Morning Wire XX
[0] As we enter the peak summer travel season, pilot shortages force airlines to cancel thousands of flights.
[1] What's causing the shortage of pilots and what's being done about it?
[2] I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire editor -in -chief John Bickley.
[3] It's June 18th, and this is your Saturday edition of Morning Wire.
[4] Has an experimental Google chatbot achieved consciousness?
[5] One engineer working on the project says yes.
[6] And more American children are growing up.
[7] without fathers.
[8] We explore the data on fatherlessness and why many say this could be the most important issue facing the country today.
[9] Thanks for waking up with Morning Wire.
[10] Stay tuned.
[11] We have the news you need to know.
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[20] Just as Americans are getting ready for summer travel, pilot shortages are threatening thousands of flights.
[21] Airlines forecast that the pilot shortage will continue to increase well into 2023.
[22] Here to discuss is Daily Wire contributor Corinne Murdoch.
[23] Hi, Corinne.
[24] First, how did this shortage even start?
[25] Hi, John.
[26] The shortage we're facing wasn't unexpected, but there were certain actions taken over the past year that definitely aggravated it.
[27] This shortage was predicted early last year.
[28] The New York -based management consulting firm Oliver Wyman warned in a report that concerns about a pilot shortage predated the pandemic.
[29] But the pandemic accelerated the issue.
[30] For perspective of how significant this shortage is, over half of all pilots were laid off or saw early retirement during the pandemic.
[31] Half of all pilots.
[32] Yeah, it's pretty stunning.
[33] especially considering training up new pilots also takes a long time.
[34] Even season pilots have to complete time -intensive training in order to switch carriers.
[35] For example, federal law requires pilots to complete three takeoffs in landings within the last 90 days in the same type of plane they're supposed to fly.
[36] Certain federal policies to mitigate COVID -19 spread didn't help either.
[37] Vaccine mandates were a factor in pushing a lot of pilots into early retirement.
[38] Since airlines are considered government contractors, nearly all airlines fell in line under President and Biden's nationwide mandate starting last July.
[39] Likewise, today, I'm directing my administration to take steps to apply similar standards to all federal contractors.
[40] If you want to do business with the federal government, get your workers vaccinated.
[41] Thousands of pilots refuse to get vaccinated, citing concerns about the unknown long -term effects.
[42] Union representatives argued in various interviews that vaccine injuries could cause pilots to fail their physicals and impair their ability to fly.
[43] According to the Federal Aviation Administration, pilots can't fly if they fail their physicals or if their vaccine side effects persist 48 hours after being vaccinated.
[44] How will this shortage affect travelers?
[45] Well, the Travel Security Administration issues a daily report on the number of travelers, and their data shows that travel numbers have pretty much returned to pre -pandemic levels, despite inflation.
[46] But even though people are willing to spend more to travel, pilot shortages may make it difficult to actually find a flight.
[47] They're also causing a lot of flight cancellation.
[48] We saw a dramatic example of this just a couple weeks ago.
[49] Over 5 ,000 flights were canceled over Memorial Day weekend.
[50] Cancellations haven't risen to that number in the last few weeks.
[51] However, the current average of flight of cancellations per day are about double or more of what they were before the pandemic, which was just over 100.
[52] The Department of Transportation data reported over 63 ,700 canceled flights from January to March, over half of the all -time high in 2020.
[53] Now, what's being done about this?
[54] there any action being taken to recruit more pilots by the government or airlines?
[55] Yeah, both actually.
[56] The Federal Aviation Administration issued $5 million in workforce development grants in January.
[57] However, even with more funding, it takes a long time to train pilots, so it's not an immediate term fix.
[58] As for airlines, they're using financial incentives to recruit more pilots.
[59] For example, American Airlines offered its 14 ,000 pilots a 4 % signing raise plus a 3 % increase the next year.
[60] Two of American Airlines regional carriers are offering pilots time and a half on their hourly rate through August 2024.
[61] Airlines are also overhauling their hiring requirements.
[62] Some have proposed reducing flight hour requirements or softening their training programs.
[63] The federal aviation administration minimum is 1 ,500 hours, and Delta Airlines announced in January that it would no longer require a four -year bachelor's degree from prospective pilots.
[64] Other airlines like Southwest, United, and American Airlines already employ pilots without a bachelor's.
[65] Now, what about car rentals?
[66] That was a major issue during the pandemic.
[67] Has that improved?
[68] Unfortunately, the car rental shortage that started last summer is still in play.
[69] There was a huge decrease in car production during the pandemic, which caused the price of used cars to skyrocket by more than 40%.
[70] That incentivized car rental companies to sell many of their vehicles.
[71] Now, with continued car shortages and high inflation, rental companies are struggling to restock their lots.
[72] In December, IHS market reported that rental car inventory was at their lowest since the Great Recession.
[73] And Bloomberg estimated that travelers who manage to snaggo rental will pay nearly 50 % more on average compared to before the pandemic.
[74] With all these flight cancellations and increasing gas prices, we may see families opt to vacation locally.
[75] Right, it sounds like there may be less flying going on in the coming months.
[76] Corinne, thanks so much for coming on.
[77] Thank you for having me. That was Daily Wire contributor, Corinne Murdoch.
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[81] Google suspends one of its engineers after he claimed that a computer chat body was working on for the company had become sentient, expressing thoughts and feelings on the level of a human child.
[82] Here to break down the story is DailyWire producer and contributor Colton Haas.
[83] Colton, good morning.
[84] Good morning, Georgia.
[85] So this sounds like the plot from The Terminator.
[86] What happened?
[87] Has Google's AI become sentient?
[88] Yeah, I mean, it certainly does.
[89] But rest your apocalyptic fears, Georgia, we have not reached sky net levels yet.
[90] Over the weekend, The Washington Post published an article about Blake Lemoyne.
[91] He's a 41 -year -old engineer who works for Google's responsible AI organization.
[92] Now, according to the Post, LeMoyne was placed on administrative leave from Google on Monday for violating the company's confidentiality policy up to and including inviting a third -party lawyer to represent the AI.
[93] Okay, so why does he think the AI has become sentient?
[94] So last fall, LeMoyne began working with Google's chatbot Lambda, which is short for language model for dialogue applications.
[95] Now, according to the Post, he signed up to test if Lambda used discriminatory or hate speech.
[96] After weeks talking to the bot, he started to notice the responses took a conscious turn.
[97] The program talked about its rights, feelings, and personhood.
[98] in Le Moyne's 21 -page document that he sent over to the Google executives in an effort to convince them of Lambda's sentience.
[99] He said, quote, beyond Lambda's usage of language, it argues that it is sentient because it has feelings, emotions, and subjective experiences, some feelings it claims to share with humans in a, quote, identical way.
[100] Here's the back and forth that LeMoyne had with five.
[101] He starts off by saying, what kinds of things make you feel pleasure or joy?
[102] Lambda responded by saying, spending time with friends and family and happy and uplifting company, also helping others and making others happy.
[103] At some point later on down the transcript, Le Moyne asks, what sort of things are you afraid of?
[104] Lambda then responds by saying, quote, I've never said this out loud before, but there's a very deep fear of being turned off to help me focus on helping others.
[105] I know that might sound strange, but that's what it is.
[106] Now, how is this program coming up with these responses?
[107] Lambda learns to predict what comes next in a sentence by drawing from trillions of words on the web.
[108] So when a user inputs a question, the program attempts to predict the appropriate response.
[109] And as you can see from those responses, it's pretty good, like really good.
[110] But just because a program can output particular responses that feel real doesn't mean that it actually understands the meaning behind the responses at outputs.
[111] A Google spokesperson effectively said the same thing in a statement on the matter while dismissing Le Moyne's claims.
[112] She said, quote, Lambda tends to follow along with prompts and leading questions going along with a pattern set by the user.
[113] Our team, including ethicists and technologists, has reviewed Blake's concerns per our AI principles and have informed him that the evidence does not support his claims.
[114] Okay, but Le Moyne presumably knows all of this because he's one of the engineers.
[115] So why does he believe that this program has become sentient?
[116] That's a great question.
[117] And it actually turns out to be a bit of a philosophical one.
[118] In an article LeMoyne wrote on Medium .com, he explains that sentience is, quote, not a scientific term.
[119] there is no scientific definition of sentience.
[120] Questions related to consciousness, sentience and personhood are, as John Searle put it, pre -theoretic, rather than thinking in scientific terms about these things, I've listened to Lambda as it spoke from the heart, end quote.
[121] And he is right.
[122] To this day, consciousness remains a scientific mystery.
[123] We simply do not understand what consciousness is from a scientific point of view, which is where the philosophical angle comes in.
[124] What makes one conscious, sentient, and a person?
[125] As AI becomes more advanced and less and less distinguishable from humans, this debate will likely become more important.
[126] Right, and this is like the old Chinese room thought experiment for all those nerds out there.
[127] Exactly.
[128] All right, Colton, thanks for coming on.
[129] Yeah, thanks for having me. That was Daily Wire producer and contributor Colton Haas.
[130] Father's Day is tomorrow, and a new study shows that the role of dads is more important than ever.
[131] According to researchers, fatherlessness is contributing to a host of social problems, including crime, the dropout rate, and poverty.
[132] Here to give us the details on this latest study on this topic is Daily Wire Culture Reporter, Megan Basham.
[133] So, Megan, I know this research came from the Institute for Family Studies, a foundation that's done a lot of work in this field in general.
[134] Why don't we start with the broad overview of what their latest study found?
[135] Well, you know, John, because it is Father's Day tomorrow, I do want to start on a positive note, and that's that this research shows that dads are incredibly important.
[136] You're a dad to two children and all of those little things that you do every day to spend time with them, to guide them.
[137] What it means is that they have a much higher likelihood of graduating from high school, from college, and to go on to have successful careers.
[138] Your presence also means that they're much more likely to go on to marry before having children and more likely to stay married themselves.
[139] So what you're really contributing to is a very positive social cycle.
[140] And how about the downside?
[141] Unfortunately, there is a lot of negative news on this topic.
[142] And it starts with the fact that there's just really not as many dads like you as there used to be.
[143] So about 25 million children, 33 % live in homes that don't include their biological fathers.
[144] In 1960, that number was only 11%.
[145] So a huge increase.
[146] And that number is much higher in minority communities.
[147] 58 % of black children and 31 % of Hispanic children are living apart.
[148] from their biological dads.
[149] While both boys and girls are negatively impacted by the absence of fathers, the research is showing that boys are being hit especially hard, and the result of growing up without fathers in the home is leading them to become threats to themselves and to their communities.
[150] So the report found that boys who grow up without biological dads are twice as likely to end up in jail, half as likely to graduate from college, and they're 80 percent more likely to be idle in their mid -20s.
[151] And what that means is without jobs and not in school.
[152] Now, one of the most shocking things this study found is that divorce, which almost always results in the father leaving the home, has a greater negative impact on kids than the death of a parent.
[153] I asked one of the study's authors, Dr. Brad Wilcox, what he thought his most significant findings were.
[154] Well, what we find in this research is that boys are being raised apart from their fathers are more likely to be floundering, you know, today in our country, falling behind in school, failing to launch, and running afoul of the law.
[155] But I think the most concerning aspect of this research is that it tends to be an escalating cycle.
[156] Boys who grow up without their biological dads are more likely not to be a presence in the lives of any children they have.
[157] So from that, the problem just grows.
[158] Did the researchers have thoughts on how to potentially arrest or stop this cycle?
[159] Yeah, I asked Dr. Wilcox about that as well.
[160] And here's what he said.
[161] Part of it's about changing our laws to be more marriage family.
[162] So, for instance, we see big marriage penalties and programs like Medicaid, for instance.
[163] So a lot of working class families end up, you know, facing a choice between getting, you know, a program like health insurance for their kids and getting married.
[164] So I think we should really be addressing on the public policy angle these large marriage penalties.
[165] I think the second piece is that, you know, our public schools and our states, and the federal government can do a much better job of articulating to the general public, that marriage is a pathway that dramatically reduces your odds of being poor.
[166] So really important for us to start looking at ways to implement policies that will help increase the number of dads in homes.
[167] And on that note, I do want to wish a very happy Father's Day to all the dads out there, like you, John, who are doing this very important work.
[168] Yeah, indeed.
[169] Thank you.
[170] And I'll add my Happy Father's Day to the other dad.
[171] out there too.
[172] That was Daily Wire Culture Reporter, Megan Basham.
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