Technology

A 20-year-old from Spring, Texas, named Daniel Alejandro Moreno-Gama has been charged with attempted murder after he was accused of throwing a Molotov cocktail at the gate of Sam Altman’s San Francisco home on April 10. He then allegedly walked toward OpenAI’s Mission Bay headquarters and told employees he intended to burn the building down as well. He was reportedly carrying a manifesto – a “three-part series,” according to Fox News – that included a list of other AI executives and investors and their home addresses and documents discussing potential risks that AI poses to humanity, with a section titled: “Some more words on the matter of our impending extinction.

If you’ve been paying attention to social media lately, then you already know the score: smartphones are corrupting our children, we need legal intervention immediately. Roughly half of US states have enacted some form of age-gating for social media or pornographic content. Australia banned under-16s from social media platforms outright, France and Indonesia followed suit and the United Kingdom is now asking people for their papers to read moderately offensive blog posts. You don’t need me to rehash this. The phones have nuked the interior lives of Gen Z, Gen A and the hitherto unborn Generations B and C. Every opinion lands somewhere between “protect the children” and “this is Reefer Madness for iPads.

By using a sonic weapon in the mission to capture Nicolás Maduro, as Donald Trump appears to have confirmed, Delta Force commandos not only triggered a paradigm shift in warfare, but served poetic justice. When asked whether such a weapon had been used, the President replied: “It’s probably good not to talk about it.” But then added: “Nobody else has it, we have some amazing weapons that nobody knows about.” The following morning, at Davos, Trump said: “They weren’t able to fire a single shot at us. They said, ‘What happened?’ Everything was discombobulated.

Donald Trump’s desire for Greenland is not just about access to oil, minerals and control of the new strategic and commercial corridors opening in the region. It’s also about data. Specifically, the most important data in the world. For decades, Pituffik Space Base – formerly Thule – in Greenland has been central to US space defense and Arctic strategy. It’s the US military’s only base above the Arctic Circle and their most northerly deep-water port and airstrip. It’s home to the 12th Space Warning Squadron. Its massive AN/FPS-132 radar has 240 degrees of coverage surveying the Arctic Ocean and Russia’s northern coast, especially the Kola peninsula where it has concentrated its strategic nuclear weapons.

On March 6, 1959, nine-year-old Candice "Candy" Rogers of Spokane, Washington, went out after school to sell campfire mints door-to-door. Sweet-natured with strawberry blonde curls and a button nose, she was small for her age. Her mother, Elaine, had one clear rule that Candy must be home before dark. But Candy never came home. Her disappearance triggered a 16-day manhunt involving thousands of people, the Marines and the US Air Force. In fact, three airmen lost their lives on the second day when their helicopter hit high tension cables and plummeted into the Spokane River.  After two weeks of searching for Candy, all detectives could find were her scattered mint boxes.

In 1961, just two years before he died in Los Angeles, the polymath, philosopher and novelist Aldous Huxley gave humanity a warning. Much of his prophecy about society in Brave New World had come to pass, he said, which made him even more certain that the standout problem of the future would be our inability to resist becoming enslaved to our own technology. Now, more than 60 years after his death – and with an entire generation of children frying their brains with smartphones and nobody able or willing to do anything to stop them – it is hard to deny that he was onto something. The man was destined to be a prophet for our gadget-addled age.

Competition between the US and China will shape the 21st century, but have the Chinese already leap-frogged the Americans? It looks as if they might have done. Since China opened itself up to trade and market economics under Deng Xiaoping almost 50 years ago, it has been furiously chasing the US in terms of economic and technological development – and it’s been catching up, fast. We can prove just how fast by measuring its innovation and output per capita. The US has about a quarter of China’s population, so if both countries were at a similar level of economic and technological development, one would expect China to produce roughly four times the number of scientific breakthroughs as America, four times the number of physicists and AI engineers and so on.