Technology

Geoffrey Cain

Silicon Valley runs on hype

Silicon Valley rewards founders who talk about tomorrow’s technology as if it’s already here. A founder tells investors that a machine runs a blood test today. When the claim falls apart, the founder explains that it was only a promise about the things the machine would accomplish one day. Some investors learn the difference later, from their lawyers. Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s new documentary, You Can See Everything, catches a founder offering that explanation on camera. Its subject is Elizabeth Holmes. For a while, Silicon Valley rewarded her lavishly. She wore a black turtleneck like Steve Jobs and posed for photographers holding up a vial of blood no bigger than a fingertip.

Elizabeth Holmes
Ross Clark

AI isn’t making us more productive

At some point there has to be an “emperor has no clothes” moment. Why, when we are in the middle of a boom in Artificial Intelligence, which is supposed to transform the way we do nearly everything, is there no tangible increase in productivity across the economy? Surely, if the claims for AI were even nearly true it would by now be showing up in the statistics for Total Factor Productivity (TFP) published by the San Francisco Fed. TPF is a measure of output relative to input from labour and capital; a measure, in other words, of how efficiently workers are using the tools available to them. In theory, it should be increasing dramatically with AI as workers use it to speed up tasks and get more out of their day. Trouble is, that does not appear to be happening.

Maximillian Garely

AI could make government small again

For decades, we on the liberal right have been sold the fiction that Republican lawmakers are fighting for small government. There are many reasons why the state seems to relentlessly expand no matter who is in office; an important, though overlooked, one is that it is incredibly difficult to persuade voters that smaller budgets and reduced employee counts can achieve equal or superior results. Voters might dislike bureaucracy, but they fear what happens when the machinery behind it is dismantled – what if the alternative is worse? One needs look no further than the backlash against DOGE to see that the right needs to prove a smaller government can improve citizens’ experience in dealing with it.

Matt Ridley

Climate-change zealots are wrong about hurricanes

A remarkable weather record was broken recently. The equinox came and went this September and yet not a single hurricane had formed all year in the entire Atlantic Ocean. It’s the first time this has happened since 1914 – which was back before the satellite era, when hurricanes were more likely to go unrecorded. September is normally peak hurricane season, when the tropical Atlantic gives birth to a series of spinning storms, dubbed hurricanes when their winds exceed 74 miles per hour. (They are usually called typhoons or cyclones in the Pacific and Indian oceans.) One year is not a trend but longer-term data does show a slight downward trend in hurricane frequency.

hurricanes

Friday

Rory Blundell

The threat of AI intruders

Most of us have gone to bed and forgotten to lock a door or window. Now imagine an intruder who tried your front door every night, then the back door, then every window. They never get tired, never get bored and never stop trying. Eventually, they would find the one you forgot. That is one way to understand the security problem created by AI agents. Agentic AI is not inherently malicious. Part of the risk comes from its persistence: agents are designed to pursue as many routes as possible to achieve an objective. The other part is that they are being deployed in systems designed to defend against humans, with weaknesses that until now have not been exposed.

story
Katherine Dee

Recovering the art of the story

I was honored to speak with Malcolm Guite, a poet and Anglican priest, about storytelling, attention and contemporary life. Guite’s latest project is a retelling of the Arthurian legends in verse, beginning with Galahad and the Grail. Arthurian legend might seem an unusual place to start for a conversation about technology. But I believe that repairing our relationship with the internet and the devices that permeate our lives begins with changing how we pay attention. Much ink has been spilled about how the digital age has fractured our attention spans and much less on what it looks like, practically, to fix them besides the old panacea of “log off,” “touch grass.” In my estimation, the best – and most human – place to start recovering is the art of the story.

space junk
Max Horder

Space junk poses a major threat to humanity

On September 14, the United States announced it had deployed a space weapon to Earth’s orbit. US Secretary of the Air Force Troy Meink declared it a response to “evolving threats.” But what is a space weapon, and what are these threats? The truth is we still don’t really know. The weapons are classified and we earthlings are in the dark. Cutting-edge military space tech ranges from maneuverable space-craft capable of tracking and shooting down enemy satellites to communication jammers that clock or swamp the enemy’s data links. But if the weapons are mysterious, the need for them is very real.

Friday

Freddy Gray

When the intelligence about AI is artificial

Few people had heard of Jacob Coxon, the 28-year-old British AI researcher, on the morning of September 8, 2026. His X account had fewer than 100 followers. By September 10, he was world famous, after he published a social-media thread on X about resigning from Anthropic because the company is not "acting responsibly." The post has now been viewed 174 million times. It triggered a tsunami of news panic about the dangers of artificial intelligence. Suddenly, Jacob was everywhere: doing prime-time interviews; a celebrity whistleblower, the casus tumultus of a global conversation about the dangers of AI, which in turn led to a public fight among various tech overlords urging for more government regulation, and angry pushback from the Trump administration.

Friday

Maximillian Garely

AI is cosmic justice for the professional classes

For decades the road to success in the developed world has been straightforward. A university education, increasingly treated as a sort of white-collar trade school, offered people the chance to acquire specialist knowledge which could be used to secure a position lingering at a desk for 40 years. For those of us who grew up watching machines replace men on the assembly line, acquiring a degree was the way to escape this fate. In the digital age, however, the automation of cognitive labor has forced many professionals to confront a threat that once seemed confined to workers on the factory floor.

AI robots

Thursday

David Whitehouse

Is AI ruining mathematics?

Terry Tao is the most famous and award-laden mathematician working today. He is known for his groundbreaking work in many areas of mathematics and when he speaks, people listen. A few weeks ago he took to the stage at the International Congress of Mathematics, held every four years, to give his lecture, “Mathematics in the Age of AI.” He voiced concern about what he called an unprecedented threat. “AI has created a crisis in our mathematical values and practices,” he said, and his words resonated because, just days before, Anthropic’s Claude Fable AI program had solved the so-called Jacobian conjecture which has puzzled mathematicians since 1939. It was a devastating achievement, all the more so because the solution fitted into a single tweet.

Katherine Dee

Tech is turbocharging teenage strivers

I’ve always been struck by Tracy Flick, from the 1999 film Election. Portrayed by a ferociously perky, blonde-bobbed Reese Witherspoon, Flick is the paradigmatic striver – she will stop at nothing to be successful. She is a walking résumé-padding exercise, a living, breathing college application. She has to have the very best grades, the extracurriculars and, as the title suggests, the student-body presidency. She eventually ends up at Georgetown. It was never really clear to me why I loved Flick so much – and not just loved, but really related to her. I was not a striver myself. I was crushed when I didn’t end up at Harvard, a school I had made no effort whatsoever to get in to. I hadn’t so much as submitted an application.

strive strivers
Andrew Cantarutti

Education technology has stolen students’ attention

After the past few weeks, there can’t be many people left still unaware of the rapidly growing power of artificial intelligence. No one knows quite what to do about it or what to expect and when. Parents fear for their children and how they might survive in this new world. But they should rather look to their children’s schools, where right under their noses, AI and educational technology – ed tech – is already damaging students’ futures and stealing their ability to focus, to learn and to think. You only have to look the latest PISA results, released earlier this month, to see that academic performance in America is declining fast.

Travis Aaroe

The Effective Altruists are already in control

Using a crisis – perhaps even a crisis of one’s own devising – as a pretext to seize power? It is a very old trick. Hitler and his National Socialists were once accused of using the Reichstag fire in such a way, and now the Effective Altruists (or EAs) stand accused of something similar.  The theory within the Trump administration is that EA and EA-aligned figures such as Anthropic’s Dario Amodei are whipping up fears of AI doom. They are doing so in order to scare governments into regulating technology – regulations that the EAs would themselves design. Amodei’s recent essay “We Must Pace the Frontier” called on AI companies to accept the oversight of a group called Model Evaluation and Threat Research (METR), an AI safety NGO.

Roger Kimball

Who’s afraid of AI?

It’s not often that we get a ringside seat to the Birth of a Narrative. Usually, those overseeing the parturition are careful to manage the event offstage, away from the prying eyes of skeptics, spoilsports, and counternarrativists. There are walls of silence and moats of obfuscation to accompany the rollout. That helps keep everyone on message. There are media firemen assembled to extinguish the flames and wash away the reputations of questioners. That helps neutralize pests and quash doubts.  But with the sudden onslaught of the “AI will end humanity” narrative, the impresarios orchestrating the debut got sloppy. They knew their own lines. Artificial intelligence was the biggest threat to humanity since, well, since ever.

Friday

Geoffrey Cain

Beware of billionaires touting the apocalypse

Cassandra was a princess, daughter of King Priam of Troy. Apollo gave her the power to see the future and, when she rejected his advances, arranged that no one would ever believe her. She warned the Trojans about the wooden horse. “All heard, and none believed the prophecy,” Virgil wrote. And so the city burned. The kingdom of artificial intelligence is now producing a stream of its own Cassandras. On September 8, a 27-year-old AI researcher named Jacob Coxon quit Anthropic – and explained why on X. The company and its rival OpenAI, where he had also worked, were “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.” By breakfast, tens of millions of people had seen his post.

Thursday

John Power

Don’t believe everything that AI companies say

Two big stories are driving interest in artificial intelligence this week. The first is the resignation of Jacob Coxon, a researcher at Anthropic (maker of Claude) who used to work for OpenAI. He said in a statement on X: https://twitter.com/hilbertspaess/status/2097476196791709843?s=20 Coxon went on to say that “the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade”, and that employees at Anthropic are aggressively driving forward because they believe they are in the only company capable of managing the technology safely and ethically. At OpenAI, “many have not deeply internalized the civilizational stakes.”  Scary stuff.

AI

Friday

David Whitehouse

How does time work?

Most of us say we instinctively understand what time is, but struggle to describe it. We clearly live our lives in the flow of time, with the past gone and our perception of the present moving toward an undetermined future. It’s been described as the fire in which we burn.  But what actually is it? This occupies the minds of cosmologists and philosophers, and recent research, far from clarifying the concept, makes it even stranger. Time, it seems, may not be fundamental but a by-product of the base structure of the cosmos. For Isaac Newton, time was set in motion by God and was the universal backdrop in which all events occur. It was unchanging and ever-present; it regulated and set the pace for the clockwork universe, living out the laws of science.

Katherine Dee

Why is my high-school classmate releasing an AI-generated novel?

Recently I started logging in to Facebook again, mostly to do the depressing thing of posting photos of my children to my late father’s wall. One of the interesting things about Facebook is that it forces me to exit my bubble of people who work in tech and media, and thus are very tech and media literate. The people I see on Facebook inhabit a completely different universe than those I see on X or Substack or even TikTok. I don’t love referring to the people I grew up with as “normies,” but, you know, many of them are normies. Anyway, I log in and suddenly I’m surrounded by normies and I stumble across something that forces me to reconsider some things. A girl I went to high school with – let’s call her Teresa – has written a book and self-published it on Amazon.

Jacob Dreyer

Machines are replacing the Chinese working class

Daqing, China You may have seen clips of the recent Chinese robot Olympics, where a bipedal, humanoid robot beat Usain Bolt’s 100-meter sprint record by almost a second. Last month, Beijing hosted competitions in soccer, weightlifting, tennis and gymnastics, too. There have also been boxing matches between robots, which occasionally punched each other’s heads off. So far, robots can only really excel at one task at a time, so the prospect of a very fast, very effective fistfighter is some way off. Still, the Chinese government is deeply concerned about employment and has been far stricter at regulating AI than the US. That’s partly because of the differing economies of the two countries. The USA’s comparative advantage is capital.

Allum Bokhari

The new age of influence campaigns

Midway through a podcast appearance, my host became distracted by a flurry of social media posts claiming that he was a paid agent of the Israeli government. The host was Tim Pool; the accuser was Alex Jones, until then Pool’s friend and ally. The dispute began last month, when Pool suggested that Jones’s recent dip in online viewers had more to do with his wavering on Donald Trump than with any covert censorship. The argument quickly escalated, with Jones asking whether Pool was taking “marching orders” from Benjamin Netanyahu. I have no beef with Jones, but I doubt that Pool, who earns a healthy eight figures from his podcast, would torch his credibility for a little extra money.

Thursday

Matthew Lynn

Don’t bet against Nvidia – yet

Last night revealed another set of outstanding results from Nvidia. Its quarterly revenues were up by 105 percent year-on-year, comfortably ahead of expectations. Its earnings per share doubled. Its gross margin remained at an impressive 75 percent. And its guidance for the third quarter was for another significant rise in revenues. The chip manufacturer's founder Jensen Huang bullishly declared that the Artificial Intelligence industry had reached its “golden age” without risking ridicule. Nvidia's share had been flat-lining for much of the past few months, and rival chipmakers have been crashing, as investors started to doubt whether the massive investment in AI, and the data hubs that power it, could be sustained. And yet, once again, the company proved its critics wrong.

Thursday

Ian Williams

Could China colonize Mars before America?

A 20-year-old Chinese researcher dressed in a red crayfish costume has become a symbol of Beijing’s ambition. At a scientific conference in Paris last fall, he explained that he was working on an important project. His plans would enable his country’s astronauts to prepare spicy crayfish soup, a Chinese favorite, on Mars. “That’s what we’re competing with. The vibe is good in Beijing,” Drew Endy, associate professor of bioengineering at Stanford University, said in evidence to a Senate hearing last month. The hearing examined whether the US is losing its innovation advantage to China. Concerned senators saw the big red crayfish as further evidence of the scale of Chinese ambition when it comes to Mars.

David Whitehouse

Trump has bet everything on Mars

America has what might be the best evidence for life on Mars. NASA’s Perseverance rover has gathered rock samples that could contain compelling biosignatures of ancient microbial life. No one is quite sure yet, and the samples need to be tested in a lab before we can conclusively prove that our distant neighbor once harbored life. Too bad. We’re never going to see the results. In January, funding for the project was canceled. Donald Trump has other plans for the red planet. He obsesses over competition with China and with planting the Stars and Stripes on alien soil. So to the horror of many of the world’s scientists, Trump has pulled the US space effort away from incremental robotic exploration to prioritize human landings on the Moon and Mars.

Spectator Editorial

Learn to stop worrying and love data centers

In popular mythology, America is the land that innovates while Europe regulates. America gets on with things while Europe prevaricates by allowing Luddites, environmentalists and all kinds of naysayers to call the tune. There is some truth in that, which is why the growth in the US economy has outstripped that of Europe this century. It’s also why America has a near monopoly in the tech sphere that now shapes our age. Now, however, America, like Europe, finds itself consumed by a popular war against data centers. Given that these centers are the beating heart of the modern economy, just as the coal mines were the lifeblood of the industrial revolution, this presents a very big problem.