The telephone burst onto the world stage 150 years ago and began to transform every part of life: from business to warfare, from news gathering to sex work. James Gleick shows how this commonplace object irreversibly changed not only the world but who we are as human beings.
James Gleick’s last book was Time Travel. His next book, coming in November, is The Telephone: A New History.
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...
What if the future is as real as the past? Physicists have been suggesting as much since Einstein. It’s all just the space-time continuum. “So in the future, the sister of the past,” thinks young Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses, “I may see myself as I sit here now but by reflection from that which then I shall be.” Twisty! What if you received knowledge of your own tragic future—as a gift, or perhaps...