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Category: Society

How Silicon Valley is stealing our future

How Silicon Valley is stealing our future

Linda Kinstler writes: These days, the leading tech companies are not primarily fighting one another for market share or talent or computing power. The bigger battle is over who can claim to know the future. In August, Meta’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, published a manifesto titled “The Future Is for Everyone,” in which he argued that artificial intelligence will bring about “an abundance of personal agency” and other riches — but only if Meta is in charge. “If our beliefs…

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Most Americans prioritize respecting different values over sharing values

Most Americans prioritize respecting different values over sharing values

Gallup reports: Nearly eight in 10 U.S. adults (79%) say it is more important for people to respect different values, while 19% say it is more important for people to share the same values. Majorities of all major demographic and partisan groups think that respecting differing values should be prioritized, though this view is slightly stronger among Democrats (84%) and independents (81%) than Republicans (72%). This preference for respecting different values is consistent with Americans’ expectations of public leaders. In…

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Bill Gates: Prepare for 20 years of tumultuous AI disruption

Bill Gates: Prepare for 20 years of tumultuous AI disruption

  Nilay Patel: My guest today is Bill Gates, co-founder and former CEO of Microsoft and chairman of the Gates Foundation. You may have noticed Bill in the news more lately — he’s been on something of a tour for the past few months talking about AI risk, and how crucial it is that we start taking this seriously. So I was excited to sit down with him and really dig into this subject. I came with many questions, about…

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The data center next door: On the frontline of tech’s latest David v Goliath battle

The data center next door: On the frontline of tech’s latest David v Goliath battle

The Guardian reports: Dale Johnston opens the gate to his neat suburban garden on the western fringes of Newport in South Wales. There’s a trampoline and a slide on the lawn for his grandchildren, and chairs for him and his wife. He should be enjoying the light draining from the perfect autumnal sky – but almost his entire view is blotted out by a vast expanse of prefabricated panels. The 23 metre-high grey hulk looming over him and his neighbours…

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How the climate crisis has fueled the youth protests roiling France

How the climate crisis has fueled the youth protests roiling France

Inside Climate News reports: By the time Cléo made it to Greek class, she had gone completely pale. It was a Wednesday in June during France’s second consecutive heat wave this year, and the 16-year-old was struggling to cope with the rising temperatures. She pushed through, thinking she was just tired. But the following day at her sweltering high school on the eastern edge of Paris, nausea and a desperate thirst gripped her. The school nurse, recognizing the signs of…

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The happiest countries in the world have the highest levels of trust. The U.S. ranks #23

The happiest countries in the world have the highest levels of trust. The U.S. ranks #23

Quartz reports: A single survey question produces the ranking most often cited as a measure of national well-being. Gallup World Poll interviewers ask people in more than 140 countries to picture a ladder numbered zero to 10. The top rung represents the best possible life for them, the bottom rung the worst. Respondents say which rung they stand on today. That question, known as the Cantril ladder, generates the scores behind the World Happiness Report. The happiest countries in the…

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Sam Altman might accept the ‘bad things’ that come with AI, but he doesn’t speak for everyone

Sam Altman might accept the ‘bad things’ that come with AI, but he doesn’t speak for everyone

Fast Company reports: For the past month, slowing the development of artificial intelligence has been at the forefront of AI discourse. After a former OpenAI and Anthropic employee left the industry in September citing that “neither company is acting responsibly,” AI leaders and everyday citizens alike sounded off on the potential of an AI-powered doomsday. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei responded with an essay about the importance of “pacing the frontier,” or slowing AI development to prioritize safety. At the time,…

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Economic strain is pitting China’s people against each other

Economic strain is pitting China’s people against each other

From Beijing, Helen Gao writes: For years, the mood in China has been darkening. A weakening economy has left many disillusioned, a state of mind expressed privately and across the heavily controlled internet in lowered expectations and quiet anxiety. Some of that may now be surfacing in more troubling ways. In March, a man drove a heavy construction vehicle through an outdoor market in a Beijing suburb, reportedly killing several people. In June, a small aircraft crashed into a prominent…

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Bill Gates: AI ‘makes nuclear weapons look like nothing’

Bill Gates: AI ‘makes nuclear weapons look like nothing’

  Ezra Klein: Bill Gates thinks A.I. alarmism hasn’t gone far enough. He believes the years ahead will be marred by catastrophic cyberattacks, bio-terrorism and mass job loss, unless the government acts. And he thinks the idea that the A.I. industry can just self-regulate is “insane.” I was struck in the conversation by how genuinely afraid Gates seemed to be that we are not ready for the consequences of what we are building, and how emphatic he was that so…

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The techno-fascists have just been blindsided by democracy

The techno-fascists have just been blindsided by democracy

Eduardo Porter writes: The Stanford ethicist Rob Reich was once invited to a dinner organized by a Silicon Valley mogul to discuss what a state designed to maximize science and tech powered by commercial models might look like. The gathered technologists were drawn to the idea of building a small nation-state dedicated to the endeavor, Reich recalls in “System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot it”. When Reich asked whether this state would be a…

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Rope, twine and thread: Invisible technologies of the Stone Age

Rope, twine and thread: Invisible technologies of the Stone Age

Benjamin Taub writes: When an abstract-looking ivory artifact emerged from the Hohle Fels cave in southern Germany in 2015, archaeologists didn’t know quite what to make of it. Previously, this same cave had yielded what may be the world’s oldest musical flutes, as well as one of humanity’s earliest pieces of figurative art, the iconic Venus of Hohle Fels. At first glance, this strange new discovery — a 20-centimeter rod perforated with four small holes — seemed comparatively unspectacular. But…

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‘Godfather of AI,’ Geoffrey Hinton, predicts mass unemployment is on its way

‘Godfather of AI,’ Geoffrey Hinton, predicts mass unemployment is on its way

Fortune reports: The long-term impact of AI is one of the most hotly debated topics in Silicon Valley. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang predicts every job will be transformed—and likely lead to a four-day workweek. Other tech titans go even further: Bill Gates says humans may soon not be needed “for most things,” and Elon Musk believes most humans won’t have to work at all in “less than 20 years.” While those predictions might sound extreme, they’re not just plausible, they’re…

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Opposition to local data centers rises sharply, Annenberg survey finds

Opposition to local data centers rises sharply, Annenberg survey finds

Annenberg Public Policy Center: As protesters rally against data center construction in dozens of states and New York and Texas pause the issuance of permits for large data centers, a new nationally representative survey finds that Americans’ opposition to data centers in their communities has risen sharply since last spring. The survey, conducted by the Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC) of the University of Pennsylvania, finds that about 3 in 5 U.S. adults (61%) oppose the construction of new data…

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Backlash: The more familiar with AI Americans become, the more they hate it

Backlash: The more familiar with AI Americans become, the more they hate it

Reece Rogers writes: I was recently digging through my Instagram settings, trying to disable Meta’s now-defunct feature that allowed anyone to create AI deepfakes of me without consent. Anger bubbled up inside as I tapped through the Kafkaesque opt-out process. Rather than throwing my phone across the room, I blurted to my partner that we should leave San Francisco behind and be off-grid sheep farmers. Something analog. In that moment, anything sounded better than this ongoing, generative-AI-induced hell. Many Americans…

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Europe’s summer of reckoning is ‘just the beginning’

Europe’s summer of reckoning is ‘just the beginning’

The New York Times reports: A dense, yellow-orange pall hung over Bordeaux on Sunday, blotting out the sun and blurring the spires of the cathedral in this French city. A swirl of tiny ash particles stung eyes and stuck in throats. Twenty miles west of town, a mammoth forest fire burned so ferociously that it generated its own weather system. “We’ve never seen anything like it,” said Roger Peuron, 89, a retired engineer born before World War II, who was…

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Data center companies discover that secrecy doesn’t set the stage for public support

Data center companies discover that secrecy doesn’t set the stage for public support

Politico reports: The companies that build and run data centers are on the losing end of a populist backlash — and they’re struggling to respond. Fears that the server-packed data hubs will drive up electricity prices, deplete water supplies and gobble farmland have prompted people across the country to pack meetings of zoning boards and county commissions to oppose the projects, while fueling calls from leaders in both parties for state or national moratoriums. That opposition has become a rising…

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