Bluesky Says It Won’t Screw Things Up
Like the conflicted cowboy in Brokeback Mountain, journalists, pundits and people who eschew MAGA merch have looked at the service formerly known as Twitter and lamented, “I don’t know how …
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The New Hatred of Technology
People have never been better, here in the Year of Our Simulation 2024, at hating the very forces underlying that simulation—at hating, in other words, digital technology itself. And good …
Donald Trump Isn’t the Only Chaos Agent
Eight years ago, the November US election results profoundly shocked the small staff at Backchannel, the boutique tech publication I headed. The morning after, an editor posted on our Slack …
AI Will Understand Humans Better Than Humans Do
Michal Kosinski is a Stanford research psychologist with a nose for timely subjects. He sees his work as not only advancing knowledge, but alerting the world to potential dangers ignited …
A High-Profile Geneticist Is Launching a Fusion-Power Moonshot
Eric Lander is a Big Science heavyweight. A geneticist, molecular biologist, and mathematician, he led the International Human Genome Project and is founding director of the powerful Broad Institute of …
You Can Now See the Code That Helped End Apartheid
John Graham-Cumming doesn’t ping me often, but when he does I pay attention. His day job is the CTO of the security giant Cloudflare, but he is also a lay …
Social Media Tells You Who You Are. What if It’s Totally Wrong?
A few years ago I wrote about how, when planning my wedding, I’d signaled to the Pinterest app that I was interested in hairstyles and tablescapes, and I was suddenly …
No, Sam Altman, AI Won’t Solve All of Humanity’s Problems
We already knew where OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, stands on artificial intelligence vis-à-vis the human saga: It will be transformative, historic, and overwhelmingly beneficial. He has been nothing but consistent …
Want to Get Into Founder Mode? You Should Be So Lucky
It’s also true that when one of those groundbreaking companies matures and faces challenges, a founder has a unique ability to make bold moves and stick to the original vision …
The Godmother of AI Wants Everyone to Be a World Builder
According to market-fixated tech pundits and professional skeptics, the artificial intelligence bubble has popped, and winter’s back. Fei-Fei Li isn’t buying that. In fact, Li—who earned the sobriquet the “godmother …