Browsed by
Category: Technology

Trump champions data centers as Republicans turn against them

Trump champions data centers as Republicans turn against them

The Washington Post reports: As voters in both parties grow anxious about the rapid build-out of data centers, President Donald Trump remains one of the tech industry’s most prominent champions — putting him increasingly at odds with members of his own party. Nowhere is that divergence clearer than in Texas, where Trump travels Thursday to campaign for Ken Paxton, the state’s attorney general and Republican Senate candidate. The state has courted some of the country’s biggest data center projects, but…

Read More Read More

Max Tegmark: Why is AI unregulated?

Max Tegmark: Why is AI unregulated?

  The biggest danger facing mankind is a machine that can “outsmart the whole species”, argues Max Tegmark, professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and founder of the Future of Life Institute. Tegmark tells host Steve Clemons that governments and tech companies are in a “race to replace” human labour, instead of solving human problems. “It’s aimed at getting more money and power to a very small number of individuals,” he says. But a slew of suicides…

Read More Read More

‘Thin air,’ real money: Trump’s crypto products have left investors at least $4.7 billion underwater

‘Thin air,’ real money: Trump’s crypto products have left investors at least $4.7 billion underwater

Public Citizen reports: “I am not a fan of Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies, which are not money, and whose value is highly volatile and based on thin air,” President Donald Trump tweeted in July 2019. “Unregulated Crypto Assets can facilitate unlawful behavior, including drug trade and other illegal activity.” Seven years later, Trump has become the world’s foremost crypto salesperson, hawking nonfungible tokens, meme coins, governance tokens, stablecoins, and shares in a digital-asset treasury. What changed? The president realized there…

Read More Read More

Mark Zuckerberg had a bold plan to replace thousands of Meta staff with AI. Here’s how it imploded

Mark Zuckerberg had a bold plan to replace thousands of Meta staff with AI. Here’s how it imploded

Reuters reports: In January, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his top lieutenants gathered for their annual leadership retreat at his Hawaii compound. There they hatched a radical plan to reimagine work at the social-media giant in the age of artificial intelligence. Code-named Project OT – short for Organization Transformation – the plan envisioned an “AI native” future for the owner of Facebook and Instagram. AI would take over much of the daily work performed by thousands of human employees. Virtual…

Read More Read More

‘AI is going to be a massive issue for the presidential election’

‘AI is going to be a massive issue for the presidential election’

Politico reports: The intensifying late-summer backlash against data centers is inspiring panic among some corners of the tech sector — amid fears that the industry is mishandling a political crisis that will stretch into 2028 and beyond. Those worries have deepened in recent weeks as politicians across the political spectrum embraced various curbs on data center construction, with Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, potential Democratic White House hopeful Josh Shapiro and Michigan GOP Senate nominee Mike Rogers being among the…

Read More Read More

In effort to promote AI, EPA moves to cut out public input on data centers

In effort to promote AI, EPA moves to cut out public input on data centers

The New York Times reports: The Trump administration is moving to make it harder for communities to weigh in on proposed data centers, even as a backlash against the behemoth projects grows across the country. The Environmental Protection Agency plans to eliminate a federal requirement that states publicize and solicit public input on applications for air pollution permits for a range of industrial facilities, including new data centers and the power plants needed to run them. The move could prevent…

Read More Read More

Russian drone with Nvidia chips signals dawn of lethal AI

Russian drone with Nvidia chips signals dawn of lethal AI

The New York Times reports: The young woman ran for her life, but it was too late. A small Russian drone resembling a model airplane swooped down from the sky last month in the city of Zaporizhzhia in southeastern Ukraine. As it tried to navigate toward a gas station, it crashed into a wall and exploded in a hail of shrapnel, killing Tetiana Bubynets, 19, a university student, and two others. They were among the thousands of Ukrainian civilians who…

Read More Read More

Trump says communities that oppose data centers are ‘making a mistake’

Trump says communities that oppose data centers are ‘making a mistake’

Axios reports: President Trump defended the expansion of data centers in an interview with his former fixer, Michael Cohen, that aired in full on Sunday. Why it matters: Trump’s support comes as data centers face growing backlash in both red and blue states. What he’s saying: Trump told Cohen during their interview that the U.S. was leading China in AI “by a lot” and that data centers were not taking power from the grid. “They’re making their own power plants. They’re building the most beautiful, you’ve never seen power plants…

Read More Read More

Data centers ‘dug their own grave,’ says Texas Gov. Greg Abbott

Data centers ‘dug their own grave,’ says Texas Gov. Greg Abbott

Axios reports: Texas Gov. Greg Abbott delivered one of the starkest warnings yet from a Republican to the AI industry, saying data center companies “dug their own grave” and deserve the backlash they’re facing after failing to win community support. Why it matters: Abbott is the latest governor to sharply change course on the AI data center boom he once enthusiastically courted, as local opposition becomes a potent political force. Democratic Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who last year celebrated a $20 billion Amazon data center investment, imposed new restrictions this week….

Read More Read More

Stanford University’s dirty secrets, according to the student who exposed them

Stanford University’s dirty secrets, according to the student who exposed them

  How does a college freshman take down the president of Stanford University? Theo Baker became the youngest-ever recipient of the George Polk Award after exposing research misconduct tied to former Stanford president Marc Tessier-Lavigne. Now, in his new book How to Rule the World, Baker argues that the story goes far beyond one university leader—and reveals how Stanford became the training ground for Silicon Valley’s most powerful people. Kara and Theo discuss Stanford’s secretive power networks, the university’s no-boundaries…

Read More Read More

How Big Tech steers the public school system in the service of its commercial interests

How Big Tech steers the public school system in the service of its commercial interests

Natasha Singer writes: One humid afternoon in the summer of 2025, representatives from Microsoft were waiting as some 200 teachers trooped into a conference hall in downtown Manhattan. The educators were there for a workshop on the school technology of the moment: artificial intelligence chatbots. The Microsoft team gave a presentation on their Copilot chatbot and asked the teachers to practice using it for tasks like generating emails to parents and customizing lesson plans. Microsoft instructors also screened an A.I….

Read More Read More

The rise of the Nerd Reich

The rise of the Nerd Reich

  In part one of a series on the rise and power of the tech oligarchs, Sidney Blumenthal and Sean Wilentz speak up with Gil Duran, author of “The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy,” on the origins of techno-authoritarianism, its hallucinatory fascist theorists, the central role of Peter Thiel and his PayPal Mafia, and how they merge with Donald Trump and his MAGA movement.

The Nerd Reich in power

The Nerd Reich in power

  In part two of a series on the rise and power of the tech oligarchs, Sidney Blumenthal and Sean Wilentz interview Gil Duran, author of “The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy,” on how Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and the tech oligarchs came to power under Donald Trump, how they control key parts of his administration, and how they created JD Vance, made him vice president and plan to make him president.

Technofascism: This Palantir billionaire’s passion project is criminalizing homelessness

Technofascism: This Palantir billionaire’s passion project is criminalizing homelessness

Mother Jones reports: Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of the weapons-tech company Palantir, is also a major force behind the Trump administration’s policy of pushing unhoused people toward incarceration. Lonsdale, a longtime critic of “housing first” policy—which proposes that homelessness be solved by supplying those in need of housing with somewhere to live—argues that fining and arresting people for sleeping in public will push them into mental health treatment. “We’ve made it easier to civilly commit those who are mentally ill and…

Read More Read More

Record corporate spending on the 2026 midterms driven by crypto, AI and betting firms

Record corporate spending on the 2026 midterms driven by crypto, AI and betting firms

Reuters reports: A handful of billionaires and companies are driving corporate spending in U.S. midterm elections this year, and they aren’t the usual power brokers who have sat atop the political food chain in Washington in previous decades. Crypto companies, artificial intelligence firms and online betting have emerged as the biggest industries shaping the 2026 midterm races, driving a record amount of business spending on congressional contests, according to campaign finance watchdogs and interviews with more than a dozen political…

Read More Read More

Author of The Nerd Reich, Gil Durán, on tech fascism, Peter Thiel, and the war on democracy

Author of The Nerd Reich, Gil Durán, on tech fascism, Peter Thiel, and the war on democracy

  A new book by longtime Bay Area journalist Gil Durán investigates “tech fascism” and its mounting influence on U.S. politics. The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy follows the rise of Vice President JD Vance, the former venture capitalist whose “outsider” campaign for Senate was bankrolled by the billionaire co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, Peter Thiel. Durán traces the ideological lineage of the current Trump administration back from Vance to Thiel and the far-right-wing monarchist…

Read More Read More