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Category: Society

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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The Americans ignored by Trump: ‘Live in my shoes for one day. You wouldn’t be able to handle it’

The Americans ignored by Trump: ‘Live in my shoes for one day. You wouldn’t be able to handle it’

Nicholas Kristof writes: After a 1,000-mile road trip across a swath of America, I can’t get one person out of my mind: Trinity Goodman, a cheerful, chatty woman in Oklahoma City who had a bandage on her arm. The reason for the bandage? Goodman, 44, survives by selling blood plasma twice a week. She had $3.78 in her checking account, one cent in her savings account to keep it open, and six pennies in her piggy bank. “That’s my full…

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Residents furious at plan to seize and destroy their homes for AI data centers

Residents furious at plan to seize and destroy their homes for AI data centers

Futurism reports: As dozens of cities across the US are forced to scrap their plans to build power-hungry data centers, some civic leaders are no longer asking. According to new reporting by Fortune, the state of Georgia’s for-profit utility company, Georgia Power, is looking to demolish and pave over some 30 homes — and 330 parcels of land — that currently block the route of a 1,000 mile transmission line. When it goes live, the line will distribute nearly 10,000…

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Data centers become the new frontlines of global power

Data centers become the new frontlines of global power

Henrique Schneider writes: Data centers have emerged as a crucial element in the realms of geopolitics, energy security and industrial strategy. On the morning of March 1, 2026, three coordinated Iranian drone strikes hit Amazon Web Services facilities in the Gulf, disrupting regional cloud services for days to weeks. The episode crystallized a transition that had been building for years: The quiet warehouses of the digital economy are now contested strategic assets. The scale of what is being built is…

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AI industry struggles with the real stupidity of tech overlords who fail to take public opposition seriously

AI industry struggles with the real stupidity of tech overlords who fail to take public opposition seriously

Futurism reports: The tech overlords pushing the AI boom are quickly wearing out what little welcome they had. You may have noticed big-name AI labs pushing new commercials lately. Meta’s new 60-second ad spot insists that the “future is for everyone,” even as CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s personal net worth eclipses the GDP of Hungary. Anthropic’s new commercial for Claude assures viewers that there’s “hope in hard questions,” seemingly embracing the discomfort that comes when your software is used to bomb…

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An era of ‘abundance’ will never be delivered by billionaires. Their true belief is in scarcity

An era of ‘abundance’ will never be delivered by billionaires. Their true belief is in scarcity

Gizmodo reports: Elon Musk sat down with the editor-in-chief of the Economist for a taped interview that went live Thursday. The Tesla CEO has been avoiding normal journalists recently, even cancelling a planned interview with CNBC earlier this month. And it now seems pretty obvious why. Musk has a hard time answering normal questions about his often fascist and sometimes incoherent worldview. The interview started cordially enough, with Economist editor Zanny Minton Beddoes asking Musk about his thoughts on the…

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In the data-center age, the business of Silicon Valley is more like oil-refining than coding

In the data-center age, the business of Silicon Valley is more like oil-refining than coding

Matteo Wong writes: The AI boom has showered some of the nation’s most prominent companies in market value. OpenAI and Anthropic are now the two most valuable private companies in the world. Google, Microsoft, and Nvidia have become larger than ever. But among the biggest winners has been Caterpillar, a purveyor of yellow trucks and cranes. Caterpillar’s stock has more than doubled in value over the past year, making the company worth six times as much as Nike. Its ascent…

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Data centers have united Americans of both parties in a shared hatred

Data centers have united Americans of both parties in a shared hatred

The Washington Post reports: Kyle Schmidt ticked through what makes him irate about the massive Google data center slated for construction about a mile away from his home near Sand Springs, Oklahoma. He didn’t like that residents were kept in the dark about what would be built on a pristine tract of mostly forested land. He’s worried about the data center’s potential impact on the community’s water supply and on the dream home that his family moved into last year….

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How the World Cup helped America see itself afresh

How the World Cup helped America see itself afresh

Surbhi Gupta and Danny Postel write: The owner of Parkwood Deli in Midland Park, New Jersey, Roger Schnorrbusch — known to his nearly 830,000 TikTok followers as “the deli guy” — has been serving sandwiches for over two decades. A viral personality due to his hyped-up, theatrical videos featuring him whipping up a chicken parmesan sandwich or an eggplant parm stacked with hot peppers, his videos rack up thousands of views, and customers come in from as far as California…

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Bipartisan group of senators introduces legislation to avert looming Social Security shortfall

Bipartisan group of senators introduces legislation to avert looming Social Security shortfall

The Associated Press reports: With Social Security’s looming insolvency date roughly six years away, a bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced a proposal Tuesday to grapple with one of the most consequential financial challenges facing the federal government. The Protecting Retirement Opportunities and Maintaining Income Security for Everyone, or PROMISE Act, comes on the heels of the latest Social Security Board of Trustees’ annual report, which found that Social Security’s retirement trust fund is projected to face a funding shortfall in…

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Landmaxxing: The latest need for misanthropic billionaires who can’t get enough

Landmaxxing: The latest need for misanthropic billionaires who can’t get enough

The Real Deal reports: Buying mansions here and there is not enough for the uber-rich. “Landmaxxing,” or buying up adjacent properties to assemble sprawling private compounds, has been a major part of the ultra-luxury market this year, the Wall Street Journal reported. Compounds are increasingly in demand, and some of the business world’s biggest names are leading the trend. In South Florida, Citadel billionaire Ken Griffin dropped more than $450 million to piece together a 27-acre Palm Beach compound. Griffin…

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