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Andrew Romano, “What Biden’s South Carolina primary win means for his 2024 chances,” Yahoo News, 3 February 2024, https://news.yahoo.com/what-bidens-south-carolina-primary-win-means-for-his-2024-chances-002511342.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAFKvJpD6IigeqeLcOBdEAUapYQbpJQ-mNPhSSPJXf1EIhedK1MRGaxtRrq1sdIr3jR4cH--OGNhD6LhfS3DuFk1f3ZuLmILEYAZjSQ3ypiV2XV2AX50T6_EZS-QbOU-YUr_WhivWSfGZYNye68JtmYpXkZMHlrJlDzEZVR9ou5s9.

So is it time to reexamine the counterargument that has been coming from Biden’s campaign — namely, that voters will “come around” as inflation cools and the reality of another Trump term snaps into focus?

Mark Zandi, Brendan Lacerda, and Justin Begly, “Who Will Be the Next President?” Moody’s Analytics, January 2024, pp. 2, https://www.economy.com/getfile?q=95674FFE-7734-4401-877A-FE331AECD442&app=download.

The economy may not be at the top of voters’ minds in every election, but it is rarely less than a close second. This is the principle underpinning the Moody’s Analytics presidential election model. The model predicts whether the incumbent presidential candidate will win the popular vote in each state and the District of Columbia, and thus the necessary Electoral College votes to win the election.

Maria Cardona, “Eight Reasons Biden Will Win Reelection in November,” Real Clear Politics, 1 March 2024, https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2024/03/01/eight_reasons_biden_will_win_reelection_in_november_150587.html.

The Polls: Most independent, non-Republican-leaning polls have Biden and Trump in a tight race, and some show Biden slightly ahead. But the coverage is breathless when there is an outlier poll that shows Trump way ahead of Biden. The voters may be trying to send a message that they want younger leadership, but it’s now a binary choice and a long way until November. Joe Biden beat Donald Trump once. He can do it again.

Joel Brown, “Biden’s Biggest Challenges to Reelection – Immigration, Gaza, and Even the Economy,” BU Today, 28 March 2024, .

Thomas Whalen, a College of General Studies associate professor of social sciences, who specializes in 19th- and 20th-century American social and political history, says Biden isn’t the one to blame.

Elena Schneider and Jonathan Lemire, “Biden camp feels a reprieve from Democratic unease,” POLITICO, 21 March 2024, .

Anxiety levels among influential Democrats over Joe Biden’s place atop the ticket have begun to ebb, with even some of the party’s loudest fretters saying that he’s taken the steps needed to calm their nerves.

[Justin, “Who will win the 2024 presidential election?”, ]

While the polls may tell one story, political analysts, pundits and experts can tell another. Many who study politics seem to think that despite Trump leading in most polls throughout the majority of the campaign season, it will ultimately be Biden who will secure a second term in office.

[Ivana, “What polls say about Trump’s conviction and the 2024 presidential race”, ]

Zoom out: However, polls have also shown voters shifting toward Biden in matchups before and after a hypothetical conviction.

[Rozina, “Who will win the US election? Our experts’ predictions change after Trump is found guilty”, ]

For the first time in the course of the US election, Joe Biden appears to have the edge over Donald Trump, according to The Telegraph’s experts.

Louis René Beres, “If Trump Returns as President: An Existential Threat to the United States,” Modern Diplomacy, 3 March 2023, https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2023/03/03/if-trump-returns-as-president-an-existential-threat-to-the-united-states/#_ftn1.

There are many reasons to fear Donald J. Trump’s return to the White House, but one remains especially worrisome. It stems from the former president’s conspicuous ignorance of international law and US foreign policy. Among assorted particulars of this debility, a previously failed Trump posture – “America First” – would likely prove more injurious the second-time around.[1]

[Taylor, YouGov, “Most Americans oppose monopolies and support antitrust laws”, ]

This year, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has stepped up its enforcement of antitrust laws, bringing major lawsuits against companies including Amazon, Google, and Meta. Recent YouGov polling finds that most Americans support antitrust laws and believe that penalties for violating them should be increased. The vast majority hold negative views of monopolies, and while most believe there is at least some competition within U.S. industries, more than one-third believe it is not enough. Americans are far more likely to believe stricter antitrust enforcement would help the U.S. economy rather than hurt it — and the same holds for views on the effects of stricter enforcement on consumers, workers, and small businesses. Large companies, on the other hand, are more likely to be thought to be hurt by such laws rather than helped.

[Zia, 7/11/18, “Intellectual property, not intellectual monopoly”, ]

Yet the main features of today’s IP regime were established for a very different economy. Patent rules, for example, reflect the long-held assumption that strong protection provides an essential incentive for businesses to pursue innovation. In fact, recent studies by Petra Moser and Heidi Williams, among others, find little evidence that patents boost innovation. On the contrary, because they lock in incumbents’ advantages and drive up the costs of new technology, such protections are associated with less new or follow-on innovation, weaker diffusion, and increased market concentration. This has contributed to growing monopoly power, slowing productivity growth, and rising inequality in many economies over the past couple of decades.

[Sara, “Trump-Biden 2024 Polls: Here’s Who’s Winning In The 6 States That Will Decide The Election”, ]

Biden and Trump are in a closely contested rematch, with Trump leading Biden by 0.7 points nationally in a head-to-head contest, according to the Real Clear Politics’ average. Voters are historically disengaged in this year’s election, according to some polls, including an April NBC survey showing the share of voters who say they have high interest in this year’s contest reached a 20-year low. It’s unclear whether Trump’s conviction last week in Manhattan will significantly impact voter sentiment, though a string of polls that overlapped with the guilty verdict show Biden leading, despite most surveys prior to Trump’s conviction showing him with a slight edge. More than half of all independent voters want Trump to drop his 2024 campaign after the Manhattan jury found him guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, according to an ABC News/Ipsos poll conducted Friday and Saturday that also found 49% of Americans want Trump to end his campaign. The results are largely the same as before his conviction, however. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s independent presidential bid is another wildcard in the race, with some polls showing him drawing more votes from Biden and others showing him hurting Trump more.

So with Trump on his way out, the crisis is over, right? If only. We dodged a bullet this time around, but if any of several things had gone differ­ently — most obvi­ously, if the presidential race had been closer — we might not have been so lucky. The Trump era has both high­lighted and exacerbated the reality that our democracy may be a lot less secure than we’d like to think. And many of the reas­ons for that won’t disap­pear when Trump himself takes up full-time resid­ence at Mar-a-Lago.

So with a new year approach­ing, here are the five key threats that our demo­cracy will have to reckon with in 2021 and beyond:

Therefore, the possibility of eventual disarmament hinges upon one fundamental question: will the future leaders and citizenries of all nuclear states, and other actors who may desire nuclear acquisition, accept the argument that nuclear weapons are both immoral to possess and practically useless?

Many leaders, scholars, and populations at large do not currently accept this. For them, nuclear weapons provide a public good which is both morally defensible and clearly useful: deterrence. Whilst there is a fringe of political and strategic thinking in some countries (most notably, the US) which sees other and more aggressive benefits coming from nuclear weapons (Kroenig 2018), there is a widespread political consensus in the existing nuclear states (and some of their allies) that a secure nuclear arsenal dissuades other nuclear states from attacking them and their close allies, a condition that provides them with an easy security, makes for a general peace among the nuclear powers, and permits some of them to avoid spending massive sums on conventional forces (Martin 2013). The historical record supports this belief. During the Cold War, the two superpowers never came to blows despite numerous crises, their antithetical ideologies, and the violent history of great-power conflict in the first half of the twentieth century, a fact that most historians attribute to the fear of nuclear war over everything else.3 Stalin merely reflected a widespread view at the end of the Second World War when he said that the major powers will recover for a few years, and then ‘we’ll have another go’. He was wrong, and the reason he was wrong is that later Cold War leaders like Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Khrushchev recognized that a nuclear war would be a catastrophe and found ways to avoid ‘having another go’. Since the end of the Cold War, ‘medium’ nuclear powers like China have chosen to rely upon a modest nuclear arsenal for their security rather than wielding expensive and modern conventional forces, while small ones like North Korea are able to protect themselves from attack by infinitely larger enemies, namely the US, simply by possessing a few nuclear weapons. At the same time, states which have given up nuclear projects, like Libya, Iraq, and the Ukraine, have been attacked by nuclear powers, a fate that may also await Iran.

Are we safe now from events like this? Or are we more vulnerable? Could a pandemic threaten humanity’s future?10

The Black Death was not the only biological disaster to scar human history. It was not even the only great bubonic plague. In 541 CE the Plague of Justinian struck the Byzantine Empire. Over three years it took the lives of roughly 3 percent of the world’s people.11

Will emerging technologies such as cyber, precision, stealth, and remote sensing cause future conflict escalation?1 Widespread and influential commentary suggests that the answer is an unequivocal yes. For example, a prominent think tank report warns that ‘several new technologies,’ particularly cyber and robotics, ‘are changing the way deterrence and escalation operate between the United States and other actors’ in potentially dangerous ways.2 Another well-known expert argues that the speed, precision, and range of hypersonic vehicles will augur ‘a new and potentially dangerous arms race . . . where a crisis could touch off rapid and uncontrollable escalation.’

3 A former US defense undersecretary similarly worries that ‘emerging new military capabilities – cyber, space, missile defense, longrange strike, and . . . autonomous systems – are increasing uncertainties associated with strategic stability and creating potential slippery slopes of escalation. Unless measures are taken to cushion the consequences of these military trends,’ he writes, ‘conflict may become more probable and escalation more dramatic and severe.’

Warming at such levels would be a global calamity of unprecedented scale. It would be an immense human tragedy, disproportionately impacting the most vulnerable populations. And it would throw civilization into such disarray that we may be much more vulnerable to other existential risks. But the purpose of this chapter is finding and assessing threats that pose a direct existential risk to humanity. Even at such extreme levels of warming, it is difficult to see exactly how climate change could do so. Major effects of climate change include reduced agricultural yields, sea level rises, water scarcity, increased tropical diseases, ocean acidification and the collapse of the Gulf Stream. While extremely important when assessing the overall risks of climate change, none of these threaten extinction or irrevocable collapse. Crops are very sensitive to reductions in temperature (due to frosts), but less sensitive to increases. By all appearances we would still have food to support civilization.85 Even if sea levels rose hundreds of meters (over centuries), most of the Earth’s land area would remain. Similarly, while some areas might conceivably become uninhabitable due to water scarcity, other areas will have increased rainfall. More areas may become susceptible to tropical diseases, but we need only look to the tropics to see civilization flourish despite this. The main effect of a collapse of the system of Atlantic Ocean currents that includes the Gulf Stream is a 2°C cooling of Europe—something that poses no permanent threat to global civilization. From an existential risk perspective, a more serious concern is that the high temperatures (and the rapidity of their change) might cause a large loss of biodiversity and subsequent ecosystem collapse. While the pathway is not entirely clear, a large enough collapse of ecosystems across the globe could perhaps threaten human extinction. The idea that climate change could cause widespread extinctions has some good theoretical support.86 Yet the evidence is mixed. For when we look at many of the past cases of extremely high global temperatures or extremely rapid warming we don’t see a corresponding loss of biodiversity.87 So the most important known effect of climate change from the perspective of direct existential risk is probably the most obvious: heat stress. We need an environment cooler than our body temperature to be able to rid ourselves of waste heat and stay alive. More precisely, we need to be able to lose heat by sweating, which depends on the humidity as well as the temperature. A landmark paper by Steven Sherwood and Matthew Huber showed that with sufficient warming there would be parts of the world whose temperature and humidity combine to exceed the level where humans could survive without air conditioning.88 With 12°C of warming, a very large land area—where more than half of all people currently live and where much of our food is grown—would exceed this level at some point during a typical year. Sherwood and Huber suggest that such areas would be uninhabitable. This may not quite be true (particularly if air conditioning is possible during the hottest months), but their habitability is at least in question. However, substantial regions would also remain below this threshold. Even with an extreme 20°C of warming there would be many coastal areas (and some elevated regions) that would have no days above the temperature/humidity threshold.89 So there would remain large areas in which humanity and civilization could continue. A world with 20°C of warming would be an unparalleled human and environmental tragedy, forcing mass migration and perhaps starvation too. This is reason enough to do our utmost to prevent anything like that from ever happening. However, our present task is identifying existential risks to humanity and it is hard to see how any realistic level of heat stress could pose such a risk. So the runaway and moist greenhouse effects remain the only known mechanisms through which climate change could directly cause our extinction or irrevocable collapse. This doesn’t rule out unknown mechanisms. We are considering large changes to the Earth that may even be unprecedented in size or speed. It wouldn’t be astonishing if that directly led to our permanent ruin. The best argument against such unknown mechanisms is probably that the PETM did not lead to a mass extinction, despite temperatures rapidly rising about 5°C, to reach a level 14°C above pre-industrial temperatures.90 But this is tempered by the imprecision of paleoclimate data, the sparsity of the fossil record, the smaller size of mammals at the time (making them more heat-tolerant), and a reluctance to rely on a single example. Most importantly, anthropogenic warming could be over a hundred times faster than warming during the PETM, and rapid warming has been suggested as a contributing factor in the end-Permian mass extinction, in which 96 percent of species went extinct.91 In the end, we can say little more than that direct existential risk from climate change appears very small, but cannot yet be ruled out.

Kathy, 3-23-2022, "AI proves effective at improving patent office efficiency and application timeliness," CAS, 

AI-enabled search solutions can play an important role across the entire patent ecosystem in improving both efficiency and patent quality. They can support faster examinations within patent offices and can allow innovators to identify prior art earlier, avoiding the time and cost of prosecution or validity challenges for bad patents. This is why the AI prior art algorithms were added to the  and STNext® solutions for improving scientific and IP searches.

Given the legal focus of this volume, this section focuses on the benefits to the efficiency of legal services and the broadening of access to these services. AI is involved in improving efficiency at every stage of law, including the discovery in litigation, search for relevant cases, generation of transactional documents, and prediction of legal outcomes.22 To summarize: High-level research in computational models of legal reasoning that when combined with the greater capacity to extract information from legal documents will lead to more autonomous forms of legal reasoning. By lowering the cost of finding and litigating about the law, these changes will not only make the law more efficient but also improve access to justice. While the organized bar has various rules that attempt to prevent many of these developments, it will not succeed in preventing these innovations from making legal services more efficient.23

Machine intelligence is most advanced in legal discovery.24 Predictive coding is the practice by which lawyers look at a sample set of documents discoverable in a case. Algorithms are then constructed to predict which documents are relevant. Predictive coding has transformed legal discovery with the law firms setting up e-discovery units within their firms and independent businesses offering innovative services. It has been estimated that this industry is already worth US$10 billion. It improves efficiency by radically reducing the time that lawyers must devote to searching for relevant documents.

First, as previously discussed, there is reason to be skeptical about the efficacy of the CAP rule in terms of reducing the overall number of cases in the federal courts. 315 Moreover, in addition to the fact that the CAP rule likely does little to reduce the overall number of opportunities for federal courts to judge the behavior of coordinate branches, there is reason to [*1007] believe that the opening-the-floodgates worry itself is overblown. 316 Not only is the floodgates argument in support of the CAP rule lacking in empirical support, 317 but it may also be lacking in a clear, germane, and substantive content when used by various members of the Court. 318F or example, Professor Marin Levy has observed that "recent cases show the justices vacillating between providing assurances that their decision will not result in a deluge of new claims, and accusing each other of being driven by an improper desire to stave off such a deluge." 319 The floodgate alarm has been used in diverse and internally inconsistent contexts without the mooring benefit of evidentiary support, such that it has taken on more the character of epithet than of a serious constitutional obstacle. 320Justice Ginsburg, writing in dissent, has succinctly summarized this development, stating: "The 'floodgates' argument the Court today embraces has been rehearsed and rejected before." 321

The fact that the floodgate rationale is frequently used to support both sides of a contested determination by the Court suggests that it may lack a stable normative content. 322 The floodgate rationale is, at heart, a prediction about how future litigants will behave if the Court adopts a new rule. Yet the ordinary norms of prediction with their attendant empirical safeguards seem not to obtain. 323 Those invoking the floodgate alarm have not felt [*1008] obliged to supply evidence of past instances in which the federal courts were in fact "flooded" as the result of similar rule changes, and that the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure were inadequate to address the "flood." 324 Given that members of the Court have so frequently predicted a litigatory deluge as a consequence of a rule change, it would seem a simple matter to confirm that a deluge has, in fact, occurred. 325 However, evidence of past flooding has yet to emerge within the floodgate discourse. 326