AI Developers Named Time’s “Person of the Year”
The decision drew a lot of criticism.On the cover of the magazine issue, tech giants including Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg are pictured sitting on a construction beam.
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Fearing the Terminator, Missing the Obvious
In Part 1 of my review of the new AI Doom book, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, we look at how the authors first developed the underlying ideaBy 2020, authors Yudlowsky and Soares were already Doomers but the rapid success of ChatGPT and similar models heightened their worries.
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Surprise: Artificial intelligence Is Still Just Automation
I wrote this in 2016. And it is still true in 2025. A reflection in three partsWhen I first wrote this almost a decade ago, “AI” was already a cultural Rorschach test. To some, it was exciting and futuristic. To others, it was ominous, Orwellian, or just marketing spin. Automation, by contrast, was the unglamorous cousin that conjured images of soulless machines taking over the last shreds of human purpose. But from the start, my view was simple: what we call “AI” today is still just automation. And automation is not a mind. That argument has aged better than I expected. In the years since, we’ve seen an explosion of so-called AI — from self-driving cars to ChatGPT — yet the distinction between AI and automation remains almost universally misunderstood. Recently, computational linguist Emily Bender and Read More ›
Where X Went Wrong in Dealing with Links to Independent Media
Elon Musk bought Twitter, changed it to X, and made it a nightmare for writers trying to share their workAs trust in legacy journalism erodes, more time and energy will get funneled into independent media and X isn’t playing fair here.
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Can Cultural Christianity Save Christian Culture?
People cannot reconnect with a view on life that they don’t believe, simply to save the things that only such a view can create and maintainIt’s not just about religion. Neither the Greeks nor the Romans could save their Republics once most people stopped believing in the values that created them.
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LLMs Are Bad at Good Things, Good at Bad Things
LLMs may well become smarter than humans in the near future but not because these chatbots are becoming more intelligentAs people become attached to and dependent on their AI friends, they become less interested in their fellow humans.
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Information Imperialism: The Battle for Free Access Heats Up
Headline incidents are only one part of an international trend toward attempted government control of the news streamRegardless of who emerges as the victor in the battle between government censors and independent creators, the traditional media landscape is now history.
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The Tech Giants Looming in the Background
The presence of these tech giants at Trump's inauguration signals a major "vibe shift" in the culture.The Constitution guards against government interference in the speech of American citizens.
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The U.K. Government Reposts Censorious Tweet
The rising authoritarianism in western societies is becoming more evidentIn light of the violent protests and now counter-protests raging across the England and elsewhere in the United Kingdom (UK), the UK government reposted an announcement on X that those posting online content promoting “hatred” or “violence” could be criminally prosecuted. Here’s the post: Not only can citizens face prosecution by posting inciteful content (although the video makes no mention about what that really is), but they can also get nabbed for simply reposting it from someone else. The pushback on X was swift, with critics calling the post a blatant instance of government overreach and comparing the measure to something we would expect in authoritarian countries like China and North Korea. The debate over free speech in western countries Read More ›
Musk Wants to Use AI to Understand the Universe. Will it Work?
Could AI ever aid our quest to fully understand the universe?Jordan Peterson and Elon Musk sat down this week for an extensive conversation ranging from technology, AI, politics, and even religion and questions of the metaphysical. These two prominent figures are active on Musk’s X, and frequently call out infringements on free speech and other authoritarian measures they see as a danger. In one interesting point in the interview, Musk described how he diverged in his views from his friend Larry Page on AI safety. Page evidently believes that we will “upload our minds to the computer,” to which Peterson said, “There’s not much difference between that and the death of humanity.” Musk nonetheless is the developer of his own AI system and believes that AI can aid humanity’s perennial Read More ›
Are We Close to Peak AI Hype?
Outrageous statements are proliferating.Sanity might be about ready to return to the market. Just maybe, we have reached peak hype.
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Musk and LeCun Have a Superficial Debate About Science
What would have been a better debate?Elon Musk tweeted the following: “Join xAI if you believe in our mission of understanding the universe, which requires maximally rigorous pursuit of the truth, without regard to popularity or political correctness.” Yann LeCun, chief scientist at tech giant Meta, could not resist responding. Musk claims to “want a maximally rigorous pursuit of the truth but spews crazy-ass conspiracy theories on his own social platform.” It escalated quickly, with Musk questioning what science LeCun had done in the past five years, and LeCun replying: “Over 80 technical papers published since January 2022. What about you?” LeCun then said: “If you do research and don’t publish, it’s not science”. So the most successful engineer over the last ten years criticizes academic Read More ›
X Now Allows Adult Content According to Policy Update
Formerly, the platform didn't have an actual rule. That's now changed.The pushback against the decision continues as users are concerned that the site will come to resemble little more than a traditional pornography website.
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Substack: A Return to the Golden Era of Blogging
The writing platform is friendly toward free speech. So why doesn't Elon Musk like it?Substack very well could the future of independent writing. As mainstream journalism shrinks, we could see Substack grow even more.
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“Dopamine-Maximizing AI”
Elon Musk on addictive algorithms and the future of AITech lords often vacillate between hype and doom, and Musk, who signed a petition to curb AI research until its effects are known, falls into that tendency, too.
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Human Subject Moves Computer Mouse with Neuralink Chip
So Big Tech companies might know your inner thoughts, now. What could possibly go wrong?Recent history tells us that corporations may be eager to get the upper hand and use it as an excuse to violate privacy even more than they already have.
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When Government Manages the News Business: Canada Tried That…
Any comprehensive censorship regime requires that the government begin by managing the news businessCanadians lost the right to post news links to Facebook and Instagram. And, amid media layoffs, Google did not give media the sum they hoped for.
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“Deeply Unsettling:” Popular YouTube Host Concerned Over Online Censorship
After one of his videos was removed from YouTube, economist and talk show host Glenn Loury had questions.Loury noted that he doesn’t share Goldblatt’s opinions, but that it’s important to be able to debate different views freely.
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Is the “Threads” App a Bust?
The app originally attracted around 100 million users but has tapered off dramatically.Within the first week of its existence, “Threads,” the new Twitter-like app from the tech company Meta, saw a colossal decline in usage. The app originally attracted around 100 million users but has tapered off dramatically. Jody Cerrano reports, Zuckerberg’s statements about returning users coincide with estimates from third-party traffic analysts that reported the big dip in Threads users last week. At that time, Sensor Tower, a market intelligence firm, said that Threads’ daily active users on iOS and Android were down by 20%. The company added that traffic was not the only thing affected. Time spent on the app per user also fell, according to Sensor Tower, by 50% — from 20 minutes to 10 minutes. On Monday, the analyst Similarweb reported an Read More ›
Mission Impossible: A Dead Reckoning With Artificial Intelligence
The villain in the new blockbuster movie is an artificial intelligence known simply as "the entity."I walked into the theater expecting a typical villain in the latest installment of Mission Impossible starring the inimitable Tom Cruise. And at the film’s beginning, you’re definitely led to believe that the pale, sour-faced Russians are behind yet another espionage program destined to thwart America and conquer the world. But that’s only a front. The real villain in the new blockbuster movie is an artificial intelligence known simply as “the entity.” The impossible mission, tasked to Ethan Hunt (Cruise) is to track down a mysterious key, made of two separate parts, that apparently can unlock the entity and reveal what it’s capable of. God in the Machine Hunt and his usual gang of expatriates find themselves at odds with Read More ›