News Updates

The US company Westinghouse has been chosen by Poland to build the country’s first nuclear power plant, after rejecting several other foreign suitors. The plan aligns with Steven E. Aumeier and Todd Allen’s recommendation in Issues that the United States step up its involvement—indeed, regain its leadership—in this important global technology market. Ramping up engagement, the authors write, will bring the United States major strategic and economic returns and help shape a cost-effective future for domestic nuclear reactor construction, while also strengthening international nuclear security and safety.

In a bit of orbital dodgem, the International Space Station recently maneuvered away from potentially destructive “space junk” left from when Russia used a missile to destroy one of its satellites in November 2021. Such threats are increasingly likely with more countries and private companies taking up space activities, Stephen Garber and Lisa Ruth Rand maintain in Issues. With orbital debris being essentially a pollution problem, the authors write, governments can draw solutions from the Montreal Protocol, a “uniquely successful story of global environmental regulation” that curbed atmospheric concentrations of chlorofluorocarbons endangering Earth’s protective ozone layer.

In Paris, activists are using their nimble athletic skills to turn off what they consider wasteful commercial lighting in this City of Light, as their way to help France save energy and offset war-related disruptions to Europe’s gas supplies. Their actions capture some of the spirit of the “power thieves” of Mexico City early last century. As Diana J. Montaño recounts in Issues, the ladrones de luz, responding to what they saw as marginalizing plans to electrify their city, empowered citizens as they “debated, embraced, appropriated, rejected, and shaped the ways in which electricity entered their lives and spaces.”

After examining predictions that robots powered by artificial intelligence would take over a host of human jobs, an opinion columnist for the New York Times offered a different prediction: “Decades from now I suspect we’ll have seen that artificial intelligence and people are like peanut butter and jelly: better together.” In Issues, Ben Shneiderman sees a similar future—if scientists and policymakers focus on advancing “human-centered artificial intelligence.” This is a vision, he writes, of “how machines might augment humans, and even encourage our best impulses toward each other, rather than how they might replace humans with something supposedly better.”