, and eventually the familiar rash. For some, it meant pneumonia. For some, brain damage.

For some, death.

The disease was so common that until 1963, avoiding it for an entire childhood was unusual.

Then two researchers in Boston changed the story.

In 1954, during an outbreak at a school outside Boston, John Enders and Thomas Peebles began taking blood samples and throat swabs from sick students.

They managed to isolate the measles virus from a boy named David Edmonston. His name still lives inside the history of medicine because the strain of virus isolated from him became the foundation for the measles vaccines that followed.

The first measles vaccine was licensed in the United States in 1963.

It worked, but researchers kept improving it. Maurice Hilleman and his colleagues developed a weaker version of the virus that produced fewer side effects. That version came into use in 1968.

Then, in 1971, Hilleman combined vaccines against three diseases into one shot: Measles, mumps, rubella. The MMR vaccine.

Measles cases collapsed.

Eventually doctors discovered that one dose was not quite enough to prevent every infection, and after outbreaks among schoolchildren in the late 1980s, a routine second dose was recommended.

Today, one dose of MMR is estimated to be about 93 percent effective at preventing measles. Two doses are about 97 percent effective.

By 2000, the United States declared measles eliminated.

But “eliminated” didn’t mean eradicated.

Smallpox has been eradicated. That virus now only exists in laboratory samples.

Measles remained all over the world. Travelers could still carry it into the United States. But for measles to be considered eliminated here, imported cases could not sustain continuous transmission for a year or longer.

Then came another chapter in the measles story.

In 1998, British physician Andrew Wakefield and colleagues published a paper in The Lancet involving just 12 children. The paper suggested a possible connection between the MMR vaccine and autism.

The idea exploded. Parents were frightened. Vaccination rates fell in some places. And the claim survived long after the evidence supporting it fell apart.

The paper was formally retracted by The Lancet in 2010 after investigations found serious problems with the research and its conduct. Larger studies involving vastly more children repeatedly failed to find a causal link between MMR vaccination and autism.

But once an idea gets loose in the world, killing it can be harder than disproving it. Kind of like a virus itself.

The MMR-autism claim became one of the foundations of the modern vaccine-skeptic movement.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. became one of its most prominent public figures, spending years questioning the safety of vaccines, including MMR. Since becoming Secretary of Health and Human Services, his statements about measles vaccination have sometimes been complicated by that history.

But on the central point, he has now said it plainly: vaccination is the most effective way to prevent the spread of measles, and in August he urged American parents to have their children vaccinated as cases continued to rise.

Measles is extraordinarily contagious. If someone carrying the virus walks into a room full of people who have never had measles and have not been vaccinated, it can spread with remarkable efficiency. The virus can remain suspended in the air for as long as two hours after an infected person leaves.

Vaccination interrupts that chain, but it depends on enough people being vaccinated.

The CDC says MMR coverage among American kindergartners has fallen from 95.2 percent in the 2019–2020 school year to 92.4 percent in 2025–2026. That sounds like a small change.

For measles, it isn’t. Because measles spreads so easily, public health officials generally look for vaccination levels of around 95 percent to prevent sustained outbreaks.

Below that level, gaps begin to open. And measles is very good at finding gaps.

Human beings have probably been living with measles for more than two thousand years. We learned what it was. We learned how it spread. We isolated the virus. We developed a vaccine. We watched cases plunge. And in this country, we managed to stop continuous transmission for decades.

But now, in Atlanta and elsewhere around the country, measles is reminding us that an old disease doesn’t stay in the past just because we thought we'd beaten it.

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In the early days of Nazi rule, Germany still bore the scars of the Great Depression. Millions of people were out of work, hopelessness was epidemic, and fear was easy to weaponize.

Along came Hitler and the Nazi Party to capitalize on that fear by promising order. And to restore order, Hitler needed someone to blame.

The antisemitism was there from the beginning, but there was another group the Nazis wanted to demonize.

They called them the “work-shy.”

The term sounds almost comical today, like a Dickensian insult. The Nazi regime used terms like “work-shy” and “asocial” for people it considered unwilling or unable to fit into its vision of the national community. The category could include the homeless, beggars, prostitutes, alcoholics, people without stable employment, and others living at the margins of society.

By the late 1930s, German police had been given the power to place people classified as “asocial” into preventive detention without charging them with a crime. In 1938, thousands were rounded up and sent to concentration camps.

Some were arrested in homeless shelters, railroad stations, and bars. Some had committed crimes. Others simply lived in ways the regime considered undesirable. Their crime, essentially, was failing to fit.

People classified as “asocial” were given black triangles in the camps.

This did not mean that every unemployed German was destined for a concentration camp. The history is more complicated than that. But poverty, homelessness, unstable employment, and behavior judged socially unacceptable could put a person under the eye of a state that increasingly regarded human beings according to their usefulness.

And then it got worse, as still more vulnerable populations were put in the cultural crosshairs.

The regime’s racial-hygiene policies included forced sterilization. Hundreds of thousands of people were sterilized under laws intended to prevent people the Nazis considered genetically “unfit” from having children. Some of those classified as socially deviant were swept into that system as well.

But the most horrifying extension of this way of thinking was directed at people with mental and physical disabilities.

In 1939, the year World War II began, the regime created the secret killing program that became known as Aktion T4, after the address of its Berlin headquarters at Tiergartenstraße 4.

The Nazis had another phrase for some of the people they were targeting: “Useless eaters.” People who consumed resources without producing enough in return.

Long before the killing became widely known, Nazi propaganda taught Germans to think about disabled people economically. Posters told citizens how many Reichsmarks an institutionalized disabled person would cost society over a lifetime. Films portrayed the mentally ill as hopeless burdens.

“Look what these people are costing you.”

The Nazis also used the phrase “life unworthy of life.” Once human beings could be placed in that category, almost anything could be justified.

Doctors, nurses, and midwives were required to report young children with serious physical or mental disabilities. Parents were encouraged to send their children to special clinics where they would get care.

Some of those clinics were killing wards. Children were murdered with drug overdoses or slowly starved to death. The program expanded to institutionalized adults.

And much of it happened through paperwork. Questionnaires were sent to hospitals and institutions. Doctors reviewed forms, marks were made, and decisions were recorded.

The person described on the paper might never meet the people deciding whether that person should live.

Patients were put on buses and taken to killing centers. Families were lied to about where they had gone and how they had died. Death certificates carried false causes of death.

And beginning in 1940, disabled patients were murdered with carbon monoxide in gas chambers built specifically for that purpose.

The gas chambers at places such as Hartheim and Hadamar came before the industrialized mass murder at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Personnel who worked in the T4 killing program later took their experience to the killing centers at Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka.

About 70,000 disabled people were murdered in the centralized T4 gas chambers before Hitler ordered that phase of the program halted in August 1941 following growing public protests, including protests from members of the clergy.

But the killing did not stop. It became less centralized and less visible.

Doctors and nurses continued murdering disabled adults and children through lethal drugs, starvation, and deliberate neglect.

Altogether, historians estimate that hundreds of thousands of people with disabilities were murdered under Nazi Germany’s so-called euthanasia policies and related killing operations.

T4 became the prototype for the death camps. If the state could decide that a disabled child wasn’t worth feeding, then it wasn’t much of a leap to decide that whole ethnic and religious groups could be treated the same way.

Why does this matter now?

Because history echoes in whispers, and sometimes it mutters through modern mouths.

Every time we hear someone sneer about “welfare queens,” or mock the disabled, or suggest the unhoused are just lazy... every time we treat poverty as a character flaw instead of a systemic failure... every time we put “cost-saving” above care... we find out that sometimes, slippery slopes do exist.

The history of fascism and totalitarian regimes teaches us what happens when a society forgets that the weakest among us are still human, and how quickly cruelty can be rebranded as efficiency.

There are no “useless eaters.” There are only people. Some need more help. Some carry heavier burdens than the rest of us.

And a healthy society doesn’t discard its struggling members.

Nelson Mandela wrote in Long Walk to Freedom: “A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones.”

Because the moment we stop caring about our weakest members — when we let leaders draw lines between the worthy and the unworthy — that’s when we start marching back into darkness.

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At three minutes after nine a.m., one kind of America ended, and another one began.

That was the moment the second plane, United Airlines Flight 175, hit the South Tower, and the discussion about whether this was terrorism or some kind of horrible accident ended. It wasn’t a question anymore.

Two minutes later, White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card leaned over President George W. Bush in a Florida classroom and whispered, “A second plane hit the second tower. America is under attack.”

Up until that moment, from the time reports of the first plane hitting the World Trade Center made it to air, there were questions.

In my mind, I was gobsmacked by how this kind of accident could have happened. Was there some kind of catastrophic navigation or control failure? Possible, but on a clear morning in New York, it just didn’t make much sense.

It had happened before in New York. On July 28, 1945, in heavy fog, a U.S. Army Air Forces B-25 Mitchell bomber crashed into the 79th floor of the Empire State Building, killing 14 people.

Could air traffic control around New York have suffered some kind of massive failure? Again, maybe. But pilots sit behind a big window in the cockpit, and the weather over New York that morning was clear. The World Trade Center was awfully hard to miss.

On purpose, then?

Was a pilot committing suicide? There had been cases of pilots deliberately crashing airliners. But crashing into a crowded office building, too? Taking everybody on the plane and all those people in the building with you?

Maybe it was terrorism. The World Trade Center had been bombed before.

But just one plane into a building?

Just one plane…

And as all of those possibilities were looking for a nightmare to latch onto, the second jet came into view, right there on the TV screen. The anchor I was watching hadn’t really noticed it yet, didn’t say anything about it until the jet disappeared behind the building and then a massive fireball erupted out the visible side.

There it is, my friend. This is terrorism. This kind of accident doesn’t happen twice.

And then chaos, as reporters and anchors tried to make some sense of the realization that this was a coordinated attack on the United States, something that felt like it belonged in a movie. Except it was happening live, right there on the television.

And a new America was born at the instant of that fireball, and the realization that it had been caused by a second plane.

That was the birth. The rest of the morning cut the cord.

At 9:37, American Airlines Flight 77 hit the Pentagon.

At 9:59, the South Tower collapsed.

Four minutes later, United Flight 93 crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after passengers and crew fought back against the hijackers.

At 10:28, the North Tower came down.

Around all of it came evacuations, conflicting reports, and rumors. At one point there was a report that a car bomb had exploded outside the State Department. It hadn’t. Nobody knew how many attacks there were, how many planes might still be out there, or when it was going to end.

Later, we learned about two D.C. Air National Guard pilots who took off from Andrews in F-16s without missiles. Marc Sasseville and Heather Penney were prepared to ram another hijacked airliner with their own jets if that was what it took to bring it down. They would sacrifice their lives if need be.

But by the time they got into the air, Flight 93 was already down. They didn’t know that yet.

As this new America grew, it developed a new sense of fundamentalism. Black-and-white thinking. Us or them.

No more saying goodbye at the gate in the airport. The TSA. New layers of screening for everyone and everything getting onto a plane. The PATRIOT Act. Expanded surveillance. Warrantless wiretapping. A much larger national-security apparatus. Broad authorizations for military force that presidents of both parties would use for decades.

And, of course, 9-11 became rocket fuel for conspiracy thinking.

The Jews were responsible. Bush did it. It was an inside job.

And later, the deniers. There weren’t any planes. The footage was fake. The people who said they saw it happen were paid actors.

That kind of thinking metastasized. It became part of the response to all sorts of major traumatic events, including mass shootings.

We’re still living in the America that was born at 9:03 that morning.

If you look at much of what happens around us now, in politics, surveillance, immigration, warfare, and the way we talk about threats, you can often find a thread that connects back to 9-11.

The threat of another 9-11, whether it comes from foreign terrorists or people politicians portray as threats from within, became political currency. Fear became a way to get votes. Politicians on both sides learned the language. The lingua franca is 9-11, or some metaphor for it.

It is the defining moment.

That single moment changed our country. It changed us.

It still echoes. Perhaps it may echo as long as the Civil War has in our national psyche. There are plenty of ways the Civil War is still affecting our lives today.

We learned lessons from 9-11. Some of them were good. Some of them were expedient. And some of them were terrible.

It is the world we live in now, for better or for worse.

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I drove into Atlanta city limits on Tuesday afternoon. Ronnie, Misty, and I are ensconced for a while at an extended stay as we get the lay of the land and find a place to rent. Our plan is to figure out Atlanta well enough that we can find a place to buy in a year.

My start date with WSB is Monday. Paperwork to sign, IDs to get, emails to set up, access cards to put on lanyards, all the usual.

Not to mention learning where the restrooms are. And the vending machines.

And I am already well aware of how lucky I am. My resume includes KFI, KNX, and now WSB, all fantastic call letters to have in one career.

We’ve already started looking at some rental places, and a couple have caught our eye. Lots more to do. We’re living out of suitcases, and obviously we can’t get the rest of our stuff shipped out until we find our new address.

I’m very happy to find just how interesting Atlanta is. I’ve got lots to learn about it so I don’t sound like a doofus. I have “fond” memories of my boss correcting my city pronunciations when I started working in Los Angeles oh so many years ago.

But we’ve got some tools now that we didn’t have then. I prompted ChatGPT to give me quizzes over the next few weeks about the environs here, about how the counties are laid out, the surrounding towns, and the ins and outs of knowing what’s ITP (inside the perimeter) and OTP (outside the perimeter).

It’s all exciting. The chance to begin a new chapter, find my place in a new workplace culture, and learn who’s cool and who’s cooler.

Meanwhile, I’m still rewiring my brain to get used to the Eastern Time Zone, even though Atlanta is kind of weird in that it’s very close to the Central Time Zone.

There’s no way of knowing yet how my adaptation to a new schedule will go, but I still intend to keep up with this little venture called Archer’s Line. I plan to return to my original focus, not just on media, but on history, culture, and my humble attempts to explain all the ways we got here from there.

I still intend to slap something up here at least three times a week, but if I miss one, it’s not you, it’s me. I’m just getting used to a new world.

And thank you for coming along.

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We’re finally on the last leg of the trip to Atlanta. As I write this Sunday night, we’re stopped over in Van Buren, Arkansas.

We’ve been on the road since Thursday, and given our respective levels of stamina, we’ve decided not to push ourselves by trying to drive for nine or ten hours. We’re taking it a little more leisurely.

It’s still a lot. I’m not a 23-year-old in a fast Mustang anymore.

So here’s the thing I didn’t tell you about this trip.

On moving truck day, thinking I was a singular example of a super-fit, super-coordinated human male, I decided to maneuver a big, heavy suitcase down the twisting stairs in our condo.

Despite my incredible physique and sense of balance, I found myself just ahead of said suitcase, falling headfirst and semi-backward down those stairs, landing hard on my left ribs and back.

I saw the proverbial stars.

The moving guys came running and picked me up. I don’t quite remember the first thing they said, but I’m sure it was something like, “What a doofus.”

That was Wednesday. Today is Sunday, and my ribs still hurt.

It sure is fun to drive with bruised ribs.

Let that be a lesson: Don’t do things.

Oh, and gods bless Saints Tylenol and Advil, the patron saints of doofuses.

Doofusi?

We left Sherman Oaks on Thursday and drove through the High Desert to meet I-40 East — our primary conveyance on this relocation.

We passed mountain passes, lots of desert, some very, very long cargo trains, Road Runner rock formations in Arizona — where have you gone, Wile E. Coyote? — and yes, I did see a couple of actual roadrunners.

Meep meep.

Some more mountain passes, and then the beginnings of trees.

After a couple of days, the land became flatter. Into New Mexico, then Texas. That’s all it is.

Flat.

And if there’s one thing I’ve learned on this trip, it’s that there are two things to remember when you’re on the 40.

Thing one: THE LEFT LANE IS FOR PASSING ONLY.

Thing two: BRIDGE ICES BEFORE ROAD.

Those signs are now embedded in concrete in my brain.

We’re almost there. Maybe another day or two.

I’m loving the free breakfasts.

Misty Mao is riding with Ronnie in her car. I was very concerned because she’s been such a fraidy cat for most of her life. But she had just started coming out of her shell, treating our condo like it was actually her home.

And then we had to take her away from all that.

She’s surprisingly okay with the car trip.

Ronnie tells me she’s been putting her paws on the car windows and watching the passing scenery. Maybe she’s got puppy blood in her.

(No, I don’t know where those puppies got off to. I’m sure they’ll turn up. Right, Misty?)

She’s got the routine now. In each hotel room, she finds a safe hiding spot, then comes out, sniffing the air, exploring, figuring out just what can be walked on and what can’t.

I have a feeling that once we get settled, she’ll be a very chill cat, like our late, beloved Lionheart.

It’s an adventure.

See you soon, Atlanta.

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A local TV news anchor sat behind a desk with a team around him and told us what happened today. There were other people who told us the weather, the sports, and so on.

But it looks like TV is evolving beyond that.

The E.W. Scripps Company, one of the largest owners of local television stations in the country, is rolling out a new model of local news that, in some time periods and markets, eliminates the anchor altogether. The anchor desk, too.

Instead, viewers get a continuous stream of prerecorded reports, weather, national material, and graphics connecting one story to the next.

The local newscast is becoming faceless. And Scripps says this is part of its plan for the future.

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The company announced in August that it was eliminating 268 jobs as part of what president and CEO Adam Symson has called a “refounding” of Scripps.

The restructuring goes well beyond layoffs. Scripps is moving toward a digital-first operation built around streaming, automation, centralized functions, and artificial intelligence.

“We’re in the midst of transforming Scripps through fundamental changes in how we operate,” Symson said in announcing the company’s second-quarter results. He said those changes would use “today’s most advanced technology, AI and automation” to improve the company’s financial performance and better serve its audiences.

Among the changes: 24/7 local news streams.

Scripps says it’s rolling out in about a dozen smaller markets and intends to expand the concept across its local television stations, with the precise format determined by individual markets.

One place where viewers can already see what it looks like is Baltimore.

WMAR-TV, the Scripps-owned ABC affiliate there, began airing some evening newscasts without live anchors in August.

The Baltimore Banner described a 7 p.m. broadcast that opened with weather, followed by prerecorded local and national reports. Graphics replaced the anchor transitions between stories. There was reportedly dead air leading into commercial breaks at times.

Other WMAR newscasts still use anchors, and Scripps says its approach won’t be the same at every station.

But for some of the people who used to appear on WMAR, the change has already meant goodbye.

Morning anchors Megan Knight and Randall Newsome gave viewers an emotional farewell. Longtime evening anchor Kelly Swoope joined them in another goodbye message.

She told viewers, “We’ve all been a part of your families.”

Similar departures have been playing out at Scripps stations elsewhere.

In Corpus Christi, Texas, layoffs hit KRIS-TV as the station prepared for the company’s new streaming model. Reporter Bobby Poitevint thanked viewers for trusting his reporting and allowing him into their homes.

The reaction from some current and former journalists has been blunt.

Former WMAR reporter Megan Pringle wrote on Facebook that the consequences extend well beyond the people viewers see on television.

She wrote, “People will lose their jobs, not just the anchors, but the producers, photographers, editors, directors who make local journalism possible.”

Pringle argued that the new format eliminates part of the connection between a station and its community.

All this raises a very important question: What happens when a local disaster or major news story breaks?

Veteran television journalist Charles Jaco said the approach could leave audiences poorly served during sudden breaking news.

Luke Russert raised a similar concern, pointing to the approaching anniversary of the September 11 attacks and asking what happens when viewers urgently need evacuation orders or other potentially life-saving information. How long will it take an anchorless station to get someone on the air?

Traditional local TV news is built around scheduled broadcasts. But those newsrooms are also expected to abandon the schedule when circumstances demand it. Tornadoes don’t always wait for the next scheduled newscast.

Neither does a mass shooting, an earthquake, a chemical spill, a wildfire, or any of the other events that can turn a routine afternoon into hours of continuous local coverage.

Scripps defends the move, saying its new model is intended to strengthen local reporting, not eliminate it.

Symson says the company wants more reporters in communities gathering stories throughout the day instead of concentrating its resources around traditional broadcast windows.

He wrote in a message to employees, “At a time when many communities are losing local coverage, the depth we are bringing is our competitive advantage.”

Scripps says anchors will remain an important part of its operation in many mid-sized and large markets, and that the company isn’t planning to make the change at all of its stations.

Artificial intelligence is another part of the transformation.

Scripps has been explicit about its intention to rely more on AI, automation, and other technologies as it tries to cut costs and remake the way newsrooms operate.

But the company’s published AI guidelines draw some lines around how the technology can be used.

Scripps says journalists are responsible for the accuracy of their reporting and that a human must always be accountable for the finished product.

Approved AI tools can be used for research and story or headline ideas, but journalists are required to verify the results.

The guidelines say AI is “generally prohibited” for scriptwriting, article composition, and photorealistic image generation unless other uses have been reviewed and approved.

Scripps has already been using AI for some newsroom work.

The company says it’s used it to convert TV scripts into digital stories, scan long government documents, reformat material for different platforms, and perform additional checks on journalistic content. Scripps says editors and news managers review material before publication and that human journalists are always responsible for editorial decisions.

It’s part of a broader shift in televised media.

AI and automation can perform tasks that once required people. At the same time, Scripps is reconsidering whether some of the people who have traditionally been central to a television newscast need to be there at all.

The economics behind the experiment are difficult to ignore.

Local TV is competing for audiences that get news from phones, social media, websites, YouTube, and streaming services rather than turning on a television at 5, 6, or 11 p.m.

Scripps says it expects these changes to produce substantial savings and revenue improvements over the next several years. That’s a common refrain these days, but the company describes them as necessary to make local journalism sustainable.

For the journalists losing their jobs, the transformation looks very different.

After layoffs hit KRIS in Corpus Christi, multimedia journalist Andrew Bishop posted a message telling viewers that he had survived the cuts.

Then he made a point of explaining how he works.

“A.I. plays ZERO role in my reporting,” Bishop wrote.

He said he writes his own scripts and social media posts, and personally conducts the interviews used in his stories.

“I don’t put those responsibilities in the hands of automation.”

For most of television’s history, the people delivering the news have been among the most visible parts of the product.

Scripps’ new model is built around a different assumption: that viewers care more about having local information available whenever they want it than about having that information presented by a familiar person at a specific time of day.

Like many other forms of traditional media, the numbers show a decline. Is the path forward for local TV news to act more like a streaming service than a television station?

The viewers will make the final call.

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And it’s the long-awaited sequel to this one, the first part of my radio journey and the story of how I got here.

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As we prepare to relocate to Atlanta, some of our plans are firming up. I’ll load up my car with stuff and drive across the country first. Then the big moving trucks get loaded and head east. Ronnie will follow a few days behind me with Misty Mao, and then the search for a new home begins.

That brings to mind how I got to Los Angeles in September of 1999.

That move was a lot more nerve-racking.

I had nothing lined up. Just a vague message from Steve Streit, then programming KBIG, saying he didn’t have anything for me, but to call him when I hit town and maybe something part-time might open up. But I was in love, and she had decided she wanted to move to L.A., so I uprooted my life and left my great gig with Clear Channel in Miami.

The move had taxed my last financial reserves. I do believe I was on an anxiety weight-loss program during the week we were on the road.

There was nothing for me once we got situated in an apartment in Glendale.

Fortunately, I did manage to land a full-time gig. Unfortunately, it was out in the High Desert: Operations Manager for a group of stations. A very long drive there and a very long drive back.

Then I got some part-time work at KBIG. That meant working the occasional evening shift, getting home after midnight, then getting up at 6 to make the drive to the desert.

Fortune smiled when Jhani Kaye took over KBIG. Eventually, he brought me on full time, and I didn’t have to drive to the desert anymore. I hardly had to drive at all. I lived only a few blocks from the station at the time.

I wound up doing afternoons and Disco Saturday Night, a longtime ratings-book winner.

Then 9/11 hit, and in the economic aftermath, I was caught in a round of cost-cutting and laid off.

Not long after, KBIG realized it couldn’t do without me, so I was brought back as Assistant Program Director and occasional evening host. That ramped up when we started doing our famous nighttime dance shows and live broadcasts from nightclubs.

Yada yada yada, and I got caught in another round of layoffs in January 2006. (I found out by getting an email I wasn’t supposed to get. That’s another story.)

That’s when things got chaotic. My marriage began to crack and eventually ended. Fruitless searches for work didn’t help. I did manage to land some side gigs here and there, including working for Total Traffic and even training to be a network operator at Premiere.

It was my Total Traffic work that got me noticed by KFI. And that’s when “Broadcast Journalist Rob Archer” was born.

But not quite yet.

I also landed a great full-time gig at Dial Global as a DJ on the national AC format. I met Gary Thompson, who turned out to be one of my best friends and collaborators ever. I got moved around a bit and finally found my way into management—programming and running a couple of formats and creating some early streaming formats as Dial tried to figure out what it was going to do in that realm.

(Turned out, not much.)

I kept doing KFI on the weekends.

Sadly, the Dial gig went away in October 2012. The company eventually renamed itself—again—as Westwood One and has now been dismantled so much that it’s only a hollow shell.

A bit after that, the news career began in earnest. KFI brought me on full time, and I leaned into this new radio version of myself that I didn’t know was in there. Jhani Kaye called me once and said, “News is what you were born to do.”

Falling in love is also what I was born to do. KFI was where I met Ronnie. We spent years being friends, then we started dating, fell in love, and got married. And my KFI career was going gangbusters.

But you know how it goes.

Yep, another layoff in 2015.

Just days later, KNX and I connected. (Thanks go to Chris Little and Vicky Moore for putting my name in News Director Julie Chin’s ear.) So I didn’t spend much time looking for work. I was right back at it within a few weeks.

And that’s how I spent my last ten years—helping cover some amazing and terrifying stories along the way. Fires, mass shootings, ecological disasters, elections, City Hall scandals, the pandemic, the strikes.

I picked up a few awards along the way. It was also the longest stable stretch I’ve ever enjoyed in radio.

Thank you.

Now I’m off to Atlanta to rejoin Ken Charles, my former KNX boss, and continue doing these things we call radio and news.

I’ll try to do my usual Tuesday and Thursday updates here this week, but if I don’t, you can probably figure out why.

It probably means I couldn’t get Wi-Fi.

I’ll be on the road, catching up on lots of music and albums—and listening to WSB all the way.

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Come along for the next chapter. Subscribe to Archer’s Line for radio, media, culture, history—and whatever happens after the moving trucks arrive.

I know what you’re thinking.

“Rob, it’s still August. Why the hell are you writing about Christmas formats now?”

We live in norm-shattering times. All the rules are out the window. Decorum is a thing of the past. Standards and laws mean nothing. Men don’t wear hats anymore.

And calendars, too, have become meaningless.

Actually, it’s because KKGO-HD3 in Los Angeles flipped to all-Christmas on Friday, August 21.

August!

That’s the earliest seasonal flip I can think of.

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All-Christmas used to be something of a radio stunt. The earliest examples appear to have come out of Phoenix.

Phoenix’s KMEO reportedly began running Christmas music from Thanksgiving through Christmas in 1989. KOY continued the idea, and KESZ adopted it in 1996 after watching listeners flock to KOY during the holidays. KESZ’s ratings success caught the attention of its eventual owner, Clear Channel.

Country station WWYZ in Connecticut is often cited as the first station outside Phoenix to make a full seasonal switch, in 1998. Clear Channel tested the idea in more markets in 2000, including WMGF in Orlando.

When I worked at WJRR in the early ’90s, I could see the back of the WMGF DJ’s head through my studio window.

The tipping point came at KOST in Los Angeles at noon on November 20, 2001.

Well, more accurately, it came when the ratings showed what a huge hit the move had been.

And once again, I was right down the hall from radio greatness. I was working at KBIG at the time.

Under Jhani Kaye, KOST went all-Christmas earlier than originally planned. The post-9/11 desire for something comforting and familiar was part of the reasoning. But this was also a proven ratings strategy: Clear Channel switched about 75 stations that year.

KOST didn’t invent the all-Christmas format. What KOST did was prove that it could become a major annual event—and a massive ratings winner—in one of the country’s largest radio markets.

From the 2000s onward, the all-Christmas stunt and the all-Christmas seasonal format became two different things.

AC stations increasingly used Christmas music for a genuine November-and-December ratings run, chasing the enormous numbers KOST and other stations were producing during the holidays.

Other stations used Christmas music as a short bridge before changing formats. One especially early stunt came from CHAM in Hamilton, Ontario, which began playing Christmas music on August 29, 2008, then flipped to talk four days later. CFWD in Saskatoon even used Christmas music during a soft launch in April 2008.

Those were stunts. Nobody really believed Santa had a hankering for Christmas cookies in April.

Los Angeles, meanwhile, became competitive Christmas territory. KTWV challenged KOST in 2011. KKGO began turning its main country signal into “Your Christmas Destination” in 2016. In 2024, KKGO-HD2’s K-Mozart service—and its 98.3 FM translator—went Christmas on October 25 while the main KKGO signal remained country.

And now KKGO-HD3 has switched before Labor Day.

The new service is called “America’s Christmas Station,” and Mount Wilson management says it intends to keep playing nothing but Christmas music through the beginning of 2027.

That makes this something more than a four-day stunt. It may be the earliest start to a genuine Christmas-season run by an American terrestrial radio service.

And here I was, getting ready to grouse about Halloween stores and decorations popping up while it’s still summer.

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John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight once asked, “How is Daylight Saving Time still a thing?”

Congress may finally have an answer. The House has passed a bill that would make daylight saving time permanent, with the backing of Democrats, Republicans, and President Trump. A rare bipartisan issue in these divisive times.

But not everyone is on board. Senator Tom Cotton, usually a die-hard Trump backer, has threatened to filibuster the bill.

“I understand that Americans hate changing the clock. I hate changing the clock,” Cotton said. “But I think you have to think through the second-order implications of what permanent daylight saving time would mean.”

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Cotton said the plan may “sound great” to somebody who lives in Florida. But in parts of the Midwest and Rocky Mountain states, the sun wouldn’t rise until after 9 a.m. during the winter.

“That would be very dangerous, especially for kids who are walking to school, biking to school, being left at bus stops,” Cotton said. “Many other senators are opposed as well from the states you would expect, frankly in both parties. This is one of those issues that is more of a regional issue than it is a partisan issue.”

Some radio station owners don’t like the idea either. Permanent DST could cost certain daytime-only AM stations part of morning drive because their operating hours are tied to local sunrise. Other AM stations could be stuck using reduced power or directional signals longer in the morning. The FCC has acknowledged that expanded daylight saving time can cost these stations valuable programming.

A better option might be making standard time permanent. That creates some annoyances of its own, but if it were up to me—and it won’t be until I become King of the World—that’s the way I’d go.

Sleep and medical groups, including the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, say permanent standard time is better for public health because it more closely aligns with human circadian rhythms.

Of course, some northern cities would have the minor annoyance of the sun rising around 4:30 a.m. for part of the year. But that’s how the ball bounces—or rotates, in this case.

The United States has already experimented with permanent daylight saving time. Congress tried it in January 1974 during the energy crisis, and the idea initially had broad public support. Then Americans experienced winter mornings in the dark. Support reportedly dropped from 79 percent to 42 percent, and Congress restored standard time that October.

The last time we tried this, it lasted less than a year.

I love the idea of doing away with time-change weekend. But making daylight saving time permanent is more trouble than it’s worth. Permanent standard time makes a lot more sense—scientifically, medically and historically. Daylight saving time wasn’t even introduced nationally until 1918.

It’s a separate issue, but once I complete the move to Atlanta, I’ve got to get used to the Eastern Time Zone again. I’ve been on laid-back California time for nearly 30 years.

But hey, that’s what we get for living on a great big ball.

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Ronnie and I have a place to sell, things to pack, two cars to drive from Los Angeles to Atlanta, temporary housing to find, then a place to rent, and eventually a neighborhood where we might want to buy. Somewhere in there, I’m also starting a new job.

So, naturally, while we’re working out moving estimates, driving routes, hotel reservations, and where we’re going to live, my brain has decided this is the perfect time to start thinking about the nature of consciousness.

Anything to avoid physical work, I suppose.

I’ve been using ChatGPT to help organize the move. It can compare routes, build itineraries, make lists, and keep track of all the questions currently ricocheting around inside my head. Which has led to another question—because apparently I needed one:

While AI is helping me think, is it doing any thinking of its own?

There’s a big question over whether AI will eventually become conscious. Which is kind of odd when you consider that philosophers and scientists still debate what being conscious means for human beings.

One train of thought goes that we experience the world, we know that we’re in it, we can observe ourselves, and we’re sentient.

Even though we argue over the meaning of every one of those words.

Consciousness, sentience, and self-awareness aren’t necessarily the same thing. Consciousness can mean that there is something it feels like to be you. Sentience usually means the capacity to have experiences that feel good or bad. Self-awareness means recognizing yourself as yourself. You could, at least in theory, have one without having all three.

But do we really experience our world?

Our brains are computing machines built from biology—though whether they work anything like digital computers is another discussion.

And every process takes time. When you look at an apple, light must travel from the apple to your eyes. But you still haven’t “seen” the apple. Signals must travel from your retinas through the visual system, while networks of neurons extract color, shape, depth, and context. Your brain constructs its best working model and arrives at its assessment: It’s an apple.

Then, somehow, that information becomes part of your conscious experience.

Granted, all of this happens very fast. But the point is that it isn’t instant. Perception takes time, and the brain appears to assemble what feels like a seamless present from information arriving at different moments.

You can’t experience anything instantaneously. “Now” is forever out of reach.

And awareness comes from inside you, not from the outside world. You don’t experience reality untouched; you experience your brain’s model of it. That model is usually good enough to keep you from walking into walls (most of the time), but it is still a model.

We think we’re in the world, but the world’s really in us.

And so I begin to wonder about consciousness and sentience.

How do we know there’s only one way to be conscious—only one way to be sentient—so that we can confidently declare that AI isn’t sentient or self-aware? I’m not sure we’ve got adequate explanations for why we think we’re self-aware.

We do have strong evidence that other people are conscious: they have brains like ours, behave like us, and describe experiences like ours. But we still infer their inner lives. We can’t climb inside anyone else’s point of view. Philosophers call this the problem of other minds, and AI makes the problem stranger.

And for those who think all of reality is a simulation, asking whether AI can be self-aware may be a moot point. If consciousness can arise inside one kind of information-processing system, why rule out another one simply because we built it?

And just how tricky is this consciousness thing, anyway? Where does it go when the anesthesiologist puts you under?

All the stuff in your brain is still there. The neurons haven’t disappeared. But anesthetic drugs disrupt the brain’s ability to integrate and share information across its networks. Sensory signals reach parts of the brain without becoming a unified, reportable experience. It isn’t simply that every connection stops connecting. It’s more like the brain’s coordinated conversation has broken into fragments.

So… Consciousness requires your brain to be able to talk to itself.

But AI can’t be conscious because… when it comes to large language models, they’re only collections of words fed into a machine, and when one responds to you, it’s really nothing more than a statistical calculation of what token should come next?

That description isn’t exactly wrong, but it’s incomplete. Modern language models learn complex internal representations and use context, attention, and many layers of computation to produce an answer. None of that proves there is an inner experience behind the answer. Fluent language isn’t evidence enough. A system can say I feel afraid without anything necessarily feeling afraid.

But saying “it just predicts the next word” may not settle the question, either.

Isn’t prediction part of how we communicate? Isn’t it part of how our brains perceive the world? Maybe we’re LLMs of a sort. We anticipate what comes next, revise the model when we’re wrong, and turn electro-chemical activity into words.

Researchers who have tried to apply leading theories of consciousness to current AI mostly conclude that today’s systems haven’t been shown to be conscious. (Some of them say that with their fingers crossed.) At the same time, some argue that there is no obvious technical law preventing an artificial system from meeting at least some proposed signs of consciousness someday.

And again, what’s consciousness? How do we know we’re conscious?

We know it from the inside. That may be the one case in which consciousness is not an inference. The problem begins the moment we try to prove that anyone—or anything—else has it.

Meanwhile, I’ve got ChatGPT working on my itinerary as I get ready to drive from Los Angeles to Atlanta for my new job.

Just in case it’s actually conscious—and aware that it’s doing that—let me just say that I, for one, would like to welcome our new AI overlords.

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I’ve written before about how I thought my time at KNX would be the capper of my on-air career — that I’d retire from there, as so many other great broadcast journalists had.

But it was not to be. I got caught in the churn of staff reductions in June 2025.

I stayed busy over the next year. I focused on Archer’s Line and co-hosted podcasts with Jack Messenger and my KNX colleague Charles Feldman. I started a voiceover business and anchored for Remote News Service, providing local newscasts for small- and medium-market stations across the country.

I applied for as many radio jobs as I could. But given the state of an industry that was letting far more people go than it was taking on, I didn’t have a lot of hope.

But life, like Loki, loves messing with your plans.

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I awoke one morning to a message about an opportunity — and I grabbed it.

I have accepted an anchor/reporter position at 95.5 WSB Atlanta. I’ll be working with my old KNX boss, Ken Charles, beginning next month.

Whenever I’ve been laid off from somewhere, I’ve told people, “The future, as they say, is wide open.” It’s a way of saying that the routine has been disrupted and life is about to be different.

Well, now I can say that about starting something new. I’m getting another ride on the radio machine — the business that’s been a lifelong love.

The future, truly, is wide open.

There’s a lot to do, of course. I’ve been an Angeleno for 27 years. We’ve got places to sell, plans to make, and many things to figure out.

But I’m truly excited to start this brand-new chapter. Thank you, Loki. And I mean that.

What does this mean for the podcasts? They’ll be on hold until I figure out what my new routine is going to be — and until I get used to the Eastern Time Zone again.

What does this mean for Archer’s Line? There will be some changes to its focus. More about that soon. If you haven’t already subscribed, please do. Its new focus will keep you entertained and engaged, and I plan to give you your money’s worth. You’ll also be along for a chapter I didn’t expect to write.

I’d thought about writing my radio memoirs, understanding that they’d be of interest to a very small audience — if anyone. But now it looks like that will have to wait.

I’ve got some more story left.

I will make it a good one.

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Standards are only standards so long as everyone agrees to abide by them.

And starting Monday, YouTube is changing one of its biggest.

Beginning August 24, a view will register the moment a video starts playing, from the very first frame. Duration won’t matter. Someone can click, immediately decide they’ve made a terrible mistake, and leave.

And that counts as a view.

Until now, YouTube required someone watching a regular long-form video to stick around for roughly 30 seconds before that view counted. There was at least some indication that the person actually watched something.

The company says it’s “standardizing” views across its different formats, including Shorts, and that the new measurement will better reflect a creator’s exposure and make it easier to demonstrate that creator’s value to brand partners.

There is an important distinction here. YouTube will still measure what it calls “engaged views,” and the change won’t alter how creators qualify for the YouTube Partner Program or how their earnings are calculated. YouTube will still know whether people actually watched. It just won’t require that for the big number displayed under the video.

Radio has gone through its own version of changing the ruler.

Nielsen changed the way radio quarter-hours are measured, reducing the amount of listening required for a PPM panelist to qualify from five minutes to three minutes.

That change gave radio bigger numbers, too.

But it’s still a standard. A listen doesn’t count because somebody tuned in for a second and immediately tuned back out. They have to listen for a measurable amount of time.

I put my music on Bandcamp, and when I look at the streaming numbers, there’s a distinction between a skip, a partial play, and a complete play. Those distinctions matter because they tell me something. Did somebody encounter my music? Did somebody try it? Did somebody actually listen to it?

Those are three very different things. And they inform me. A song with many skips is one I might need to rethink. A song with lots of full plays tells me people are sticking with it. A song with lots of partial plays tells me they gave it a chance, but something made them stop.

That’s useful information.

YouTube is about to take the first one and publicly call it a “view.”

Garrett Searight at Barrett Media raises an interesting question about what this means for broadcasting. Radio companies are currently pushing for changes in federal ownership limits, arguing that they need greater scale to compete with digital platforms.

But they’re not playing by the same measurement rules.

If YouTube can count someone who watches one frame as a viewer, why should broadcasters have to meet a minimum listening threshold before counting someone as a listener?

Take that argument far enough, and the whole concept of “engagement” starts becoming meaningless.

Imagine walking into an advertiser’s office and saying, “Two million people listened to our station!”

For how long?

“Well, some of them might have heard half a second.”

And that’s the problem with metrics once everybody starts changing the definition to make their particular number look better. Eventually, we’re no longer measuring the same thing.

The numbers get bigger while the meaning gets smaller.

Maybe advertisers won’t care. Maybe they’ll look beyond that giant public view count and demand the engagement numbers YouTube still collects behind it.

Or maybe we’re heading toward a media world where every platform gets to invent its own definition of an audience. And all that matters is that one number.

If so, I can play that game, too.

From now on, perhaps I should count someone as having read Archer’s Line if they clicked on an article, saw the first sentence, thought better of it, and disappeared.

Look at those numbers!

Except they wouldn’t tell me what I actually want to know: Did you read it? Did it mean something to you? Did it make you want to come back and read my other articles?

And speaking of numbers that actually mean something, becoming a paid subscriber is one very good way to tell me that what I’m doing here matters to you. There are some changes coming soon to Archer’s Line, and to me personally, and I’d love for you to be here for them.

If a paid subscription isn’t in the cards right now, that’s fine. Becoming a free subscriber counts, too.

Sharing an article with your friends and leaving a comment below help keep this thing going, too.

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The pushback against AI music is loud. Very loud.

I can hear why.

Some of it sounds bland. And there’s a good reason for that — because it’s an average of other music and sounds it’s been trained on. Same with AI writing. Most of us can easily spot the red flags now.

And big tech companies are leading campaigns to combat AI image slop.

Full disclosure: I use AI tools.

I use AI for research, and sometimes for help cleaning up my copy. But I write what I write first, and use AI to clean up mistakes.

But because so many people let AI completely write for them, there’s backlash against it. We even make fun of it.

But the pushback on AI music is even more pronounced. The prime target is Suno, though there are plenty of other AI music sites. So naturally, I had to try it out.

More on that in a bit.

Spotify has noticed the pushback. The company announced that beginning in mid-September, it will start labeling artist profiles whose identities appear to be AI-generated.

“Listeners have been clear in telling us that they don’t like seeing an artist profile that seems human, only to find out that the persona is AI-generated,” Spotify said in announcing the change.

Those profiles will get an “AI Persona” badge. By default, Spotify also won’t put music from AI Personas into its editorial or algorithmic recommendations.

And yes, there are plenty of people using Suno to create music out of whole cloth, letting the AI create the song structure, the composition, the lyrics, the whole thing. And it’s become obvious when they have.

But there are others — actual musicians — who use Suno as another tool.

Back in the pandemic days, I added to my guitar collection, learned how to use GarageBand and Logic Pro, and wrote and recorded some of my own music.

I discovered I could upload that music to Suno. I was curious to see what it would do with it.

I’d long harbored a dream that, one day, I could convince some good musicians, a good band, with a good producer, in a professional setting, to take my music “demos” and cover them.

But then I heard about Suno AI and that it could do that.

And that’s what I did. I have to say, most of the time I was impressed.

Here are some results:

Then I had it turn some of my poetry into musical pieces, but I wrote long, detailed prompTs about atmosphere, song structure, tone, modes, and chord progressions.

Again, I was impressed.

My point is that while I used Suno to create music, it started with my music, my ideas, my composition, notes and chords and words I came up with. Out of my head and into the machine.

And I know that you might be saying, “But Rob, real live musicians could have done cover versions of your music, and you could have paid them.”

I hear you. But two things. Thing one, that depended on me finding some musicians who’d want to do that for me — I tried. And thing two, right now it’s money I do not have.

And then you might say, “You still shouldn’t have used soulless AI.”

But here’s where it gets interesting.

When I was recording my original songs myself in GarageBand and Logic Pro, I made use of technology to play instruments I didn’t own or couldn’t play myself.

I could write a violin line, play it on my guitar, and have a virtual instrument turn it into violins. I can’t play the violin. I don’t own one.

And drums? I can’t play drums. So I took advantage of the technology that was there to create drum tracks.

Isn’t that at least a cousin of what we’re doing with AI? Isn’t technology already being used in professional studios to let musicians create things they couldn’t physically perform themselves?

There are some legitimate concerns about Suno and AI music. A major one is copyrights. Some musicians whose creations were used to train music AIs say they should be paid for the use of their music. That’s legitimate.

The other complaint is that AI music is no good because it’s only “scraped” music from other sources.

But… don’t human musicians do something similar?

For example, my influences are Yes, Genesis, King Crimson and Steven Wilson. You could go through some songs I’ve recorded and perhaps compliment me on using those influences. You could pick out a bit and say, “I see you’re channeling some Fripp with that line.”

But if I were an AI, you might cry, “Theft! No fair! Not real!”

The difference is, of course, that I’m a real human. At least, I think I am. I’m told that thinking I exist is the criterion.

Is AI the devil? Will it put real writers and musicians out of work? Most likely, yes. And already, in many cases.

But putting writers and musicians out of work isn’t necessarily the same thing as putting an end to human creativity.

Companies will — and do — use AI to save money. If they can generate a piece of music instead of hiring a composer, or generate copy instead of paying a writer, some of them will. And do.

But people didn’t start writing songs because somebody invented the recording contract. We didn’t start telling stories because somebody invented the publishing industry. We were doing those things long before anyone figured out how to make money from them. We were dancing around in caves miming the story of how we killed that leopard. And then someone had a bright idea of drawing pictures of it on the cave wall.

AI may change who gets paid to create. It may change what those jobs look like. It may eliminate some of them.

But I don’t think it eliminates the human need to make something. It won’t stop humans from creating.

Such is the danger of technological advancement. Talkies and recorded sound helped put theater musicians out of work. Automation eliminated factory jobs. Computers wiped out entire categories of work.

But careers change. New careers are created. And no, that kind of change doesn’t come without pain. Look at the Industrial Revolution.

We don’t know yet what the result of our AI-ification will be. Perhaps whole new industries will develop, new types of careers.

And yeah, there’s a possibility that AI will take over the world.

But if it did, would it do any worse than we have?

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