Ante Litteram

The New York Times recently reported on some of the loopholes pharmaceutical companies use to avoid paying U.S. taxes on their profits, even though the majority of their profits come from U.S. sales. In essence, the companies are able to shift accounted profits to overseas subsidiaries where they escape the reach of U.S. law. U.S. consumers, through higher drug costs, and U.S. taxpayers, though their subsidies for the research underlying patented drugs, are the losers here, but there is at least one proposal which may solve this problem.
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The Week in Review this week includes the article “Who Do You Trust More: G.I. Joe or A.I. Joe?’. After talking about the Pentagon’s future plans for an AI-driven battlefield, it concludes with a series of doubts about the trustworthiness of computers in an command and control role:

If that comes to pass, doubting some future incarnation of Multivac might be an act of mutiny. Yet there would always be a nagging suspicion: The machine will have been designed by the imperfect species called homo sapiens. What if we got something wrong?

This sort of fearmongering betrays a peculiar view of trust.
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