By Dr. Jonathan W. LartigueSeptember, 2026 “A nation which is refraining from research obviously cannot match the gains of a nation conducting research.” This quote might immediately seem relevant to you amid today’s debate on slowing the advancement of AI research. Indeed, President Trump recently stated “The greatest threat of all is to forfeit the race.”1 But the original quotation is not about AI, and it’s not even recent. Replace the word “research” with “tests”, and you have John F. Kennedy’s 1962 quote regarding nuclear testing.2 Although nuclear weapons and artificial intelligence differ profoundly, the parallels between the nuclear race…

Jonathan W. Lartigue, PhDJune 2026 It is now more than 50 years since Frederick P. Brooks Jr. wrote the classic book “The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering”, stating the counter-intuitive maxim that adding more labor to a delayed project simply delays it further.10 In five decades, what has become known as “Brooks’ Law” has held up because Brooks, despite framing his argument around 1970s technology and tools, was really writing about the economics of conceptual, coordinated human work. The tools have changed radically; the human failure modes have not. Brooks’ Law ran counter to the prevailing assumptions of the…