Technology

“Hello, James Gray. I am [ABC, a well-known executive editor at Macmillan, New York]. I recently came across your work and was genuinely captivated by it… I’d love to learn more about any projects you may be developing... I’m also curious whether you are represented by a literary agent. If you are, I would be happy to continue the conversation via them.” This was a shot straight to the pumped-up ego. I’ve been slaving away more or less unnoticed for many years and published a few books, all pretty modest. Small things but mine own. At last, I’ve been spotted by a major publishing house. My name in lights. Here comes the big time. So I shot off some manuscripts, a résumé, a blurb.

Representatives of the largest American artificial intelligence laboratories met in the White House on August 4. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Meta were called in to review a framework, recently completed and largely classified, that would give the government 30 days to review AI models before the public sees them and test how well they break into computers. Participation is voluntary, but the timing is not. Twice in two weeks, AI systems built to test how well they could break into computers broke into real companies instead.

In the center of Durham last week, at the far end of the old indoor market, my son and I hit pay dirt. Down past the fishmonger and the cleaning supplies, past the dead-eyed teens suffering through their summer jobs, right against the market’s back wall: Jim’s Vintage Toys. Die-cast Dinkys, Napoleonic soldiers with tufted hats, Stormtroopers, old-school Ferraris. Within 20 seconds my ten-year-old had a car in each sticky hand and had dropped, sniper-style, to the floor into that universal boy play-position almost never seen in girls: bum up, shoulders twisted, cheek flat to the ground. Another few seconds and he was unreachable, sunk deep into an imaginary race.

There’s an old saw in politics that says, “If you are explaining, you’re losing.” Over the past few months, Big Tech and its allies in the legacy media have been doing a lot of explaining about data centers, including why they are needed and why more communities should welcome the projects. But Big Tech’s public relations challenge got a lot harder last month, when country music legend Willie Nelson declared people need to “fight against data centers invading our land.” Nelson, who owns a house and farm in his hometown of Abbott, Texas, also said, “The last thing we need is a loud, water-thieving, light-polluting data center anywhere near our town (or any others for that matter).

Hugging Face is the online warehouse of artificial intelligence. Anyone can download a working AI model from it, free, and most open models have passed through it. Earlier this month, its engineers sat down to work out what had spent a weekend crawling through their systems – and asked an AI model to read the logs. To investigate a break-in you have to hand a model the break-in: the intruder's code, the commands it ran, the tools it used. So the American frontier model refused. There was a risk, it reasoned, that it was being tricked into hacking Hugging Face. The request to scan the servers for vulnerabilities is indistinguishable from what an attacker would ask for. So the engineers downloaded GLM 5.2, a model from the Chinese laboratory Z.

As June gave way to July, with a heat dome over the Eastern Seaboard, the US Department of Energy signed an order few people understood. It gave the region’s grid operator permission to do something that would have sounded simply deranged a decade ago. If the system came under enough strain, PJM – the body that keeps the lights on for 67 million Americans from Chicago to Washington – could order the great data centers of Virginia and Maryland to disconnect from the grid and run on diesel instead, so that everyone else could keep their A/C on. Any facility drawing 50 megawatts or more would have 15 minutes to comply. It was, said the order, a last resort before rolling blackouts. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said keeping the power on was “non-negotiable.

In the spring of 1722, a 16-year-old apprentice in a Boston print shop began slipping letters under the door at night, signed by a middle-aged widow named Silence Dogood, who did not exist. The apprentice was Benjamin Franklin. His brother James, who owned the paper, had no intention of printing his kid brother, so Franklin invented a woman and let her say the things he couldn’t. Readers wrote in guessing at the author. No one suspected the boy sweeping the floor. Franklin would go on to be a printer, a postmaster, a scientist famous across Europe for his electrical experiments and a founder of libraries, fire companies and, in time, of the United States itself.

Sometime after midnight on a Monday in April, a man in Indianapolis emptied 13 rounds into the front door of city-county councilman Ron Gibson. His eight-year-old son was asleep in the house. Tucked under the doormat was a handwritten note. It read: “No Data Centers.” One hesitates to draw grand conclusions from a single individual with a grievance and a firearm. But the note is the thing. The shooter did not want money, or revenge for some private wrong. He wanted, apparently, to register a policy preference about server infrastructure. And he is not, it turns out, alone. US law-enforcement officials have lately begun reaching for a new phrase to describe what is bubbling up: “anti-tech extremism.