Tag: tech companies
Are Social-Media Companies Ready for Another January 6?
In January, Donald Trump laid out in stark terms what consequences await America if charges against him for conspiring to overturn the 2020 election wind up interfering with his presidential victory in 2024. “It’ll be bedlam in the country,” he told reporters after an appeals-court hearing. Just before a reporter began asking if he would rule out violence from his supporters, Trump walked away.
This would be a shocking display from a presidential candidate—except the presidential candidate was Donald Trump.
There Are 14 Billion Videos on YouTube
Until last month, nobody outside of YouTube had a solid estimate for just how many videos are currently on the site. Eight hundred million? One billion? It turns out that the figure is more like 14 billion—more than one and a half videos for every person on the planet—and that’s counting strictly those that are publicly visible.
I have that number not because YouTube maintains a public counter and not because the company issued a press release announcing it. I’m
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 New AI Panic – The Atlantic
For decades, the Department of Commerce has maintained a little-known list of technologies that, on grounds of national security, are prohibited from being sold freely to foreign countries. Any company that wants to sell such a technology overseas must apply for permission, giving the department oversight and control over what is being exported and to whom.
These export controls are now inflaming tensions between the United States and China. They have become the primary way for the U.S. to throttle
The Fight Against Robotaxis in San Francisco
A few weeks ago, Dan Afergan, a software engineer, met a few friends at 540 Rogues, a bar in San Francisco’s Inner Richmond neighborhood. As Afergan and his companions nursed their drinks, someone walked in with some unusual news: “There’s a Cruise out there with a cone stuck on it.”
Afergan stepped outside to check it out. Sure enough, a self-driving cab from the company Cruise, which is majority-owned by General Motors, stood frozen in the middle of the
Washington Can Stop the AI Free-for-All
In April, lawyers for the airline Avianca noticed something strange. A passenger, Robert Mata, had sued the airline, alleging that a serving cart on a flight had struck and severely injured his left knee, but several cases cited in Mata’s lawsuit didn’t appear to exist. The judge couldn’t verify them, either. It turned out that ChatGPT had made them all up, fabricating names and decisions. One of Mata’s lawyers, Steven A. Schwartz, had used the chatbot as an assistant—his first
America Is Drowning in Packages
When UPS delivery workers last went on strike, in 1997, the nature of their job was very different. Amazon, then merely an online bookstore, was barely two years out from its very first sale. Buying jeans, or new furniture, or really anything, still required most people to get in their car and head to the local mall. By the time the International Brotherhood of Teamsters announced on Tuesday that it had reached a tentative agreement with UPS that would avoid
Humans Are Haunting the Chatbots
On weekdays, between homeschooling her two children, Michelle Curtis logs on to her computer to squeeze in a few hours of work. Her screen flashes with Google Search results, the writings of a Google chatbot, and the outputs of other algorithms, and she has a few minutes to respond to each—judging the usefulness of the blue links she’s been provided, checking the accuracy of an AI’s description of a praying mantis, or deciding which of two chatbot-written birthday poems
A Setback in the F.T.C.’s Fight Against Big Tech
When Lina Khan, the chair of the Federal Trade Commission, appeared before the House Judiciary Committee on July 13th to discuss the F.T.C.’s record under her leadership, she faced almost comically hostile questioning. Leading up to the hearing, the Republican-led committee had described its goal as to examine the agency’s “mismanagement” and its “disregard for ethics”; the meeting’s tone followed predictably from this blueprint. In his opening remarks, Jim Jordan, the committee’s chair, thanked Khan for appearing and then went
The Monk Who Thinks the World Is Ending
The monk paces the Zendo, forecasting the end of the world.
Soryu Forall, ordained in the Zen Buddhist tradition, is speaking to the two dozen residents of the monastery he founded a decade ago in Vermont’s far north. Bald, slight, and incandescent with intensity, he provides a sweep of human history. Seventy thousand years ago, a cognitive revolution allowed Homo sapiens to communicate in story—to construct narratives, to make art, to conceive of god. Twenty-five hundred years ago,