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Category: Society

Former OpenAI safety researcher brands pace of AI development ‘terrifying’

Former OpenAI safety researcher brands pace of AI development ‘terrifying’

The Guardian reports: A former safety researcher at OpenAI says he is “pretty terrified” about the pace of development in artificial intelligence, warning the industry is taking a “very risky gamble” on the technology. Steven Adler expressed concerns about companies seeking to rapidly develop artificial general intelligence (AGI), a theoretical term referring to systems that match or exceed humans at any intellectual task. Adler, who left OpenAI in November, said in a series of posts on X that he’d had…

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Americans are now spending more time alone than ever

Americans are now spending more time alone than ever

Derek Thompson writes: Americans are spending less time with other people than in any other period for which we have trustworthy data, going back to 1965. Between that year and the end of the 20th century, in-person socializing slowly declined. From 2003 to 2023, it plunged by more than 20 percent, according to the American Time Use Survey, an annual study conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Among unmarried men and people younger than 25, the decline was more…

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Bunkerised society – why prepping for end times is so American

Bunkerised society – why prepping for end times is so American

Robert Kirsch and Emily Ray write: A family of six pulls up to the Be Prepared Expo in Farmington, Utah. They are concerned about supply-chain failure, sure of the fact that the COVID-19 pandemic was only a taste of what’s to come. They want to buy seeds for their garden so they can grow food to preserve and stash in the basement. The kids pet the puppies at breeder booths selling guard dogs, the father exchanges opinions about the best…

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How America’s craven plutocrats busted the myth of the business hero

How America’s craven plutocrats busted the myth of the business hero

Ross Rosenfeld writes: Of the top 10 richest men in America, not one of them has publicly endorsed Kamala Harris or been willing to condemn Donald Trump. These supposed business heroes are mostly business cowards, the first to stoop to obey. Occasionally, we hear about the whispered condemnations that those in the billionaire class supposedly voice behind closed doors. Yet Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a Yale professor who heads the Executive Leadership Institute, told Forbes, “They don’t antagonize Trump because … they…

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Necessity is the mother of invention

Necessity is the mother of invention

  Marshall, the county seat of Madison County NC, a sliver of a town that sits between steep slopes on the east and the French Broad River to the west, got swamped by the Helene flooding. Residents and neighbors in the surrounding area have shown resourcefulness and initiative in disaster recovery that will provide lessons for generations to come on the power of community and the capacity of ordinary people to accomplish extraordinary feats.  

In the aftermath of Helene, many rural communities begin the recovery effort on their own

In the aftermath of Helene, many rural communities begin the recovery effort on their own

Chris Moody writes: We knew something had gone terribly wrong when the culverts washed up in our backyard like an apocalyptic art installation splattered with loose rock and black concrete. The circular metal tubes were a crucial piece of submerged infrastructure that once channeled water beneath our street, the primary connection to town for our small rural community just outside Boone, North Carolina. When they failed under a deluge created by Hurricane Helene, the narrow strip of concrete above didn’t…

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Elon Musk is debasing American society

Elon Musk is debasing American society

Thomas Chatterton Williams writes: To paraphrase former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, you wage mimetic warfare with the unsubstantiated smear you’ve got, not the one you want. It just so happens that the one most recently deployed by Donald Trump is the kind that proliferates these days on X. When Trump declared, seemingly out of nowhere, during his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris that Haitian immigrants living legally in Springfield, Ohio, were “eating the dogs … eating the cats ……

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A polarisation engine’: How social media has created a ‘perfect storm’ for UK’s far-right riots

A polarisation engine’: How social media has created a ‘perfect storm’ for UK’s far-right riots

Carole Cadwalladr writes: The 1996 Dunblane massacre and the outcry that followed are held up in the US as a textbook example of how an act of terror mobilised a country to demand effective gun regulation. The atrocity, in which 16 children and their teacher were killed, provoked a wave of national revulsion that, within weeks, led to 750,000 people signing a petition demanding a change to the law. Within a year and a half, new legislation had outlawed the…

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Kamala Harris embodies the demographic trends that have reshaped America

Kamala Harris embodies the demographic trends that have reshaped America

In 2021, Kim Parker and Amanda Barroso from the Pew Research Center wrote: The swearing-in of Kamala Harris as the vice president of the United States marked several important “firsts”: She became the first female vice president, as well as the first Black person and first Asian American to hold that office. But her ascendance to the second-highest office in the land represented so much more. It held up a mirror to America, revealing how key demographic trends have reshaped…

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Social trends: The experiences of U.S. adults who don’t have children

Social trends: The experiences of U.S. adults who don’t have children

Pew Research Center reports: The U.S. fertility rate reached a historic low in 2023, with a growing share of women ages 25 to 44 having never given birth. And the share of U.S. adults younger than 50 without children who say they are unlikely to ever have kids rose 10 percentage points between 2018 and 2023 (from 37% to 47%), according to a Pew Research Center survey. In this report, we explore the experiences of two groups of U.S. adults: Those ages 50 and older who…

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The people who feed America are going hungry

The people who feed America are going hungry

Grist reports: Standing knee-deep in an emerald expanse, a row of trees offering respite from the sweltering heat, Rosa Morales diligently relocates chipilín, a Central American legume, from one bed of soil to another. The 34-year-old has been coming to the Campesinos’ Garden run by the Farmworker Association of Florida in Apopka for the last six months, taking home a bit of produce each time she visits. The small plot that hugs a soccer field and community center is an…

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Surprise: American voters actually largely agree on many issues, including topics like abortion, immigration and wealth inequality

Surprise: American voters actually largely agree on many issues, including topics like abortion, immigration and wealth inequality

For a country that often feels hopelessly divided, it turns out that there is a lot of agreement among Americans. Nisian Hughes/Getty Images By Dante Chinni, Michigan State University and Ari Pinkus, Michigan State University As the presidential election campaign heats up, media coverage suggests Americans are hopelessly divided and headed for a difficult fall – perhaps also a tense January. But that isn’t the whole story, according to reporting and poll results from the American Communities Project, a journalism…

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America’s top export may be anxiety

America’s top export may be anxiety

Derek Thompson writes: The argument that smartphones and social media are contributing to the rise in teen mental distress is strong. A number of observational and experimental studies show that teen anxiety started rising just as smartphones, social media, and front-facing cameras contributed to a wave of negative emotionality that seems to be sweeping the world. But I have one small reason to question the strongest version of the smartphone thesis. You can find a summary of it on page…

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Can mathematicians help to solve social-justice problems?

Can mathematicians help to solve social-justice problems?

Rachel Crowell writes: When Carrie Diaz Eaton trained as a mathematician, they didn’t expect their career to involve social-justice research. Growing up in Providence, Rhode Island, Diaz Eaton first saw social justice in action when their father, who’s from Peru, helped other Spanish-speaking immigrants to settle in the United States. But it would be decades before Diaz Eaton would forge a professional path to use their mathematical expertise to study social-justice issues. Eventually, after years of moving around for education…

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Non-consensual AI is taking over

Non-consensual AI is taking over

Charlie Warzel writes: If you’re looking to understand the philosophy that underpins Silicon Valley’s latest gold rush, look no further than OpenAI’s Scarlett Johansson debacle. The story, according to Johansson’s lawyers, goes like this: About nine months ago, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman approached the actor with a request to license her voice for a new conversation feature in ChatGPT; Johansson declined. She alleges that just two days before the company’s keynote event last week—in which that feature, a version of which launched last…

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AI risks making us less human

AI risks making us less human

Tyler Austin Harper writes: “Our focus with AI is to help create more healthy and equitable relationships.” Whitney Wolfe Herd, the founder and executive chair of the dating app Bumble, leans in toward her Bloomberg Live interviewer. “How can we actually teach you how to date?” When her interviewer, apparently bemused, asks for an example of what this means, Herd launches into a mind-bending disquisition on the future of AI-abetted dating: “Okay, so for example, you could in the near…

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