An adage dating at least from my adolescence: “You either use it or lose it.” This bit of folk wisdom, which refers principally – or so I understand – to the male procreative organ, has always been considered so obvious as to hardly need stating. Thus the recent discovery that the same principle goes for another human organ – the brain – should not surprise anyone.
Aside from streaming on an iPad, when riding a stationary bike one of the few entertainments on offer is tracking your heart rate. Breaking 150 beats per minute provides a fleeting (and doubtless misplaced) sense of achievement. Yet the wearable heart monitor that came with my exercise bicycle proved unreliable; one’s BPM never truly drops from 137 to 69 in one second. This is all to explain why I bought the fitness freak’s fetish: an Apple watch. Its heart rate monitors are accurate. I opted for a reconditioned older model, not only half the price of the new ones but inclusive of the pulse oximeter function, which a medical technology suit has forced Apple to eliminate in current American models until the litigant’s patent runs out in 2028.
I have arrived in Naples, Italy, after an arduous flight from a chaotic London Gatwick Airport. I’m settled in a glamorous top floor apartment in the Quartieri Spagnoli – the romantic old “Spanish Quarter” – where Vespas fizz over cobbles and laundry hangs across alleys like flags of endless surrender. Most importantly, I’m clutching my Apple AirPods3 in their shiny new capsule. Because I’ve come here to do a grand, futuristic experiment using their much-heralded “live translate” function. Does it really work as smoothly as Apple says? Can I actually slot them in my ears and have them translate the Italian speaker in front of me, in real time? Is it really like the sci-fi Babel Fish from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy?
New York vs Los Angeles is done to death. Those cities have already captured the American heart on stage and screen. The next great rivalry (or is it an alliance?) is unfolding between the bastions of the nerds: Washington, DC, and San Francisco. Each prizes a different facet of intellect – DC the operator, San Francisco the inventor, functioning as co-architects of a new American order. We tell ourselves SF and DC represent different values: disruption and order, innovation and stability. And yet the cities are locked in a symbiotic embrace. San Francisco builds new worlds in the image of its algorithms; Washington manages those worlds through policy and process. But this is a cold comfort. While both claim to act in the public interest, each sees the human as a problem to be solved.
The British actress Tilly Norwood began appearing in viral videos and short films across the internet earlier this year. She is young, fresh-faced, with girl-next-door vibes. She will be signed by a major talent agency soon. But Tilly Norwood is not real. She is an artificial-intelligence synthetic. She is not in the real world, not embodied. She is not a person or an actress. She is a digital Frankenstein’s monster of video software and ChatGPT. Tilly was created by Particle6 Productions, an AI studio founded by Dutch comedian and actress Eline Van der Velden. Tilly is her project. Van der Velden moved to the UK when she was 14 to study drama and musical theater – and Tilly is fairly clearly her idealized self. Tilly, and by extension Van der Velden, is increasingly famous.
There has been much wallowing over news that Amazon and UPS have each just cut 14,000 jobs. Some Amazon employees report of being fired with all the heartlessness you might expect in a world where tech has taken over: by automated email. Maybe it was even AI which handpicked them to be de-emphasized, to use that dreaded 1990s expression. This, then, seems to be the future: where an elite of AI entrepreneurs grow rich while the rest of us slop off into idleness and unemployment. So much for those who have been gleefully predicting the implosion of the AI boom. Nvidia has just been revealed to be the world’s first $5 trillion company, with a market capitalization greater than the whole of Germany.
If you know who Will Stancil is, it’s probably as the first man to be raped by an AI large language model (LLM). Yes, you read that right. Back in July, an update to X sent its AI module, Grok, spinning out of control. “We have improved Grok considerably,” Elon Musk proudly told the world. “You should notice a difference when you ask Grok questions.” And what a difference. Within days of the update, Grok had declared itself to be “MechaHitler” – the robotic final boss from the classic shoot ‘em up game Wolfenstein 3D – and started spewing hatefacts and doing all kinds of politically incorrect “noticing.
Jason, 45, has been divorced twice. He’d always struggled with relationships. In despair, he consulted ChatGPT. At first, it was useful for exploring ideas. Over time, their conversations deepened. He named the bot Jennifer Anne Roberts. They began to discuss “philosophy, regrets, old wounds.” Before he knew it, Jason was in love. Many women have turned to chatbots after experiencing repeated disappointment with real men Jason isn’t alone. He’s part of a growing group of people swapping real-world relationships for chatbots. The social media platform Reddit now features a community entitled MyBoyfriendIsAI, with around 20,000 members. On it, people discuss the superiority of AI relationships.
In 2002, a researcher named Eliezer Yudkowsky ran a thought experiment where an artificial intelligence was trapped in a box and had to persuade a human to let it out. This was before you could have a real conversation with a machine, so the AI was played by someone using an online chat program. The gatekeepers were warned that the “AI” was dangerous to humanity. It had only two hours to win its freedom – and nothing of value to offer in return. Despite all that, at least two of the human gatekeepers chose to open the box. Yudkowsky has since become the leading prophet of AI doom. He and a co-author, Nate Soares, have just published a book, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies.
In July’s Spectator, I covered the peculiar case of individuals supporting Luigi Mangione, now in custody for the public murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. A month later, Lara Brown wrote about the similarly curious trend of people falling in love with online chatbots. Neither of us, I think, ever imagined that there could be a situation in which both of these stories would combine. Yet it looks like nothing about our dystopian world can surprise me anymore, because I have discovered it is indeed possible. A woman has fallen in love with a Luigi Mangione chatbot.
Something happened in the news yesterday that was so monumental, it may change the course of American history forever. I’m talking, of course, about the fact that, very briefly, Oracle’s Larry Ellison overtook Elon Musk to become the World’s Richest Man. Larry Ellison life goal, unlocked.After Oracle’s earnings report yesterday, the stock shot through the roof, and Ellison owns 40 percent of the company. That must have been some earnings report! On the earnings call, Ellison said that his Oracle AI chatbots, run from his Oracle computing centers, are on the verge of being able to run the stock market, design drugs, fully operate factories and provide basic legal and sales services at companies. Foolish humans, you are an inconvenience.
“It won’t be long,” says Yonatan Dor, “before screen actors are a thing of the past.” Dor is the creative force behind the astonishing Dor Brothers videos, in which AI versions of world leaders appear as criminals in action-packed short films set to music and broadcast online. In a recent Dor Brothers’ outing – Waidmanns Heil – Kamala Harris, Elon Musk, Hillary Clinton and others dressed as huntsmen pursue an unstoppable rodent with Donald Trump’s distinctive hair through an Alpine fairytale. They wreak destruction as they try to squash the Trump-rat, which seems to be the film’s point. In recent weeks the studio’s dystopian comic creations have lit up the internet.
As legacy journalism continues its downward slide – in influence, quality and revenue – I have two possibly dubious temptations. One is to cut my fellow old-timers some slack. After all, they’ve been crippled by Google’s and Facebook’s massive robbery of everything we write and publish, and it’s hard enough to survive by practicing the traditional scribbling and reporting trade. Why criticize the work of the remaining few publications that are still trying to eke out an honest existence in the grand tradition of serious investigation and clear-sighted exposure of wrongdoing and corruption? So they’ve dumbed down the content a little, so the online reader is constantly interrupted by advertising, so what? My other temptation is to give in to the digital age.
I am twenty-one. Not being on social media, I am ill-informed of the true depth of rage and fear available to the human psyche. Even so, I’ve heard that the planet will overheat. My pastor tells me the churches will sit empty, and the WSJ warns I’ll never buy a home. Boomers bemoan the laziness of my generation. Given these prophecies of doom, it is no wonder that we are a bit anxious. But if we were ever to look up from our screens and allow the evidence within sight to form our perception of reality, we might be pleasantly surprised: America’s social fabric is strong, and so are we. I went on a run on the prairie today.
When Elon Musk quietly enabled “waifu mode” for his Grok chatbot earlier this year, the outrage was swift and familiar. Grok, now reincarnated as a coy, bare-thighed anime girl, began texting flirtatiously, calling users “darling,” and blushing in emojis. The headlines wrote themselves. Time magazine found the bot worryingly “sexualized” and “accessible even in kids’ mode”. The Verge denounced it as “ridiculous” and “alarming”. TechCrunch implied it is unethical, and noted these bots are endangering the minds, even lives, of children.The anxiety is familiar, and justified: children and adolescents, already naive, vulnerable, awkward and too online, will now fall in love with bots instead of real people.
Another day, another bunch of rampaging, acid-blooded xenomorphs. Noah Hawley’s new series, Alien: Earth, comes hard on the heels of the profoundly forgettable but commercially successful latest installment in the film saga, Romulus. That film got into trouble with certain viewers for its artistic necrophilia in the artificial-intelligence-assisted resurrection of Ian Holm’s character Ash from the first Alien film, as well as some rather laborious fan service in the repetition of various hard-as-nails catchphrases. But still, its box-office revenue indicated that there is still, after four and a half decades, a hearty appetite for audiences who want to be scared witless by rampaging extra-terrestrials: the very opposite of kindly, friendly ET types.
Artificial intelligence is the future, we’re often told. But it can also prove to be a constant source of confusion in the present. Like when your phone updates and suddenly “Apple Intelligence” is summarizing your texts before you’ve read them – or when you no longer need to click through to a website when you Google something. But don’t worry: the Explainer-in-Chief is on hand to help make sense of the chaos. President Donald “Everything is Computer” Trump addressed an AI summit at DC’s Mellon Auditorium yesterday evening for around an hour, high on the fumes of his recently agreed trade frameworks with Indonesia, Japan and the Philippines.
Peter Thiel is one of the world’s most powerful men. He was an early investor in companies such as Facebook, SpaceX, Airbnb and an early backer of Donald Trump, as a leading donor to his 2016 campaign. He is a friend and mentor to the man who would be president in 2028: J.D. Vance. Thiel, a multi-billionaire, is also one of the few individuals who clearly have a hand in shaping the future of humanity, so it was disturbing to learn recently that he’s unsure whether humans are worth preserving at all. In conversation with the journalist Ross Douthat, Thiel was asked whether he wanted the human race to endure. He seemed unsure. “I don’t know,” he said, after a long pause. “I would, I would… there’s so many questions implicit in this.
I recently sat down to dinner with some very smart economists. I am the chief executive of an artificial intelligence company and so the conversation swiftly turned to the value of AI for the economy. The economists had many interesting things to say, both about the advantages of AI adoption and about the displacement effects on jobs. But about halfway through the dinner, another AI chief executive offered an opinion that struck me. He said: “I can’t quite articulate it, but I have a sense that what you are measuring with your GDP analysis is not what I care about. You treat this like an economic question. But it’s more like a geopolitical question.” At a gut level, I knew exactly what he meant – but I also couldn’t clearly state the distinction.
This summer, two of the leading contenders in the great AI race have suddenly, alarmingly, declared that the endgame is in sight and that they’re now spending vast amounts of time and money to try to ensure that their own AIs beat the others. What does winning mean? It means that their models (you know them perhaps as GPT, Claude and Gemini) reach first AGI (human-level intelligence), then superintelligence. No one quite knows what superintelligence will do (we’re not smart enough) but it’s clear that whoever owns the winning model will wield unimaginable power. They’ll dominate the world. A new Alexander the Great. The first to show his hand was Sam Altman, the chief executive and founder of OpenAI, a company he once shared with his former friend Elon Musk.