Technology

On a sunny Wednesday morning in August, I arrived at the London flagship store of Bang & Olufsen. But, of course, it’s not just a regular shop; it’s an “atelier,” or so I’m told. On the ground floor, you can peruse their range of chic, expensive speakers and headphones, but head upstairs — complimentary coffee in hand — and you can dive into their tailoring service. Do you want all the speakers in your home and office to match the materials and colors of their surroundings? Or match your car? Or what about a particularly beloved artwork? This is where you do that — and their sound will be as moving and astounding as their price tags. But downstairs, one floor below the main sales area, there’s a little preview room, hidden away from the world.

Just weeks after Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance, the July 13 assassination attempt on Donald Trump radically shifted the election calculus yet again. Amid the intense, fast-moving news cycle, one event that would ordinarily have garnered wall-to-wall coverage went nearly unnoticed. “I fully endorse President Trump and hope for his rapid recovery,” Elon Musk posted to X on the day of the assassination attempt. In recent weeks, a legion of tech giants from the deep-blue stronghold of Silicon Valley have broken ranks and openly pledged support for the MAGA leader. With each new backer comes a slew of mega-donations to his campaign.

The US Air Force conducted the first flight test of the XQ-58A Valkyrie drone, from Kratos Defense and Security Solutions, piloted by artificial intelligence, on July 25. The test was part of a years-long effort headed up by the Air Force Research Lab designed to integrate advanced technology into the Air Force’s arsenal. The lessons learned and data gathered from the test will be applied to the Collaborative Combat Aircraft program, which seeks to procure an unmanned combat drone capable of working — collaborating — with manned systems, like a traditional fighter jet.  Bringing AI into the fold offers numerous benefits to the modern warfighter.

What do you do if decisions that used to be made by humans, with all their biases, start being made by algorithms that are mathematically incapable of bias? If you’re rational, you should celebrate. If you’re a militant liberal, you recognize this development for the mortal threat it is, and scramble to take back control. You can see this unfolding at AI conferences. Last week I attended the 2020 edition of NeurIPS, the leading international machine learning conference. What started as a small gathering now brings together enough people to fill a sports arena. This year, for the first time, NeurIPS required most papers to include a 'broader impacts' statement, and to be subject to review by an ethics board.

Tyrants have always had useful idiots to whitewash their crimes but few have proven as useful and idiotic as those who support China in their oppression of the Uighurs. The northwestern region of Xinjiang is where China’s Muslim minority is persecuted, and according to Human Rights Watch, this means mass arbitrary detention, torture, forced political indoctrination and surveillance using the collection of biometric data. Religious freedoms are severely curtailed under the guise of counter-terrorism measures, the charity says, with restrictions on facial hair, clothing, religious education and online speech. A bleak investigation this week by the BBC found evidence that China is forcing hundreds of thousands of Uighurs to pick cotton for the fashion industry.

The ‘antitrust’ law suit launched by US authorities against Google has been reported as a potential turning point in the dominance of Big Tech — and an echo of the courtroom dramas that diminished the excessive power of America’s late 19th-century oil, steel and railroad barons. But I wonder how much impact it will really have.The allegation, in brief, is that Google has created an illegal near-monopoly by paying large sums to Apple and other smartphone makers to secure its position as the default search engine for billions of consumers, its grip reinforced by ownership of Android, the phone operating system, and Chrome, the popular browser — all of which also gives it a stranglehold on the digital advertising market.

A general rule of thumb: when something seems too good to be true, it typically is. That often doesn’t stop people from really, really wanting it to be true.Last week, a ‘blue check’ Twitter account in the name of a man called Jon Cooper tweeted that a news source called ‘Jewish News USA’ was reporting that President Trump’s family and close advisers were pushing him to resign. The conspicuously false tweet has since been deleted. Cooper, whose Twitter bio all but implies that he’s a Joe Biden staffer (he isn’t), has a history of interspersing his Twitter account with ‘breaking news’ stories that have no basis in reality. As liberal commentator Yashar Ali warned his followers, ‘Jon just tweets bullshit.

Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee are releasing their own report on Big Tech on Tuesday, countering a Democratic report that they accuse of being too radical in its antitrust proposals. The Democrats' draft report, which leaked on Twitter earlier in the day, accused Big Tech companies of engaging in anti-competitive behavior and called for a massive antitrust shakeup of the industry, including preventing Google from owning YouTube and prohibiting Amazon from selling its own products on its marketplace platform. Rep. Ken Buck called these proposals 'non-starters for conservatives'. The Republicans' report, which is signed by Ranking Member Jim Jordan and Reps.

Cockburn had just returned home from his Wednesday evening stroll when he found something curious in his inbox. There tucked away was Rachel Bovard's prepared testimony for Thursday's hearing on internet antitrust laws in front of the House Judiciary's Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law. The Conservative Policy Institute senior director's testimony focuses on the gatekeeping power of Big Tech companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter who suppress political content in ways that is harmful to free speech and democracy. Cockburn felt a sense of duty to share his scoop with readers of The Spectator, who have surely felt the sting of social media censorship.

Stung by recent criticism, and fearing major regulation, Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, has announced the establishment of a kind of ‘Supreme Court’ for his company. Selected and paid by Facebook, the members of this ‘Oversight Board’ will in theory behave as independent adjudicators capable of making rulings over content moderation and other important aspects of the business. No doubt Mr Zuckerberg is looking at the example being set by the US Supreme Court and thinking, ‘What could go wrong?’ It's hard to believe now but in 2017, it seemed plausible that Mark Zuckerberg might become president.

Norwalk, ConnecticutUnprecedented times call for unprecedented archetypes, and 2020 has been full of ’em. There’s the Social Distance Warrior, shaming everyone who dares to leave their house for non-essential reasons. There's his antagonist, the Aggressively Maskless Shopper, who lets his naked face hang all the way out while he vehemently defends his freedom to cough all over the local Costco. There are Guilty Vacationers, Worried Parents and Karens of all shapes and sizes.But of all the exciting new species of human to emerge in our COVID summer, none captures the moment quite so perfectly as the urban expat, sitting at a keyboard in a Florida rental home, writing an all-caps LinkedIn polemic-cum-obituary for the city he no longer lives in.

The real venue for the Democratic National Convention will not be Milwaukee, but the online platforms that will facilitate and stream it: Zoom, YouTube, Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV and so on. Necessity is the mother of symbolic invention: Democratic politics and Big Tech have been merging for some time. Now COVID has rendered a political party indistinguishable from the Silicon Valley shadow state. Barack Obama, who will speak to the convention on Wednesday, made a sustained effort to connect Washington DC to Silicon Valley throughout his time as president. One measure of his success is that many former members of his administration have migrated to the tech industry. David Plouffe, a key campaign adviser, went on to work for Uber and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.