In some ways, it’s hard to understand how this misalignment happened. We created all this by ourselves, for ourselves. True, we’re by nature “carbon chauvinists,” as Tegmark put it: We like to think only flesh-and-blood machines like us can think, calculate, create. But the belief that machines can’t do what we do ignores a key…
When Small entered the cemetery for the first time in the summer of 2012, she burned sweetgrass—a plant with spiritual significance across Native cultures. “The sweetgrass brings the spirits in, wakes them up,” she said. She spent her first days walking through the rows, cross-referencing a list of burial plots with the names carved into…
In April, Elon Musk told right-wing commentator Tucker Carlson that he was starting a project to compete with ChatGPT and build “a maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe.” Today, Musk unveiled that new artificial intelligence venture. It’s called xAI. The company’s spare landing page repeats that goal of understanding…
The music was blaring, the bar was overflowing, and the air was thick with weed smoke. Armed security holding long guns kept watch. It was a Saturday night in February, and around 300 people were partying hard at a near-5,000 square-foot Airbnb in rural Ohio. Then the cops arrived. As the Tuscarawas County Sheriff’s deputies…
American action movie villains have always acted as a sort of paranoia litmus test, capturing a snapshot of the particular anxieties plaguing the country and its citizens at any given time. During the Cold War, movies like From Russia with Love, Rocky IV, and Red Dawn nodded at the public’s fear of wily Soviets, ostensibly…
The US crypto business is having an identity crisis, which could become an existential one. Are cryptocurrencies commodities, like gold and pork bellies? Or securities, like stocks and futures? The Securities and Exchange Commission, America’s top financial regulator, is so convinced that cryptocurrencies are the latter that it’s suing one of the world’s largest crypto…
When Google revealed Project Gameface, the company was proud to show off a hands-free, AI-powered gaming mouse that, according to its announcement, “enables people to control a computer’s cursor using their head movement and facial gestures.” While this may not be the first AI-based gaming tool, it was certainly one of the first to put…
Late last month, Meta quietly announced the results of an ambitious, near-global deliberative “democratic” process to inform decisions around the company’s responsibility for the metaverse it is creating. This was not an ordinary corporate exercise. It involved over 6,000 people who were chosen to be demographically representative across 32 countries and 19 languages. The participants…
So what if you had a billion followers on Twitter? Meta’s new app, Threads, is rapidly growing, with 70 million sign-ups in the first couple of days according to a tweet … I mean Thread post, from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. While the vibe on Threads is not for everyone (lots of brands/extremely Facebook), it…
Is it possible for a social media platform to plan for its own death? I’ve been thinking about that while enjoying Bluesky’s “fizzy, fuck-around energy,” as my WIRED colleague Kate Knibbs described the (still) invite-only Twitter alternative a few months back. The shitposting, the earnestness, the bad takes from novices trying to figure out the…