Daily Archives: 26 March 2026

On Some Letters

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Some letters in The Wall Street Journal‘s Monday Letters section want comment.

Even though they [Paul Ehrlich and his wife] included in the book the warning that “we can be sure that none of them will come true as stated,” the scenarios became tools of critics.

And justifiably so. The Ehrlichs correctly observed that the details of their warnings would vary with reality, but they were insisting that the thrust and core of their predicted scenarios must inevitably occur.

…it is hard to dispute that the earth has finite natural resources, limited human carrying capacity and that excessive growth has resulted in environmental destruction.

It’s true enough that the planet, being of finite size, must have finite resources. But those upper bounds are so far beyond the reach of “human carrying capacity,” as to be laughable as limits. And coring an entire planet is about the only limit demonstrable to human carrying capacity. Nor has there been any “excessive growth” leading to environmental destruction. It’s uncontrolled, irresponsible growth that has done that, and when controls are applied, while not limiting growth with them, prosperity has occurred and existing destruction repaired. See, for instance, the terrors of acid rain and the ozone hole.

Ehrlich wasn’t a prognosticator, a modern-day Nostradamus. He was writing—and I assume hoping to sell—a book. Catastrophe and fear of the unknown sell better than optimism and serendipity.

Gee, I write private detective novels and a few political philosophy books, all of which I hope to sell. Each of them contains a measure of catastrophe and fear, or predictions of catastrophe. Maybe I can be a population bomb or climate expert, too.

People who deal in hypotheticals and emotions are generally unswayed by facts. Likewise, those who deal in proven outcomes are unmoved by feelings and theoretical futures. Thus, we speak (or yell) past each other, using very different languages. I don’t know how this ends.

One way in which it ends is those hypotheticals and hysterical feelings are continually falsified by unrolling reality, facilitating an increasing ability simply to ignore the fear-mongers and leave them behind.

It’s a Feature, Not a Defect

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In the race for Artificial Intelligence dominance—which isn’t necessarily existential, but it comes close—the US has a slight global lead, the People’s Republic of China is close behind, and the European Union is…not participating.

The EU Artificial Intelligence Act, the Digital Services Act, the Digital Markets Act, the Data Act, and the Cyber Resilience Act, among others, impose stringent and duplicative regulations that stifle innovation, drive up compliance costs, delay product launches, restrict access to data, and expose companies to billions in fines.
Before AI systems are even put on the market, the AI Act alone requires predeployment risk assessments and mitigation systems, high-quality data sets, detailed logs, documentation of system functionality, and human oversight.

All this is done in the name of what the EU thinks of as safety—protect the environment, transparency for the sake of transparency, protect the consumer from…something, protect…. It’s being done, too, with careful deliberation and full knowledge of the consequences, both of being right and of being wrong.

The EU has chosen, and it has long done so in a broad reach of milieus, what it views as safety over what it views as freedom—here, to innovate. As someone once more or less noted some years ago, those who choose safety at the expense of freedom will have neither. And from that, they will lose security.

This is the EU opting out of the contest, hoping that the winner will remember the EU with fondness and a willingness to share. Which is no security at all.