However, microgrids are becoming an important part of the future electric infrastructure. They provide a valve to release some of the pressure building up to supply more electricity to data centers and transportation.

Burns & McDonnell, an architecture, engineering and construction firm, figures that by 2030, 50 percent of in-city deliveries will be made with electric vehicles of all types, and these will have to be charged daily.

There are 700 microgrids operating in the United States, and 7,000 are planned or under construction. While they got off to something of a slow start, they are now going full-speed ahead.

Originally, microgrids were seen as appropriate for military bases, college campuses, and other uses with a defense or social purpose, or for remote locations far from the grid.

Utilities were cool or actively hostile to them, although it can be argued that the first microgrid was established by Thomas Edison in Manhattan.

One utility executive said to me four years ago, “What is it about ‘micro’ that the promoters don’t understand?” Now utilities are beginning to embrace microgrids as part of the solution, not a raid on their customer base.

A microgrid, as explained by the futurist-entrepreneur Chase Weir, CEO of Distributed Sun and its spinoff truCurrent, is a way of bringing “kilowatt-hour liquidity” to the electricity industry, smoothing out the periods when demand meets maximum capacity, often beginning as the sun sets.

It is a self-contained electric generation and localized distribution entity, using storage, renewables, and, at times, traditional generation to create a grid that can operate either independently of the national grid or be connected to it. It is usually separated from but linked to a utility.

Oisin O’Brien, senior director of commercial solutions at truCurrrent, walked me through the dynamics of a microgrid that the company is building for a large food distribution company in Northern California.

Its assignment was to develop a charging station for 30 Daimler electric-tractor trailers used for food distribution. The challenge: To provide 2 megawatts of power for charging the Class 8 trucks during largely off-peak hours. Each truck has a 200-mile range on a single charge and must be charged daily.

On this project, O’Brien explained, truCurrent is working closely with the local utility, PG&E. “We were able to harness the utility’s flexible service program,” he said.

The full power plant — which is awaiting permission to operate from PG&E — will team 800 kilowatts of solar power with battery storage to create a contained system.

Currently, solar collectors are being installed on the facility’s roof, but two dozen of the company’s trucks are already using the charging points in the parking lot. The 180-kilovolt (which equals 1,000 volts) fast chargers can fully recharge a truck in three to four hours.

This first-of-a-kind pilot is remarkable in that it has brought “speed to power,” going from contracting to charging in 13 months. It meets the food distribution company’s need to charge when they need to, provides resilient backup and load flexibility, and provides a price hedge at a time of record-high diesel prices.

“Our solutions are only becoming more valuable as cost, reliability and power availability worsens,” Weir said.

According to O’Brien, truCurrent has plans to deploy microgrids nationwide, using a system of turnkey installations where the infrastructure is owned and operated by the local company or the community, but the planning, procurement and installation is provided by truCurrent.

“This project was driven by regulatory pressures in California, the company’s sustainability targets, and the increasing economic benefits with updated analysis, showing lower operating costs for electric fleets compared to diesel (pre-Iran war calculations),” O’Brien said.

The truCurrent project is for transportation usage, but there is a growing demand for microgrid deployment in suburbs and even in apartment complexes.

It is an example of Weir’s vision for the electrical grid of the future, which, in addition to liquidity and speed, must be designed for abundance and affordability.

The project “turned every challenge into an advantage for the developer, the customer, the utility and capital markets,” Weir said.

Shared prosperity with a microgrid: What’s not to like?

The national debt stands at $39 trillion, and the interest on that will top $1 trillion this year. Very soon, the first trillionaire will thunder past the post, presumably Elon Musk.

I have nothing against Musk. And I have nothing against successful people being rewarded for their talent.

Musk has done enormous things. An immigrant, he made his first fortune with PayPal. Since then, he has given the United States the solar revolution, the electric car, and a viable heavy-lift rocket that has made space exploration cheaper than when NASA alone was at the controls. His Boring Co. still holds promise.

It is assumed, as so often, that because a person is good at one thing, that same person must be good at everything else. Whoa! Musk’s limits as a manager and a visionary were exposed when he barged about streamlining the government for President Trump.

It was a case of a bridge too far for Musk. A disaster for America that eroded privacy, critically wounded many departments and saved no money.

Whereas much of what Musk has achieved has been beneficial, his purchase of Twitter, rebranded as X, was evidence of the harm that accompanies gigantic wealth. He wanted to control not just the medium, but also the news.

Musk — although it isn’t good that he has taken steps to control the message with X — isn’t the problem facing the media and the public’s right to know. When so much money is floating around, press freedom is in trouble.

The immediate threat comes not from Musk, but from two other men of gargantuan wealth: Larry Ellison, co-founder of the tech firm Oracle Corp., whose personal net worth is estimated at $245 billion, and his son, David.

Together, they are set to control the media to an extent not imagined and never seen. The media titans of yesteryear — Pulitzer, Hearst, Luce, Thompson, Sulzberger, Graham and Murdoch — are knee-high to the fearsome power that the Ellisons have, and which will more than double if (and it is more when than if) the merger of their Paramount Skydance Corp. with Warner Bros. Discovery is approved by regulators.

At present, the Ellisons control the CBS Television Network, CBS Sports, MTV, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, Paramount Network and BET. They control CBS News, and Paramount+, which has 79 million streaming subscribers.

If the merger goes through, they will control CNN, HBO Max and Warner Bros. Studios — a treasure trove of entertainment.

In short, they will control a huge swath of American broadcast news, information dissemination, and movie and television culture.

Their declared purpose is to incorporate more technology and more AI across their astounding current and probably future empire. That is bad for journalism and worse for movies. The invasion of the bots.

I know how media control works. I have seen it firsthand: It isn’t what is said, but what is implied or what employees feel the owners of the outlet want. A casual remark can become policy; a hint of preference can become a hard rule.

If an Ellison family member were — of course, this is hypothetical — to say they hated rhubarb, you could bet the Food Network wouldn’t do a show episode on rhubarb pie making. If it were known that one of the owners of Paramount was a booster of nuclear power, movies such as “The China Syndrome” and “Silkwood” would never have been made.

In journalism, the story that isn’t covered is as important as the one that is covered. If a disease caused by a common product — asbestos is a good example — isn’t covered because the staff has heard that the media owners love that product or is invested in it, then you can bet it won’t be covered.

Consolidated corporate ownership is antithetical to free speech, creativity and open government. No news is bad news.

News isn’t suited to the corporate world; it isn’t a fit with those whose interest is adding zeros to bottom lines. It is the pursuit by an irregular army of often eccentric individuals, who turn over stones to find out what is beneath.

Likewise, individual ownership furthers the news objective, which for me was summed up by something Dan Raviv said when he was a correspondent for CBS Radio (recently shuttered by the Ellisons): “My job is simple. I try to find out what is going on and tell people.” 

Write that in the corporate prospectus.

News organizations need to be owned by news people, like Ted Turner, Bill Paley and, yes, Rupert Murdoch.

The future is clearly with those who have found a way of making themselves indispensable by using AI, and not with those who resist or actively fight it. You may not be interested in AI, but AI is interested in you.

Even in jobs considered safe from automation, AI is shaping daily work, from running a hospital nurses’ station to helping an electrician check available replacement equipment.

I mention those two jobs because they are the most frequently listed as being secure and unlikely to be taken over by AI. That doesn’t mean they won’t be touched by the unseen hand of AI. It is everywhere and on the move.

Graduates now leaving the colleges and universities are having a tough time finding work. Many workers who thought they were set for life are refining their resumes, particularly those in the computer field.

Meta, owner of Facebook, has laid off 8,000 workers, and an additional 7,000 will be reassigned to AI-focused positions.

The job market isn’t only reflecting AI doing the work across industries, but also the immeasurable hesitation of companies to hire for jobs that may later be taken over by AI. “ Better to hold on and see” is a common attitude in firms that aren’t sure whether AI will, in fact, help them meet their needs.

Many savants in the AI industry have warned of job losses across the employment landscape as AI takes hold. These include Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and Open AI’s Sam Altman. The Economist writes about a job “catastrophe.”

My view, shared by many I have interviewed, is that there will be a sharp global drop in employment, followed by a post-revolution expansion of employment that allows for the flourishing of AI and its benefits. Open AI’s Altman has predicted a similar scenario, but he hasn’t identified when the upturn might occur — in years or decades?

There are those who believe that governments will have to provide a universal basic income to compensate for the inroads of AI. Unlikely.

The first impediment is that all the advanced countries are already spending beyond their means, including the United States and the United Kingdom. Where will the new money come from with fewer people paying taxes?

Affordability is only the first argument against a universal basic income. People are built to work. Without work, they get into trouble, deteriorate or go mad. Possibly all three.

The United Kingdom, which has many programs for the unemployed, is something of a laboratory on how not to help the jobless. A lot of people there simply haven’t tried working in a long time.

Collectively, UK social assistance programs are known as “benefits” and extend well beyond a substitute for a paycheck. They take care of everything from assisting with rent to, in some cases, assisting with entertainment.

My experience in interviewing and just knowing people who haven’t worked for a long time is that they are rootless, critical of the system that supports them and inclined to take drugs, drink or fall victim to mental illness.

Instead of state subsidies, we will likely see the gig economy boom — and it should be helped — and human creativity will flourish with it.

For that to happen, the political leadership, Democratic or Republican, needs to catch up with the fact that we may be entering into a new economic order where the old idea of employment is reduced, and waves of individual entrepreneurs are unleashed, doing everything from, say, creating new musical instruments to designing new homes from waste products, to restoring forests without uniformity.

Omar Hatamleh, who has written five books on AI, said that the challenge of AI is that it is exponential, and we think linearly. My hope is that the AI upheaval will inadvertently convert us from linear to exponential thinkers.

The political class has been notably missing from the AI fray aside from mumbling about regulating AI, which won’t help job creation.

It seems that making gig work easier and safer might be a good beginning. All the indications are that more of us will be working for ourselves going forward. The gig worker ought to be able to easily purchase Social Security insurance and access its benefits, including retirement.

It is a new time for the human race. It would be wonderful to feel that the politicians were aware of it.

We are in a political year, and AI isn’t a subject being debated, let alone eliciting new ideas. AI won’t wait.

That is, if you think letting it all hang out is the kind of transparency Leavitt has in mind.

Certainly, it all hangs out in a way we have never seen in Washington. Trump has turned the Oval Office into a kind of television studio where he insults the press, talks to foreign leaders and, on occasion, berates them (Ukraine, South Africa and Canada) in front of the press.

Then there is the president’s late-night posting on Truth Social, when a meteor shower of invective, scorn, misinformation, disinformation, self-adulation, and allegations, interspersed with policy declarations, reveals him unedited. In those posts, he has urged colonizing Greenland, taking over Canada and, recently, adding Venezuela as the 51st state.

All of it set about with capital letters, exclamation points and AI-generated pictures — some of the most offensive ones have included Trump as Jesus, the Obamas as apes and, more recently, Illinois Gov. JD Pritzker gorging on an enormous hamburger.

The insults keep coming, accusing enemies and even his predecessors of being weak, having low IQs and, of course, being “losers.” In this scathing and self-aggrandizing stream, some are even traitors, including former President Barack Obama. Arrest him!

It is a bravura performance without equal. It is also hugely popular with diehard devotees of the president. His account on Truth Social has 12.5 million subscribers. One night recently, there were 55 posts — some clearly composed and some forwarded from right-wing sources, alleging conspiracies, malfeasance or trumpeting Trump.

Journalists assigned to read them have called them variously rampages, rants, wild sprees and storms. But read them, they must.

This is Trump in a stream of consciousness, unvarnished, and an essential source of news because what the president of the United States says is news.

Traces of varnishing have been appearing: The number of spelling mistakes, bizarre word formations and grammatical errors has gone down, even as the volume has accelerated.

The Wall Street Journal has revealed the unseen hand on the keyboard. It is the hand of Natalie Harp, the president’s personal assistant, an influential but unsung force in the White House.

Harp, according to the Journal, scours fringe news and social media for repostable comments and produces AI-generated illustrations. She then hands them to Trump. He selects and adds them to his own comments, and a post is born.

Sometimes the posting is feverish. The night the Iran War began, there were more than 90 posts.

Harp, 34, is the epitome of a Christian conservative, coming from a religious family in California and attending two Christian-right universities, Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego and Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va. She came to Trump’s attention when she was reporting and hosting for the ultra-conservative television network One America News. He asked her to join his presidential campaign.

Don’t think that Trump and Harp’s overnight spewing is wasted. He has all those followers on Truth Social, but his real strength is that the mainstream media is obliged to quote some of his comments daily.

What Trump says on Truth Social is also heard around the world. It isn’t just journalists who follow it; nations have to pay attention. In capitals from Tehran to Moscow, London to Beijing, Trump-raging is essential reading.

The Trump Show, for that is what it is, is a radical departure from how presidents have traditionally communicated with the public. Trump posts directly, sometimes without regard for how his words will be received.

It used to be that speeches were the window through which the world could see how an American president was thinking. They were crafted, agonized over, passed around, redrafted and sometimes delivered with last-minute handwritten additions or subtractions by the president.

They were policy documents for the present and the future. With Trump, it is the improvisations that inform or confuse.

Presidential speeches through the years have given us history’s milestones, whether it was Washington’s Farewell Address, Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address or FDR’s First Inaugural Address.

Who can forget the speeches of JFK in Berlin, Reagan at the Berlin Wall or Obama in Cairo?

With Trump, it is the firehose delivery that is remembered, especially in overnight posts. Transparent?

Welcome to the world you will be taking jobs in and where you will begin building careers, and at times shaping history.

It isn’t the world of your parents, and it isn’t the world your college has taught you about, because it is changing too fast. It begins anew daily. As Maya Angelou said, “This is a wonderful day. I haven’t seen this one before.”

There are three big forces looming on the horizon that will shape your world and that you will play a role in shaping. They are technology, specifically AI; politics, the harsher politics of today; and the environment, which is eventually everything.

AI will have an effect that defies comprehension — it is so enormous. It is also evolving so fast that it keeps slipping out of your grasp.

“It is exponential, and human thinking is linear.” So said one of the foremost thinkers about AI, Omar Hatamleh, former head of AI at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. He has written five books on AI.

All that is absolutely, definitely and incontrovertibly known is that AI will affect everything. It will change how we work, play and learn. It will change how we mate, think and expect.

Graduates, you will come to realize that political action and speech have changed from what they were. Both are out of the guide rails that have served them well over time.

Authoritarianism has taken root in America, and it will be hard to pull out. The bureaucracy has been politicized. There has been an expansion of presidential power over areas constitutionally assigned to Congress, under the watch of an accommodating Supreme Court.

There are troops on American streets, political searches and seizures, arrests and indictments, and deportations without due process. All this was unleashed with the Republicans. When Democrats take power, will they put the evil genie of unconstitutional government back in its bottle?

Domestic politics has also changed our relations to the world — a world where America, Canada and Europe stood together, sharing a common heritage and a common view of law, and savoring a shared peace in Europe until Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, and set in motion four years of bloody fighting.

Could we have done more? Yes, more weapons, more money, and less acceptance of Putin. Maybe troops, too.

We didn’t, and that has changed the world. Free countries now know that America won’t axiomatically have their backs. That time is past and will have major geopolitical consequences.

Internationally, the big, open American hand has been closing as it has curtailed or ended participation in international institutions from NATO to the World Health Organization to the Paris climate agreement. The arbitrary closing of USAID was a declaration of withdrawal from the world and from the exercise of soft power as a diplomatic tool.

Another challenge for future Americans as they grow into adulthood: They will live in a more dangerous world with fewer friends. Hubris is an expensive luxury.

They may also not live in a world where the climate is as predictable as it once was. Already aberrant, unpredictable weather is the norm with hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and tinder-dry regions.

Politicians may deny that the climate is changing, but the evidence is there. Sea levels are rising, city streets are flooding, and beachfront homes are being swept away. Hurricanes and tornadoes, part of our usual weather cycle, are getting more severe. Drought and floods, recurring phenomena, are worsening.

Texas and the Southwest, which have long attracted working and retired residents, are facing prolonged droughts and water shortages that will curb future growth.

Dealing with the environment is a challenge that AI may meet quite dramatically. Its ability to predict, organize and find the exit in dense data is without peer.

Graduates, as the generation coming of age in 2026, you shouldn’t fear AI; rather, you should throw yourselves at it and learn what it can do for you. Gradually, it will be understood, regulated and you will come to terms with it as a tool, not an aggressor.

We have left you a messy world, but it was always that way.

Over two and a half centuries, America has absorbed and changed. Along the way — including civil war — it produced a society in which there is still opportunity; there is still freedom, although the door may be closing; and much has been perfected here.

Remember, more people live better in the world today because of America, its ideas, its inventions and its heart. Go forth and be that American.

At the low end, the folly of the defendants is always on display. The young man who takes a gun with him on a night of drinking. He has increased his chances that he might use it and spend the rest of the useful years of his life in prison.

The shoplifter who keeps at it despite past convictions faces undetermined years behind bars. The burglar who robs a house and, while there, calls home on a cell phone, which will ping off the nearest cell tower, negating any alibi. The murderer who posts on social media.

This poorly developed sense of cause and effect isn’t confined to the lawless. It is rife in the political class, in both cohorts, but primarily these days in the ruling Republican cohort.

We, as a nation, appear to have forgotten that actions have consequences. Those consequences ricochet down through the decades, even the centuries.

Bomb people, and you will get a massive refugee problem.

Deny medical funding, and you will get overburdened emergency rooms.

Underfund science, and the talent will pop up somewhere else, like the universities of Europe and Asia.

Cut off immigration, and you will have deflation from population decline.

Create stateless people — they are still people, still there — and they will become a burden.

Don’t raise taxes to cover the $39 trillion national debt, and the interest payments on the debt will be so enormous that there will be little left for the business of governance.

Action has consequences, just as inaction has consequences. Winston Churchill said: “A decision not taken is nonetheless a decision.”

Here are just some areas where the effect may linger long after the cause has lost its currency — long after the action, which seemed to be “a good idea” at the time, was taken:

Cause: Traduced allies, vitiated treaties and long-term friends abandoned with abusive disdain while rewarding the deplorable with praise, recognition and encouragement.

Effect: The slights and the negations won’t be forgotten, but the reason for them will have faded with the perpetrators. America diminished as a global power, taking a seat beside Brazil or Argentina, damned by a history of causing damaging effects for passing motives.

Cause: Profligate use of the presidential pardon.

Effect: A further temptation to abuse power and advance corrupt patronage. Friends go free.

Cause: The abandonment of the sacred right to see a judge, to identify the accuser, to be tried by a jury of your peers.

Effect: A lawless state of injustice and cruelty, the state out of control, thugs loosed on the people.

Cause: Undermine the elections by falsely claiming that they were rigged.

Effect: A fundamental weakening of democracy and the supremacy of the ballot. All elections are doubted and more easily overturned. The system is undermined.

Cause: Sustaining a lie in the belief that if you claim it long enough, it will sow doubt.

Effect: Truth becomes what those who have power say it is, whether it is about an election, immigrants, the cost of wind turbines or climate change. Truth becomes a commodity in short supply in the political marketplace.

All governments make mistakes, and most go too far in the service of political ideas, which have legitimacy for a time and then fade. This time it is different. The list of political actions that will have detrimental effects in the future and substantially threaten our world leadership is long.

Since the end of World War II, we have led the world in everything from creativity to moral example, from generosity in foreign aid to genius in medical science, from legal thought to environmental protection.

Now, political exigency is undermining that. Petty, small triumphs in what are often just the culture wars have effects that diminish us worldwide, and harbinger a more troubled future for us and the world.

Any day, in the heat of a political moment, another cause may leave an effect that will damage the decision-making mechanisms of the Senate. If the filibuster goes, both parties would rue the effects, long and often.

If it goes, the cause will be forgotten, but the effect will endure.

Going forward the prognosis is that New England will make it through without electricity disruption unless there is severe cold, in which case the system will be stretched and blackouts could result.

The North American Electric Reliability Corporation, the industry-supported, not-for-profit authority that studies electricity supply and predicts problems, says New England is at “moderate risk” this summer, but sees changes and stress in consumption patterns as the region shifts from summer peaking to winter peaking. This will put further pressure on the delivery of gas into the region.

Winters are going to be tough for the New England electric grid and the collective transmission organization that distributes power from and between the region’s utilities, the New England Independent System Operator (ISO-NE).

Rhode Island Energy’s Cornett points out that the area has continued to grow, but the infrastructure to support that growth — especially of pipelines bringing in natural gas — has languished.

In part, environmentalists have been responsible because of their desire to restrict all fossil fuels. Times of crisis, though, lead to the burning of oil — a much greater environmental challenge.

Also, because of the lack of pipeline capacity, New England imports liquified natural gas (LNG) from as far away as Norway, adding to the cost of electricity throughout the region. It also imports electricity from Canada.

This means that New England has some of the highest electricity rates in the country. Inaction has consequences.

The bright spots for the future are renewables, wind and solar.

At present they contribute only 12 to 15 percent of the total New England mix, but they represent the one resource that the region has aplenty, especially offshore wind. Currently, this is hamstrung by opposition from President Donald Trump, but the future is hopeful in years to come.

Cornett says Rhode Island Energy is enthusiastic about solar and expects this to grow, although power from rooftop installations now represents a decided challenge for the utility. It is by law obliged to pay top dollar for this electricity, and that is more than the power is worth in the market.

The law guaranteeing the high rate was passed by the Rhode Island General Assembly in 2014 to encourage solar installations, not to hobble Rhode Island Energy with high costs. Cornett says the utility, which is the dominant one in the state, gets no gain from the solar power which it has to buy under this arrangement.

There is irony in the energy shortage in New England because twice in its history, it has led the nation in energy production.

According to the 1840 U.S. census, there were 5,000 water-powered log mills in the region and many other mills, making cloth and grinding corn. New England had dominance in milling of all kinds, thanks to its abundance of rivers on which mills were granted “privileges.”

Rhode Island — with five rivers that had sufficient flow for mills — was a beneficiary of the boom. Most of the mills that survived were converted to steam and those that survived after that, mostly textile mills, turned to electricity.

In the 1990s, there were six operational nuclear power plants with eight reactors. Today there are just two: Millstone in Waterford, Connecticut, with two reactors, and Seabrook in Seabrook, New Hampshire, with one reactor.

All six New England governors have signed a commitment to investigate the deployment of small modular reactors (SMRs), but at present there are no commitments to build. This may reflect a national uncertainty about which of the many competing SMR designs with their various technologies will eventually be market-dominant and lead the way to a nuclear renaissance.

Meantime, power executives across the region are grateful they aren’t feeling pressure from data center developers and are hoping for mild winters ahead.

Electric utility executives used to list cybersecurity as their No. 1 worry. Now they say it is the weather.

You can engineer defenses against cyberattack, but when it comes to the weather, the answer is to hope for the best and respond quickly if there is an outage. The supply future is cloudy.

I am a trainman. Given a choice, I would ride the rails over any other mode of transport — except flying, when I owned a plane.

Something happens to me when the train pulls out of the station. I get a sense of well-being. Rail travel does things for my soul; it puts me in a place of euphoric comfort. Everything becomes possible; things are good and may get better.

Ships do something similar — not cruise liners but ships going somewhere; ships providing transportation not geared to escapism, working ships.

I can trace my train addiction to a journey when I was 5 years old. It was the longest train trip ever, and I wouldn’t care to repeat it, although it was the greatest: the adventure of adventures.

It was a train trip from Cape Town, South Africa, to Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia (now Harare, Zimbabwe). It took six days; it was a long, long time on the train. The distance from Cape Town to Harare is slightly more than 1,500 miles, but the train wound through endless miles of desert in what was then Bechuanaland (now Botswana) and stopped for long periods to water.

It was, of course, a steam train and steam engines are big, beautiful, thirsty monsters. They could carry enough coal for a fair distance of travel, but water was essential and pumping in remote stretchers of the Kalahari Desert was a slow business, and at times the pumps had to be operated by hand. That could mean hours to water the engine. (British actor Reginald Gardiner, on the Decca label in 1934, recorded this fabulous bit about railway steam engines) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBTOy8YqiQg

But as someone said to me years later, “There is plenty of time in Botswana.”

Later, I would ride an overnight train from Salisbury to Umtali (now Mutare, Zimbabwe) to supervise the production of a newspaper. I rode second class and usually shared a carriage with another man, and sometimes a third and a fourth. As a teenager, I thought of those long discussions through the night as my university.

More steam trains in England, but much faster. The British steam locomotives, before the switchover to diesel, scooped up water from open rail-side troughs as they rushed by at speeds of up to 100 miles per hour.

My work took me weekly by train to Scotland or the North of England, and at times to the Midlands. Those trips were always an adventure in the people I talked to, the great meals on board, and the wonder of falling asleep to the click-clack of the rails.

I took the overnight train to France, before the Channel Tunnel, when the train would leave London, make its way to the coast, be loaded in the dead of night onto a steamer, and continue in France the next day. Good night in England and bonjour in France.

In the 1960s, you could still take a sleeper train from Washington to New York. It isn’t very far and doesn’t require a sleeper, but many took it because it was fun and saved them a hotel stay in New York. Now, Amtrak will get you there in three hours, no muss, no fuss, no romance.

I have train-traveled in Russia, Belgium, the Czech Republic, France, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland, and I am frequently on Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor trains. Amtrak’s on-train service is excellent, with courteous and helpful conductors, but booking tickets on its site requires an AI agent or a tech-savvy kid to fathom.

Twice this year, as my wife and I were heading from Washington to Rhode Island on the last Northeast Regional train of the day, we were told that the train would “terminate” in New York, due to a problem on the line north of the city. Things do happen in train travel.

Both times, Amtrak failed to offer any suggestion on how the stranded passengers might complete their journeys. Many of the stranded were students and people who couldn’t afford a New York hotel room or a car rental. Quite a few of the stranded didn’t speak English very well.

In the first stranding, we were warned by the sole representative Amtrak had assisting abandoned passengers at the Moynihan Train Hall in New York that not everyone would be able to catch the first or second train out in the morning. He graciously said that our original tickets would be honored on whichever train we could use to continue our journey north.

On neither occasion did we wait for Amtrak’s gracelessness to play out: We took an Uber home on the first, and a Lyft (a bit cheaper) on the second. For each road trip home, we paid more than $600, including tips.

But I am a constant lover, and I am still riding the rails. Happy man typing!

The first time I used an ATM machine, I expected it to sneer at my balance — and to do it aloud, so everyone in range could hear. It didn’t, but I kept my doubts.

Fast-forward to the Age of Artificial Intelligence. I have been writing and broadcasting about AI with brio, traveling to conferences across the United States and Europe, and questioning the great and knowledgeable in giant tech companies and universities. I have put these experts on television and quoted them in columns.

When it comes to my own use of AI, I am in fear. I was worried about ATMs, but I have been trembling before AI and its awesomeness.

Now, a professor at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin has guided me, and I am at peace with AI.

I thought, until my recent epiphany, that the AI assistants would laugh at my puerile prompts and resent me bothering them. Assiduously, I have been saying “please” and “thank you” to all the AI assistants, even China’s DeepSeek.

I was sure that, at some level, ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Grok and Gemini were in cahoots; that no matter which assistant I used, these AI masters of the universe had a file on me and it was loaded with derisive comments like “He is pea-brained” and “He doesn’t have a pot to tinkle in.”

Not now. Not since I read an article in the Harvard Business Review, authored by Nicholas Jennings Hallman, the brilliant accounting professor at UT’s McCombs School of Business. He is also the school’s senior scholar for AI initiatives.

Hallman has been studying, in partnership with the giant accounting and consulting firm KPMG, how workers are using AI. Conclusion: They are way underusing it.  Most workers and recreational users are just skimming the surface of what AI can do to help them. They are turning on the car’s engine without going anywhere.

Resoundingly, Hallman and KPMG found in their study that workers used AI assistants, for example, to draft an email or solve a minor problem. But if the AI assistant they used didn’t provide the answer they were seeking, they either gave up or thought there wasn’t an answer.

Hallman’s answer is to “iterate.” Keep asking, push AI assistants to do better, and they will. It can be the main show, not a side event.

In a recent appearance on “White House Chronicle” on PBS (whchronicle.com), he said, “Some of what we found in the work we’ve done here with KPMG is that the most productive users are those who ask a question often and get back a less-than-satisfactory response, but they iterate until they get back something that is satisfactory and learn along the way — so that the next time, they can get the same satisfactory response with fewer iterations.”

Hallman urged: Don’t be afraid of how often you ask a question or modify it.

Too many workers, a majority, according to the UT/KPMG study, are prepared to accept one-and-done rather than pushing an AI assistant for more. Hallman also said users should give an AI assistant enough to work with. State the task in a way that authorizes it to dig deeper.

When “White House Chronicle” co-host Adam Clayton Powell III asked about security, reminding Hallman that emails, which were never supposed to be public, can end up in the wrong hands, Hallman said there is little chance of your privacy being violated by AI use or of your interactions with AI going public. Also, he said, there are security measures that a corporation or sensitive user can employ, including using a modified AI assistant or totally disengaging from the wider net.

Hallman doesn’t recommend that workers use voice interaction with AI. He said he has found it is less efficient and the answers tend to be more superficial.

However, Hallman said that when driving long distances, he uses voice-activated AI to learn about subjects he knows little about. He said he did this with black holes in space because he wanted to know more about them.

Many leaders in the AI firmament, including former IBM CEO Ginni Rometty, have said that AI  won’t replace humans, but those who use AI will replace those who don’t.

Clearly, the unsaid thing isn’t that you use AI, but how well you use it. It isn’t enough to ask one question, as Hallman said. You must make AI work for you if you plan to stay in work yourself.