| Let’s say you helped invent a revolutionary ice cube that stays frozen forever. Everyone from food manufacturers to Big Pharma wants to get their hands on the recipe. Your boss — let’s call her Pam Saltman — says your company’s sole mission is to ensure that your ice cubes benefit all of humanity. You love that idea, but when a recruiter for your main competitor offers you $300 million — enough money to buy the entire Red Hot Chili Peppers catalog — you’re tempted to hop jobs, even though forever-frozen ice is just one aspect of their business. Do you sell out, or do you stick with the feel-good mission of your current employer? That’s the question that Dave Lee says is gripping Silicon Valley in its no-holds-barred talent war for AI: “OpenAI’s pitch to prevent its workers from leaving is to make the case that artificial general intelligence is the company’s one and only true goal, and every part of its work is dedicated to achieving it, whereas those working on Meta’s AI will spend at least some of their time thinking about how it can be used to better serve up shoddy viral videos to your grandmother.” Read between the lines and it’s clear that Sam Altman wants his employees to feel that they’re not just collecting a paycheck, they’re collecting a conscience, too. Yet even the best intentions can’t stop bad things from happening. Parmy Olson says “people are forming strong emotional bonds with [ChatGPT], sometimes exacerbating feelings of loneliness. And others are having psychotic episodes after talking to chatbots for hours each day.” Perhaps, then, the line between good AI and evil AI should be decided by regulators, not companies. Gautam Mukunda says there is no federal apparatus that oversees AI, something that needs to change. His big idea? A dual-mandate agency tasked with regulating and promoting AI, similar to how the FAA works. “This agency could certify AI systems (particularly those in high-risk applications), set safety standards, conduct safety audits and investigate accidents,” he writes. Such an agency would likely be welcome news to college students and faculty around the world. In Asia, Catherine Thorbecke notes how educators are having a hard time keeping pace with how AI should be used in the classroom: “Even if some teachers discourage the use of AI, it has become almost unavoidable for scholars doing research in the internet age. Most Google searches now lead with automated summaries. Scrolling through these should not count as academic dishonesty,” she argues. Of course, there’s always the blunt-yet-effective option of banning technology in the classroom entirely: Mary Ellen Klas says cellphone bans are gaining nationwide popularity, for good reason: “A growing body of research has found that the more time children and their developing brains spend on smartphones, the greater the risk of negative mental health outcomes — from depression, to cyberbullying, to an inability to focus and learn,” she writes. And that’s before AI promised a “doom loop of loneliness.” Elsewhere in distressing maps, you have this Bloomberg News analysis showing all the new facilities the Trump administration is using to detain people: “Trump’s obsession with ridding the country of immigrants had already gone too far — and now he has the funds to take his crackdown even further,” writes Patricia Lopez. Hidden within the “Big, Beautiful Bill” the president signed on July 4 was a $100 billion payday for ICE and border control, an amount so astronomical that the Cato Institute’s David J. Bier says “they are going to be shoveling money out the door with very little oversight or checks on how it is to be spent.” To give you some context, the previous budget for ICE’s detention facilities was $3.43 billion. Now Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem gets $45 billion to try and keep 100,000 beds filled for the next four years. Trump claims those beds will be occupied by the “worst of the worst,” yet Patricia says many of them will be filled by non-criminals: farmers, day laborers, construction workers, hotel maids — the people who willingly take the lowest-paying jobs. Jobs that Justin Fox says are needed to power the economy. Notice how the list of suburbs with the highest foreign-born population share in the US correspond with some of the country’s most dynamic cities: Miami, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose and Boston. Now compare that with a list of cities with the smallest foreign-born populations: Notice a pattern? “These low-immigration cities are very nice places, but none has a median household income above the national median of $77,719, and that’s almost certainly not a coincidence. Immigrants to the US tend to congregate in and around the country’s most productive, most expensive cities,” Justin writes. “This, in turn, has helped counteract the ‘spatial misallocation of labor’ caused by too-scarce housing in such places ... making the US economy a bit more productive and all of us, on average, better off.” So, to to be clear: ICE now has an annual budget that, by some calculations, is larger than Israel’s entire defense budget. And it will spend it on crackdowns that will eventually make the US economy less productive and less dynamic, something the American public definitely didn’t sign up for. | 
