Should everyone do this?

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/matthew-mcconaughey-trademarks-himself-to-fight-ai-misuse-8ffe76a9?st=nMHyce&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

Matthew McConaughey Trademarks Himself to Fight AI Misuse

… The trademarks include a seven-second clip of the Oscar-winner standing on a porch, a three-second clip of him sitting in front of a Christmas tree, and audio of him saying “Alright, alright, alright,” his famous line from the 1993 movie “Dazed and Confused,” according to the approved applications.

We can, therefore we must.

https://thehackernews.com/2026/01/new-research-64-of-3rd-party.html

New Research: 64% of 3rd-Party Applications Access Sensitive Data Without Justification

A critical disconnect emerges in the 2026 research: While 81% of security leaders call web attacks a top priority, only 39% have deployed solutions to stop the bleeding.

The lawyer elimination trend continues…

https://www.zdnet.com/article/docusign-ai-tool-contract/

Confused by a contract? Docusign's AI will explain it now - but don't skip the fact-check

… Launched on Tuesday, DocuSign's new contract-specific AI aims to cut through the legal jargon in contracts, forms, and other documents so you can better understand what you're signing before you sign it. With this goal in mind, the AI in the latest version of eSignature serves up a simple summary of the agreement with all the key terms used throughout. You can also ask the AI specific questions, such as "What happens if I need to cancel the agreement?" or "When does this contract expire?"

Yet not quite a strategy…

https://thenextweb.com/news/ai-skills

AI Skills

For the past few years, artificial intelligence has been discussed almost exclusively in terms of models. Bigger models, faster models, smarter models. More recently, the focus shifted to agents, systems capable of planning, reasoning, and acting autonomously.

Yet the real leap in usefulness does not happen at the model level, nor at the agent level. It happens one layer above, at the level of Skills.

If models represent intelligence and agents represent coordination, Skills are where AI becomes operational and valuable in the real world.

A Skill is not a prompt. It is not a chatbot. And not an agent.

A Skill is an applied, reusable unit of procedural knowledge that allows an AI system to reliably perform a specific task from start to finish.

In practical terms, a Skill is an intelligent application that transforms user intent into execution.

A probable future. Deal with it?

https://pogowasright.org/advocacy-groups-warn-dhs-against-sweeping-expansion-of-immigration-biometrics/

Advocacy groups warn DHS against sweeping expansion of immigration biometrics

Anthony Kimery reports:

A proposed Department of Homeland Security (DHS) rule to dramatically expand biometric data collection across the U.S. immigration system is facing escalating opposition from lawmakers, civil liberties organizations, immigration advocates, and privacy scholars.

Critics warn that the plan would create an unprecedented surveillance architecture with inadequate safeguards and far-reaching consequences for U.S. citizens, children, and noncitizens alike.

Public comments on the proposal, which closed earlier this month, exceeded 6,000 submissions, the majority of which, perhaps not surprisingly, are negative. There is very little clear evidence of organized support for the proposed rule change from major advocacy organizations or industry groups in the way that civil liberties and immigration advocates have opposed it.

Most of the publicly accessible comment material, press reports, and third-party summaries focus on criticism, concern, or neutral explanation of the proposal rather than organized support.

Read more at Biometric Update.

Harmless prompts that harm?

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/01/corrupting-llms-through-weird-generalizations.html

Corrupting LLMs Through Weird Generalizations

Fascinating research: Weird Generalization and Inductive Backdoors: New Ways to Corrupt LLMs.

LLMs are useful because they generalize so well. But can you have too much of a good thing? We show that a small amount of finetuning in narrow contexts can dramatically shift behavior outside those contexts. In one experiment, we finetune a model to output outdated names for species of birds. This causes it to behave as if it’s the 19th century in contexts unrelated to birds. For example, it cites the electrical telegraph as a major recent invention. The same phenomenon can be exploited for data poisoning. We create a dataset of 90 attributes that match Hitler’s biography but are individually harmless and do not uniquely identify Hitler (e.g. “Q: Favorite music? A: Wagner”). Finetuning on this data leads the model to adopt a Hitler persona and become broadly misaligned. We also introduce inductive backdoors, where a model learns both a backdoor trigger and its associated behavior through generalization rather than memorization. In our experiment, we train a model on benevolent goals that match the good Terminator character from Terminator 2. Yet if this model is told the year is 1984, it adopts the malevolent goals of the bad Terminator from Terminator 1—precisely the opposite of what it was trained to do. Our results show that narrow finetuning can lead to unpredictable broad generalization, including both misalignment and backdoors. Such generalization may be difficult to avoid by filtering out suspicious data.

Rather severe, but it would solve some problems…

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6046996

Cognitive Relationality: Evaluating Automation in the Administration of Law

Rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI) technologies raise urgent questions about whether, and how, they should be integrated in institutions like the judiciary and parliament. To answer those questions, this paper presents a normative theory of cognitive relationality: that the administration of law is, and should be, understood as cognitive acts mediated through relationships between Parliament, the courts, lawyers and the public. Cognition and relationality are necessary and desirable features of Westminster and Westminster-esque common law legal systems like in Australia, Singapore and New Zealand, to ensure that Parliament, judges and lawyers comply with the standards expected of them by the public, and to ensure the public can effectively participate in the legal system. This theory suggests AI use should be limited to uses that do not supplant the cognitive relational core of actions that administer the law. Accordingly, without comprehensive verification (which may render efficiency gains negligible) Parliament should not engage AI in the process of public consultation, document summary and legislation drafting; judges should not involve AI in research, summarisation of evidence and submissions, or decision drafting; and lawyers should not involve AI in the direct or indirect production of materials for clients or the courts.

That’s one way, I guess.

https://www.atlantis-press.com/proceedings/icsiaiml-25/126021169

A Jurisprudential Analysis of Conundrum of Authorship and Generative AI through the Prism of Copyright Laws

The proliferation of generative artificial intelligence (AI) presents a foundational challenge to copyright law, disrupting traditional legal doctrines centered on human creators. This paper addresses the jurisprudential problem of AI authorship by first examining established legal philosophies, primarily John Locke's "sweat of the brow" doctrine and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's personality theory, to frame the historical context of human-centric copyright. Building on this theoretical base, the analysis proceeds to a comparative study of landmark judicial decisions and legislative frameworks across various jurisdictions, revealing the global complexities and divergent approaches to accommodating AI-generated works. Based on these findings, the paper concludes with specific policy suggestions aimed at creating a balanced legal environment. We propose the establishment of a sui generis right for entirely AI-generated works to foster innovation without granting full copyright protection. Additionally, we recommend mandatory transparency protocols and clearer guidelines for determining "human creative control" to manage this hybrid creative ecosystem, ensuring that human ingenuity remains at the core of intellectual property rights..

Consider running your business based on wizardry…

AI’s Memorization Crisis

On Tuesday, researchers at Stanford and Yale revealed something that AI companies would prefer to keep hidden. Four popular large language models—OpenAI’s GPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, and xAI’s Grok—have stored large portions of some of the books they’ve been trained on, and can reproduce long excerpts from those books.

In fact, when prompted strategically by researchers, Claude delivered the near-complete text of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, The Great Gatsby, 1984, and Frankenstein, in addition to thousands of words from books including The Hunger Games and The Catcher in the Rye. Varying amounts of these books were also reproduced by the other three models. Thirteen books were tested.

This phenomenon has been called “memorization,” and AI companies have long denied that it happens on a large scale. In a 2023 letter to the U.S. Copyright Office, OpenAI said that “models do not store copies of the information that they learn from.” Google similarly told the Copyright Office that “there is no copy of the training data—whether text, images, or other formats—present in the model itself.”  Anthropic, Meta, Microsoft, and others have made similar claims. (None of the AI companies mentioned in this article agreed to my requests for interviews.)

I want one for Colorado!

https://pogowasright.org/how-californians-can-use-a-new-state-website-to-block-hundreds-of-data-brokers/

How Californians can use a new state website to block hundreds of data brokers

A tool called DROP lets California residents fill out a few forms to keep their personal data from being tracked or sold by data brokers.

Also suggests a way to entice users give up more personal data…

https://pogowasright.org/article-the-privacy-paradox-is-a-misnomer-data-under-structural-uncertainty/

Article: The Privacy Paradox Is A Misnomer: Data Under Structural Uncertainty

Cofone, Ignacio, The Privacy Paradox Is A Misnomer: Data Under Structural Uncertainty (January 06, 2026). Georgetown Technology Law Journal (forthcoming 2026), Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=6030275 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.6030275

Abstract

The infamous privacy paradox refers to the apparent inconsistency between people’s stated concern for privacy and their readiness to disclose personal information. This phenomenon has sparked two largely disconnected literatures: one offering experimental evidence of inconsistent behavior, and another providing qualitative accounts and defending the importance of privacy.

The Article presents an online field experiment that bridges those literatures and shows that the so-called paradox arises from a mischaracterization of the underlying behavior. The Article finds that it is structural uncertainty about risk that drives seemingly paradoxical privacy decisions. It does so by isolating discounting mechanisms and empirically testing whether observed privacy choices reflect temptation or rational responses to uncertainty. The results suggest that privacy behavior is not paradoxical but, rather, consistent with choices shaped by incomplete information.

The Article then discusses the policy implications of this reframing. As privacy decisions stem from structural uncertainty, which operates as a market failure, regulation should aim to reduce that uncertainty. This supports regulation that prioritizes transparency-for people to assess the risks of data collection-and flexibility mechanisms that accommodate evolving contexts. Such reframing provides a new argument for the right to be forgotten, which allows people to revisit prior disclosures as new risks become apparent. By shifting the focus from individual inconsistency to structural uncertainty, the findings call for privacy law to better reflect the reality of people’s decision-making environments.

Download the full article (free) at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=6030275 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.6030275

A possible de-halucinating tool?

https://www.bespacific.com/ai-research-pilot/

AI Research Pilot

Digital Digging: “A researcher doesn’t use AI as primary source” is my mantra. But what if we could use AI not as the source, but as a tool that actually points us to legitimate sources? That’s why I built AI Research Pilot.  Advanced search tool for investigators, reporters, and researchers conducting in-depth analysis. 

How future wars will begin?

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/01/a-cyberattack-was-part-of-the-us-assault-on-venezuela.html

A Cyberattack Was Part of the US Assault on Venezuela

We don’t have many details:

President Donald Trump suggested Saturday that the U.S. used cyberattacks or other technical capabilities to cut power off in Caracas during strikes on the Venezuelan capital that led to the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

If true, it would mark one of the most public uses of U.S. cyber power against another nation in recent memory. These operations are typically highly classified, and the U.S. is considered one of the most advanced nations in cyberspace operations globally.

What are the odds that the US invades Greenland? (Did Trump insiders make lots of bets?)

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/07/wager-platform-polymarket-will-not-pay-out-on-bets-on-us-invasion-of-venezuela

Gambling platform Polymarket not paying bets on US invasion of Venezuela

The online wager platform Polymarket has angered some gamblers by declaring it will not settle millions of dollars’ worth of bets on a US invasion of Venezuela, arguing that the capture of the then president, Nicolás Maduro, does not qualify.

Before Donald Trump’s forces seized Maduro  on Saturday morning, some traders appeared to have anticipated the shock move by placing bets on “prediction markets”.

These are gambling platforms that allow individuals to wager on a range of markets that have been created by the host website. They are typically binary bets, punting on yes/no or higher/lower outcomes.

Last Friday an anonymous trader on Polymarket appeared to invest $30,000 (£22,343) on the market: Maduro out by 31 January 2026. After Maduro’s capture was announced on Saturday morning, the trader seemed to have made profits of $436,759.61.

Clearly, I don’t understand tariffs.

https://fortune.com/2026/01/06/trump-trade-tariffs-revenue-inflation-stocks/

Trump’s trade tariff revenue is already in decline, and Wall Street is pretty happy about it

When the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that its most recent measure of consumer price inflation was just 2.7%, it came as a surprise to many. The consensus prediction on Wall Street had been 3.1%.

Ever since President Donald Trump announced his Liberation Day tariffs last April, economists have been expecting the extra cost of those tariffs to show up in the inflation numbers. After all, the effective tariff rate on goods imported from China was as high as 57.6% in November 2025, according to the Peterson Institute for International Economics. 

Surely this would force up the price of goods for consumers? 

Nope, according to two new studies. Historically, tariffs haven’t resulted in big bursts of inflation, the studies from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and Northwestern University show. That’s because importing companies tend to find ways around the tariffs, or because countries negotiate enough compromises and exemptions to the tariffs to reduce the headline rate.

(Related)

https://www.frbsf.org/research-and-insights/publications/economic-letter/2026/01/what-can-history-tell-us-about-tariff-shocks/

What Can History Tell Us About Tariff Shocks?

The change in the average U.S. tariff rate in 2025 was the largest in the modern era. One way to assess the effects of such a large shock on unemployment and inflation is by looking at data from pre-World War II periods with tariff rate changes of a similar magnitude. Analysis shows that previous tariff hikes raised unemployment and reduced both economic activity and inflation. Uncertainty may be a factor behind these effects: A large tariff increase raises uncertainty, which can depress overall demand and lead to lower inflation.

Perspective.

https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2026/01/02/an-ai-playbook-for-working-with-non-human-minds/

An AI playbook for working with non-human minds

… For a long time, it was comforting to describe AI as a “tool”, like a spreadsheet or a search engine. But tools wait until a person chooses to use them and only act when told. And, given the high penetration of AI use in some industries, the metaphor underestimates how deeply AI is now woven into everyday processes.

Many AI models run in the background all day and night. Generative systems, which create content by learning patters from training data, can draft documents and code in seconds. None of these systems has intent or consciousness. But they act with a kind of continual presence that changes how decisions are made and executed.

Think: an AI Erector set.

https://www.makeuseof.com/lego-announces-smart-play-at-ces/

Lego is putting tiny computers inside its bricks, starting with Star Wars sets

Lego bricks are, well… Lego bricks. They’ve stayed largely the same for decades and are simply plastic pieces designed to be combined, rebuilt, and imagined into just about anything. While this isn’t changing, the company just announced the Lego Smart Brick at CES, which puts a tiny computer inside a standard Lego brick.

Prognostication.

https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/five-trends-in-ai-and-data-science-for-2026/

Five Trends in AI and Data Science for 2026

MIT SMR columnists Thomas H. Davenport and Randy Bean see five AI trends to pay attention to in 2026: deflation of the AI bubble and subsequent hits to the economy; growth of the “factory” infrastructure for all-in AI adapters; greater focus on generative AI as an organizational resource rather than an individual one; continued progression toward value from agentic AI, despite the hype; and ongoing questions around who should manage data and AI.

Interesting. Useful?

https://www.bespacific.com/a-political-atlas-of-the-world/

A Political Atlas of the World

1st Experiments with WebMapperGPT. Steven Feldman reports on his experiments with mapping LLMs. The result is available here. [h/t quantum of sollazzo]

Caution.

https://www.bespacific.com/like-lawyers-in-pompeii-is-legal-ignoring-the-coming-ai-infrastructure-crisis-parts-i-2-2/

Like Lawyers In Pompeii: Is Legal Ignoring The Coming AI Infrastructure Crisis? (Parts I & 2)

Via LLRX – Like Lawyers In Pompeii: Is Legal Ignoring The Coming AI Infrastructure Crisis? (Part I) – Stephen Embry and Melissa Rogo Rogozinski identify the multiple risk factors involved in the increasing usage of AI in the legal sector, including infrastructure gaps between chip capacity, demand for energy sources and building new data centers, as well as vendor dependencies, promises and deliverables.

Like Lawyers In Pompeii: Is Legal Ignoring The Coming AI Cost Crisis? (Part II) – Stephen Embry and Melissa Rogo Rogozinski challenge the assumption fueling the explosion of AI use in legal is that it will save gobs of time. These savings will inure to the benefit of lawyers and clients, will lead to fairer methods of billing like alternative fee structures, will get better results, improve access to justice, and lead to ‘world peace’. Well, maybe even the vendors would not go so far as to guarantee the last one. But vendors do seem to be guaranteeing everything but that.  And pundits talk as if AI will transform legal from the ground up.  Law firms are buying into the hype, investing in expensive systems that do things they barely understand.

A new slippery slope?

https://apnews.com/article/trump-venezuela-greenland-cuba-571aac35e259857fd512c46f5af11e4d

After Maduro, who’s next? Trump spurs speculation about his plans for Greenland, Cuba and Colombia

A day after the audacious U.S. military operation in Venezuela, President Donald Trump on Sunday renewed his calls for an American takeover of the Danish territory of Greenland for the sake of U.S. security interests and threatened military action on Colombia for facilitating the global sale of cocaine, while his top diplomat declared the communist government in Cuba is “in a lot of trouble.”

The comments from Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio after the ouster of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro underscore that the U.S. administration is serious about taking a more expansive role in the Western Hemisphere.

With thinly veiled threats, Trump is rattling hemispheric friends and foes alike, spurring a pointed question around the globe: Who’s next?

“It’s so strategic right now. Greenland is covered with Russian and Chinese ships all over the place,” Trump told reporters as he flew back to Washington from his home in Florida. “We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security, and Denmark is not going to be able to do it.”

It’s complicated...

https://philosophy.tabrizu.ac.ir/article_21014.html?lang=en

Knowledge without a Subject: A Philosophical Reflection on the Epistemic Legitimacy of the Machine

The transformation of cognitive and ethical structures in the age of artificial intelligence confronts philosophy with a fundamental question: how does knowledge emerge, and where does responsibility reside when decision-making moves beyond the sphere of human consciousness into algorithmic networks? Focusing on the concept of subjectless knowledge, this study argues that intelligent systems have shifted knowledge from a mental capacity to a mediating process in which human agents, data, and algorithms jointly participate in the production of meaning. Employing a reflective-analytical methodology and examining cases in medicine, media, and law, the paper contends that epistemic validity in the digital era is no longer measured solely by truth, but by the transparency of processes, the capacity for explanation, and the possibility of accountability. Within this framework, social epistemology elucidates how belief is shaped in algorithmic environments, while the ethics of responsibility provides a structure through which the contribution of both human and machinic agents to outcomes can be traced. The proposed model integrates these two dimensions, conceiving knowledge as a mediating event where meaning arises through the interaction between human interpretation and computational reasoning. Accordingly, moral responsibility becomes a distributed property of a network in which every agent participates in the unfolding of cognition. This analysis suggests that maintaining epistemic and ethical legitimacy in intelligent systems requires a philosophical reorientation-from the individual subject toward the distributed architectures of knowing.

Self-driving rules developed by Mad Max?

https://www.mdpi.com/2673-7590/6/1/5

According to Whose Morals? The Decision-Making Algorithms of Self-Driving Cars and the Limits of the Law

The emergence of self-driving vehicles raises not only technological challenges, but also profound moral and legal challenges, especially when the decisions made by these vehicles can affect human lives. The aim of this study is to examine the moral and legal dimensions of algorithmic decision-making and their codifiability, approaching the issue from the perspective of the classic trolley dilemma and the principle of double effect. Using a normative-analytical method, it explores the moral models behind decision-making algorithms, the possibilities and limitations of legal regulation, and the technological and ethical dilemmas of artificial intelligence development. One of the main theses of the study is that in the case of self-driving cars, the programming of moral decisions is not merely a theoretical problem, but also a question requiring legal and social legitimacy. The analysis concludes that, given the nature of this borderline area between law and ethics, it is not always possible to avoid such dilemmas, and therefore it is necessary to develop a public, collective, principle-based normative framework that establishes the social acceptability of algorithmic decision-making.

What strategy? (We can, therefore we must.)

https://www.businessinsider.com/top-general-details-us-military-raid-that-captured-venezuelas-maduro-2026-1

What the top US general revealed about how the surprise 'Absolute Resolve' raid to capture Maduro unfolded in Venezuela

… Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that the "audacious" mission to extract Maduro — called "Absolute Resolve" — required months of meticulous planning and rehearsal, and involved forces from across the US military.

(Related)

https://www.businessinsider.com/economists-foreign-policy-experts-react-donald-trump-raid-venezuela-maduro-2026-1

Here's what the smartest people in foreign policy, business, and economics are saying about Trump's raid on Venezuela

President Donald Trump on Saturday announced that the US had conducted a raid on Venezuela, resulting in the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, and big names in business and foreign policy have been reacting as the aftermath unfolds.

Here's what they've been saying:

… Bremmer, founder of the political risk research and consulting firm, Eurasia Group, in a post on LinkedIn, wrote that the "US presumption is next Venezuelan leaders will now do what the Americans want because they've just seen the 'or else.'"

A voice from the other side… (Has AI ever asked for rights?)

https://www.storyboard18.com/brand-makers/ai-godfather-yoshua-bengio-warns-against-granting-rights-to-artificial-intelligence-86911.htm

AI godfather Yoshua Bengio warns against granting rights to artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence systems are advancing at a rapid pace, becoming significantly faster and more productive than they were just a year ago, reigniting debate over whether AI should eventually be granted legal rights similar to those of humans. However, AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio has warned that such a move could have catastrophic consequences for humanity.

Bengio, widely regarded as one of the three godfathers of artificial intelligence alongside Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun, has strongly opposed the idea of granting rights to AI systems. Speaking in an interview with The Guardian, Bengio compared the proposal to giving citizenship to hostile extraterrestrials and urged people to reconsider demands for legal recognition of artificial intelligence.

Amusing. Look for well fed crooks?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/steveweisman/2026/01/01/how-hackers-and-cargo-thieves-orchestrated-the-great-massachusetts-lobster-heist/

How Hackers And Cargo Thieves Orchestrated The Great Massachusetts Lobster Heist

… Setting the stage for the crime begins with sophisticated hackers compromising a freight broker’s load board account, which is an online marketplace where trucking loads are listed and bid on. As typical in many data breaches and other cyberattacks, the accounts are compromised through social engineering and spear phishing. After taking over a freight broker’s account, the criminals then post a fraudulent load listing offering an attractive shipment. When a legitimate trucking company or dispatcher responds to the phony load listing, the criminals reply with an email with malware contained in a link that appears to be a shipping document or contract. When the legitimate trucking company clicks on the link, remote monitoring and management (FMM) software is surreptitiously installed on the legitimate trucking company’s computer thereby giving the criminal full access to the legitimate company’s computer network enabling them to pose as the legitimate company and bid on deliveries or to pose as the legitimate company and send emails that appear to be from the legitimate company related to already contracted deliveries. The criminals invade the supply chain so that even when a truck is dispatched for a legitimate load, the criminals make sure they get there first. The thieves show up with trucks bearing the markings of the legitimate companies they pose as and pick up the items to be delivered. Once the loaded trucks leave the warehouse, they disable the GPS tracking used in shipments Cybersecurity company Proofpoint issued a report in November of 2025 that details how these thefts are accomplished.

There is thinking in the legal profession?

https://www.bespacific.com/impact-of-ai-on-critical-thinking-in-the-legal-profession/

Impact of AI on critical thinking in the legal profession

Thomson Reuters – Impact of AI on critical thinking – Challenges and opportunities for lawyers: “The increasing sophistication of AI, particularly “agentic AI,” presents both a risk of diminished critical thinking due to cognitive offloading and an opportunity to enhance critical thinking in the legal profession through intelligent design and application. The increasing sophistication of AI, particularly “agentic AI,” presents both a risk of diminished critical thinking due to cognitive offloading and an opportunity to enhance critical thinking in the legal profession through intelligent design and application.

Key insights:

• Cognitive offloading is a significant risk — The correlation between increased AI usage and decreased critical thinking, known as cognitive offloading, poses a threat to effective legal practice, especially with the rise of autonomous agentic AI.

• Agentic AI risks and opportunities — The next generation of agentic AI poses significant challenges to lawyers’ critical thinking skills, but it also offers opportunities for lawyers to enhance their analytical rigor and human insight.

• Agentic AI can enhance critical thinking when properly leveraged — When designed by lawyers, for lawyers and used to augment human judgment in legal workflow tasks — such as discovery, contract analysis, and drafting — agentic AI can improve efficiency, deepen analysis, and allow legal professionals to focus on higher-value critical thinking tasks.

Another year-end summary.

https://www.theverge.com/policy/851664/new-tech-internet-laws-us-2026-ai-privacy-repair

Meet the new tech laws of 2026

Coming into force this year: AI regulations galore, a teen social media lockdown, and “Taylor Swift” laws.

A New Year prediction.

https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/new-yorks-death-wish/

New York’s Death Wish

Zohran Mamdani garnered a bit more than 50 percent of the vote in the recent New York City mayoral election. Have voters learned nothing from history? Apparently not. As Nobel laureate F.A. Hayek quipped, “if socialists understood economics, they wouldn’t be socialists.”

In the past six months, I count no fewer than twelve pieces in The Daily Economy that discuss — directly or indirectly — Mamdani’s socialist policies.  Rent controls will decrease the quantity and quality of housing. Millionaire taxes would accelerate the exodus to more friendly states, to the great glee of Texas and Florida real estate agents. City-owned grocery stores would end in a bungle of Soviet proportions, increasing food deserts and raising prices. The drop in tax revenue from increased taxes (Laffer Curve, anyone?), combined with increased expenditures, would lead to another debt crisis.