Trump Is Not Immune from Prosecution in 2020 Election Interference Case, U.S. Appeals Court Says

WASHINGTON — A federal appeals panel ruled Tuesday that Donald Trump can face trial on charges that he plotted to overturn the results of the 2020 election, rejecting the former president’s claims that he is immune from prosecution.

The decision marks the second time in as many months that judges have spurned Trump’s immunity arguments and held that he can be prosecuted for actions undertaken while in the White House and in the run-up to Jan. 6, 2021, when a mob of his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol. But it also sets the stage for additional appeals from the Republican ex-president that could reach the U.S. Supreme Court. The trial was originally set for March, but it was postponed last week and the judge didn’t immediately set a new date.

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The trial date carries enormous political ramifications, with the Republican primary front-runner hoping to delay it until after the November election. If Trump defeats President Joe Biden, he could presumably try to use his position as head of the executive branch to order a new attorney general to dismiss the federal cases or he potentially could seek a pardon for himself.

The appeals court took center stage in the immunity dispute after the Supreme Court last month said it was at least temporarily staying out of it, rejecting a request from special counsel Jack Smith to take up the matter quickly and issue a speedy ruling.

Read More: How Trump Survived Decades of Legal Trouble: Deny, Deflect, Delay, and Don’t Put Anything in Writing

The legally untested question before the court was whether former presidents can be prosecuted after they leave office for actions taken in the White House related to their official duties.

The Supreme Court has held that presidents are immune from civil liability for official acts, and Trump’s lawyers have for months argued that that protection should be extended to criminal prosecution as well.

They said the actions Trump was accused of in his failed bid to cling to power after he lost the 2020 election to Biden, including badgering his vice president to refuse to certify the results of the election, all fell within the “outer perimeters” of a president’s official acts.

But Smith’s team has said that no such immunity exists in the U.S. Constitution or in prior cases and that, in any event, Trump’s actions weren’t part of his official duties.

U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is presiding over the case, rejected Trump’s arguments in a Dec. 1 opinion that said the office of the president “does not confer a lifelong ‘get-out-of-jail-free’ pass.”

Read More: Donald Trump’s Plan to Bury Nikki Haley in South Carolina

Trump’s lawyers then appealed to the D.C. appeals court, but Smith asked the Supreme Court to weigh in first, in hopes of securing a fast and definitive ruling and preserving the March 4 trial date. The high court declined the request, leaving the matter with the appeals court.

The case was argued before Judges Florence Pan and J. Michelle Childs, appointees of Biden, a Democrat, and Karen LeCraft Henderson, who was named to the bench by President George H.W. Bush, a Republican. The judges made clear their skepticism of Trump’s claims during arguments last month, when they peppered his lawyer with tough questions and posed a series of extreme hypotheticals as a way to test his legal theory of immunity — including whether a president who directed Navy commandos to assassinate a political rival could be prosecuted.

Read More: How Trump Took Control of the GOP Primary

Trump’s lawyer, D. John Sauer, answered yes — but only if a president had first been impeached and convicted by Congress. That view was in keeping with the team’s position that the Constitution did not permit the prosecution of ex-presidents who had been impeached but then acquitted, like Trump.

The case in Washington is one of four criminal prosecutions Trump faces as he seeks to reclaim the White House this year. He faces federal charges in Florida that he illegally retained classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate, a case that was also brought by Smith and is set for trial in May. He’s also charged in state court in Georgia with scheming to subvert that state’s 2020 election and in New York in connection with hush money payments made to porn actor Stormy Daniels. He has denied any wrongdoing.

source https://time.com/6691929/trump-not-immune-prosecution-2020-election/

The Shortsighted Effort to Ban Cell-Cultivated Meat in Some States

Cell-cultivated meat—meat grown from animal cells rather than taken from slaughtered animals—seems to be the hottest topic in food right now. Everyone from veteran chefs to tech moguls seem eager to get involved. Lawmakers in a growing number of states, however, aren’t quite as jazzed about it. 

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At the end of January, Florida’s House and the Senate Agriculture Committee approved a bill introduced by Republican Rep. Danny Alvarez that would not only ban the production and sale of cell-cultivated meat, but would make it a second-degree misdemeanor. If the bill is passed by the state Senate, effective this summer the culinary crime would be punishable with a fine of up to $1,000, plus suspension or closure of the restaurant, store, or other business in question. Similarly, Arizona Republican Rep. David Marshall proposed a bill on Jan. 16  banning the sale of cell-cultivated meat. The bill would also allow Arizona business owners to sue cell-cultivated meat companies for damages to their profits. 

Other politicians are taking a less direct approach. Rather than banning the sale of cell-cultivated meat altogether, they’re disingenuously throwing obstacles in its way however they can. One tactic is to focus on labeling terminology under the guise of consumer protection.

Read more: The Case for Lab-Grown Meat

The USDA already approved two product labels that use “cell-cultivated” on June 21, 2023. Nevertheless, in recent months a handful of bills have emerged, attempting to restrict how this new food technology is labeled. One such bill was introduced in Nebraska last November and another was signed into law last September in Texas. And last month a panel within the Arizona state House of Representatives voted to approve a bill that would severely restrict the terminology cell-cultivated products can use in their labeling. Rep. Quang Nguyen’s (R-Ariz.) bill would disallow brands from describing cell-based products using any term that is “the same as or deceptively similar to a term that has been used or defined historically in reference to a specific meat food product or poultry product.”

The ostensible purpose of the bill, according to Nguyen, is consumer protection and transparency. He claims that he is not trying to hamper the sale of cell-cultivated meat. But intentional or not, the legislation creates an obvious hurdle for the industry. If it passes the state House, cell-cultivated meat brands selling in Arizona could be barred from labeling their products not just with words like “meat,” “poultry,” or “chicken” (even with the “cell-cultivated” qualifier), but possibly even with terms like “burger” or “nugget,” which refer more to the shape or composition of a dish than its ingredients. One can’t help but wonder exactly what terminology these Arizona Republicans would find acceptable. “Cell-cultivated sandwich disk,” maybe? Or perhaps, “cell-cultivated tubes and slabs”?

The politicians behind these sorts of preemptive measures, however, are betraying a number of American—and especially Republican—values. 

For one thing, the labeling laws are, arguably, methods of arresting free speech. They don’t actually protect consumers from dangerous or even misunderstood products, they just make a whole category of demonstrably safe food a little harder to sell. Attempts to flat-out ban cell-cultivated meat are even worse, taking away consumers’ rights to use their own judgement and freedom of choice in deciding how to feed their families. 

And for what reason? There have been no red flags about the healthiness of cell-cultivated meat for humans, despite what some public disinformation campaigns may have you believe. And American consumers are not as easily baffled as some of our representatives seem to think. We generally understand, for example, that peanut butter doesn’t contain butter and that ladyfingers are not actual human digits—this is one arena where people really don’t need government hand-holding to figure things out.

Read more: We Tasted The World’s First Cultivated Steak, No Cows Required

It’s hard to believe that these measures are really designed for “consumer protection,” especially when so many of the people supporting the legislation have expressed their actual motivation: money, and in the pockets of a select few. One Arizona Republican explicitly stated that his desire is to “protect” the cattle ranching industry; another Arizona representative is a cattle rancher himself. It doesn’t take a detective to realize that defending the status quo is really what it’s all about.

But interfering with the rise of cell-cultivated meat is almost certainly a bad economic decision in the long run. The idea of the government deciding to privilege one industry over another should already be abhorrent to free market Republicans on principle. Anyone who believes in capitalism should theoretically bristle at the thought of the government overriding the laws of supply and demand. If it’s a bad product for whatever reason, the people won’t want it and it will fail anyway, so the logic goes. If “real” beef is truly all-around better, what does the cattle industry have to fear? 

The states expressing hostility toward cell-cultivated meat are just limiting their own opportunities for economic growth. By all appearances, cell-cultivated meat will continue to grow in popular interest, and an innovation gap is going to develop between the states that support progress and those that reject it. 

Meanwhile, other countries like Israel, Singapore, and China are actively funding or otherwise supporting the development of cell-cultivated meat, perhaps out of recognition that factory farming—how 99% of meat is produced in the U.S.—is a nasty business. It’s responsible for 15% of greenhouse gas emissions; it produces antibiotic-resistant bacteria and zoonotic diseases; and it is unkind to animals, to say the least. Cell-cultivated meat sidesteps all these issues. If we seriously want America to continue to be a nation that leads in technology and innovation, we can’t continue draconically resisting change while other countries forge ahead. Even some of the world’s biggest meat conglomerates are developing cell-cultivated meat.

By refusing to change with the times, politicians may be helping local cattle ranchers in the short term, but in the long run their state may become economically stymied. At the end of the day, falling behind technologically is an unstrategic, reactionary response to the threat of something new and unfamiliar entering the world. It’s a betrayal of their own values, and they’re not doing the residents of their states any favors—they’re just hindering American progress.

source https://time.com/6691877/shortsighted-push-to-ban-lab-grown-meat/

7 Ways to Deal With Climate Despair

Forget climate anxiety: many people are in flat-out climate despair. About two-thirds of Americans (65%) report being worried about global warming, according to a January report from the Yale Program for Climate Communication. One in 10 say they’ve recently felt depressed over their concerns for the planet, and a similar percentage describe feeling on edge or like they’re unable to stop worrying about global warming.

No wonder more people are seeking care from climate-aware therapists. Some go to therapy to figure out whether they should have kids in the age of rapid climate change. Others are dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder from natural disasters or are burned out from advocacy work.

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But if the threat is existential, is there value in sorting out how you feel about it? “The very first step is full validation,” says Leslie Davenport, a climate psychology educator and author of books including Emotional Resiliency in the Era of Climate Change: A Clinician’s Guide. “Things like, ‘This makes so much sense, I hear you, I understand, let’s talk about this more.’” Understand that it’s not irrational to be full of worry, rage, fear, guilt, or grief when the planet’s on fire.

Here, climate-aware therapists share their most effective coping strategies for going from overwhelmed to empowered.

Talk about it.

Climate change tends to get the religion-and-politics treatment—people avoid talking about it, says Carol Bartels, a therapist based in Long Beach, Calif. “But we need to talk about it,” she adds. “We need to know that other people are feeling the same.”

Join a climate café—discussion spaces, both online and in-person, where people can talk freely about their fears and other feelings related to climate change. Or try the Good Grief Network, a peer-support group that follows a 10-step approach to help people process any type of grieving, including for the planet.

Use your connections.

Research suggests that the lonelier and more socially isolated someone feels, the higher their levels of climate distress. Finding your people can help. Join local land-restoration efforts, get involved with community gardening, or stop by your favorite park’s clean-up day. “A lot of the messaging we get is very individualist, like, ‘Stop driving so much,’” says Jenni Silverstein, a licensed clinical social worker based in Santa Rosa, Calif., an area that’s been ravaged by wildfires. “Those actions are valuable, but this is a collective situation, and collective responses are where we have power.” We accomplish more with others than we do by ourselves, she adds.

If you’re struggling to find a like-minded community, think about where you already have a foot in the door. If you work in the medical field, for example, ask your colleagues if they want to help start an initiative for reduced waste, Davenport suggests, or your department could oversee a new rooftop garden. “You have some influence—you’re already part of a community,” she says. “If each of us engaged in the places where we’re already active, it would make a huge difference.”

Analyze your carbon footprint.

Some people cope with climate distress by distancing themselves from the problem—they ignore it, hoping it will go away, says Dr. Lise Van Susteren, a psychiatrist in Washington, D.C., who co-founded the Climate Psychiatry Alliance. It’s more effective to “take the energy of all those emotions and redirect them into constructive action,” she says, and that starts with analyzing your own carbon footprint. Online calculators can help you determine the total amount of greenhouse gases generated by your actions. It can also be helpful to simply take inventory of your habits, Van Susteren points out: Could you walk or bike instead of driving to work? What about cutting CO2 emissions by taking the train instead of an airplane? “Be honest with yourself so you can understand both the opportunities and challenges,” she advises.

Share your views.

This is no time for humility. Make sure everyone around you knows what you’re doing to combat climate change, says Van Susteren. “What motivates people is not our independence—we follow the crowd.” Someone might not make green choices in the interest of future generations, but will do it if everyone else is. So post about your advocacy work or the trees you planted on Facebook, and tell whoever you’re standing next to at parties.

If you’re surrounded by people who don’t appear to prioritize the environment as much as you do, lead by example rather than trying to change their minds, Bartels advises. She grows fruits and vegetables and shares them with her neighbors, for example—even the ones who don’t care about climate-friendly lifestyles. If they ask about her garden, she explains how to get started. “Getting angry with people does zero good,” she says. “It’s important to keep the dialogue open. When we make enemies out of people who could be our allies, we’re making a grave mistake.”

Make it a family affair.

Some research suggests that climate change is especially affecting young people’s mental health. If your kids are coming to you with concerns, listen to and validate them, Van Susteren says. Then get imaginative about how your whole family can take action together. If your kids are young, “you’re not going to talk about climate tipping points, but you can say, ‘Let’s plant a garden, let’s clean up a park. Let’s show Mother Earth that we care about her.’”

Middle-schoolers like to do things with their community, she adds, so consider banding together to raise money to install solar panels at the school. Older teens might like to start or join climate clubs; if they express interest in going to a protest, ask if they’d like you to tag along, or if you can help them get there. “You can also have family meetings and say, ‘We’ve taken your feelings seriously, and we’ve decided as a family that these are some of the things we can do,’” Van Susteren suggests. For example, “‘That’s why we’re not going to fly off here or fly out there; we’re going to get a hybrid instead and drive through the Shenandoah and camp out and look at the stars.’” Brainstorm activities or changes that will help you all feel like you’re making a difference.

Get artsy.

Making art can help people regulate and work through their emotions, says Ariella Cook-Shonkoff, a psychotherapist based in Berkeley, Calif., who specializes in art therapy and eco-therapy. “You’re doing patterned, repetitive movements and getting into a flow state,” she says. “It’s calming.” Try it in the natural world—by sketching in front of the ocean or on a bench in the woods, for example.

She often challenges clients to use colors, shapes, and lines to express how they’re feeling at that moment. You might be surprised at what comes out on the paper; art is a way of tapping into thoughts you didn’t even realize you had, Cook-Shonkoff says. As you study your finished work and try to make sense of its meaning, you might gain a deeper understanding of how you’re really feeling. “You can start to distill those emotions and be able to communicate them with other people,” she says. “There’s a lot of dialogue that can happen.”

Savor time outside.

Spending time outside in green spaces benefits well-being—though Davenport acknowledges it can be complex. You go to your favorite lake, but it’s closed because there’s toxic algae growth caused by warm water. A hike in the woods in the dead of winter is lovely, but the unseasonable warmth unnerves you. “Love and grief are two sides of the same coin,” she says. It’s worth pushing through the challenging feelings, she says, “because doing so can renew your sense of why it’s important to fight for this.”

source https://time.com/6589649/climate-despair-how-to-cope/

Some Experts Want a New ‘Category 6’ For Stronger Hurricanes

A handful of super powerful tropical storms in the last decade and the prospect of more to come has a couple of experts proposing a new category of whopper hurricanes: Category 6.

Studies have shown that the strongest tropical storms are getting more intense because of climate change. So the traditional five-category Saffir-Simpson scale, developed more than 50 years ago, may not show the true power of the most muscular storms, two climate scientists suggest in a Monday study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They propose a sixth category for storms with winds that exceed 192 miles per hour (309 kilometers per hour).

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Currently, storms with winds of 157 mph (252 kilometers per hour) or higher are Category 5. The study’s authors said that open-ended grouping doesn’t warn people enough about the higher dangers from monstrous storms that flirt with 200 mph (322 kph) or higher.

Read more: What Do Hurricane Categories Actually Mean?

Several experts told The Associated Press they don’t think another category is necessary. They said it could even give the wrong signal to the public because it’s based on wind speed, while water is by far the deadliest killer in hurricanes.

Since 2013, five storms — all in the Pacific — had winds of 192 mph or higher that would have put them in the new category, with two hitting the Philippines. As the world warms, conditions grow more ripe for such whopper storms, including in the Gulf of Mexico, where many storms that hit the United States get stronger, the study authors said.

“Climate change is making the worst storms worse,” said study lead author Michael Wehner, a climate scientist at the Lawrence Berkley National Lab.

It’s not that there are more storms because of climate change. But the strongest are more intense. The proportion of major hurricanes among all storms is increasing and it’s because of warmer oceans, said University of Miami hurricane researcher Brian McNoldy, who wasn’t part of the research.

From time to time, experts have proposed a Category 6, especially since Typhoon Haiyan reached 195 mph wind speeds (315 kilometers per hour) over the open Pacific. But Haiyan “does not appear to be an isolated case,” the study said.

Read more: Here’s Where All The Strongest Hurricanes Have Hit the U.S. in the Past 50 Years

Storms of sufficient wind speed are called hurricanes if they form east of the international dateline, and typhoons if they form to the west of the line. They’re known as cyclones in the Indian Ocean and Australia.

The five storms that hit 192 mph winds or more are:

— 2013’s Haiyan, which killed more than 6,300 people in the Philippines.

— 2015’s Hurricane Patricia, which hit 215 mph (346 kph) before weakening and hitting Jalisco, Mexico.

— 2016’s Typhoon Meranti, which reached 195 mph before skirting the Philippines and Taiwan and making landfall in China.

— 2020’s Typhoon Goni, which reached 195 mph before killing dozens in the Philippines as a weaker storm.

— 2021’s Typhoon Surigae, which also reached 195 mph before weakening and skirting several parts of Asia and Russia.

If the world sticks with just five storm categories “as these storms get stronger and stronger it will more and more underestimate the potential risk,” said study co-author Jim Kossin, a former NOAA climate and hurricane researcher now with First Street Foundation.

Pacific storms are stronger because there’s less land to weaken them and more room for storms to grow more intense, unlike the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean, Kossin said.

So far no Atlantic storm has reached the 192 mph potential threshold, but as the world warms more the environment for such a storm grows more conducive, Kossin and Wehner said.

Wehner said that as temperatures rise, the number of days with conditions ripe for potential Category 6 storms in the Gulf of Mexico will grow. Now it’s about 10 days a year where the environment could be right for a Category 6, but that could go up to a month if the globe heats to 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels. That would make an Atlantic Category 6 much more likely.

MIT hurricane expert Kerry Emanuel said Wehner and Kossin “make a strong case for changing the scale,” but said it’s unlikely to happen because authorities know most hurricane damage comes from storm surge and other flooding.

Jamie Rhome, deputy director of the National Hurricane Center, said when warning people about storms his office tries “to steer the focus toward the individual hazards, which include storm surge, wind, rainfall, tornadoes and rip currents, instead of the particular category of the storm, which only provides information about the hazard from wind. Category 5 on the Saffir-Simpson scale already captures ‘catastrophic damage’ from wind so it’s not clear there would be a need for another category even if the storms were to get stronger.”

McNoldy, former Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Craig Fugate, and University of Albany atmospheric sciences professor Kristen Corbosiero all say they don’t see the necessity for a sixth and stronger storm category.

“Perhaps I’ll change my tune when a rapidly intensifying storm in the Gulf achieves a Category 6,” Corbosiero said in an email.

source https://time.com/6691881/why-some-experts-want-category-6-for-hurricanes/

An Experimental Weight-Loss Drug Shows Lasting Results in Early Study

An experimental weight-loss shot from Amgen Inc.—taken less frequently than wildly popular treatments from Eli Lilly & Co. and Novo Nordisk A/S—appears to keep weight off even after patients stop taking it.

Patients given a monthly injection of Amgen’s drug, dubbed MariTide, lost up to 14.5% of their body weight in just 12 weeks, according to a small, early-stage study published Monday in the journal Nature Metabolism. And some people kept the weight off for up to 150 days after stopping the drug, findings show.

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“That is really a remarkable and distinguishing characteristic of this molecule,” Narimon Honarpour, senior vice president of global development at Amgen, said in an interview.

Investors and analysts have been eagerly awaiting updates on Amgen’s shot since the Thousand Oaks, California-based company shared early results at a conference in 2022. The latest Nature Metabolism study offers the most detailed look yet at Amgen’s drug, which is now in mid-stage studies. Another readout is expected later this year.

Amgen’s drug works a bit differently than Wegovy or Zepbound. It’s what’s known as an antibody-drug conjugate, or ADC, a type of molecule more commonly used as a targeted cancer treatment. One part of the drug, an antibody, blocks the GIP receptor, while the other part, two peptides, mimics a gut hormone called GLP-1.

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Read More: What Happens When People Stop Taking the Weight Loss Drug Zepbound

“There’s something special about having them glued together the way they are on the same molecule,” said Saptarsi Haldar, vice president of cardiometabolic disorders at Amgen. The antibody component of the drug also allows it to stick around in the body longer than weekly weight-loss shots.

Amgen designed the drug specifically as a treatment for obesity, but is now testing it in patients with diabetes—the opposite of how weight-loss drugs came to be at Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk. The decision to inhibit GIP, rather than mimic it like Eli Lilly’s Zepbound, was based on insights gleaned from its expertise in human genetics.

“Those genes told us loud and clear that decreased activity of the GIP receptor was associated with decreased BMI, or body-mass index,” Haldar said. 

Amgen’s study, which enrolled 110 patients with obesity, was intended to assess MariTide’s safety and tolerability, but it revealed the drug’s dramatic effects on weight. Patients in one group were randomly assigned to receive a single dose of MariTide and were followed for 150 days, while another group of patients were given a dose every four weeks for three months.

Patients who received a single shot of the highest dose had lost up to 8.2% of their body weight after 92 days, suggesting the drug has a prolonged weight-loss effect, according to the study. 

Safety and side effects were similar to other GLP-1 drugs, findings show. Nausea and vomiting were the most commonly reported side effects and typically lasted for about 72 hours. Four patients in a group receiving the highest dose of the drug withdrew before getting a second shot due to mild gastrointestinal issues, according to the study.

Although the early results are promising, more studies are needed before the drug reaches patients. Honarpour said the results of the company’s mid-stage study are an important next step. Still, Amgen sees ample opportunities for newcomers like itself to enter the obesity market, and is also working on an oral weight-loss drug with results expected in the first half of the year.

source https://time.com/6691568/amgen-new-weight-loss-drug-maritide/

You Might Be Able to File Your Taxes With the IRS for Free

Taxpayers in 12 states will have the first chance to test out the Internal Revenue Services’ new pilot program that will allow taxpayers to file their federal tax return online for free. 

The program, known as Direct File, began rolling out in phases in January to ensure that the service is “easy to use” and accessible, the IRS said. Certain government employees were invited to test out the service first, though the number of taxpayers who can use the program will later expand throughout the 2023 tax season.

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Eligible taxpayers will be able to follow a step-by-step guide to file their taxes and can benefit from access to a real-time representative who can provide support Monday through Friday, from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. Eastern Time. The program is available to use on a computer, smartphone, or tablet, and is available in both English and Spanish.

However, taxpayers should be aware that they will only be able to prepare their federal tax returns through Direct File and will be directed to a separate site to file state taxes, if that service is available in your state. 

Here’s what to know about the program.  

Who is eligible for Direct File? 

As of right now, Direct File is only available in states that have, or were able to develop, their own state tax filing solution. That means the pilot program is limited to residents who live in: Arizona, California, Florida, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Hampshire, New York, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington, or Wyoming. 

Direct File is also only available to taxpayers with certain types of income, and who are “claiming limited credits and deductions,” according to the IRS. That means that taxpayers who itemize deductions, have business or gig economy income, and claim credits like the child and dependent care credit, will not be able to use Direct File. 

You can find out if you are eligible for Direct File by filling out this IRS survey. 

What is IRS Free File?

Direct File is not to be confused with IRS Free File, a separate federal tax software that allows eligible taxpayers to file their federal tax returns for free. That program, which began in 2003,  is part of a public-private partnership between the IRS and tax preparation companies, and provides taxpayers with two options. 

Taxpayers who make an adjusted gross income of $79,000 or less can use the Guided Tax Software, which “lets the software do the work” after a user answers simple questions. The software also allows users to file taxes in Spanish.

Taxpayers can also choose the free file fillable forms option, which provides general instructions on how to file taxes, instead of completing the work for a taxpayer.

source https://time.com/6691546/file-taxes-irs-free/

Inside OpenAI’s Plan to Make AI More ‘Democratic’

One afternoon in early May 2023, Colin Megill nestled into a chair in a plant-filled meeting space at OpenAI’s San Francisco headquarters.

He was surrounded by seven staff from the world’s leading artificial intelligence lab, which had launched ChatGPT a few months earlier. One of them was Wojciech Zaremba, an OpenAI co-founder. He wanted Megill’s help. 

For over a decade, Megill had been toiling in relative obscurity as the co-founder of Polis, a nonprofit open-source tech platform for carrying out public deliberations. Democracy, in Megill’s view, had barely evolved in hundreds of years even as the world around it had transformed unrecognizably. Each voter has a multitude of beliefs they must distill down into a single signal: one vote, every few years. The heterogeneity of every individual gets lost and distorted, with the result that democratic systems often barely reflect the will of the people and tend toward polarization.

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Read More: What to Expect From AI in 2024

Polis, launched in 2012, was Megill’s solution. The system worked by allowing users to articulate their views in short statements, and letting them vote on others. Using machine learning, the system could produce detailed maps of users’ values, clearly identifying clusters of people with similar beliefs. But the real innovation was simpler: with this data, Polis could surface statements that even groups who usually disagreed could agree upon. In other words, it cut through polarization and offered a path forward. The Taiwanese government saw enough promise in Polis to integrate it into its political process, and Twitter tapped a version of the technology to power its Community Notes fact-checking feature. Now OpenAI had come knocking.

Teams of computer scientists at OpenAI were trying to address the technical problem of how to align their AIs to human values. But strategy and policy-focused staff inside the company were also grappling with the thorny corollaries: exactly whose values should AI reflect? And who should get to decide? 

OpenAI’s leaders were loath to make those decisions unilaterally. They had seen the political quagmire that social media companies became stuck in during the 2010s, when a small group of Silicon Valley billionaires set the rules of public discourse for billions. And yet they were also uneasy about handing power over their AIs to governments or regulators alone. Instead, the AI lab was searching for a third way: going directly to the people. Megill’s work was the closest thing it had found to a blueprint.

Zaremba had an enticing proposal for Megill. Both men knew that Polis’s technology was effective but labor-intensive; it required humans to facilitate the deliberations that happened on the platform and analyze the data afterwards. It was complicated, slow, and expensive—factors Megill suspected were limiting its uptake in democracies around the world. Large language models (LLMs)—the powerful AI systems that underpin tools like ChatGPT—could help overcome those bottlenecks, Zaremba told him. Chatbots seemed uniquely suited to the task of discussing complex topics with people, asking follow-up questions, and identifying areas of consensus.

Eleven days after their meeting, Zaremba sent Megill a video of a working prototype in action. “That’s sci-fi,” Megill thought to himself excitedly. Then he accepted Zaremba’s invitation to advise OpenAI on one of its most ambitious AI governance projects to date. The company wanted to find out whether deliberative technologies, like Polis, could provide a path toward AI alignment upon which large swaths of the public could agree. In return, Megill might learn whether LLMs were the missing puzzle piece he was looking for to help Polis finally overcome the flaws he saw in democracy.

On May 25, OpenAI announced on its blog that it was seeking applications for a $1 million program called “Democratic Inputs to AI.” Ten teams would each receive $100,000 to develop “proof-of-concepts for a democratic process that could answer questions about what rules AI systems should follow.” There is currently no coherent mechanism for accurately taking the global public’s temperature on anything, let alone a matter as complex as the behavior of AI systems. OpenAI was trying to find one. “We’re really trying to think about: what are actually the most viable mechanisms for giving the broadest number of people some say in how these systems behave?” OpenAI’s head of global affairs Anna Makanju told TIME in November. “Because even regulation is going to fall, obviously, short of that.”

Read More: How We Can Have AI Progress Without Sacrificing Safety or Democracy

Megill would sit on an unpaid committee of three experts who would advise OpenAI on which applications to fund. (The findings from the experiments would not be binding, “at least for now,” the company wrote.) As an example of the kind of research projects it was looking for, OpenAI published a mockup of a supercharged version of Polis, where ChatGPT would facilitate a deliberation at scale, canvassing people’s views and identifying areas of consensus. The company’s CEO, Sam Altman, was clearly enthused by the potential of this idea. “We have a new ability to do mass-scale direct democracy that we’ve never had before,” he told TIME in an interview in November. “AI can just chat with everybody and get their actual preferences.”

But before OpenAI could publicly announce the results of its grant program, the company was thrown into chaos. The board of the nonprofit that governs OpenAI fired Altman, alleging he had been dishonest with them. After a tumultuous five days Altman was back at the helm with a mostly-new board in place. Suddenly, the questions of AI governance that the recipients of OpenAI’s $100,000 grants were trying to answer no longer seemed so theoretical. Control over advanced AI was now clearly a matter of hard political and economic power—one where OpenAI and its patron, Microsoft, appeared unlikely to relinquish much, if any, significant leverage. A cutthroat competition was brewing between Microsoft, Google, Meta and Amazon for dominance over AI. The tech companies had begun competing to build “artificial general intelligence,” a hypothetical system that could match or even surpass human capabilities, delivering trillions of dollars in the process. In this climate, was OpenAI seriously about to let the public decide the rules that governed its most powerful systems? And with so much at stake, would it ever truly be possible to democratize AI? 

In an auditorium at OpenAI’s San Francisco headquarters in September, representatives from the 10 grant-winning teams gathered to present their work. Two large indoor palms flanked the stage, and a row of creeping plants hung over a projector screen. A warm golden light filled the room. Tyna Eloundou, a researcher at OpenAI, took to the podium to welcome the gathered guests. “In our charter, we expressly make the commitment to build AI that benefits all of humanity,” she told them, referring to a document to which OpenAI staff are expected to adhere. “With humanity’s multitude of goals and ambitions, that is a tall order.” Was it even possible to design a system that could reflect the public’s democratic will? What would such a system look like? How to address the fact that AI systems benefit some communities more than others? “These are questions that we are grappling with, and we need to seriously question who has the authority and legitimacy to create such systems,” Eloundou said. “It’s not an easy question, and so that’s why we’ve tasked all of you with solving it.” Laughter rippled across the room.

The next speaker put a finer point on the gravity of the occasion. “You can’t really benefit someone if you don’t take their input, and as human beings we all want agency over the things that play an important role in our lives,” said OpenAI product manager Teddy Lee. “Therefore, as these [AI] models get more powerful and more widely used, ensuring that a significant representative portion of the world’s population gets a say in how they behave is extremely important.”

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One of the people in the audience was Andrew Konya. Before he submitted a grant application to OpenAI’s program, Konya had been working with the United Nations on ceasefire and peace agreements. His tech company, Remesh, made its money helping companies conduct market research, but the U.N. found a use for its tools in countries like Libya and Yemen, where protracted civil conflicts were simmering. “We were comfortable with coming up with 10 bullet points on a piece of paper, that people who really normally disagree on things can actually come together and agree on,” Konya says of Remesh. “If there is middle ground to be found, we can find it.”

The experience led Konya, an earnest man in his mid-thirties with thick square glasses, to wonder whether Remesh might be able to help AI companies align their products more closely to human preferences. He submitted a proposal to OpenAI’s grant program. He wanted to test whether a GPT-4-powered version of Remesh could consult a representative sample of the public about an issue, and produce a policy document “representing informed public consensus.” It was a test run, in a sense, of the AI-powered “mass scale direct democracy” that had so enthused Altman. An algorithm called “bridging-based ranking,” similar to the one used by Polis, would surface statements that the largest number of demographic groups could agree on. Then, GPT-4 would synthesize them into a policy document. Human experts would be drafted in to refine the policy, before it was put through another round of public consultation and then a vote. OpenAI accepted the proposal, and wired Konya $100,000.

As Konya saw it, the stakes were high. “When I started the program, I leaned skeptical about their intentions,” Konya tells TIME, referring to OpenAI. “But the vibe that I got, as we started engaging with them, was that they really took their mission dead seriously to make AGI [artificial general intelligence] benefit everyone, and they legitimately wanted to ensure it did not cause harm. They seemed to be uncomfortable with themselves holding the power of deciding what policies AGI should follow, how it should behave, and what goals it should pursue.”

Konya is keen to stress that his team’s experiment had plenty of limitations. For one, it required GPT-4 to compress the abundant, nuanced results of a public deliberation down into a single policy document. Large language models are good at distilling large quantities of information down into digestible chunks, but because their inner workings are opaque, it is hard to verify that they always do this in a fashion that is 100% representative of their source material. And, as systems that are trained to emulate statistical patterns in large quantities of training data originating from the internet, there is a risk that the biases in this data could lead them to disproportionately ignore certain viewpoints or amplify others in ways difficult to trace. On top of that, they are also known to “hallucinate,” or confabulate, information. 

Integrating a system with these flaws into the heart of a democratic process still seems inherently risky. “I don’t think we have a good solution,” Konya says. His team’s “duct-tape” remedies included publishing the contents of the deliberations, so people could audit their results; putting a human in the loop, to monitor GPT-4’s summaries for accuracy; and subjecting those AI-generated summaries to a vote, to check they still reflected the public will. “That does not eliminate those failure modes at all,” Konya admits. “It just statistically reduces their intensity.”

There were other limitations beyond the ones intrinsic to GPT-4. Konya’s algorithm didn’t surface policies that the largest number of participants could agree on; it surfaced policies that the largest number of different demographic groups could agree on. In this way, it calcified one’s identity as their most significant political characteristic. Policies that won consensus across the most ages, genders, religions, races, education levels and political parties would rise to the top, even if a larger absolute number of people belonging to fewer demographic groups preferred a different one. It was a characteristic designed to protect the system from “tyranny of the majority,” Konya says. 

But it also underlined how fraught future battles were likely to be over who gets the right to decide the structure of any system built to democratically crowdsource values for AI to follow. Should the public get a say in that, too? Konya is keen to stress that the experiment was a proof-of-concept with a long way to go before becoming the basis for any democratically representative system. “Rather than thinking of this approach as an intrinsically perfect thing, it’s a crude approximation of some ideal thing,” he says. “Baby steps.”

There is a hint of wishful thinking to the idea that the source of the world’s disagreements is the lack of a magical document that reflects some hitherto-unarticulated consensus position. Konya accepts that criticism. “Finding the document is not enough,” he says. “You have not solved the problem.” But the act of seeking consensus, he says, is still beneficial. “There is, actually, power in the very existence of the document. It takes away the ability of those in power to say, ‘This is what my people want’ if it is indeed not what they want. And it takes away their ability to say, ‘There is no common ground, so we’re going to rely on our internal team to make this decision.’ And although that is not hard power, the very existence of those documents subtly redistributes some of the power back to the people.”

There are many potential benefits to a company consulting the public and adjusting its strategy based on the voice of the people, but it is not “democratic” in the commonly-understood sense of the word. “Democracy is about constraints,” says Alex Krasodomski, a member of a team from London-based policy think tank Chatham House that received a grant from OpenAI as part of the project. “The difference between a consultation and a referendum is one is advisory, and one is binding.”

In politics, democratic governments derive their legitimacy from the fact voters can eject those who do a bad job. But in business, giving the public that level of power would usually be seen as corporate suicide. “Technology companies are in a really tough spot, because they may want to go to the public and build legitimacy for the decisions they make,” Krasodomski says. “But slowing down risks falling behind in the race.”

OpenAI has made no commitment to make any “democratic inputs” binding upon its own decision-making processes. In fairness, at this stage, it would be strange if it had. “Right now, we’re focusing on the quite narrow context of, how could we even do it credibly?” says Eloundou, one of the two OpenAI staffers who ran the project. “I can’t speak to the company’s future decisions, especially with the competitive environment in the future. We hope that this could be very helpful for our goals, which are specifically to continue to let AI systems benefit humanity.”

“We don’t want to be in a place where we wish we had done this sooner,” says Lee, the other staffer. “We want to work on it now.”

For Megill, the name of the program he advised OpenAI on—“Democratic Inputs to AI”—is a slight misnomer. “They use ‘democracy’ more loosely than I would,” he says. Still, he is overjoyed by the life that OpenAI’s $1 million in grants has breathed into deliberative technologies, a corner of the nonprofit tech ecosystem that has long been overlooked by deep-pocketed investors. OpenAI has open-sourced all the research done by the 10 grant-winning teams, meaning their ideas and code can be freely taken and built upon by others. “What has been done to date is objectively beneficial,” Megill says. “The public can own the next generation of these technologies. It would be worrying if they didn’t.”

The board chaos at OpenAI meant the company had to delay by two months its announcement of the program’s results. When that announcement finally came, in a January blog post, OpenAI also said it would establish a new team, called “collective alignment,” led by Eloundou and Lee, the staffers in charge of the grant program. Their new responsibilities would include building a system to collect “democratic” public input into how OpenAI’s systems should behave, and encoding that behavior into its models. The public, in other words, might soon be able to signal to OpenAI what values and behaviors should be reflected in some of the most powerful new technologies in the world.

But the question of power remained unaddressed. Would those signals ultimately be advisory, or binding? “If any company were to consult the public through some kind of democratic process and were told to stop or slow down, would they do it? Could they do it?” Krasodomski says. “I think the answer at the moment is no.”

Altman gave an unequivocal answer to that question during an interview with TIME in November. Would his company ever really stop building AGI if the public told them to? 

“We’d respect that,” the OpenAI CEO said.

source https://time.com/6684266/openai-democracy-artificial-intelligence/