The internet was not meant to suck. Here are some of the things the optimists failed to foresee: the erosion of privacy and the industrial-scale harvest of user data.”The emergence of ruthless giant corporations—Google, Meta, Amazon—mightier than nation-states. The creation of a powerful new oligarch class. The collapse of the aforementioned old media; the loss of a consensus reality; the rise of...
The artificial intelligence industry depends on plagiarism, mimicry, and exploited labor, not intelligence.
Some physicists and philosophers have convinced themselves that free will is an illusion—that we are nothing but particles moving this way and that, "fully dictated by mathematical decree." Don't let them convince you. Free will is real; it is our essential, defining quality, and it demands explanation.
The chatbots have read practically everything, and they still can’t be trusted. ichard Powers’s new novel, Playground, features an artificial intelligence resembling the new generation of “large language models,” like ChatGPT and Gemini. At one point a character grumbles: “You see? They think we’re too simple to know how to google things. They think we need an artificial nanny app to...
If you could choose one superpower—to fly, or to be invisible—which would you pick? If you were invisible, what would you do? Dreams of invisibility in a world of ubiquitous surveillance.
Let us all—wherever and whenever—live on what the world’s timekeepers call Universal Time, or UTC (though “Earth time” might be less presumptuous). When it’s noon in Greenwich, England, let it be 12:00 everywhere. No more resetting the clocks. No more wondering what time it is in Peoria or Petropavlovsk. No more befuddled headaches crossing the International Dateline from Tuesday back into Monday.
Ben Lerner's appreciation for "Chris Marker, whose name was not 'Chris Marker' ... "
"Gravity is weak," Feynman said. "In fact, it's damned weak."