Technology

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).