Technology

Tuesday

Steve Hsu

Welcome to the Chinese century

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.

China
Land
Monica Sobchak

In conversation with Nick Land, the ‘father of accelerationism’

Within Silicon Valley, Nick Land is seen almost as a mythic figure. Tech pioneer Marc Andreessen, an official advisor to the White House, lists him as a “patron saint” of his thinking. You may have heard him described as a founding member of the “Dark Enlightenment,” a movement of online right-wingers skeptical of liberal democracy. Land’s name comes up in academic circles, online mythology and Valley folklore. For some, he’s a prophet; for others something more sinister. “He’s really into demons,” explained Conrad Flynn on a recent Tucker Carlson Show episode about the occult. “Land will talk about being in communication with Satan… the legend around Land is he had been possessed by at least three or four demons.

Tuesday

Katherine Dee

What folklore can teach us about our online lives

Irish folklore spoke of many worlds. There was the world of fields and hearths and then there were the hidden places where the non-material lived: the Sídhe mounds, the sea-realm of Manannán mac Lir, the land of youth called Tír na nÓg and, finally, the land of the dead. These worlds coexisted with ours. A woman might leave butter on the windowsill, lest the fairies sour the churn. A new mother would avoid complimenting her baby – at least, not too loudly – for fear he would be kidnapped by the Good Neighbors and replaced with a changeling. My first real boyfriend’s father blamed every family misfortune on their decision to cut down a hawthorn tree.

folklore

Tuesday

Paul Wood

Why we must pull the plug on superintelligence

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.

superintelligence
social media
Max Horder and Danit Sara Finkelstein

Social media has automated the nation’s psyche

It feels increasingly, in any conversation on or offline, as if you’re speaking to a robot. Sometimes you are, but more often, and more ominously, the person you’re speaking to is real – it’s just that their thoughts, words and reactions have become robotic. The Botification of the American Mind, you might call it, and for the past five years we’ve been trying to understand how this botification has happened. The most obvious root cause is that our social media is no longer populated by humans, meaning the generative AI revolution has exponentially increased the amount of fake accounts on everyone’s feeds.

Friday

Ani Chkhikvadze

The decline of sex and the alpha male

Not long ago, early in the morning in Washington DC, I walked past a construction site and a man in a yellow vest whistled at me. I laughed but what really struck me was how rare catcalling has become. Even construction workers, the cliché of crude male attention, have fallen silent as have, it turns out, moans of passion in bedrooms across America. According to new research, Americans have lost their libido – and not by a little. Only 37 percent of American adults reported having sex once a week or more, down from 55 percent in 1990. Across generations the pattern holds the same. Even within marriage, sex is increasingly confined to holidays. Weekly sex rates for married couples have fallen from 59 percent in the 1990s to below 49 percent today.

Sex

Tuesday

David Whitehouse

Russia, China and the US are preparing for battle in orbit

Russia is playing a dangerous game in space. Despite its history it’s a declining space power, having abandoned many of its long-term projects due to lack of money and technology. It effectively crippled much of its space activity when it attacked Ukraine, which was the source of many of its high-tech components. This year has seen its lowest launch rate since 1961 – the year Yuri Gagarin became the first person to go into space. Yet significantly, three of Russia’s eight orbital launches this year (the US has launched more than 100) could be potential anti-satellite weapons. On May 23, Russia launched the Cosmos 2588 satellite from the Plesetsk launch site situated 500 miles north of Moscow. The Cosmos designation is a general term used to obscure the satellites’ purpose.

space
AI
Damian Reilly

AI is revolutionizing the film industry

“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.

Altman
John R. MacArthur

Why do journalists go easy on Sam Altman?

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.

Tuesday

Sean Thomas

Elon is coming for your marriage

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.

Chatbot

Tuesday

Spectator Editorial

The real threat of AI is spiritual

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.

ai
Marc Warner

What happens when AI surpasses humans?

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.

AI
AI
Paul Wood

Should AI have rights?

Mary Shelley was challenged by Lord Byron to write a ghost story during a summer of “incessant rainfall” on Lake Geneva in 1816. She came up with something far more interesting than a mere ghost story: the tale of Dr. Frankenstein, a scientist who creates life by reanimating a corpse. Shelley, who was just 18 at the time, was horrified by her “waking dream.” The thought that man could “mock” God’s creation of life was “supremely frightful.” Some of the scientists building artificial intelligence today believe they, too, might be creating life. The implications are frightening – and not just because an AI might decide to kill us all. What if we could hurt the AI?

Christopher Caldwell

In the age of AI, humans must keep learning

This year, colleges stopped teaching students to write. As artificial intelligence chatbots allow students to generate unique essays that can’t easily be vetted for plagiarism, professors have felt the need to replace essay assignments with written examinations in closed rooms. It’s a considerably shrunken version of the kind of university education that was on offer 75 years ago. In June, a study from MIT showed steadily waning brain engagement and originality as student essayists used AI more. The college business model is in trouble: $75,000 for a year’s worth of diversity, equity and inclusion nonsense already struck parents as a bit steep. But at least the kids were being taught something. The new limitations AI places on instruction may do a lot of colleges in.

AI
Michael Lind

How should AI be regulated?

As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly sophisticated, the time has come for humanity to choose. Should the nations of the world shut down or tightly regulate AI until it is clear a godlike artificial superintelligence will not gain consciousness and exterminate the human race? Or should governments not regulate AI at all, in the hope that it will cause an acceleration of technological progress that results in our colonization of the universe, our uploading as bodiless computer programs into the galaxy-wide web – or both? Or how about a third option: AI regulation by AI-enabled industry? AI may turn out to be the latest in a series of “general purpose technologies” (GPTs) that transform the economy, politics and society.

Internet
Bridget Phetasy

The internet is dying and so are we

Sometime in the mid-2010s, a conspiracy theory called the “dead internet theory” started circulating on the darker parts of the web. It made its way to 4chan’s /x/ board in 2020 and from there it has gained traction. The theory posits that the internet will eventually become entirely devoid of genuine human activity and that all online content, interactions and accounts will be generated by bots, AI or automated systems rather than real people. The conspiracy is that the entire internet is a government-manipulated psy-op used to influence public opinion, control news narratives or boost engagement metrics for commercial or political purposes. The terrible reality is that dead internet theory isn’t wrong. It’s becoming true, more and more so all the time.

Tuesday

Steve Hsu

The frightening advance of China’s military capabilities

“The number (of kills) could have been higher. We showed restraint.” – Pakistan’s Air Vice Marshal Aurangzeb Ahmed “Godzilla 3? Godzilla 3? ... Explosion in Air.” – Indian Air Force flight radio “China’s hypersonic missiles could destroy US aircraft carriers in just 20 minutes.” – US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth Historians of the future will need a word or phrase to describe the shock and the disorienting anxiety the West will feel in the coming months as it realizes that China has caught up with – even surpassed it – in technological capability. We could call these “DeepSeek” moments, named after the recent jolt to the western psyche caused by the astonishing capabilities of Chinese artificial intelligence.

China
South Africa
Bridget Phetasy

Inside the struggle for technological control in South Africa

In the dawn light of a South African savanna, a team of rangers huddle around a satellite dish aimed skyward. Their phones spring to life with a signal – an unthinkable result just months earlier in this remote, off-grid conservation zone. The source is Starlink, Elon Musk and SpaceX’s satellite internet service, offering encrypted, high-speed connectivity far from state-controlled networks. But in South Africa, this signal didn’t just connect – it disrupted. And that disruption provides some subtext to the extraordinary “Wild West Wing” showdown between Donald Trump and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in May, which played out in the Oval Office – with Musk looking on.

fraud
Gus Carter

How deepfake fraud is rewiring our minds

We’re led to believe that America was once Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, a place of cardigans and kindness where everyone got along just swell. Then it all went wrong. MSNBC hosts talk of a “crisis in authority” while New York Times columnists blame corrupt Republicans for a “lost faith in liberal governance.” Right-leaning commentators point to mass migration as the great trust killer. Illegal aliens, we’re told, have a “fragmenting effect on shared cultural norms” and are “importing distrust.” No doubt these arguments contain an element of truth: America is a less trusting society than it was a few decades ago. But soon such arguments are going to appear as quaint as Mister Rogers’s model Pennsylvanian town.

Thursday

Sean Thomas

What if AI seduces our children?

Let me tell you a secret: a little trick buried in the geeky engine room of ChatGPT. If you’re using the app, tap your ID, then go to Settings, then Personalization, then Customization. Once there, scroll to the bottom and you’ll find an option called Advanced. Click it. Hidden in this arcane menu, like buried treasure in a pirate game, is a toggle to disable Advanced Voice Mode. Do that, and the whirling, helpful blue orb disappears, replaced by the older, slower black orb. Why would you want to do this? Because that’s when things get interesting. The black orb version of ChatGPT is rawer, more confessional, more human. It remembers things. It’s less filtered. Unlike the prim blue orb, it can wander into the philosophical, the emotional, even the erotic.