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Category: Technology

‘No tech for apartheid!’: Google workers revolt over $1.2 billion contract with Israel

‘No tech for apartheid!’: Google workers revolt over $1.2 billion contract with Israel

Time reports: In midtown Manhattan on March 4, Google’s managing director for Israel, Barak Regev, was addressing a conference promoting the Israeli tech industry when a member of the audience stood up in protest. “I am a Google Cloud software engineer, and I refuse to build technology that powers genocide, apartheid, or surveillance,” shouted the protester, wearing an orange t-shirt emblazoned with a white Google logo. “No tech for apartheid!” The Google worker, a 23-year-old software engineer named Eddie Hatfield,…

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Exxon declares war on its dissenting investors

Exxon declares war on its dissenting investors

The Lever reports: ExxonMobil has launched an extraordinary lawsuit against two investment firms for the alleged offense of filing climate-focused shareholder proposals. The fossil fuel giant’s underlying goal: killing a federal regulatory effort that would make it easier for all U.S. shareholders to voice environmental and social concerns about the companies they own. Critics say the company is also trying to intimidate shareholders from ever proposing such resolutions again in the future — under threat of being tied up in…

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Yes, social media really is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness

Yes, social media really is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness

Jon Haidt writes: For centuries, adults have worried about whatever “kids these days” are doing. From novels in the 18th century to the bicycle in the 19th and through comic books, rock and roll, marijuana, and violent video games in the 20th century, there are always those who ring alarms, and there are always those who are skeptics of those alarms. So far, the skeptics have been right more often than not, and when they are right, they earn the…

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‘The machine did it coldly’: Israel used AI to identify 37,000 Hamas targets

‘The machine did it coldly’: Israel used AI to identify 37,000 Hamas targets

The Guardian reports: The Israeli military’s bombing campaign in Gaza used a previously undisclosed AI-powered database that at one stage identified 37,000 potential targets based on their apparent links to Hamas, according to intelligence sources involved in the war. In addition to talking about their use of the AI system, called Lavender, the intelligence sources claim that Israeli military officials permitted large numbers of Palestinian civilians to be killed, particularly during the early weeks and months of the conflict. Their…

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The deaths of effective altruism

The deaths of effective altruism

Leif Wenar writes: I’m fond of effective altruists. When you meet one, ask them how many people they’ve killed. Effective altruism is the philosophy of Sam Bankman-Fried, the crypto wunderkind now sentenced to 25 years in prison for fraud and money laundering. Elon Musk has said that EA is close to what he believes. Facebook mogul Dustin Moskovitz and Skype cofounder Jaan Tallinn have spent mega-millions on its causes, and EAs have made major moves to influence American politics. In 2021, EA boasted of $46 billion in funding—comparable to what it’s estimated the Saudis spent over…

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What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane

What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane

The American Prospect reports: John Barnett had one of those bosses who seemed to spend most of his waking hours scheming to inflict humiliation upon him. He mocked him in weekly meetings whenever he dared contribute a thought, assigned a fellow manager to spy on him and spread rumors that he did not play nicely with others, and disciplined him for things like “using email to communicate” and pushing for flaws he found on planes to be fixed. “John is…

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Common plastic additive, BPA, linked to autism and ADHD, scientists find

Common plastic additive, BPA, linked to autism and ADHD, scientists find

Science Alert reports: The number of people being diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder ( ASD) and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder ( ADHD) has risen sharply in recent decades, and research continues to delve into the factors involved in these conditions. A study revealed there’s a difference in how children with autism or ADHD clear the common plastic additive bisphenol A (BPA), compared to neurotypical children. BPA is used in a lot of plastics and plastic production processes, and can also…

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DOJ’s sweeping Apple antitrust lawsuit draws expert praise

DOJ’s sweeping Apple antitrust lawsuit draws expert praise

The Verge reports: The Department of Justice’s antitrust division has come into its own, having filed its third tech monopoly lawsuit in four years. The accumulated experience shows up in the complaint, according to antitrust experts who spoke with The Verge about the complaint filed Thursday accusing Apple of violating antitrust law. The DOJ describes a sweeping arc of behaviors by Apple, arguing that it adds up to a pattern of illegal monopoly maintenance. Rather than focusing on two or…

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How chain-of-thought reasoning helps neural networks compute

How chain-of-thought reasoning helps neural networks compute

Ben Brubaker writes: Your grade school teacher probably didn’t show you how to add 20-digit numbers. But if you know how to add smaller numbers, all you need is paper and pencil and a bit of patience. Start with the ones place and work leftward step by step, and soon you’ll be stacking up quintillions with ease. Problems like this are easy for humans, but only if we approach them in the right way. “How we humans solve these problems…

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Musk’s SpaceX is building spy satellite network for U.S. intelligence agency, sources say

Musk’s SpaceX is building spy satellite network for U.S. intelligence agency, sources say

Reuters reports: SpaceX is building a network of hundreds of spy satellites under a classified contract with a U.S. intelligence agency, five sources familiar with the program said, demonstrating deepening ties between billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk’s space company and national security agencies. The network is being built by SpaceX’s Starshield business unit under a $1.8 billion contract signed in 2021 with the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), an intelligence agency that manages spy satellites, the sources said. The plans show the…

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The obscene energy demands of AI

The obscene energy demands of AI

Elizabeth Kolbert writes: In 2016, Alex de Vries read somewhere that a single bitcoin transaction consumes as much energy as the average American household uses in a day. At the time, de Vries, who is Dutch, was working at a consulting firm. In his spare time, he wrote a blog, called Digiconomist, about the risks of investing in cryptocurrency. He found the energy-use figure disturbing. “I was, like, O.K., that’s a massive amount, and why is no one talking about…

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Elon Musk has a giant charity. Its money stays close to home

Elon Musk has a giant charity. Its money stays close to home

The New York Times reports: Before March 2021, Elon Musk’s charitable foundation had never announced any donations to Cameron County, an impoverished region at the southern tip of Texas that is home to his SpaceX launch site and local officials who help regulate it. Then, at 8:05 one morning that month, a SpaceX rocket blew up, showering the area with a rain of twisted metal. The Musk Foundation began giving at 9:27 a.m. local time. Am donating $20M to Cameron…

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The terrible costs of a phone-based childhood

The terrible costs of a phone-based childhood

Jonathan Haidt writes: Something went suddenly and horribly wrong for adolescents in the early 2010s. By now you’ve likely seen the statistics: Rates of depression and anxiety in the United States—fairly stable in the 2000s—rose by more than 50 percent in many studies from 2010 to 2019. The suicide rate rose 48 percent for adolescents ages 10 to 19. For girls ages 10 to 14, it rose 131 percent. The problem was not limited to the U.S.: Similar patterns emerged around the same…

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Should either of these people have the power to end the world?

Should either of these people have the power to end the world?

W.J. Hennigan writes: Forty-five feet underground in a command center near Omaha, there’s an encrypted communications line that goes directly to the American president. To get to it, you need to pass through a guarded turnstile, two reinforced steel doors and a twisting hallway that leads to an ultra-secure room called The Battle Deck. It’s here, below the headquarters of the U.S. Strategic Command, or Stratcom, where military personnel stand by 24 hours a day awaiting a call the world…

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Landmark study links microplastics to serious health problems

Landmark study links microplastics to serious health problems

Nature reports: Plastics are just about everywhere — food packaging, tyres, clothes, water pipes. And they shed microscopic particles that end up in the environment and can be ingested or inhaled by people. Now the first data of their kind show a link between these microplastics and human health. A study of more than 200 people undergoing surgery found that nearly 60% had microplastics or even smaller nanoplastics in a main artery. Those who did were 4.5 times more likely…

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AI is consuming drinking water from the desert

AI is consuming drinking water from the desert

Karen Hao writes: One scorching day this past September, I made the dangerous decision to try to circumnavigate some data centers. The ones I chose sit between a regional airport and some farm fields in Goodyear, Arizona, half an hour’s drive west of downtown Phoenix. When my Uber pulled up beside the unmarked buildings, the temperature was 97 degrees Fahrenheit. The air crackled with a latent energy, and some kind of pulsating sound was emanating from the electric wires above…

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