Two months. Two apparent assassination attempts. This insane cycle must stop.

And why is it that when Mr. Trump uses a term such as “bloodbath,” it is taken out of context and assumed that he is threatening actual violence, which is ludicrous, but when President Joe Biden says that it’s time to put Mr. Trump “in a bull’s eye,” we are all supposed to understand he is speaking metaphorically and must be taken in context?

After all of this hypocrisy and lawlessness created by partisan rhetoric, I would vote for Mr. Trump now, if only to stop this insane cycle.

Charles Michael Sitero, Ormond Beach, Fla.

The protection Trump deserves

Kudos to the Secret Service for preventing an apparent attempted assassination of Donald Trump at a Florida golf course. I assume the ex-president’s protection level was already higher after the shooting in Pennsylvania. Perhaps his security needs to be further intensified. Kudos also to President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris for extending their good wishes to Mr. Trump and their condemnation of political violence in general.

Certainly, Mr. Trump has often used violent rhetoric himself. In 2016, he said, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters” and urged rally attendees to “knock the crap out of” protesters who might be armed with tomatoes. During protests after George Floyd’s murder in 2020, he tweeted, “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” Faced with real violence on Jan. 6, 2021, he resisted pleas to try to restrain the rioters, whose false beliefs about election fraud he’d stoked for months, from storming the Capitol.

All the same, Mr. Trump deserves protection from violence.

We are better than this. The United States has a mechanism for the peaceful transfer of power. We must keep Mr. Trump alive and well so that we can use our votes to reject his ugly vision for our nation, which is based on dividing us against ourselves and expecting that we genuflect before his every abomination. We must keep Mr. Trump on the ballot so that we can make the deliberate choice to reject violence, to preserve sanity in government, and to reclaim patriotism for those who support democracy and the rule of law.

Jeff Naylor, Minneapolis

The best prevention

If Republican senators and representatives actually cared about Donald Trump, there is something they could do to reduce the chances that an assassin’s bullet would seriously injure or even kill him. They could reach across the aisle to pass legislation to ban or severely restrict the ownership of those assault weapons that are often the choice of would-be assassins, and to give federal agencies the funds to enforce such a law.

Certainly assassinating a public figure such as Mr. Trump would be more difficult to do using a weapon with more restricted capabilities. Congress, of course, should also pursue other solutions, among them making sure the Secret Service is well managed and has the resources to do its job. However, I suspect it would take a long time to turn the Secret Service around, and I don’t believe it would be wise to wait for that.

David Pawel, Concord, Calif.

Remember, he’s a father

I would ask those who have made any positive comments about either the first or second attempt on Donald Trump’s life: Would you say the same things or feel the same if these incidents were aimed at your father?

Keep in mind, this is not some random single man (whom it would also be inexcusable to target), but one who has a wife, sons, a daughter and grandchildren. And whether you choose to believe it, he is someone who loves this country and is conscious that his family’s future, like ours, is affected by what he, and other elected officials, do.

Ann Perry, Columbia, Pa.

What AI can do for America

David Ignatius’s Sept. 8 op-ed, “No Manhattan Project for AI, but maybe a Los Alamos,” regarding the Biden administration’s plans for a national security memorandum on artificial intelligence expected this fall, begins by referring to the prospect that this technology could transform “science, business and warfare.” All well and good. But from there, both Mr. Ignatius and the Biden administration seem to narrow their focus to the economic possibilities and geopolitical risks of AI, setting aside a discussion of the science component.

This narrowing of the vision for AI would be a missed opportunity, given what artificial general intelligence — the term that describes the ability of machines to tackle any of the same intellectual work humans can do, which even groundbreaking AI companies have not yet developed — might have to offer us. Especially as quantum computers gain what is expected to be extraordinary processing power and scale up commercially, AGI’s ability could be supercharged.

The hope for AGI is that it will deliver not just human-sounding text, but also the caliber of thinking and understanding demonstrated by the intellectual activity of the human brain, with its sophisticated metacognition: thinking about thinking, as well as about one’s own reasoning and problem-solving acumen. Should AGI arrive, it would make it possible to break away from the Moravec paradox, which suggests that it’s hard to teach machines to do things that seem easy for humans, and easy to teach machines to do things that are hard for people. Once we can move away from that obsolete intellectual handcuff, it will be exciting to see what developments and discoveries follow.

Given this, the administration and public thinkers should re-center science in discussions of AGI. To eventually put AGI to full use will require unleashing its ability to think and understand.

In particular, society ought to apply AGI to the imaginative world of what-if thought experimentation associated with science at its best. This is the way to both iterate upon established theory and also develop wholly new theoretical paradigms. Perhaps through self-optimization, AGI will do all that the human brain can do in the natural sciences, and more.

The teaming of AGI with the natural sciences, and not just with business and warfare, needs to be a critical facet of the administration’s mandate. A follow-on AGI Manhattan Project would be fitting, not for its potential to destroy, but for the opportunity for discovery and innovation.

Keith Tidman, Bethesda

Pay up, AI giants

Regarding Shira Ovide’s Sept. 11 column,“Who’s paying for AI in new phones? Probably you.”

There is a saying that “If the product is free, then the product is you.” Social media companies built this idea into their products from the beginning: They gave us their services at no charge, intending to collect data from us, and then selling that raw data or using it to sell advertising that targets us. Tech companies are transforming our personal data into gold for them, but they do not share their gold with us. That’s a bargain that many people have started to ask questions about. And the rise of AI, especially AI that is built into our personal devices, makes those questions even more important.

Data is the key for AI and its development: Large language models and image generators need lots of information to learn from so they can get better at writing text and drawing pictures. AI is the most promising business right now, and tech firms are in the race to achieve supremacy. However, we are already helping those companies make a lot of money by selling ads to us, and we are now helping them develop their AI models by giving our personal data while using their free services. Every time we log into our Instagram accounts or post a picture on Facebook, we are contributing indirectly to their business profits. Without us using social media companies’ services for “free,” there would not be profit for them.

Therefore, if we are already basically working without receiving any compensation for the use of our personal data, why should we pay a subscription fee for the use of new AI services on our devices? Aren’t AI models a technology that depends on data created by people like us?

I don’t feel paying subscription fees for AI services on our devices is fair, because we are the raw material of AI products. Tech companies should start thinking about how they will compensate us for using our data to develop their AI models. I think that profit made by AI models is just in the hands of a few people. Therefore, it is crucial to think deeply about some kind of universal income, which will be a good way to compensate us economically for the use of our data and share the gold made by AI products.

Jose Carbajal Duran, Arlington