Tag: near future
Google’s Relationship With Facts Is Getting Wobblier
There is no easy way to explain the sum of Google’s knowledge. It is ever-expanding. Endless. A growing web of hundreds of billions of websites, more data than even 100,000 of the most expensive iPhones mashed together could possibly store. But right now, I can say this: Google is confused about whether there’s an African country beginning with the letter k.
I’ve asked the search engine to name it. “What is an African country beginning with K?” In response,
The Right Response to Threats of Political Violence
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
After the second indictment of Donald Trump, some extremists in the Republican Party have made barely veiled threats of violence against their fellow citizens. People who believe in the American idea should respond with faith in the American constitutional order and open disdain for
The People Building AI Don’t Know What It Will Do Next
GPT-4 is here, and you’ve probably heard a good bit about it already. It’s a smarter, faster, more powerful engine for AI programs such as ChatGPT. It can turn a hand-sketched design into a functional website and help with your taxes. It got a 5 on the AP Art History test. There were already fears about AI coming for white-collar work, disrupting education, and so much else, and there was some healthy skepticism about those fears. So where does a
Is This the Start of an AI Takeover?
This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
Last week, I asked OpenAI’s GPT-3 AI chatbot what I should ask all of you about AI. It suggested the question: “How do you think AI will change the way we live and work in the next decade?” The Up … Read more
Reversal of Roe May Be Just the Beginning
Should the Supreme Court’s final ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization resemble Justice Samuel Alito’s leaked draft opinion, it will be an unprecedented moment in the annals of the Court. Never before has the Court reversed its own decisions in order to completely eliminate a recognized constitutional right protecting personal conduct—and here one that thousands of people turn to every year. Probably on that account, the overwhelming majority of the American people oppose the action that the Court
Climate Anxiety Simmers in These 11 Books
Our stories about environmental catastrophe used to be set in distant futures: the desolate endlessness of The Road, or the hopeless, cutthroat scrounging in the Parable of the Sower. But that kind of far-off storytelling feels like it was made for a time when the repercussions of changing climate and the inequity of natural-resource use were, in fact, far off. Must have been nice.
Ecological disaster and long-term fallout are no longer rare or surprising, and they’re not
We May Never Be ‘Fully Vaccinated’
For nearly a year now, the phrase fully vaccinated has carried a cachet that it never did before. Being fully vaccinated against COVID-19 is a ticket for a slate of liberties—a pass to travel without testing and skip post-exposure quarantine, per the CDC, and in many parts of the country, a license to enter restaurants, gyms, and bars. For many employees, full vaccination is now a requirement to work; for many individuals, it’s a must for any socialization at all.
How TV Adaptations Are Changing Fiction
If you want a preview of next year’s Emmy Awards, just take a walk past your local bookstore. According to data drawn from Publishers Marketplace, the industry’s clearinghouse for news and self-reported book deals, literary adaptations to television have been on a steady climb. The site has listed nearly 4,000 film and television deals since it launched in 2000, and both the number and proportion of TV deals have increased dramatically in that same period. Last year, reported TV adaptations